Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Fathers were also charged with maintaining order within their families. Legal institutions in the colonies were weak, and authorities relied heavily on male household heads to ensure that the young people and women under their authority behaved properly and did not create trouble for the rest of the community.20 Fathers had the legal power (and the legal obligation) to discipline children and servants if they became unruly or disobedient, although they were supposed to use discipline in moderation and only when truly necessary. Fathers (and mothers) were legally entitled to strike their children and servants, and all of the colonies passed laws imposing penalties on children and servants who threatened or struck either parent. The most notorious was the Massachusetts statute of 1648 imposing the death penalty on children over age 16 who cursed at or refused to obey their parents. Prosecutions under such laws were rare (and no colony ever imposed the death penalty on a rebellious child), but they did clearly define the expectation that young people were supposed to obey their parents. Fathers and mothers also had the legal power, as well as the duty, to oversee their children's marriage choices. All of the colonies had laws on their books by the seventeenth century requiring the consent of a parent (usually the father) or master for a valid marriage, a legal requirement not enacted in England until 1752.21

  Although male household heads in Great Britain had some of the same formal legal powers as in the colonies, white men in the colonies typically possessed more actual power over dependants than was enjoyed by their counterparts at home. One previously noted factor was that colonial men had more children, most of whom lived at home until they reached adulthood. Thus white children in the colonies lived under paternal authority for a greater proportion of their lives than children in Britain. Colonial men were also more likely (overall) to own servants or slaves, especially during the eighteenth century, or to have purchased the indentures of poor people.

  Before the Reformation, institutions like monasteries and guilds had provided havens for poor people and their children. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, local governments in England instead began binding out poor people, especially children, to work in households until they reached adulthood. In the colonies, where other government institutions, like churches, had few resources, local governments relied even more heavily on male household heads to provide economic support as well as supervision and discipline for the poor. If they could not find family members willing to take them in, local colonial governments placed orphans, poor children, widows, unwed mothers, debtors, even indigent elderly people into the households of strangers, essentially requiring them to work as household servants for years in return for their bed and board. The result was a society in which adult male household heads had formal control over the vast majority of the population. One historian has estimated that in the colonies, by 1774, 80 percent of the population (including wives, children, servants, and slaves) lacked the legal freedom to leave the households in which they resided without the permission of the male household head.22

  A final source of coercive power over children (though not servants) in British North America was colonial fathers' virtually unlimited right to disinherit their children upon their deaths. Since fathers owned most or all of a family's productive property, this could be a very significant power. Colonial fathers often possessed more power to disinherit children than British fathers because they were more likely to hold unrestricted ownership rights to their land, especially in the northern colonies. Legally a man's authority to dispose of his land as he chose was limited (in law) only by the widow's dower right, which gave her the right to use (though not to sell or otherwise dispose of) a third of the property that the couple had built up during their marriage. The main exception to this pattern of paternal power over land was among elite families in the South. Southern families commonly tied up their land in entails, a legal mechanism used frequently in Britain to require that land be passed down through the lineage for generations. Entail weakened the powers of fathers over their children, since it prescribed how land would be disposed of and deprived fathers of the ability to disinherit children.23

  It would be logical to ask why anyone would put up with a system that was so undemocratic. Part of the answer, certainly, has to do with ideology. Early modern Europeans (particularly the Puritans) commonly viewed young people as less rational than adult men, and less capable of self-government. As noted above, notions of children as unformed or morally undeveloped strengthened notions that children needed fathers to guide and supervise their behavior. Another factor was a tendency within dissenting Protestantism to idealize fatherhood. It was commonplace in colonial culture to depict these powerful patriarchs as benevolent, wise, generous, and just, and to minimize or deny the extent to which men abused their powers. In other words, various powerful ideological currents led towards the same conclusion: that adult white men were the most rational, morally responsible members of the community. Therefore they should have the power to make decisions for everybody else.24

  By the eighteenth century the idea that fathers should have absolute power over their children was becoming discredited, having been jettisoned along with the much reviled theory of absolute monarchy. However, other ideological tendencies continued to prop up paternal authority over young people and servants, though an authoritarian style of discipline did become less popular. The Protestant idealization of fathers as benevolent figures persisted at least until the American Revolution. The growing Enlightenment era emphasis on reason highlighted children's lack of rationality, thereby making them seem in greater need of paternal guidance and protection. Meanwhile, the authority of masters over their slaves was being strengthened in the eighteenth century by developing racial ideologies suggesting that nonwhite adults were supposedly less capable of making rational moral decisions than adult white men.

  Another part of the answer may be that young people had several strategies for limiting or avoiding parental tyranny before the mid eighteenth century that did not involve outright resistance. Neighbors and friends could exert considerable pressure on household heads who acted in clearly immoral or irresponsible ways to change their behavior. Thus, dependants of a violent or unreasonable master could occasionally get help to change their situation. Also by the eighteenth century the development of a market for young people's labor in a few urban areas offered boys, if not girls, another way to resist parental tyranny: running away. The most famous runaway in colonial America was undoubtedly Benjamin Franklin. Having been bound as an apprentice to his elder brother James, a printer, Franklin became unhappy with his master's heavy-handed management style and ran away to Philadelphia in his late teens, with help from some friends. Another less famous youngster with a similar story was Ashley Bowen, a Massachusetts boy whose father apprenticed him to a sea captain at age 13 after his mother died. Bowen's master was a savage brute who bullied, starved, and beat the boy for four years, until Bowen found a way to escape and signed on with the master of another ship bound for the Caribbean.25

  A more common safeguard against parental tyranny may simply have been that fathers were often as dependent on their teenaged children, particularly their sons, as their children were on them. The scarcity of labor (combined with the abundance of land) gave some adult sons more bargaining power in negotiating the terms of their relationships than the legal rules might have seemed to permit. Nowhere was the interdependence of fathers and sons great than in seventeenth-century New England, where sons typically worked for their fathers until well into adulthood. Meanwhile fathers compensated their offspring by subdividing their own farms and building houses for each of the sons so that they could continue working for their fathers even after marrying and beginning families of their own. Sons thus benefited from the arrangement even though they did not strike out on their own and become financially independent.26

  During the eighteenth century, fathers continued to need their sons for work on family farms. Yet by this time it seems that adult sons had beg
un to make different kinds of bargains with their parents in exchange for their labor. Fewer eighteenth-century fathers had enough land to induce their sons to remain near home past their mid-twenties. Farms could not be subdivided forever, and moving further west became a more attractive option for more young men. Now New England fathers left most of their land to a designated son, usually the eldest or the youngest, and repaid the labor of their other sons by providing them with training in trades so that they could earn extra money, or by helping them to purchase land elsewhere. These strategies encouraged young men to develop greater independence, and sons in these later generations became more likely to move away from their home towns when they reached adulthood.

  Eighteenth-century Quaker fathers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey continued to exert considerable influence over their children's marriage choices, pressing their children to marry within the church. However, they too tended to encourage married adult children to live on their own rather than working on parental land. Consistent with their emphasis on moral suasion and their opposition to coercion in childrearing, Quakers offered land outright to their children once they married, usually providing a farm within a year of the marriage, rather than withholding it until the parents died. Of course Quaker fathers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had less reason than Puritan fathers in New England to withhold their sons' portions, since they were not as dependent on their sons for farm labor. They were relatively wealthier than farmers in New England, and often earned enough cash from their wheat harvests to purchase German or Scots-Irish indentured servants who could do their work instead.27

  The pattern of increasing independence for adult children during the eighteenth century was not universal. As a group, southern fathers in some ways asserted more control over their teenaged children during the eighteenth century than they had during the earlier decades. During the seventeenth century fathers in the Chesapeake, with its high mortality rates, had typically named their widows as the executors of their estates, hoping that giving their wives control over their property would more likely enable them to keep the children together under one roof and maintain continuity in the family. However, during the eighteenth century, after mortality had declined, fathers became likely to live long enough to see their children grow up. Men stopped entrusting their widows with executorships and came to rely on male relatives to oversee their property instead, which suggests that most southern families were becoming more patriarchal, in contrast to the pattern found elsewhere in the colonies.

  Nevertheless one group of southern Anglo-American fathers consistently struggled to assert any control at all over their sons. By 1750 rich, landowning fathers in Virginia and Maryland had strikingly independent, even insolent, teenaged children. Some historians have suggested that these families had become more permissive and child-centered, encouraging sons to become independent and self-confident so that they could effectively function in a competitive society. Typically gentry families did not need their children for labor, since they depended on slaves instead; therefore, relationships between fathers and sons were less intense among the southern gentry than in small farming families. Another explanation for the absence of patriarchal control in some southern gentry families may be that children had less need for their fathers' economic assistance. As mentioned above, gentry families in the Chesapeake began during the seventeenth century to tie up their land in entails, which guaranteed that land would pass to prescribed heirs regardless of what a father wanted. If family lands were tied up through entails, fathers could not disinherit their disobedient sons. Fathers' lack of power may help to explain their children's independence.28

  By the mid eighteenth century, ideological as well as economic trends were making it easier for grown children to criticize and even openly resist tyrannical fathers. As John Locke's political theories became popular in the wake of the Glorious Revolution in 1689, his ideas about childrearing began also to be widely read by well-educated colonial settlers. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke argued that parents should moderate their discipline with a little indulgence to secure their children's gratitude and affection. The child would then respond more readily to the challenge of adulthood. Locke also suggested that a sense of shame was generally more effective than fear, for the former would naturally induce a desire for self-improvement. Corporal punishment should be administered only as a last resort, since it could make a child resentful and less open to reason and moral persuasion. The new attitude was reflected in depictions of the biblical prodigal son. Earlier versions stressed the folly and ruin that would result for children who defied their parents. By 1740 or so the emphasis had shifted to the need for parental affection and forgiveness to prevent children leaving in the first place.

  Locke's influence helped to popularize a softer version of patriarchy. He denied that any authority was absolute or divinely appointed, since it had to be contractual, giving protection to all members of the family (though Locke still believed in the natural superiority of men). The manner in which fathers were expected to assert their authority as parents began to change, as authoritarian styles of parenting became less acceptable and paternalistic styles gained popularity. Although fathers could still exert enormous influence over the lives and decisions of their children until they married and started their own households, paternal authority became more amenable to negotiation.29

  One sign of adult children's increasing assertiveness in relationships with parents was their new insistence by about 1740 on making their own courtship and marriage decisions. Traditional patterns of sexual behavior had permitted couples to become sexually intimate before marriage provided they married promptly if the woman were to become pregnant. Puritans in New England had virtually transformed these patterns during the seventeenth century by encouraging strict paternal control as well community oversight over young people's sexual behavior. However, after 1740 or so traditional patterns of courtship re-emerged as parents, even in New England, relaxed their control over their children's courtships. Social interactions between young men and women became substantially more relaxed than they had been a century earlier, and sexual intimacy before marriage became unexceptional. The best indication of the new attitudes was a considerable increase in the rate of bridal pregnancy. During the seventeenth century, the percentage of brides who became pregnant before they married never rose above 10 percent in New England. By the mid eighteenth century, the rate had increased to around 30 percent. Parents, of course, continued to have the legal right to withhold their consent to children's marriages, but were unlikely to refuse when their daughters were already pregnant. Adult children had thus found an effective way to decide for themselves whom they would marry, and when.30

  4 Social Structure: Rank and Class

  People in the United States have long prided themselves on having a classless society. Historians used to agree, offering three reasons in support: (1) that the frontier was a great leveler; (2) that, in crossing the Atlantic, immigrants to British North America left class distinctions behind; and (3) that North America was a land of opportunity. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, the question was not what a person was, but what a person could do. Ability, not birth, determined status and rewards in life.31

  Along with the perception that British North Americans invented the nuclear family, the perception that class did not exist in colonial British North American societies is one more example of American exceptionalism that contemporary historians have debunked. Of course the colonists did leave behind them the strict hierarchical structures of Europe. No feudal aristocracy or peerage existed in British North America as in Britain. But immigrants did not arrive in British North America as equals. As we have seen, the Virginia Company had dispatched a number of gentlemen to help build the colony; the Puritans were led by gentry families like the Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Vanes; Lord Baltimore sent over his brother and a number of gentry to Maryland; while the C
arolinian proprietors planned a leading role for their aristocracy. Even Penn relied on his connections with the aristocracy and on a monied class to get his settlement established.

  Domination by the elites was reinforced by religious sanction. As John Winthrop asserted on board the Arabella in 1630, “God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, has so disposed of the condition of Mankind” that “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.” In fact, British colonial societies were shot through with social inequality from the very beginning. Class distinctions became considerably more visible during the eighteenth century as colonial societies grew wealthier and elites accumulated property and prestige. British North Americans did not, however, experience class in the same ways as the British.

  To understand class divisions in colonial British North America it is helpful to begin by looking at concepts of social hierarchy found in seventeenth-century England. Contemporaries sometimes described English society as comprised of two estates: the nobility and the commons. The nobility was a legally defined category; everybody else was simply part of the commons. Other descriptions of English society were rather more nuanced. Although people did not speak of “classes,” they described the social order in terms of “rank,” “degrees,” and “sorts.” Most people thought of the “upper sort” as including both the nobility and the gentry, that is, people whose lands gave them independent incomes so that they did not have to work. Comprising the “middling sort” were a wide variety of people who worked for a living, including wealthy merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, clergymen, ship captains, highly skilled artisans in high-status trades like silversmithing, and so on. Independent yeoman farmers were often a separate category, deserving of considerable respect because of their independence (but comprising only a minority of farmers, since most farmers were tenants or owned too little land to be considered independent). There was also the “lower sort,” which included lower-paid artisans, poor farmers, unskilled laborers, ordinary seamen, servants, and the vagrant poor. Categories were not carefully defined (except for the nobility or peerage), but status roughly corresponded with wealth, especially landed wealth. It has been estimated that though the aristocracy and the gentry comprised only 2 or 3 percent of the population in early seventeenth-century England, they owned perhaps 65 percent of the land. Virtually all important offices in county and parish governments were held by members of the gentry, who were also eligible to serve in the House of Commons.