American Colonial Society and Culture

Ethnic Diversity in Colonial America• Colonial society was a

unique mix of European immigrants by the dawn of the Revolution.

• Besides the English-- Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, and French immigrants were also prominently represented in English Colonial society.

• They were loyal to the English Crown, and most regarded the New World as their new homeland.

Colonial Population Growth

Population growth1. In 1700 the

colonies contained fewer than 300,00 people

2. By 1775, there were about 2.5 million people

Africans in Colonial America

• Of the 2.5 million people, about half a million were black.

Colonials vs Native Americans

• The Pequot War was an armed conflict in 1634-1638 between an alliance of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, with Native American allies (the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes), against the Pequot tribe.

• This war saw the elimination of the Pequot in what is present-day Southern New England.

Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America [Gary Nash]

• Written by highly acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash, this book presents an interpretive account of the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans, and Euroamericans during the colonial and revolutionary eras.

Three Regions of Colonial America

• In the three main geographic areas, the South, New England and the Mid-Atlantic, social classes were quite different from each other because of the natural environment and social development.

Early American Protestantism

Chapter 2

English Reformation: Henry VIII

• The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th century England by which the Church of England first broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

Anglican Church

• The Church of England, whose members were commonly called Anglicans, became the official faith in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and a part of New York.

• One of Virginia’s Earliest Anglican Churches

Puritanism

• For our purposes, Puritanism reflected an attitude regarding God and man which stressed the sinfulness and the duty of man, and the sovereignty and law of God.

• As to doctrine, the Puritans were strongly predestinarian.

The Great Awakening• A religious revival

called the Great Awakening hit the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s.

• The Awakening brought an evangelical message of “new birth” that divided older congregations into New Lights and Old Lights.

Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758)

• Jonathan Edwards is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian.

• His work as a whole is an expression of two themes — the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness.

George Whitefield [1714-1770]

• George Whitefield (1714 -1770), was an Anglican itinerant minister who helped spread the Great Awakening in Great Britain and, especially, in the British North American colonies.

Effects of the Great Awakening

• I. Establishment of New Colleges

• Princeton [1746]• King’s

College/Columbia [1754]

• Brown [1764]• Rutgers [1766]• Dartmouth [1769]

Effects of the Great Awakening

• II. Further Growth of Religious Toleration

• Growth of an ecumenical spirit

Effects of the Great Awakening

• III. Growth of African-American Christianity

Effects of the Great Awakening

• IV. It helped prepare the American people for the American Revolution

A. Fear of Corruption [British conspiracy against liberty]

B. American Missionary Spirit

NEW ENGLAND COLONIES

Colonial New England• New England was made up

of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

• Fishing, whaling, and timber forests for shipbuilding created bustling seaports that distributed trade goods throughout the world.

• The center of business was Boston, the city that would become the birthplace of The Revolution!

New England Colonies: Pilgrims

• Pilgrims a name commonly applied to the early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts.

• The colony, established in 1620, became the second successful English settlement (after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607) in what was to become the USA.

• The Pilgrims' story has become a central theme of the history and culture of the United States.

Pilgrims are Calvinists

The Puritans are Calvinists

• A Puritan of 16th and 17th century England was an associate of any number of religious groups advocating for more "purity" of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and group piety.

• Puritans felt that the English Reformation had not gone far enough, and that the Church of England was tolerant of practices which they associated with the Church of Rome.

Each town had a meetinghouse in the center. Men met there to make laws and settle problems.

Each person was required to read the Bible.

Religion was the center of the Puritan life.

Newcomers were expectedto follow the Puritan’s beliefs.

If they did not they were not welcome. If they did, they were given farm land and a voice in local government Eventually some settlers left Massachusetts Bay and started new settlements.

• The Growth of New England – Expansion of New

England• Fundamental Orders

of Connecticut• Roger Williams’s

Dissent• Anne Hutchinson• Maine and New

Hampshire

The Growth of New England, 1620-1750

Colonial New England

• New England: Pre-Industrial Society• Major Economic Activity• Subsistence Agriculture• Urban Areas: Trade and Commerce• Fishing

New England Towns

• Towns date back to the time of the earliest European colonial settlement of New England.

• New England towns were experiments in early self-government in colonial society.

Colonial New England Farmer• The New England was a

society of small independent farmers known as yeomen.

• These farmers owned more than 70 percent of the land and worked to maintain a society of equal property owners.

• The first settlers divided their large farms among their children, and the next generation did the same thing.

Colonial American 17th Century slave market/auction

Colonial slaves in New England were often domestic help

Slave craftsman/artisan

Middle Colonies

Middle Colonies

The mid Atlantic colonies were a mix of various ethnic and religious communities who

were tied together by trade and political institutions.

Social Classes in Middle Colonies

• Small independent farms were prevalent through most parts of mid-Atlantic colonies.

• However, the society and classes in these colonies were formed based on ethnicity and religion.

• New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware hosted a rolling landscape of grain fields and iron mines, and these resources created a thriving middle class.

• The cities of New York and Philadelphia were crammed with diverse nationalities that created the first steps toward a unique level of tolerance in America.

Colonial New York

• Center Protestantism predominated [Calvinism]

• Dutch Reformed Church

Colonial Pennsylvania

• In Pennsylvania, the Quakers, who were pacifists, were the largest religious group and they controlled the state’s representative assembly until 1750s.

• Many Europeans, who were looking to escape religious persecution and poverty, were attracted to Quaker vision.

Colonial Philadelphia

• Many Germans migrated to Philadelphia in the 18th century and this period also saw the Scots-Irish settlers.

• Who are the “Pennsylvania Dutch?”

Philadelphia: Religious Diversity

• The mid-18th century saw Philadelphia having no less than 12 religious denominations which included Quakers, Anglicans, Swedish, Roman Catholics and German Lutherans among others.

Colonial Working Class

Southern Colonies

•Chesapeake Colonies• Virginia and Maryland•North Carolina• South Carolina

Southern Colonies

Southern Society

• The southern colonies included Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

• These colonies all boasted plenty of good, cleared land and a mild climate conducive to growing staple and exotic cash crops.

• Tobacco became the staple crop and the economic foundation of Virginia and North Carolina.

• South Carolinian soil, though unfit for tobacco, was perfect for growing rice and indigo, a dye used to dye textiles blue.

• The southern colonies also produced lumber, tar, pitch, turpentine, furs, and cattle.

Southern Society

• The South quickly developed an aristocratic slave-owning society that produced the so-called “Virginia Dynasty”

Native Americans were the first laborers in all the 13 American

colonies: It did not work out. Why?

Europe’s poor come to Americaas Indentured Servants

Indentured Servants on Tobacco Plantations in the Colonial South

Freed indentured servants moved to the frontier of the colonies

1. In 1676 settlers led by planter Nathaniel Bacon fought Virginia’s colonial government for failing to protect them from raids by the Susquehannock people. 2. During Bacon’s Rebellion, settlers marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital. 3. The rebellion faded later that year after Bacon died from disease.

After Bacon’s Rebellion African labor became the basis of the southern

economy

The Triangular Trade

Africans marched to the sea from the interior

Impact on Africa

• The exact number of Africans caught up in the Atlantic slave trade over the next four centuries remains unknown.

• The best estimates suggest that over nine-and-a-half million Africans were forcibly imported into the New World and that another two million died during the Middle Passage.

• But no one knows how many people died in Africa during wars in which slaves were seized, in the forced march to the coast, or in the coastal dungeons, pens, or barracoons where slaves were herded.

• The figure may well have been more than seven million, bringing the total number of Africans entrapped in the slave trade to more than 18 million people.

Slave ships to the New World

Slave labor and tobacco

• Slave Quarters

Slave labor in Carolina Rice Field• For over 4,000 years man

has grown and consumed rice.

• Probably originating in Southeast Asia; the Moors brought it to Spain in the 8th century

• By 1718, South Carolinians were exporting 6,773 barrels of rice, each weighing 350 lbs., to England and 2,333 barrels to other colonies.

Slave labor contribution From the village that would one

day become Manhattan to the small tobacco farms of British Virginia, from the sweltering fields of lucrative Carolina plantations to the construction sites of icons like the U.S. Capitol, it was millions of enslaved men, women and children who turned a barely charted territory with a shaky future into one of the strongest and richest nations in the world.