Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Chapter 11

  Settler Families and Society

  1648 Massachusetts passes a law condemning rebellious children over 16 to death for striking their parents.

  1690 The first birth control devices become available in London.

  1693 John Locke publishes his Thoughts Concerning Education.

  1700 The European American population in British North America reaches 250,000. Gender ratios in the Chesapeake become more balanced.

  1751 Benjamin Franklin publishes his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.

  1770 The European American population in British North America reaches 1.7 million.

  1 New World Families

  TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY westerners are quick to conjure up an image of what families were like in the past. We imagine them as more stable and supportive than our own, envisioning them as mainstays of generational continuity that included grandparents, parents, children, and extended family members all living under the same roof. It is an appealing image. However, insofar as it applies to the families of seventeenth-century Englishmen and settlers in the British North American colonies, the image is based more upon myth than reality. Empirical evidence painstakingly gathered by historical demographers since the 1960s has provided a more realistic picture of the contours of actual family life in early modern England and its colonies. If we want to understand why families mattered to the development of British North American societies, it is important for us to begin with that picture.1

  Historians once thought that settler families in colonial British America were smaller and less stable than families in the Old World. English people in the seventeenth century, the story went, lived from birth through adulthood in stable extended families surrounded by loving relatives from multiple generations. Only in the colonies were those extended families exchanged for nuclear families whose members moved frequently, always looking for greener pastures.

  Demographic evidence has shown historians that in fact this traditional view of Old World family life was vastly distorted. Most English families in the seventeenth century were nuclear in structure, headed by an adult male who lived with his wife and young children in a single household which they did not typically share with extended family members. Although households commonly included additional members besides the parents and children, they were generally servants, unrelated to the household head. Moreover, families were anything but cradles of support for children from birth to adulthood. Most English parents could not afford to provide property sufficient to support more than one of their children in adulthood. Therefore younger children were apprenticed or bound out to service, often by their early teens. Although they might return home after one employment ended and before another began, once they reached adulthood most young people in seventeenth-century England left the villages where they had been born and settled elsewhere. Nor did they find life easy or stable once they left. It was not uncommon for young people to fail at earning a living, and a substantial number therefore remained single, drifting from one place to another throughout adulthood. Their world was hardly one of stable havens in which people lived continuously from one generation to the next.2

  While white settler families in colonial British North America replicated some of these patterns, the distinct challenges and opportunities of economic life in the colonies changed the experience of family life (for most white settlers) in important ways. By the late seventeenth century (and much earlier in New England), nearly all young adults from white families married and began families. Their families were also considerably larger than the average English family. British American and other European American settlers had more children and were more likely to acquire servants and slaves than their counterparts in the home islands. And although they lived in nuclear families (much as in England), they were much more likely than English parents to keep their children at home with them until adulthood. The first question we need to answer is why these distinctive patterns of family life developed in colonial British America.

  Family formation was critical to the success of settler societies in North America. As we have seen from the example of the early Chesapeake, new societies did not survive and develop if they could not sustain their populations. Although a society could maintain a stable population for some time through immigration, its long-term prospects depended on people's ability and willingness to bear and rear children, and the lowering of mortality rates to a point where births at least kept pace with deaths. Since authorities in the English colonies discouraged intermarriage between whites and Native Americans (a policy distinctly different from those of the Spanish and French colonies in North America), the capacity of Anglo-American settler societies to reproduce themselves depended on developing a balanced gender ratio and reasonable longevity within the settler population. These two conditions were achieved within a generation in New England and most of the middle colonies. They took longer in the Chesapeake, but even there, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the white population had developed a reasonably balanced gender ratio through natural reproduction and the importation of a larger percentage of female servants. And from 1700 onwards, white births in the Chesapeake outnumbered deaths. Thus white settler populations in all regions by the eighteenth century had developed demographic conditions that encouraged family formation.3

  Once that happened, settlers married at a remarkable rate. In this respect, Anglo-American colonial societies were strikingly different from societies in Europe, particularly in seventeenth-century England. Studies of New England, for example, have shown that the proportion of the adult population which remained single throughout their lives was well under 10 percent, and white populations elsewhere in the colonies had similarly high rates of marriage by the eighteenth century. In contrast, in England during much of the seventeenth century a quarter of the adult population never married at all.

  Typically marriages took place shortly after the man had acquired enough property to start a farm, a fact that points us towards the main reason for the differences in marriage patterns between England and North America. In England, population was high and land scarce. In the British North American colonies, conditions were reversed. Especially after the wars of the seventeenth century forced most Native American groups to move away from Anglo-American settlements, land became widely available for purchase and settlement. What remained necessary to make it productive was labor. And marriage was the easiest way to solve the labor problem. Households with at least two members were a virtual necessity, since nobody in this commercially undeveloped economy could run a farm all alone. Unless the farm produced a profitable enough crop to be able to hire or purchase labor, a partnership was a necessity, and marriage provided the most familiar and predictable institutional mechanism for such a partnership.

  The ready availability of land not only encouraged many people to marry, it allowed them to marry relatively young. Abundant land was cheap land, and that meant young people could acquire it either through purchase or tenancy without spending many years earning and saving their money to build up capital. So white settlers in colonial British North America not only married more frequently than young people in England; they also married earlier. The average marriage age by the eighteenth century in New England was about 22 for women and about 26 for men, on average two years earlier than the average marriage age in England. Among Quakers in the middle colonies the average marriage age was slightly higher than in New England (but still lower than in England), between 22 and 23 for women, and 26 to 27 for men. In the Chesapeake before 1680, as we have seen, marriage ages were very high for both men and women, since men had a hard time finding women to marry and women who came as servants had to wait until their service was completed (usually at age 24) before being allowed to marry. But by 1700, once settler societies in the Chesapeake matured and indentured servitude became less common, young people there began to marry at strikingly young ages as well. For example, the average marriage a
ge for native-born whites in Somerset County, Maryland between 1670 and 1740 was about 23 for men, and under 19 for women.4

  Having married young, white settlers typically produced very large families. For example, during the seventeenth century the average number of children born to each couple in the town of Andover, Massachusetts was 8.2. What was remarkable was that seven of these survived to age 21. Across the Atlantic the average survival rate tended to be only between four and five out of approximately seven births. Average numbers of births per white couple in the colonies decreased somewhat during the eighteenth century (as did survival rates), but family sizes were still well above the British norm. In the South, the average number of children born to families during the second half of the eighteenth century was a stunning 9.6 children per woman.5

  Document 16

  Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” (1751, published 1755), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven, 1961), Vol. 4, 225–34

  Benjamin Franklin wrote this essay in 1751 but did not publish it until the lead-up to the French and Indian War in 1755. When the essay was republished in several London magazines, some material including the last paragraph was omitted. Questions to consider: How would a high fertility rate among the white settler population affect the societies they created in North America? How might it affect their expectations? What kinds of assumptions does Franklin make in this essay about ethnicity and race? What is surprising about them?

  Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereupon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered.

  Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there, that there is but one Marriage per annum among 100 Persons, perhaps we may here reckon two; and if in Europe they have but 4 Births to a Marriage (many of their Marriages being late) we may here reckon 8, of which if one half grow up, and our Marriages are made, reckoning one with another at 20 Years of Age, our People must at least be doubled every 20 Years …

  … [T]here are supposed to be now upwards of One Million English Souls in North-America … This Million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another Century be more than the People of England, and the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water. What an Accesion of Power to the British Empire by Sea as well as Land! What Increase of Trade and Navigation! …

  And since Detachments of English from Britain sent to America, will … increase so largely here; why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them …

  Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

  Though the main reason for the size of colonial settler families was simply that women had more years to bear children, another contributing factor had to do with the North American environment. New England, in particular, was a healthy place. During the seventeenth century it was relatively isolated from the epidemics which regularly swept across Europe, an isolation which (along with the cold weather) made diseases relatively rare and produced lower levels of infant mortality and greater life expectancies than in Europe. Although the commercialization of New England's economy during the eighteenth century ended its isolation and brought more European epidemic diseases, mortality rates were not as devastating as in the Old World. American colonists enjoyed a better diet than Europeans, meaning that no one starved; the famines that were so common in Europe simply did not occur. Most farmers had enough land, and no one was dependent on a single crop.

  The large size of settler families would have a profound impact on patterns of development in British North America during the eighteenth century, because they meant a very rapid rate of settler population growth. The white population in the English colonies in 1700 was approximately 250,000. Between 1700 and 1770 the number of new European immigrants who flowed into the colonies was approximately 300,000. Remarkably, by the end of the period (in 1770) the total white population of the colonies had grown to 1.7 million, an extraordinary increase made possible by very high rates of fertility.6 Meanwhile, as the settlers thrived, Native American populations continued to be ravaged by warfare and disease. The settler population in effect became a juggernaut that pressed its way onto Native American land, forcing the Indians to assimilate or migrate to new territory where there was less competition for resources.7

  Birth rates in most societies today are nowhere near as high as those found in colonial British North America, for we have experienced what historical demographers call the “fertility transition,” the point when couples began to limit their fertility. Why did Anglo-American couples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have so many children? The absence of birth control technology is part of the answer, of course. Although sheaths made of sheep's gut could be purchased in London from the 1690s, they were unavailable to colonists (indeed they were not widely available in the United States until the late nineteenth century). Yet families could have limited their fertility without artificial birth control. Women in Native American societies managed to limit their fertility to one pregnancy every three or four years by prolonging the breastfeeding of small children in order to inhibit ovulation. And in the early nineteenth century, both American and French women began limit the sizes of their families by abstaining from sexual intercourse when they wanted to avoid pregnancies.

  To put the question another way, why did women in British North American settler communities not limit their pregnancies in the ways these other women did? Ideology provides a partial explanation. The Christian religion taught that God would provide bountiful blessings through a loving union between husband and wife. Large families may have offered solace and security to immigrants who had left their own families of origin far behind. However, the most basic explanation is that having lots of children made economic sense. Land was abundant, but it was valuable only to the extent there was labor to clear the trees and make the capital improvements needed for it to become productive. Children provided cheap, obedient labor. If they could be put to work milking cows and tending chickens when they were young, they cost very little, and as teenagers they could more than repay the cost of their upkeep in the value they added to a family farm.8

  Colonial British North Americans' need for children's labor on family farms would shape family life in other ways as well, especially in the North and in the piedmont regions of the South where farmers relied on family labor. Colonial settlers' children typically stayed with their families through adolescence. Unlike the experience
of English teenagers, who were sent into service during their mid-teens and returned home only intermittently thereafter, white colonial children remained at home and remained dependent on their parents until adulthood. A poorly developed labor market meant that teenaged sons and daughters were their parents' laborers of choice, and also that teenagers had fewer opportunities to earn a living away from their own homes.

  To us, it may seem cold or heartless to think about children in terms of their economic value. To European settlers in the colonies it would not have seemed heartless at all. Members of these families understood full well that each of them was responsible for a share of the family's productive work. Families worked together so that everyone in them could survive and thrive. Even in the mid eighteenth century the relative scarcity of goods for purchase made household production as well as local trading vital to family well-being. Growing up in such a society was a different kind of experience than it is for middle-class children in the United States and Europe today, and childhood had a different set of meanings.