Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Similar sorts of categories were used to describe people in colonial British North American societies, but they appear to have acquired different meanings. A titled aristocracy never developed in the British North American colonies. Still, by the end of the seventeenth century, local elites had emerged who thought of themselves as members of the gentry in every colony. New York was dominated by the Anglo-Dutch dynasties of Van Rensselaer, Livingston, Stuyvesant, Bayard, and Philipse; Virginia was controlled by the planter families of Beverley, Randolph, Carter, Harrison, Lee, and Byrd; and South Carolina had its Pinckneys, Rutledges, Draytons, and Manigaults. Massachusetts had long been dominated by its Puritan ministers and magistrates, the Mathers and the Winthrops being the pre-eminent examples, who by the end of the seventeenth century shared a place at the top of the social scale with members of merchant families like the Dudleys, Hutchinsons, Pynchons, and Sewalls. In every province this gentry dominated social and political life, especially at the level of the provincial council. In New York during one decade 25 of the 28 councillors were from the landed families of the Hudson Valley. Similarly, in Virginia, nine families made up one-third of the council in the period 1700–60, while in Connecticut 25 names accounted for two-thirds of that body.

  What about the rest of the population? Fifty years ago many scholars suggested that British colonial North American society was equal because it offered unrivaled economic opportunity, at least for the immigrants who came here from Europe. Robert E. Brown in particular argued that the presence of the frontier made land both plentiful and cheap, while the high level of wages opened its purchase to all whites. Since property was the only qualification men required in order to vote or to hold office, entry into the political and social life of a colony was unrestricted. Brown called this situation economic democracy, a society in which the majority of the white population was middle-class.32

  Unfortunately, the Brown thesis contained several flaws, which most historians now recognize. In the first place, though land may have been cheap in many areas, the frontier itself was far from having a leveling effect. Settlers simply did not arrive there in an equal condition, for of course the scions of the rich were able to secure the best tracts from their relatives on the council and gain a head start before coming west with slaves or servants. Such “pioneers” included William Byrd of Virginia, who purchased 100,000 acres in what became Lunenburg County; and John Pynchon, who developed the frontier settlement of Springfield, high up the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts.33

  In the second place, as settlement expanded, the price of land rose, putting it out of the reach of many ordinary settlers in some areas by the eighteenth century. As we have seen, by 1700 in Virginia only half the free adult male population owned land and 50 percent of these did not have the necessary 100 acres to make life comfortable. The extent of tenant farming rose substantially during the eighteenth century. The same was true in Maryland. In Talbot County 150 men owned land and slaves, 220 owned some land, but 420 owned no land at all. In neighboring Prince George County during the 1730s the average tenant was worth just £26; the owner of a small farm was worth £117; but a planter with slaves possessed almost £600. Perhaps most significant is the fact that some 60 percent of households still possessed less than £100.

  In the North, the distribution of land was more balanced, though by the middle of the eighteenth century inequality was growing there too. In Dedham, Massachusetts, the top five percent of the population owned a mere 15 percent of the property in the town by 1730. But in cities, where merchants and ship-owners were able to amass considerable wealth, the gap was greater. In Boston the top five percent owned about 46 percent of inheritable wealth on the eve of the Revolution, while the lowest half of the population owned just 5 percent. In Philadelphia the top five percent owned more than 55 percent of inheritable wealth by the same period.34

  It was these discrepancies that helped to create an upper class in the British mainland colonies. Still, it was an upper class not particularly secure in its claims to gentry status. Most of the upper class in the North, for example, owed its wealth to commerce, not land. Members of the southern upper class did their best to replicate the British gentry, solidifying their pedigrees through intermarriage and carefully settling substantial amounts of wealth on their eldest sons. But they still lacked the long history, and with it the claim to inherited authority, of the British gentry. Perhaps hoping to buttress their stature, the families of the upper classes began distancing themselves from the rest of society around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Their way of life changed. They built conspicuously large houses and furnished them with luxuries imported from Europe. They bought carriages, wore clothing made from imported fabrics in the latest European fashions, and gave greater attention to their personal hygiene and appearance. Their patterns of consumption seemed designed to affirm to the world, as well as to themselves, that they really were gentlemen, entitled to respect and deference. The new elite sought, too, to educate their children in a way that befitted the children of the gentry, sending them to school and later college, where they could develop a network of acquaintances. Such children mixed only with their peer group and soon absorbed the manners and attitudes of a governing class.

  We have already seen that at the other end of the social scale, colonial societies by the eighteenth century were also seeing the emergence of real poverty. As land grew more crowded with the growth of settler populations, some young people whose parents could not provide for them took to the roads in search of work, particularly after about 1760. Some among them migrated to the larger towns and seaports, hoping to ply their trades or looking for jobs as dockworkers, laborers, or sailors. Though paid work was often available in urban areas, wage laborers and artisans were extremely vulnerable to disruptions of the market caused by wars and economic downturns. Epidemics, too, could be devastating. New York's yellow fever epidemic in 1702, for example, killed 10 percent of the city's population and left one in five families headed by a widow. Wages for many urban workers (especially women) were so low that when work disappeared as a result of a temporary downturn, they could not support their children without binding them out to masters or sending them to beg in the streets. When people grew truly desperate, they could apply for public alms; some five to seven percent of urban people received public assistance during the eighteenth century, either in almshouses or in the workhouses that were built in cities like Boston and Newport to attempt to make poor relief pay for itself. Others, not yet on the verge of starvation or death from exposure, did not qualify for alms and thus are not counted in that figure. Although most historians have found that poverty in British North American urban areas was not as extensive as in London or other contemporary European cities, the poor were just as vulnerable in the colonies as elsewhere.35

  Some historians have argued that the growth of commerce in British North America helped produce a distinctive working class, since the market economy, with its differentiation between owners and operatives, reduced labor from having a dignified status to that of a mere commodity. Distinctions of wealth and class were clearly on the increase during the eighteenth century. There is also evidence that some of the poorer sorts of people, especially in colonial cities, may have developed a distinct set of cultural values during the eighteenth century that made it possible to criticize elite claims to authority under some circumstances. On the other hand any self-conscious working class in the British colonies was still small. One reason is the majority of workers were still servants who lived with their masters in considerable intimacy. The segregation of the workplace from the home by the payment of a flat wage had yet to be adopted on a large scale, though as we have seen, many northern cities had a population of wage laborers by 1760. Unlike wage workers who lived in their own neighborhoods, servants had relatively few opportunities to complain to others outside their household or to develop a thorough critique of their situation, since so much of their time was supervised by th
eir masters. Another factor was that many servants later became masters and property-owners, although they rarely became rich. A true working class would not emerge until industrialization produced both capitalist and propertyless classes which were mutually antagonistic. This sort of division had yet to occur except on southern plantations, where the workers were enslaved.36

  The evidence of growing disparities of wealth is at odds with Brown's thesis about a universal middle class. On the other hand, to people who had come to the colonies from Great Britain or other European countries as immigrants, colonial societies looked considerably less class-stratified than societies back home. Even with the growing disparities between the rich and poor, the “middling sort” in the British mainland colonies was substantial. Landownership was considerably more widespread than in Great Britain, where most rural people were tenants, poor farmers, and hired laborers. Indeed landownership was widespread enough that the majority of free white men could at least dream of achieving a competence – becoming a yeoman or an independent artisan, capable of supporting himself with the help of his dependants, and enjoying the respect of his wife and children. Even if tenancy was increasing, land was available enough and wages high enough to ensure that most free white men in the British North American colonies could marry at a relatively young age and have children of their own. And in many regions, it would be possible to develop strategies so that the majority of a man's sons could become independent household heads themselves, a prospect virtually unthinkable for most men in contemporary Britain.

  For white men from modest origins, this was enough to hope for. A yeoman or an independent artisan could earn enough to be entitled to the respect and deference of a wife and a household full of children, and of his community as well. The colonies were hardly classless societies, and no settler would have said they were. But that they offered so many the opportunity to achieve the status of a patriarchal household head was enough to make most white men feel very confident and optimistic about their futures – as long as enough land remained available to keep that opportunity open for them and for their sons.

  1. The new demographic history began appearing in the late 1960s. See especially Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age (New York, 1973); and Peter Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group (Cambridge, 1972). For summaries of much of the subsequent research, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, 1982), and Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1982). These studies in demography came about because social changes in Europe, not least the democratization of political structures, generated interest in the history of the common man. An early survey of the new methodology and its implications for American history can be found in Philip J. Greven, Jr., “Historical Demography and Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 24 (1967), 438–54. The first major demographic works on colonial America were Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); and John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970). Later studies include Vivian C. Fox and Martin H. Quitt, eds, Loving, Parenting, and Dying: The Family Cycle in England and America, Past and Present (New York, 1980); John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York, 1986); and Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York, 1988).

  2. For the now discredited theory that extended English families gave way in the colonies to nuclear families, see Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, 1960).

  3. The discussion in this chapter is limited to the family experiences of white settlers. African slaves on the North American mainland would overcome a similar demographic imbalance, begin to form families, and become remarkably successful in reproducing their population by about 1750. However, the nature of family life for enslaved people would be very different than for the free white population. By the end of the seventeenth century, African Americans in many of the colonies were prohibited from marrying whites, and slaves were legally prohibited from marrying at all. Given these constraints, African American family experiences were distinct from those of whites. It will be important for us to focus on some of the differences, so African American family experiences will be discussed separately in Chapter 14.

  4. Statistics are from Henry A. Gemery, “The White Population of the Colonial United States, 1607–1790,” in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds, A Population History of North America (Cambridge, 2000), 143–90, especially table 5.2.

  5. Gemery, “White Population of the Colonial United States,” table 5.2.

  6. Imports of enslaved Africans will be discussed in Chapter 14.

  7. For a comparison of the family patterns of English and Native American New Englanders, see Gloria Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

  8. For a particularly clear explanation of the economic relationships involved in family farming, see Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1830 (Chapel Hill, 1994).

  9. This argument was most fully articulated by Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962).

  10. There is little evidence that colonial women hired wet nurses, as wealthy Englishwomen sometimes did.

  11. See Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston, 1992).

  12. The view that childrearing was extensive rather than intensive and thus involved less individual attention to children is argued by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York, 1982); and Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850 (New York, 1985). The emotional commitment of mothers to their children is emphasized by Mary Beth Norton in Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980).

  13. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York, 1966), 77, argues that New England families adopted this practice to protect themselves from being excessively indulgent. The economic reasons behind such family disruption are emphasized in Helena M. Wall, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 97–125. Poor children are discussed in Ruth Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001).

  14. Quoted in Fox and Quitt, eds, Loving, Parenting, and Dying, 313.

  15. Levy, Quakers and the American Family.

  16. For the influence of Enlightenment ideas about childhood in eighteenth-century colonial America, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1982). Another view is that the rising standard of living, coupled with increasing longevity, encouraged people to plan not only for their children but for their grandchildren too and provided an additional incentive to develop a close and loving relationship. This view is argued by Daniel Blake Smith in Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980). See also his review article, “The Study of the Family in Early America: Trends, Problems, and Prospects,” William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982), 3–28.

  17. The declining autonomy of children is dealt with in Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, 2005).

  18. Since around 1990, there has been a revived interest in exploring the establishment, evolution, and persistence of patriarchal forms of authority in early America. This interest grew in part from questions about why the American feminist movement had failed to achieve one of it
s main goals, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996), argues that a highly patriarchal political ideology prevailed in New England, while a more modern political ideology (which also insisted on male dominance in the family) developed in the Chesapeake. Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville, 2002), argues that white male household heads had exceptional powers over Anglo-American households until the mid nineteenth century. Holly Brewer's findings on the declining autonomy of children (cited above) also support the general thesis that parental authority grew during the eighteenth century, rather than declined.

  19. The patriarchal model of the family received considerable reinforcement from the political theories of Sir Thomas Filmer, who used a model of the patriarchal family to justify absolute monarchy in the seventeenth century. Filmer argued that all government authority flowed from the father's authority over dependents. John Locke, a critic of absolutism, argued that the family was a private realm, separate from the state. For a discussion of the Filmer and Locke models of the family, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers.