Chapter 5 - Study Guide\Review

US:  A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 5 Review

The Mosaic of Eighteenth Century America [1689-1771]

AN AMERICAN STORY

The Tale of a Tattooed Traveler

August 13, 1720: morning sunlight breaks over the confluence of the Platte and Loup Rivers in what today is Nebraska. Jean L'Archevêque rises stiffly from where he slept and looks about camp at his companions emerging from their tents. A few dozen Spanish soldiers mill about in the early light, donning their long, leather vests and their wide-brimmed hats. At another end of the encampment the Pueblo Indian men who have accompanied the expedition speak softly to one another, making less noise than the soldiers, though double their number. A friar in his habit makes his way around the tents. Don Pedro de Villasur, lieutenant governor of New Mexico and leader of the party, threads his arms through a bright, red officer's coat and orders the soldiers to bring in their horses. Most of these men had known L'Archevêque for years—had come to appreciate his sly humor and grown accustomed to his thick accent. But on this morning, as they set about the king's business in an alien land some 600 miles from their homes and families, there must have been something unnerving about the dark, swirling tattoos that covered the Frenchman's face. They had been put there years earlier by a steady Indian hand, in the aftermath of a Texas expedition that had ended in calamity. One had only to look at L'Archevêque to be reminded that things sometimes go badly for both kings and their servants. It was a tangled path that brought the Frenchman to the Platte River in 1720. Born in 1672 in Bayonne, France, L'Archevêque was only a boy when he boarded ship to the French Caribbean, fleeing his family's financial troubles. Then in 1684 he enlisted in a colonization scheme led by the French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. Three years earlier La Salle had been the first to navigate the immense Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. He was famous and respected. The nearly 300 colonists in his care had reason to put confidence in their leader. Their confidence was misplaced. Try as he might, La Salle could not find the mouth of the Mississippi when he approached this time from the Gulf of Mexico. Instead he landed on the coast of present-day Texas and threw up some ramshackle buildings. As months stretched into years, the expedition lost its ships, while the colonists sickened, starved, and died. The survivors blamed their leader and in 1687 hatched a plan to be rid of him. Young L'Archevêque played a part, distracting the great explorer while an accomplice blew his head apart with a musket shot. As the colony spiraled into ruin, L'Archevêque and a few desperate companions eventually found themselves unhappy guests among Caddo Indians in east Texas. These were the people who tattooed the young man's face, carefully inserting a dye made from walnuts into countless tiny cuts. Spanish explorers, determined to root out La Salle's colony, stumbled across L'Archevêque in 1690, ransomed him from the Caddos, and imprisoned him—first in Mexico City and then for two and a half years in Spain. Finally he was freed and returned to Mexico City. Jean L'Archevêque had become a pawn in a high-stakes game.

News of La Salle's stillborn colony convinced Spanish officials to take more energetic measures to secure their claims on the North American West, to prevent France from using the region as a base for threatening New Spain and its all too famous silver mines. Crucially, Spain had to reconquer New Mexico. Popé's Pueblo Revolt of 1680 had expelled the Spanish (Chapter 3), but the determined unity of the diverse Pueblo villages collapsed within a dozen years. When Spanish colonists returned in earnest in 1692 under Diego de Vargas, they met only fragmented resistance. It was in reconquered New Mexico that L'Archevêque found his first real home since boyhood. Sent north perhaps because of his facility not only with French but also Indian languages, L'Archevêque quickly became a fixture in Santa Fe, prospering, marrying well, and gaining the trust and esteem of his neighbors. The Spanish had not long returned to New Mexico before they began hearing complaints from the plains Apaches about Pawnee raiders armed with French guns and mocking the Spanish, calling them “women.” In 1720, with Spain and France at war in Europe, New Mexico's governor ordered his lieutenant Villasur to take L'Archevêque and a mixed group of Indian and Spanish fighters to confront the French—hence the long trek to the Platte River, where the men awoke at daybreak on August 13 to do the king's business. But things sometimes go badly for kings and their servants. Moments after ordering his men to bring in their horses, Villasur heard wild screams and saw dozens of painted Pawnee warriors rush the camp. The lieutenant governor was one of the first to die, killed with mouth agape just outside his tent; the well-traveled L'Archevêque fell soon after. In the end only 13 Spaniards and 40 Pueblo warriors escaped to bring the doleful news back to Santa Fe, where residents would long remember the ambush as one of the great calamities of their history. That a merchant's boy from Bayonne, France, could be shipwrecked, recruited to murder, and tattooed in Texas, imprisoned in Mexico and Spain, married and made respectable on the Upper Rio Grande, and finally shot dead and buried alongside Spanish and Indian companions somewhere in Nebraska, testifies in a very personal way to the unpredictable changes unleashed by contact between European and American civilizations. As Europeans established colonies and began competing with one another across the far reaches of the continent, individuals throughout North America, especially native peoples, found life changing at astonishing speed. Europeans, with their animals, plants, technologies, diseases, and designs, drove the existing dynamism in the Americas to a fever pitch of transformation. But Europeans could not predict and did not control the process. Despite their grand ambitions, colonial newcomers often found their own plans upended and their lives reordered by the same forces reworking native life.

Crisis and Transformation in Northern New Spain

French, English, and Indian nations all jockeyed for power and position across North America during the eighteenth century. The French expanded their fur trade through the interior, while the English at midcentury began to press the barrier of the Appalachians. But native peoples still controlled the vast majority of the continent and often held the balance of power in inter-imperial struggles. As European rivals laid claim to more and more of North America, nervous Spanish officials stared at their maps. Around the region that had been the Aztec Empire, Spain controlled enormous cities, booming towns, and agricultural villages—a region still populated by millions despite waves of epidemic disease. Though drier and home to far fewer people, the lands hundreds of miles north of Mexico City were of special concern because of their remarkable silver mines.

To protect these lands from French designs, Spain had to start paying more attention to the blank spaces still further north on their maps—spaces entirely controlled by Indians.

Defensive Expansion into Texas

Nowhere did the French seem more menacing than in Texas, one of the most important blank spots on Spanish maps. La Salle's catastrophic adventure could have turned out differently: before his grisly death, the Frenchman pledged to invade northern New Spain with an army of thousands of Indians, who, he believed, had “a deadly hatred of the Spaniards.” Fearful that another French expedition might actually acquire such an army, in 1690 Spain began establishing missions among the native peoples of Texas. The project started haltingly, but by the early 1720s the Spanish had fortified their claim on Texas with 10 Franciscan missions, 4 presidios (military garrisons), and the beginnings of a civilian settlement on the San Antonio River. Still, missions disappointed Franciscans and natives alike. Missionaries hoped to create orderly, regimented communities where Indians could be shielded from outside influence and taught to be industrious and devout. The friars did baptize natives by the thousands in Texas. But Indians insisted on coming and going when they pleased. Many nonsedentary peoples sought the food and sanctuary missions offered, only to leave periodically to rendezvous with kin, hunt, and harvest wild plant foods. Their comings and goings confounded the missionaries. Matters were even worse for Franciscans in east Texas, where sedentary Caddos barely tolerated the missions at all. Farmers themselves, and relatively secure in their fixed villages of beehive-shaped homes, Caddos had no need for the missionaries' crops or protection. Just as important, they could and did trade with Frenchmen from Louisiana, who offered more manufactured goods at better prices than Spaniards did. However successful they were at retaining autonomy, Indians throughout Texas paid a steep price for any benefits they wrung from missions. Those compelled inside by hunger and insecurity often endured harsh discipline and corporal punishment for disobeying orders. Even worse, missions proved ideal vectors for epidemic disease. In the 1730s alone smallpox killed more than 1,000 mission Indians near San Antonio. Other illnesses became commonplace as nomadic peoples with sanitary practices suitable for life on the move crowded together in filthy, cramped buildings. Children were especially vulnerable to the new regime. In eighteenth-century Mission San Antonio, for example, only one in three newborns survived to his or her third birthday. While friars and Indians negotiated their complex and tragic relationship, Spanish administrators struggled to foster civilian communities in Texas. The crown tried to convince Spanish subjects to move to the infant colony and even sent agents to recruit among the impoverished families on the Canary Islands. These efforts met with only token success. In 1731 Texas's nonnative population barely amounted to 500 men, women, and children; by 1760 that figure had slightly more than doubled. In 1778 a Franciscan inspector described San Antonio as “a town so miserable that it resembles a most wretched village.” The town consisted of “59 houses of stone and mud, and 79 of wood, but all poorly built.” Spain had pushed into the blank space on the map that was Texas, but after generations into the project it still controlled only an archipelago of missions, presidios, and a few towns.

Crisis and Rebirth in New Mexico

Elsewhere the region remained in the hands of unconquered Indians, whose power in the region seemed to be expanding. At first Apaches did most to threaten Spain's ambitions in Texas. Their raids thinned Spanish herds, prevented ranching and farming communities from expanding outward, and threatened missions with destruction. Spaniards responded with slave raids on Apache camps, and the violence escalated. By the 1730s, however, a new force emerged to eclipse even Apaches. They called themselves Numunuu “the People.” Their enemies came to call them Comanches. Emerging from the foothills of the Rockies in the late sixteenth century, Comanches integrated European horses into their lives, moved permanently onto the Plains, and quickly became some of the most formidable equestrian warriors in history. They allied with Indians who could provide them French guns and ammunition from Louisiana and embarked on a program of territorial expansion. By the mid-eighteenth century Comanches drove most Apaches from the plains and took over their rich bison-hunting territories in what is today southern Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and west Texas. Without bison, Apaches turned more and more to stealing Spanish animals to survive. Spaniards from Santa Fe to San Antonio soon found themselves at war with Apaches and Comanches both; New Mexico often came into conflict with Navajos and Utes as well. Much of northern New Spain became a theatre of desolation; abandoned villages up and down the Rio Grande testified to the limits of Spanish power. Spaniards accused the “barbarians” of animalistic savagery, but all sides inflicted horrors on their enemies. Outside the little besieged town of Tucson, for example, Lt. Col. Pedro de Allende boasted that he had decapitated a fallen Apache in front of the dead man's comrades and “charged the Apache line single-handed, with the head stuck on his lance.” Away from the din of battle, a prominent Spaniard noted that his people accuse the Indians of cruelty but added, “I do not know what opinion they would have of us.” By the 1780s nearly everyone had had enough of war. A farsighted Comanche leader named Ecueracapa helped broker peace with Spanish authorities in 1786, after which the new allies cooperated to entice or threaten Utes, Navajos, and Apaches into peace as well. Northern New Spain entered a period of relative calm, expansion, and economic growth. Changes were most dramatic in New Mexico, where Spanish subjects opened up new farms and ranches, enlarged their flocks and herds, and devoted new energy to local manufacturing. As New Mexico's non-Indian population grew (20,000 by the close of the eighteenth century), new roads funded by the crown helped ease the province's isolation. Finally, peace meant that Nuevo Mexicanos could accumulate wealth by trading more with their Indian neighbors and with merchants in Chihuahua, Durango, and Mexico City. Trade and supply caravans began setting out from Santa Fe for Chihuahua City once or even twice a year. Some of the New Mexicans who profited most from the newfound opportunities began to patronize artists and skilled craftsmen. By the late eighteenth century a distinctive New Mexican culture started to emerge, one marked by new traditions in such crafts as woodworking and weaving, as well as in religious art and practice. A master craftsman known only as the Laguna Santero helped define this movement by training local apprentices in his workshop and making pieces for wealthy patrons. The Laguna Santero, his apprentices, and others he inspired began making exquisite portraits of saints on pine boards (retablos), hide paintings, elaborate altar screens for churches, and wooden statues of saints (bultos)—all art forms still associated with New Mexican folk culture today.

Spanish California

Spanish California was the empire's last major colonial project in North America. Like the colonies in Texas and Florida, settlement was sparked by a fear of foreign competition, this time from Russians moving south from Alaska. Though Spaniards first explored the California coast in 1542, not until 1768 did the crown authorize permanent colonization. A joint expedition of military men and Franciscans led by the pragmatic Gaspar de Portolá and the iron-willed Fray (Friar) Junípero Serra, braved shipwrecks, scurvy, and earthquakes to establish ramshackle presidios (military garrisons) and missions at San Diego and Monterey. Officials found it difficult to recruit colonists for California and even turned to orphanages and prisons in New Spain, with little success. Moreover, it seemed nearly impossible to get colonists to California alive. The sea route along the Pacific coast proved costly and often deadly, and the back-breaking overland route from northwestern New Spain had to be abandoned after 1781, when an uprising of Yuma Indians shut down the crossing at the Colorado River. Still, the colony enjoyed steady if modest growth. By 1800 California had two more presidios (at San Francisco and Santa Barbara), three Spanish towns (San José, Los Angeles, and Branciforte, near present-day Santa Cruz), and a total of 18 Franciscan missions, ministering to 13,000 Indian converts. Like their colleagues in Texas and Florida, Franciscans tried to entice Indians into missions with promises of food, shelter, instruction, and protection. As time went on, missions became self-sufficient and more effective both at attracting Indians and policing those who came in. All the while, Indians saw the world changing around them. In Monterey, for example, imported pigs, sheep, mules, horses, and cows multiplied at astonishing speed. These animals radiated out from the mission and presidio, overgrazing and annihilating native plants. Soon weeds and plants that Spaniards had unwittingly brought with them spread throughout the region. Pollen analysis of the vegetable matter in adobe from the early nineteenth century indicates that by the time the bricks were made, alien weeds had all but displaced native plants. With their lands transformed by overgrazing and invasive plant species, and their populations diminished by epidemics, native families around Monterey abandoned their villages and either fled to the interior or surrendered to the discipline and danger of mission life. California's three colonial towns depended on missions for food and labor. Given the difficulties of immigrating to California, the colonial population grew mainly through natural increase. By 1800 California was home to only 1,800 Hispanic residents. Despite their relative poverty and isolation, these men, women, and children maintained distinctive traditions. An English visitor to Monterey savored local parties, bullfights, and hunts in the countryside. Most of all, he marveled at the “exhilarating” fandango, a dance that “requires no little elasticity of limbs as well as nimbleness of capers & gestures.” The whirling men and women moved “with such wanton attitudes & motions, such leering looks, sparkling eyes and trembling limbs, as would decompose the gravity of a stoic.”  Like most English-speaking visitors to California, this excitable traveler found Hispanic women both alluring and improper. Proper women knew their place, and, while delightful to watch, fandango seemed a good deal too joyous and suggestive to be proper. Had the Englishman probed deeper, he would have learned of other, far more consequential differences between Spanish and English women than the former's love of bold and beautiful dance.

Women and the Law in New Spain and British North America

Women in California and throughout the Spanish world had a host of important legal rights denied to women in English-speaking realms. For comparison's sake, consider a few critical moments in the lives of two imaginary women: Soledad Martínez, of Los Angeles, California; and Constance Snowling, of Albany, New York. When Soledad's parents passed away, Spanish law insured that she would inherit their property on an equal footing with her brothers. English law, in contrast, allowed fathers to craft wills however they wished. Constance could theoretically receive nothing upon her parents' deaths. If, as was usually the case, Constance's father died without a will, by law his eldest son inherited all his land and any buildings on it. Constance and any other sisters or brothers would receive only a share of the remaining personal property (money, tools, furniture, clothing, and so on).  The legal advantages enjoyed by women in the Spanish empire become even more apparent in marriage. Suppose that both Soledad and Constance were fortunate enough to come into their marriages with some personal property of their own, and with modest dowries—sums of money meant to help the young couple get established. After her wedding, Soledad retained complete legal control over her personal property and could dispose of it however she wished (with or without her husband's blessing). Moreover, although her husband had the right to manage the dowry and invest it as he saw fit, it still belonged to Soledad. Once death or divorce ended the marriage, he was legally obliged to return its full value to her or her family. Finally, as a married women Soledad retained the right to buy and sell land in her own name and could legally represent herself in court. Wives in the English-speaking world had no such rights in the colonial era. Upon marriage, Constance surrendered her dowry and even her personal property to her new husband, who could dispose of all of it however he wished. As a married woman, Constance had virtually no control over property of any kind, could not write a will, and could initiate no legal actions without her husband's consent.  Finally, if our two imaginary colonial women had outlived their husbands, they would have experienced widowhood very differently. In addition to the full value of her dowry, Soledad was legally entitled to at least one-half of all property she and her deceased husband had accumulated in marriage. Upon Soledad's death, this property would pass to her own children or to her other family members. Constance had no claim on her dowry following her husband's death. She would have entered widowhood with her personal “paraphernalia” (clothes, jewelry, and similar items), any land she had been fortunate enough to inherit during marriage, and control over a third of her dead husband's property. Crucially, however, Constance could use this property only to support herself in life. Upon her death, it would pass into the hands of her husband's family. Not all Spanish and English women would have felt these legal differences as keenly as Soledad and Constance. Poor women who inherited little, came into marriages with paltry dowries, and lived hand to mouth as adults endured poverty whether they lived under English or Spanish law. But for those who did have some property or wealth, it mattered a great deal whether they lived in New Spain or British North America. France's legal traditions descended from the same Roman sources as Spain's, so women in New France enjoyed legal protections similar to women in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California. And France and Spain's colonies in North America had other, less happy things in common. Like northern New Spain, New France generally cost the crown more money than it brought in. Like their Spanish counterparts, French administrators found it all but impossible to convince or compel large numbers of their fellow subjects to move to the colonies.As in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California, the colonial population of New France struck many well-heeled observers as degraded, insolent, lazy, and ignorant. And, as with all Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande, New France remained dependent on Indians generations after its founding. Preoccupied with blood and birthright, officials throughout Spanish America routinely labeled people according to their supposed heritage. Mestizo referred to children of a Spaniard and an Indian; mulatto to a child of a Spaniard and an African; coyote to a child of a mestizo and an Indian; chino to a child of a Spaniard and a salta-atras (a person with African features born of white parents); and pardo (child of an African and Indian). 

Eighteenth-Century New France

Like the sprawling vastness of Spain's territorial claims in North America, France's imperial reach was nothing if not ambitious. French colonial maps laid claim to the heart of the continent, a massive imperial wedge stretching from Newfoundland southwest to the Mississippi Delta, then northwest across the Great Plains and into the cold north woods, and east again through Upper Canada to the North Atlantic. Of course it was one thing to draw an empire on a map, another to make the empire a reality.

Colonial Compromises

Despite their grand claims, most eighteenth-century French-Americans continued to live along the St. Lawrence River. Most dwelt in farming communities up and down the river valley between the small cities of Montreal and Quebec, capital of New France. Jesuit missions also lined the river, ministering to native converts. The crown had given the valley a boost with an energetic colonization program in the 1660s and 1670s, but thereafter the French population grew almost totally through natural increase. Fortunately for France, the colonists excelled at natural increase—nurturing large, thriving families and basically doubling their own population every generation. Those determined enough to endure darkness, isolation, and numbing cold in winter, then heat, humidity, and swarming mosquitoes in summer, found life in Canada considerably easier than life in France. Colonists were healthier and lived longer, were much more likely to own their own land, and enjoyed significantly more autonomy over their lives than rural peasants across the Atlantic. By 1760 the valley was home to around 75,000 French colonists, soldiers, and priests. Many Canadian households also included Indian slaves: women and children, mostly, who had been captured by other Indians in places as far away as the Arkansas Valley and sold into trade networks that eventually brought them to New France. Though modest by Anglo-American standards, by the mid-eighteenth century the colonial project along the St. Lawrence River had nonetheless put an unmistakable French stamp upon the land. To the west and north in the country known as the pays d'en haut (“upper country”), France's eighteenth-century venture took on a very different look. Around the Great Lakes, north around lakes Manitoba and Winnipeg, and south along the Mississippi River Basin, forts and missions rather than farms or towns anchored French ambition. More exactly, the goodwill of Indian peoples provided the anchor. Though as quick as other Europeans to use violence to get what they wanted, the French in North America recognized that they were too few to secure their interests through force alone.

France gained an edge over its rivals in the interior by being useful to Indians, primarily the Algonquian-speaking nations who spread across eastern Canada and the Upper Mississippi. French merchants brought coveted European presents and trade goods, while military men, administrators, and Jesuits often mediated in conflicts between native groups. Vastly outnumbered by Indians throughout most of the territory that it claimed in North America, France remained deeply dependent on native peoples. Dependence meant compromise. Cultural differences between the French and their Indian allies often seemed vast and irreconcilable. The two peoples had radically divergent expectations about warfare, trade, marriage, child rearing, religion, food, beauty, and many other areas of life. Few cultural differences seemed as difficult to bridge as those concerning law. In 1706, for example, men associated with a prominent Ottawa leader known as Le Pesant killed a priest and a French soldier outside of Fort Detroit. Enraged French authorities demanded that Le Pesant be delivered to them so that he could be tried and, once found guilty, executed for murder. Ottawa leaders countered by offering to replace the dead Frenchmen with Indian slaves. “Raising” the dead this way was a common Ottawa remedy in cases of murder between allies, because it helped avoid a potentially disastrous cycle of blood revenge. Moreover, Le Pesant was powerful man. His execution would have political consequences dangerous to the broader French alliance. Neither side surrendered to the other. Instead they crafted a novel solution that exemplified the pattern of creative, mutual compromises typical of what one scholar has called the “middle ground” characterizing French-Indian relations in the pays d'en haut. On a snowy morning, grim Ottawa leaders turned over Le Pesant to the French commander at Fort Detroit who then quickly condemned the man to death. But before the execution could be carried out, Le Pesant escaped to freedom. It is exceedingly difficult to believe that French authorities would have been careless enough to allow this most wanted of men to slip away. Moreover, Le Pesant was elderly and obese; hardly a nimble escape artist. Clearly the French and their Ottawa allies came to an understanding.  Le Pesant would be surrendered, and, once condemned, quietly allowed to escape. This new compromise more or less satisfied both sides and became a model solution to later French-Indian murder cases. Necessary and inevitable, such compromises nonetheless rankled authorities in Paris. In 1731 one such official bemoaned the fact that after more than a century, colonial administrators in New France had failed to make the “savages” obedient to the crown. The colony's governor general dashed off a terse reply: “If this has not been done, it is because we have found the task to be an impossible one. Kindly apprise me of any means you should conceive of for securing such obedience.”

France on the Gulf Coast

Forced into uncomfortable compromises in the north, authorities in Paris hoped to establish a colony on the Gulf Coast that could be more profitable, and more French. When shipwreck on the Texas coast sealed La Salle's doom, it fell to Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville to establish French Louisiana. A veteran sailor and soldier, d'Iberville spent much of the 1690s destroying British settlements in Newfoundland and the North Atlantic. Sent to the Gulf in 1698, he inaugurated the new colony of Louisiana with a post at Biloxi Bay. D'Iberville's successors established settlements at Mobile Bay and, in 1718, the town of New Orleans. Crown officers and entrepreneurs envisioned an agricultural bonanza, expecting Louisiana to have far more in common with the Caribbean's lucrative sugar islands than with the maddening pays d'en haut. Nothing went according to plan. Here, too, Indians forced the French into painful concessions. While disease and aggression devastated the smaller Indian communities along the coast, more powerful peoples in the interior endured and protected their interests. Louisiana came into conflict with the mighty Chickasaws, and in 1729 the Natchez Indians rose up against French encroachment, killing or capturing some 500 colonists. Underfunded and usually neglected by the crown, Louisiana's officials became notoriously corrupt and arbitrary. The colony was, according to one observer, a place “without religion, without justice, without discipline, without order, and without police.”

Difficulties in French Louisiana

More to the point, the Gulf Coast was without many French colonists. The region quickly acquired a reputation among would-be French migrants as unattractive and unhealthy. When colonists were not fighting Indians, they contended with heat, humidity, hurricanes, droughts and crop failures, with never-ending battles to turn swamps and forests into farmland, and with the scourges of malaria and yellow fever. One despairing official lamented that “death and disease are disrupting and suspending all operations … the best workers are dead.” By 1731, two-thirds of the French who had chanced the journey to Louisiana had died or fled. Still, like New Mexico, Canada, California, and Texas, colonial Louisiana persevered to become more populous and more prosperous. Nearly 4,000 French men, women, and children called the colony home by 1746. Their fortunes had in large part come to depend on another, even larger group of newcomers: French Louisiana's African slaves.

Slavery and Colonial Society in French Louisiana

When the first colonists founded New Orleans in 1718, they immediately clamored for bound laborers. Their goal was to create prosperous plantations in the surrounding Mississippi delta. A year later the Company of the Indies, which managed France's slave trade, brought nearly 6,000 slaves, overwhelmingly men, directly from Africa to Louisiana. Unfortunately for white planters, Louisiana tobacco and, later, indigo proved inferior to the varieties exported from Britain's colonies. Instead of providing the formula for economic success, the sudden influx of Africans challenged French control. In 1729 some newly arrived slaves joined forces with the Natchez Indians in their rebellion. The alliance sent waves of panic through the colony, whose population by then had more slaves than free French. The French retaliated in a devastating counterattack, enlisting both the Choctaw Indians, rivals of the Natchez, and other enslaved blacks, who were promised freedom in return for their support. The planters' costly victory persuaded French authorities to stop importing slaves into Louisiana. Thus the colony did not develop a plantation economy until the end of the eighteenth century, when the cotton boom transformed its culture. In the meantime, blacks continued to make up a majority of all Louisianans, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, nearly all were native-born. The vast majorities were slaves, but their work routines—tending cattle, cutting timber, producing naval stores, manning boats—allowed them greater freedom of movement than most slaves enjoyed elsewhere in the American South. They were also encouraged to market the produce of their gardens, hunts, and handicrafts, which became the basis of a thriving trade with both white settlers and the dwindling numbers of coastal Native Americans.

But the greatest prize—freedom—was awarded those black men who served in the French militia, defending the colony from the English and Indians as well as capturing slave runaways. The descendants of these black militiamen would become the core of Louisiana's free black community. Male subjects throughout French America stood ready to perform militia duty, formally or informally. They had to. While the French struggled to sustain peaceful relations with key Indian allies, they turned to violent coercion when they thought it would work. Though not as devastating as the Beaver Wars (Chapter 3), conflicts with Indians proved to be common enough to require a ready defense.

Imperial Rivalries

More fundamentally, France found itself in conflict with the English in the backcountry beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The rivalries had their beginnings in Europe and flared regularly throughout the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. In 1689 England joined the Netherlands and the League of Augsburg (several German-speaking states) in a war against France. While the main struggle raged in Europe, French and English colonials, joined by their Indian allies, skirmished in what was known as King William's War. Peace returned in 1697, but only until the Anglo-French struggle resumed with Queen Anne's War, from 1702–1713. For a quarter of a century thereafter, the two nations waged a kind of cold war, competing for advantage. At stake was not so much control over people or even territory as control over trade. In North America, France and England vied for access to the sugar islands of the Caribbean, a monopoly on supplying manufactured goods to Spanish America, and dominance of the fur trade. The British had the advantage of numbers: nearly 400,000 subjects in the colonies in 1720, the year of L'Archevêque's death, compared with only about 25,000 French. But this is precisely where France's many compromises paid dividends. So long as the French maintained their network of alliances with powerful native peoples, British colonies had little chance of expanding west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Forces of Division in British North America

British colonials from Maine to the Carolinas distrusted the French and resented their empire of fish and furs. But the English were preoccupied with their own affairs and, by and large, uninterested in uniting against New France. Indeed a traveler during the first half of the eighteenth century would have been struck by how hopelessly divided and disunited England's mainland colonies were, split by ethnicity, race, region, wealth, and religion. The British colonies were a diverse and fragmented lot.

Immigration and Natural Increase

One of the largest immigrant groups—250,000 black men, women, and children—had come to the colonies from Africa in chains. White arrivals included many English immigrants but also a quarter of a million Scots-Irish, the descendants of seventeenth-century Scots who had regretted settling in northern Ireland; perhaps 135,000 Germans; and a sprinkling of Swiss, Swedes, Highland Scots, and Spanish Jews. Most non-English white immigrants were fleeing lives torn by famine, warfare, and religious persecution. All the voyagers, English and non-English, risked the hazardous Atlantic crossing (Daily Lives, page 116). Many had paid for passage by signing indentures to work as servants in America.The immigrants and slaves who arrived in the colonies between 1700 and 1775 swelled an American population that was already growing dramatically from natural increase. The birthrate in eighteenth-century America was triple what it is today. Most women bore between five and eight children, and most children survived to maturity. This astonishing population explosion was quite possibly the fastest in the world at the time. Even so, the surge was merely one part of a more general global acceleration of population in the second half of the eighteenth century. China's population of 150 million in 1700 had doubled to more than 313 million by century's end. Europe's total rose from about 118 million to 187 million over the same period. The unprecedented global population explosion had several causes. Europe's climate, for one, had become warmer and drier, allowing for generally better harvests. Health and nutrition improved globally with the worldwide spread of Native American crops. Irish farmers discovered that a single acre planted with the American potato could support an entire family. The tomato added crucial vitamins to the Mediterranean diet, and in China the American sweet potato thrived in hilly regions where rice would not grow. Dramatic population increase in the British colonies, fed by the importation of slaves, immigration, and natural increase, made it hard for colonials to share any common identity. Far from fostering political unity, almost every aspect of social development set Americans at odds with one another. And that process of division and disunity was reflected in the outpouring of new settlers into the backcountry.

Moving into the Backcountry

To immigrants from Europe weary of war or worn by want, the seaboard's established communities must have seemed havens of order and stability. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century Anglo-America's colonists had to look farther and farther west to obtain farmland. With older rural communities offering bleak prospects to either native-born or newly arrived families, both groups turned westward in search of new opportunities. The founding of frontier communities in New England was left mainly to the descendants of old Yankee families. Immigrants from Europe had more luck obtaining land south of New York. By the 1720s German and Scots-Irish immigrants as well as native-born colonists were pouring into western Pennsylvania. Some settled permanently, but others streamed southward into the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas, where they encountered native-born southerners pressing westward. Living in the west could be profoundly isolating. From many farmsteads it was a day's ride to the nearest courthouse, tavern, or church. Often lacking decent roads or navigable rivers, frontier families had no means of sending crops to market and aimed for self-sufficiency instead. Distance inhibited the formation of strong social bonds, as did the rapid turnover in western communities. Many families pulled up stakes three or four times before settling permanently. Most backcountry inhabitants could not afford to invest in a slave or even a servant. Those conditions made the frontier, more than anywhere else in America, a society of equals. Most families crowded into one-room shacks walled with mud, turf, or crude logs. And everyone worked hard.

Social Conflict on the Frontier

Despite the discomforts of frontier life, cheap land lured many families to the West. Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania's most successful entrepreneur, inventor, and politician, had observed the hordes of Scots-Irish and German immigrants lingering in Philadelphia just long enough to scrape together the purchase price of a frontier farm. From Franklin's point of view, the backcountry performed a valuable service by siphoning off surplus people from congested eastern settlements. But he knew, too, that the opened frontier unleashed discord, especially between the eastern seaboard and the backcountry. Ethnic differences heightened sectional tensions between East and West. People of English descent predominated along the Atlantic coast, whereas Germans, Scots-Irish, and other white minorities were concentrated in the interior. Many English colonials regarded these new immigrants as culturally inferior and politically subversive. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican missionary in the Carolina backcountry, lamented the arrival of “5 or 6,000 Ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, the Refuse of Mankind,” who “delighted in a low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life.” German immigrants were generally credited with steadier work habits, as well as higher standards of sexual morality and personal hygiene. But like the clannish Scots-Irish, the Germans preferred to live, trade, and worship among themselves. By 1751 Franklin was warning that the Germans would retain their separate language and customs: the Pennsylvania English would be overrun by “the Palatine Boors.”

Eighteenth-Century Seaports

While most Americans on the move flocked to the frontier, others swelled the populations of colonial cities. By present-day standards such cities were small, harboring from 8,000 to 22,000 citizens by 1750. The scale of seaports remained intimate, too: all of New York City was clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, and the length of Boston or Charleston could be walked in less than half an hour. All major colonial cities were seaports, their waterfronts fringed with wharves and shipyards. A jumble of shops, taverns, and homes crowded their streets; the spires of churches studded their skylines. By the 1750s the grandest and most populous was Philadelphia, which boasted straight, neatly paved streets, flagstone sidewalks, and three-story brick buildings. Older cities such as Boston and New York had a more medieval aspect: most of their dwellings and shops were wooden structures with tiny windows and low ceilings, rising no higher than two stories to steeply pitched roofs. The narrow cobblestone streets of Boston and New York also challenged pedestrians, who competed for space with livestock being driven to the butcher, roaming herds of swine and packs of dogs, clattering carts, carriages, and horses. Commerce, the lifeblood of seaport economies, was managed by merchants who tapped the wealth of surrounding regions. Traders in New York and Philadelphia shipped the Hudson and Delaware valleys' surplus of grain and livestock to the West Indies. Boston's merchants sent fish to the Caribbean and Catholic Europe, masts to England, and rum to West Africa. Charlestonians exported indigo to English dyemakers and rice to southern Europe. Other merchants specialized in the import trade, selling luxuries and manufactured goods produced in England—fine fabrics, ceramics, tea, and farming implements. No large-scale domestic industry produced goods for a mass market: instead craft shops filled orders for specific items placed by individual purchasers. Some artisans specialized in the maritime trades as shipbuilders, blacksmiths, and sailmakers.Others, such as butchers, millers, and distillers, processed and packed raw materials for export. Still others served the basic needs of city dwellers—the men and, occasionally, women who baked bread, mended shoes, combed and powdered wigs, and tended shops and taverns. On the lowest rung of a seaport's social hierarchy were free and bound workers. Free laborers were mainly young white men and women—journeyman artisans, sailors, fishermen, domestic workers, seamstresses, and prostitutes. The ranks of unfree workers included apprentices and indentured servants doing menial labor in shops and on the docks. Black men and women also made up a substantial part of the bound labor force of colonial seaports, but the character of slavery in northern seaports changed decisively during the mid-eighteenth century. When wars raging in Europe reduced the supply of white indentured servants, colonial cities imported a larger number of Africans. In the two decades after 1730, one-third of all immigrants arriving in New York harbor were black; by 1760 blacks constituted more than three-quarters of all bound laborers in Philadelphia. High death rates and a preference for importing African males inhibited the growth of slave families. Even so, city-dwelling African Americans forged an urban black culture exhibiting a new awareness of a common West African past. The influence of African traditions appeared most vividly in an annual event known as “Negro election day,” celebrated in northern seaports. During the festival, similar to ones held in West Africa, some black men and women paraded in their masters' clothes or mounted on their horses. An election followed to choose black kings, governors, and judges who then held court and settled minor disputes among black and white members of the community. Negro Election Day did not challenge the established racial order with its temporary reversal of roles. But it did allow the black communities of seaports to honor their own leaders. Working women found a number of opportunities in port cities. Young single women from poor families worked in wealthier households as maids, cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, or nurses. The highest-paying occupations for women were midwifery and dressmaking, and both required long apprenticeships and expert skills. The wives of artisans and traders sometimes assisted their husbands and, as widows, often continued to manage groceries, taverns, and print shops. But less than 10 percent of women in seaports worked outside their own homes. Most women spent their workday caring for households: seeing to the needs of husbands and children, tending to gardens and domestic animals, and engaged in spinning and weaving—activities crucial to the household economy. All seaport dwellers—perhaps 1 out of every 20 Americans—enjoyed a more stimulating environment than other colonials did. Plays, balls, and concerts for the wealthiest; taverns, clubs, celebrations, and church services for everyone. Men of every class found diversion in drink and cockfighting. Crowds of men, women, and children swarmed to tavern exhibitions of trained dogs and horses or the spectacular waxworks of one John Dyer, featuring “a lively Representation of Margaret, Countess of Herrinburg, who had 365 Children at one Birth.”

Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-century South

Inequalities and divisions between slave and free in the south dwarfed those between seaport dwellers. By 1775 one out of every five Americans was of African ancestry, and more than 90 percent of all black Americans lived in the South, most along the seaboard. Here, on tobacco and rice plantations, slaves fashioned a distinctive African-American society and culture.

But they were able to build stable families and communities only late in the eighteenth century and against enormous odds. The character of a slave's life depended to a great extent on whether he or she lived in the Chesapeake or the Lower South. Slaves in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia lived on large plantations with as many as 50 other black workers, about half African-born. They had infrequent contact with whites. “They are as 'twere, a Nation within a Nation,” observed Francis LeJau, an Anglican priest in the low country. And their work was arduous, because rice required constant cultivation. Black laborers tended young plants and hoed fields in the sweltering summer heat of the mosquito-infested lowlands. During the winter and early spring, they built dams and canals to regulate the flow of water into the rice fields. But the use of the “task system” rather than gang labor widened the window of freedom within slavery. When a slave had completed his assigned task for the day, one planter explained, “his master feels no right to call upon him.” Most Africans and African Americans in the Chesapeake lived on plantations with fewer than 20 fellow slaves. Less densely concentrated than in the low country, Chesapeake slaves also had more contact with whites. Unlike Carolina's absentee owners, who left white overseers and black drivers to run their plantations, Chesapeake masters actively managed their estates and subjected their slaves to closer scrutiny.

The Slave Family and Community

The four decades following 1700 marked the heaviest years of slave importation into the Chesapeake and Carolina regions. Those Africans had survived the trauma of captivity, the Middle Passage, and sale at slave auctions only to be thrust into a bewildering new world: a sea of unfamiliar faces, a clamor of different languages, a host of demands and threats from men and women who called themselves masters. The newcomers also had to adjust to their fellow slaves. The “new Negroes” hailed from a number of diverse West African peoples, each with a separate language or dialect and distinctive cultures and kinship systems. Often, they had little in common with one another and even less in common with the American-born black minority. Native-born African Americans enjoyed better health, command of English, and experience in dealing with whites. They were also more likely to enjoy a family life, because their advantages probably made the men the preferred partners of black women, who were outnumbered two to one by black men. And, since immigrant women waited two or three years before marrying, some immigrant men died before they could find a wife. Competition for wives often bred conflict and division. After the middle of the eighteenth century a number of changes fostered the growth of black families and the vitality of slave communities. At the same time that slave importations began to taper off, the rate of natural reproduction among blacks started to climb. Gender ratios became more equal. These changes, along with the rise of larger plantations throughout the south, made it easier for black men and women to find partners and start families. Elaborate kinship networks gradually developed, often extending over several plantations in a single neighborhood. And, as the immigrant generations were replaced by native-born offspring, earlier sources of tension and division within the slave community disappeared. Even so, black families remained vulnerable. If a planter fell on hard times, members of black families might be sold off to different buyers to meet his debts. When an owner died, black spouses, parents, and children might be divided among surviving heirs. Even under the best circumstances, fathers might be hired out to other planters for long periods or sent to work in distant quarters.

The migration of slaveholders from the coast to the interior also disrupted black efforts to fashion domestic and communal bonds. Between 1755 and 1782 masters on the move resettled fully one-third of all adult African Americans living in Tidewater, Virginia. Most slaves forced to journey west were men and women in their teens and early 20s, who had to begin again the long process of establishing families and neighborhood networks far from kin and friends. Black families struggling with terrible uncertainties were sustained by the distinctive African-American culture evolving in the slave community. The high percentage of native Africans among the eighteenth-century American black population made it easier for slaves to retain the ways of their lost homeland. Christianity won few converts, in part because white masters feared that baptizing slaves might make them more rebellious but also because African Americans preferred their traditional religions. African influence appeared as well in the slaves' agricultural skills and practices, folktales, music, and dances.

Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British North America

British North America had no shortage of African Americans who both resisted captivity and developed strategies for survival. Collective attempts at escape were most common among recently arrived Africans. Groups of slaves, often made up of newcomers from the same region, fled inland and formed “Maroon” communities of runaways. These efforts were rarely successful, because the Maroon settlements were too large to go undetected for long. More acculturated blacks turned to subtler subversions, employing what one scholar has called “weapons of the weak.” Domestics and field hands alike faked illness, feigned stupidity and laziness, broke tools, pilfered from storehouses, hid in the woods for weeks at a time, or simply took off to visit other plantations. Other slaves, usually escaping bondage as solitary individuals, found a new life as craftworkers, dock laborers, or sailors in the relative anonymity of colonial seaports. Sometimes slaves rebelled openly. Whites in communities with large numbers of blacks lived in gnawing dread of arson, poisoning, and insurrection. Four slave conspiracies were reported in Virginia during the first half of the eighteenth century. In South Carolina more than two decades of abortive uprisings and insurrection scares culminated in the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the largest slave revolt of the colonial period. Nearly 100 Africans, led by a slave named Jemmy, seized arms from a store in the coastal district of Stono and killed several white neighbors before they were caught and killed by the colonial militia. But throughout the eighteenth century, slave rebellions occurred far less frequently on the mainland of North America than in the Caribbean or Brazil. Whites outnumbered blacks in all of Britain's mainland colonies except South Carolina, and only there did rebels have a haven for a quick escape—Spanish Florida. Faced with those odds, most slaves reasoned that the risks of rebellion outweighed the prospects for success—and most sought opportunities for greater personal freedom within the slave system itself.

Enlightenment and Awakening in America

Where colonists lived, how well they lived, whether they were male or female, native-born or immigrant, slave or free—all these variables fostered distinctive worldviews, differing attitudes and assumptions about the individual's relationship to nature, society, and God. The diversity of colonials' inner lives became even more pronounced during the eighteenth century because of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that started in Europe during the seventeenth century.

The Enlightenment in America

The leading figures of the Enlightenment, the philosophes, stressed the power of human reason to promote progress by revealing the laws that governed both nature and society. Like many devotees of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia was most impressed by its emphasis on useful knowledge and experimentation. He pondered air currents and then invented a stove that heated houses more efficiently. He toyed with electricity and then invented lightning rods to protect buildings in thunderstorms. Other amateur colonial scientists constructed simple telescopes, classified animal species native to North America, and sought to explain epidemics in terms of natural causes. American colleges helped promote Enlightenment thinking. Although institutions such as Harvard (founded 1636) and Yale (1701) initially focused on training ministers, by the eighteenth century their graduates included lawyers, merchants, doctors, and scientists. Most offered courses in mathematics and the natural sciences that taught students algebra and such advanced theories as Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics. By the middle of the eighteenth century enlightenment ideals had given rise to “rational Christianity,” which commanded a small but influential following among Anglicans or liberal Congregationalists in the colonies. Their God was not the Calvinists' awesome deity but a benevolent creator who offered salvation not to a small, predestined elite, but to everyone. They believed that God's greatest gift to humankind was reason, which enabled all human beings to follow the moral teachings of Jesus. They muted the Calvinist emphasis on human sinfulness and the need for a soul-shattering conversion. An even smaller number of Americans steeped in the Enlightenment embraced deism, which rejected the divinity of Jesus and looked to nature rather than the Bible for proof of God's existence. In the magnificent design of creation, deists detected a Supreme Architect who had wrought the world and then withdrew to let events unfold through natural law. Enlightenment philosophy and rational Christianity did little to change the lives of most colonials. French and Spanish authorities suppressed Enlightenment literature in their colonies. Likewise, innovations in Protestant doctrine were meaningless in New Spain and New France, where Catholicism was the only European religion tolerated. Eighteenth century British North Americans suffered from fewer restrictions, and more than half of all white men (and a smaller percentage of white women) could read. But few colonial readers had the interest or the background necessary to tackle the learned writings of Enlightenment philosophes. The great majority still looked for ultimate truth in biblical revelation rather than human reason and explained the workings of the world in terms of divine providence rather than natural law. Widespread attachment to traditional Christian beliefs was strengthened by the hundreds of new churches built during the first half of the eighteenth century. Church attendance ran highest in the northern colonies, where some 80 percent of the population turned out for public worship on the Sabbath. In the South, because of the greater distances involved and the shortage of clergy, about half of all colonials regularly attended Sunday services.

Despite the prevalence of traditional religious beliefs, many ministers grew alarmed over the dangerous influence of rational Christianity. They also worried that the lack of churches might tempt many frontier families to abandon Christianity altogether. Exaggerated as these fears may have been, they gave rise to a major religious revival that swept the colonies during the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

The First Great Awakening

The Great Awakening, as the revival came to be called, first appeared in the 1730s among Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the Middle Colonies and New England. Many ministers in these churches preached an “evangelical” message, emphasizing the need for individuals to experience “a new birth” through religious conversion. Among them was Jonathan Edwards, the pastor of a Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards's Calvinist preaching combined moving descriptions of God's grace with terrifying portrayals of eternal damnation. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked,” he declaimed to one congregation. “There is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arise in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up.” These local revivals of the 1730s were mere tremors compared to the earthquake of religious enthusiasm that shook the colonies with the arrival in the fall of 1739 of George Whitefield. This handsome (though cross-eyed) “boy preacher” from England electrified crowds from Georgia to New Hampshire during his two-year tour of the colonies. He and his many imitators among colonial ministers turned the church into a theater, enlivening sermons with dramatic gestures, flowing tears, and gruesome depictions of hell. The drama of such performances appealed to people of all classes, ethnic groups, and races. By the time Whitefield sailed back to England in 1741, thousands of awakened souls were joining older churches or forming new ones.

The Aftermath of the Great Awakening

Whitefield also left behind a raging storm of controversy. Many “awakened” church members now openly criticized their ministers as cold, unconverted, and uninspiring. To supply the missing fire, some laymen—“and even Women and Common Negroes”—took to “exhorting” any audience willing to listen. The most popular ministers became “itinerants,” traveling as Whitefield did from one town to another. While northern churches splintered and bickered, the fires of revivalism spread to the South and its backcountry. From the mid-1740s until the 1770s scores of new Presbyterian and Baptist churches formed, sparking controversy.  Ardent Presbyterians disrupted Anglican worship by loosing packs of dogs in local chapels. County officials, prodded by resentful Anglican parsons, harassed, fined, and imprisoned Baptist ministers. And so a diverse lot of Americans found themselves continually at odds with one another: arguing over religion and the Enlightenment, conflicted over racial and ethnic tensions, and divided between coastal and backcountry cultures. Benjamin Franklin, a man who made it his business to know, surely understood the depth of those divisions. Even he had brooded over the boatloads of non-English newcomers. He had lived in two booming seaports and felt the explosive force of the frontier. He personified the Enlightenment—and yet looked on in admiration at a George Whitefield sermon on the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse. Franklin recognized these divisions. Yet oddly enough, even though he knew how little held colonials together, he still harbored hopes for their political unity. After all, most were English. That much they had in common.

Anglo-American Worlds of the Eighteenth Century

Most colonists in British North America prided themselves on being English. Colonial towns bore English names; colonial governments drew on English precedents; colonial diets, dress, architecture, furniture, and literature all followed English models. And yet there were important differences. Some differences made colonials feel inferior, ashamed of their simplicity when compared with London's sophistication. But they also came to appreciate the greater equality of their society and the more representative character of their governments. If it was good to be English, it was better still to be English in America.

English Economic and Social Development

The contrast between the luxuries enjoyed by a wealthy few Londoners and the misery of the many disquieted colonial observers. Ebenezer Hazard, an American Quaker visiting London, knew for certain he was in “a Sink of Sin.” The differences between England and America began with their economies. Large financial institutions such as the Bank of England and influential corporations such as the East India Company were driving England's commercial development. A growing number of textile factories and mines were deepening its industrial development. Although most English men and women worked at agriculture, it, too, had become a business. Gentry rented their estates to tenants, the rural middle class. In turn, these tenants hired men and women from the swollen ranks of England's landless to perform the farm labor. In contrast, most colonial farmers owned their land, and most family farms were a few hundred acres. The scale of commerce and manufacturing was equally modest, limited by the preference of colonials to farm instead. England's more developed economy fostered the growth of cities, especially London, a teeming colossus of 675,000 in 1750. In contrast, 90 percent of all eighteenth-century colonials lived in towns of fewer than 2,000. But in another respect, England's more advanced economy drew the colonies and the parent country together. Americans were so eager to acquire British-made commodities that their per capita consumption of imported manufactures rose 120 percent between 1750 and 1773. People of all classes demanded and indulged in small luxuries such as a tin of tea, a pair of gloves, and a bar of Irish soap. In both England and its colonies, the spare and simple material life of earlier centuries was giving way to a new order in which even people of ordinary means owned a wider variety of things.

Inequality in England and America

Then there were people of no means. In England they were legion. London seethed with filth, crime, and desperate poverty. The poor and the unemployed as well as pickpockets and prostitutes crowded into its gin-soaked slums, taverns, and brothels. The contrast between the luxuries enjoyed by a wealthy few Londoners and the misery of the many disquieted colonial observers. Ebenezer Hazard, an American Quaker visiting London, knew for certain he was in “a Sink of Sin.” New wealth and the inherited privileges of England's landed aristocracy made for deepening class divisions. Two percent of England's population owned 70 percent of its land. By right of birth, English aristocrats claimed membership in the House of Lords; by custom, certain powerful gentry families dominated the other branch of Parliament, the House of Commons. The colonies had their own prominent families but no titled ruling class holding political privilege by hereditary right.And even the wealthiest colonial families lived far more humbly than their English counterparts. Probably the finest mansion in eighteenth-century America, William Byrd's plantation at Westover, Virginia, was scarcely a tenth the size of the Marquis of Rockingham's country house, a sprawling edifice longer than two football fields. If England's upper classes lived more splendidly, its lower classes were larger and worse off than those in the colonies. Less than a third of England's inhabitants belonged to the “middling sort” of traders, professionals, artisans, and tenant farmers. More than two-thirds struggled for survival at the bottom of society. In contrast, the colonial middle class counted for nearly three-quarters of the white population. With land cheap, labor scarce, and wages for both urban and rural workers 100 percent higher in America than in England, it was much easier for colonials to accumulate savings and farms of their own. Colonials were both fascinated and repelled by English society. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, felt in the House of Lords as if he “walked on sacred ground.” He begged his guide for permission to sit on the throne therein and then sat “for a considerable time.” Other colonials gushed over the grandeur of aristocratic estates and imported suits of livery for their servants, tea services for their wives, and wallpaper for their drawing rooms. But colonials recognized that England's ruling classes purchased their luxury and leisure at the cost of the rest of the nation. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin painted a devastating portrait of the degraded lives of his fellow workers in a London printshop, who drowned their disappointments by drinking throughout the workday, even more excessively on the Sabbath, and then faithfully observing the holiday of “St. Monday” to nurse their hangovers. Like Franklin, many colonials regarded the idle among England's rich and poor alike as ominous signs of a degenerate nation.

Politics in England and America

Colonials were also of two minds about England's government. While they praised the English constitution as the basis of all liberties, they were alarmed by the actual workings of English politics. In theory, England's “balanced constitution” gave every order of society a voice in government. Whereas the Crown represented the monarchy and the House of Lords the aristocracy, the House of Commons represented the democracy, the people of England. Coffeehouses such as this establishment in London were favorite gathering places for eighteenth-century Americans visiting Britain. Here merchants and mariners, ministers and students, lobbyists and tourists warmed themselves, read newspapers, and exchanged gossip about commerce, politics, and social life. In fact, webs of patronage and outright bribery compromised the whole system. The monarch and his ministers had the power to appoint legions of bureaucrats to administer the growing state and empire. By the middle of the eighteenth century almost half of all members of Parliament held such Crown offices or government contracts. Many had won their seats in corrupt elections, where the small electorate (perhaps a quarter of all adult males) were bought off with money or liquor. Americans liked to think that their colonial governments mirrored the ideal English constitution. Most colonies had a royal governor who represented the monarch in America and a bicameral (two-house) legislature made up of a lower house (the assembly) and an upper house (or council). The democratically elected assemblies, like the House of Commons, stood for popular interests, whereas the councils, some of which were elected and others appointed, more roughly approximated the House of Lords. But these formal similarities masked real differences between English and colonial governments. On the face of it, royal governors had much more power than the English Crown.

Unlike kings and queens, royal governors could veto laws passed by assemblies; they could dissolve those bodies at will; they could create courts and dismiss judges. However, governors who asserted their full powers quickly met opposition from their assemblies, who objected that such overwhelming authority endangered popular liberty. In any showdown with their assemblies, most royal governors had to give way, because they lacked the government offices and contracts that bought loyalty. The colonial legislatures possessed additional leverage, since all of them retained the sole authority to levy taxes. At the same time, widespread ownership of land meant that more than half of the colonies' white adult male population could vote. The larger electorate made it more difficult to buy votes. The colonial electorate was also more watchful. Representatives had to reside in the districts that they served, and a few even received binding instructions from their constituents about how to vote. Most Americans were as pleased with their inexpensive and representative colonial governments as they were horrified by the conduct of politics in England. John Dickinson, a young Pennsylvanian training as a lawyer in London, was scandalized by a parliamentary election he witnessed in 1754. The king and his ministers had spent over 100,000 pounds sterling to buy support for their candidates, he wrote his father, and “if a man cannot be brought to vote as he is desired, he is made dead drunk and kept in that state, never heard of by his family and friends, till all is over and he can do no harm.”

The Imperial System before 1760

Few Britons gave the colonists as much thought as the colonists gave them. It would be hard to overstate just how insignificant North America was in the English scheme of things. Those few Britons who thought about America at all believed that colonials resembled the “savage” Indians more than the “civilized” English. As a London acquaintance remarked to Thomas Hancock, it was a pity Mrs. Hancock had to remain in Boston when he could “take her to England and make her happy with Christians.” The same ignorant indifference contributed to England's haphazard administration of its colonies. Aside from passing an occasional law to regulate trade, restrict manufacturing, or direct monetary policy, Parliament made no effort to assert its authority in America. Its members assumed that Parliament's sovereignty extended over the entire empire, and nothing had occurred to make them think otherwise. Commercial ties to Spain and Portugal, Africa, and the Caribbean sustained the growth of both sea ports and commercial farming regions on the British North American mainland and enabled colonials to purchase an increasing volume of finished goods from England. The proceeds from exports in foodstuffs and lumber to the West Indies and trade in fish to Spain and Portugal enabled northern merchants and farmers to buy hardware and clothing from the mother country. Southern planters financed their consumption of English imports and their investment in African slaves with the profits from the sale of tobacco, rice, and Indigo abroad. For the colonies, this chaotic and inefficient system of colonial administration left them a great deal of freedom. Even England's regulation of trade rested lightly on the shoulders of most Americans. Southern planters were obliged to send their rice, indigo, and tobacco to Britain only, but they enjoyed favorable credit terms and knowledgeable marketing from English merchants. Colonials were prohibited from finishing iron products and exporting hats and textiles, but they had scant interest in developing domestic industries. Americans were required to import all manufactured goods through England, but by doing so, they acquired high-quality goods at low prices. At little sacrifice, most Americans obeyed imperial regulations. Only sugar, molasses, and tea were routinely smuggled. Following this policy of benign neglect the British Empire muddled on to the satisfaction of most people on both sides of the Atlantic. Economic growth and political autonomy allowed most Americans to like being English, despite their misgivings about their parent nation. The beauty of it was that Americans could be English in America, enjoying greater economic opportunity and political equality. If imperial arrangements had remained as they were in 1754, the empire might have muddled on indefinitely. By the 1750s North America was changing, both within the British world and in relation to the international order as well. For decades, Europe's imperial wars found their way to America almost as an afterthought. Colonial officials, traders, land speculators, and would-be pioneers regularly seized on news of the latest European conflict as an excuse to attack their Spanish or French or British counterparts in the North American borderlands. The interests of kings and queens had to be served, of course. And yet it was easier to exploit war for local or personal purposes out on the far margins of Europe's empires. Eastern North America's native peoples likewise sought advantage in these inter-imperial flare-ups. But for them the stakes were higher. When chiefs joined in a fight for profit or revenge, or to please one or another colonial ally, they also put their own people at risk. However the various players positioned themselves, they often found that the outcome of their struggles could be determined by men they would never see: well-heeled diplomats sipping drinks around mahogany tables in European capitals. Victories, defeats, territories won or lost—all this could be and often was undone in Paris, Madrid, or London, where negotiators casually agreed to ignore territorial gains and losses in the colonies and return everything as it was before the fighting broke out. The message was clear: great imperial struggles began in Europe and ended in Europe. America followed. Though few recognized it in 1754, this older model was about to be swept away. That year marked the beginning of yet another imperial war, one begun not in Europe but in the American borderlands. Rather than following events, this time Indians proved decisive to the war's origins, course, and outcome. And rather than the conflict ending with a return to the status quo, this time war would produce changes greater than anyone could have anticipated. In waging the war and managing its aftermath, London would pursue policies that made it difficult—and ultimately impossible—for its American subjects to remain within the empire.

Chapter Summary

This chapter surveys the growing diversity of peoples, interests, and outlooks in eighteenth-century North America. It also contrasts British colonial society with the society of the parent country. The chapter introduction illustrates the most far-reaching evidence of diversity--and conflict--in eighteenth-century North America: the struggle for control of the continent waged by the French, the English, and native Indian tribes. That rivalry erupted into three major wars fought in both Europe and America between 1689 and 1748 and culminated in the "Seven Years" War, a conflict discussed at greater length in Chapter 5. Diversity of peoples and interests characterized both the North American continent as a whole and the British settlements clustered along the Atlantic seaboard. Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan would have provided for greater political coherence, but the colonies rejected it a decision that reflected the jealous localism and social distinctiveness of eighteenth-century Americans.

Forces of Division
In 1754, the prospect of a colonial political union appeared highly improbable. American population was doubling every twenty-five years from natural increase alone. The pressure of that expanding population on older towns and villages pushed settlement westward, creating communities that developed different interests and distinct cultures from those along the coast. Eighteenth-century Americans also remained deeply divided by ethnic and sectional differences. The arrival of non-English immigrants and increasingly heavy slave importations only intensified those divisions. Most Americans on the move, both native-born and new immigrants, settled in the backcountry. Yet some swelled the populations of major colonial seaports; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston mushroomed from small villages into major centers of commerce and culture. Disorder became common in congested, polyglot seaports; but the most serious social and political conflict drew its strength from sectional controversies between East and West, contests that focused on intercolonial boundaries, and quarrels over tenancy.

Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South
The plantation districts of the eighteenth-century southern coast became tense and embattled regions, too, as slave resistance became more frequent and successful. The first half of the eighteenth century was a period of massive slave importation. As more Africans arrived, the black community received an infusion of more direct exposure to West African culture, but it also divided internally between native-born slaves and newcomers. The differences among blacks lessened as slave importations tapered off and the black population grew through natural increase. After about 1750, the growth of a native-born population brought greater coherence to black communal and family life. A distinctively African-American culture emerged. Even so, black families remained vulnerable. Slave marriages had no legal status, and masters often separated family members as part of inheritance bequests or efforts to pay off debts.

Enlightenment and Awakening in America
Religious divisions among eighteenth-century Americans compounded the tensions of racial, regional, and ethnic diversity. The two key events that intensified religious conflict were the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the influence of the first Great Awakening. While the Enlightenment prompted some American elites to embrace "rational Christianity," an even larger number of Americans fell under the sway of the evangelical Christianity preached by revivalists. Evangelicals enjoyed considerable success among the many unchurched men and women of the backcountry regions south of New York. These conversions sharpened the tensions between westerners and the assemblies of those colonies, which Eastern elites of Quaker and Anglican faith continued to dominate.

Anglo-American Worlds of the Eighteenth Century
Despite these divisions in colonial society, a majority of white Americans shared a pride in their common English ancestry. The parent country set the tone for American taste and fashion, and colonials revered the British constitution as providing the world's best and freest form of government. Nonetheless, an undercurrent of ambivalence characterized colonial attitudes toward England. While Americans who crossed the Atlantic gloried in English consumer culture, aped the fashions and manners of English aristocrats, and admired English technological and industrial advances, some recognized that the English elite had purchased progress and material benefits for the few at a high social cost. Many colonial observers expressed reservations about the economic and social inequality in England and the corruption of English Politics.

Toward the "Seven Years" War
Even so, American criticism of England in the middle of the eighteenth century remained muted by both colonials pride in belonging to a powerful empire and the advantages that an imperial policy of "benign neglect" afforded both sides. That would not change until the end of the Seven Years" War, when both the balance of power in North America and the nature of imperial administration shifted dramatically.

Keyterms
Comanche’s - Indiana peoples who moved onto the Great Plains in the 1730s and became powerful equestrian warriors, fighting heavily with the colonists of New Spain. Page 84

Spanish California - The Spanish empire's last major colonial project in North America. California's contact with Europeans began in the mid-1530s when Cortez's men ventured to Baja California. Not until 1542 did Spaniards sail north to Alta California, and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition of that year made landings as far north as modern Santa Barbara. Still, more than two hundred years passed before Spain made any concerted effort to colonize the coastal regions Cabrillo claimed for the crown. Coastal winds and currents made the voyage north difficult, and Spanish captains failed to find safe harbors for their crafts. Baja California became the northwest limit of Spanish colonization, and even there, efforts to settle the area and bring native tribes to Christianity and European ways were halfhearted at best. Not until the Seven Years War (1756-1763) realigned European alliances and their colonial empires did Spain seriously attempt to assert control of Alta California. This was to be done through a combination of military forts (presidios) and mission churches overseen by Franciscan fathers led by Junípero Serra. In 1769, the first parties set north from Baja California, and the line of Spanish settlement along the coast was inaugurated when soldiers and priests established a presidio and mission church at San Diego. By the end of the Spanish colonial period, Alta California had three more presidios (at Monterey, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara) and no fewer than twenty-one missions. In addition to the missions, where the Franciscans ministered to local converts, and the military presidios, small towns or pueblos sprang up. The earliest of these were associated with the missions and presidios, but in 1777 an independent civil pueblo was created at San Jose, and others followed. The pueblos tried to attract settlers with land grants and other inducements and were governed by an alcalde (a combination of a judge and a mayor) assisted by a council called the ayuntamiento. Page 85

Gaspar de Portolá – Spanish military officer, the first governor of Upper California, and founder of Monterey and San Diego. Portolá entered the Spanish army in 1734. After 30 years of service in Europe, he rose to the rank of captain. In 1767 the Spanish monarchy sent him to California to serve as governor. Soon after his arrival, Portolá assumed command of an expedition to establish Franciscan missions in Upper California and secure Spanish claims to the area. Page 85

Junipero Serra - A Spanish Franciscan friar who founded a mission in Baja California and the first nine of 21 Spanish missions in California from San Diego to San Francisco, which at the time were in Alta California of the Las Californias Province in New Spain. He began in San Diego on July 16, 1769, and established his headquarters near Monterey, California, at Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo. The missions were primarily designed to convert the natives. Other aims were to integrate the neophytes into Spanish society, and to train them to take over ownership and management of the land. As head of the order in California, Serra not only dealt with church officials, but also with Spanish officials in Mexico City and with the local military officers who commanded the nearby presidios. Page 85

Yuma Indians - The Yuma Indians are a Native American tribe connected to the Quechan, Yuman, Kwtsan, and Kwtsaan American Indian tribes. Yuma Indians have traditionally resided in and around the Colorado River Valley in the southwestern region of the United States. Many members of these Indian nations live on the Fort Yuma-Quechan Indian Reservation. The reservation is north of the Mexican border and includes more than 45,000 acres in parts of Arizona, Baja California, and California. The Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza was the first European to have noteworthy contact with the Yuma Indians, in the winter of 1774. Anza, the Quechan chief, and three other members of the tribe traveled to Mexico City in 1776 in an ultimately successful effort to convince the Viceroy of New Spain to establish a mission on the tribe's land. Spanish settlers were not all given a warm welcome to the Yuma Indian's territory, however. In July of 1781, tribal members attacked and killed four priests and 30 soldiers. The Yuma Indian tribe regained control over the area and held it until the early 1850s. During that period, the U.S. Army fought and defeated the tribe, and established Fort Yuma. Page 85

Middle ground – An area where whites and Indians interacted on a basis of mutual compromise. In 1706, men associated with a prominent Ottawa leader known as Le Pesant killed a priest and a French soldier outside of Fort Detroit. Enraged French authorities demanded that Le Pesant be delivered to them so that he could be tried and, once found guilty, executed for murder. Ottawa leaders countered by offering to replace the dead Frenchmen with Indian slaves. “Raising” the dead this way was a common Ottawa remedy in cases of murder between allies, because it helped avoid a potentially disastrous cycle of blood revenge. Moreover, Le Pesant was powerful man. His execution would have political consequences dangerous to the broader French alliance. Neither side surrendered to the other. Instead they crafted a novel solution that exemplified the pattern of creative, mutual compromises typical of what one scholar has called the “middle ground” characterizing French-Indian relations in the pays d'en haut. Page 87

New Orleans - D'Iberville's successors established settlements at Mobile Bay and, in 1718, the town of New Orleans. Crown officers and entrepreneurs envisioned an agricultural bonanza, expecting Louisiana to have far more in common with the Caribbean's lucrative sugar islands than with the maddening pays d'en haut. When the first colonists founded New Orleans in 1718, they immediately clamored for bound laborers. Their goal was to create prosperous plantations in the surrounding Mississippi delta. Page 87

Back country - In the Chesapeake and Southern regions, society was based heavily on agriculture, and therefore the landscape was much more rural. A large portion of land in the South was frontier “back country” that was less settled and abutted Indian land. Page 88

Scots-Irish – The descendants of seventeenth-century Scots who had regretted settling in Northern Ireland. Around one quarter of a million Scots-Irish immigrated to the early American Colonies. Page 88

Germans "Palatine Boors" - The German Palatines were natives of the Electorate of the Palatinate region of Germany, although a few had come to Germany from Switzerland, the Alsace, and probably other parts of Europe. Towards the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, the wealthy region was repeatedly invaded by French troops, which resulted in continuous military requisitions, widespread devastation and famine. The "Poor Palatines" were some 13,000 Germans who came to England between May and November 1709. Their arrival in England, and the inability of the British Government to integrate them, caused a highly politicized debate over the merits of immigration. The English tried to settle them in England, Ireland, and the Colonies. The English transported nearly 3,000 in ten ships to New York in 1710. Many of them first were assigned to work camps along the Hudson River to work off their passage. Close to 850 families settled in the Hudson River Valley, primarily in what are now Germantown and Saugerties, New York. In 1723 100 heads of families from the work camps were the first Europeans to acquire land west of Little Falls, New York, in present-day Herkimer County on both the north and south sides along the Mohawk River. Later additional Palatine Germans settled along the Mohawk River for several miles, founding towns such as Palatine Bridge, and in the Schoharie Valley. By 1751 Benjamin Franklin warned that the Germans would retain their separate language and customs: the Pennsylvania English would be overrun by the “Palatine Boors” Page 90

Artisan – skilled craftsman such as a blacksmith, a cooper, a miller, or a tailor. Page 91

Free laborers - Free laborers were mainly young white men and women—journeyman artisans, sailors, fishermen, domestic workers, seamstresses, and prostitutes. The ranks of unfree workers included apprentices and indentured servants doing menial labor in shops and on the docks.

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Bound workers - Black men and women made up a substantial part of the bound labor force of colonial seaports, but the character of slavery in northern seaports changed decisively during the mid-eighteenth century. When wars raging in Europe reduced the supply of white indentured servants, colonial cities imported a larger number of Africans. In the two decades after 1730, one-third of all immigrants arriving in New York harbor were black; by 1760 blacks constituted more than three-quarters of all bound laborers in Philadelphia. Page 91

New Negro - The four decades following 1700 marked the heaviest years of slave importation into the Chesapeake and Carolina regions. Those Africans had survived the trauma of captivity, the Middle Passage, and sale at slave auctions only to be thrust into a bewildering new world: a sea of unfamiliar faces, a clamor of different languages, a host of demands and threats from men and women who called themselves masters. The newcomers also had to adjust to their fellow slaves. The “new Negroes” hailed from a number of diverse West African peoples, each with a separate language or dialect and distinctive cultures and kinship systems. Page 92

Task system – A way of organizing slave labor in which masters and overseers of rice and indigo plantations generally assigned individual slaves a daily task; after its completion, slaves could spend the rest of the day engaged in pursuit of their own choosing. Page 92

Maroon communities – Groups of escaped slaves, often newly arrived Africans, who fled to the frontiers of colonial settlements in the American South, the Caribbean, and South America.

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Spanish Florida - Spanish Florida refers to the Spanish territory of Florida, which formed part of the Captaincy General of Cuba, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the Spanish Empire. Originally extending over what is now the southeastern United States, but with no defined boundaries, Florida was a component of the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the expansion of the Spanish Empire. Wide-ranging expeditions were mounted into the hinterland during the 16th century, but Spain never exercised complete control over Florida outside an area of what is now the State of Florida, southern Georgia, southern Alabama, southern Mississippi southeastern Louisiana, and other areas along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Page 93

Stono Rebellion - In South Carolina more than two decades of abortive uprisings and insurrection scares culminated in the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the largest slave revolt of the colonial period. Nearly 100 Africans, led by a slave named Jemmy, seized arms from a store in the coastal district of Stono and killed several white neighbors before they were caught and killed by the colonial militia. Page 93

Harvard/Yale - American colleges helped promote Enlightenment thinking. Although institutions such as Harvard (founded 1636) and Yale (1701) initially focused on training ministers, by the eighteenth century their graduates included lawyers, merchants, doctors, and scientists. Most offered courses in mathematics and the natural sciences that taught students algebra and such advanced theories as Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics. Page 94

Enlightenment – The intellectual movement that flourished in Europe from the mid-1600s through the eighteenth century and stressed the power of human reason to promote social progress by discovering the laws that governed both nature and society. Page 94

Great Awakening – The term that described periods of intense religious piety and commitment among Americans that fueled the expansion of Protestant churches. Page 94

Benjamin Franklin - One of the Founding Fathers of the United States and in many ways was "the First American". A renowned polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia's fire department and a university. Franklin as a young man adopted the Enlightenment religious belief in deism; that God's truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin, "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become." Like most Enlightenment intellectuals, Franklin separated virtue, morality, and faith from organized religion, although he felt that if religion in general grew weaker, morality, virtue, and society in general would also decline. Thus he wrote Thomas Paine, "If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it." Page 94

John Locke - One of the pioneers in modern thinking was the English philosopher John Locke. He made great contributions in studies of politics, government, and psychology. Locke is remembered today largely as a political philosopher. He preached the doctrine that men naturally possess certain large rights, the chief being life, liberty, and property. Rulers, he said, derived their power only from the consent of the people. He thought that government should be like a contract between the rulers and his subjects: The people give up certain of their rights in return for just rule, and the ruler should hold his power only so long as he uses it justly. These ideas had a tremendous effect on all future political thinking. The American Declaration of Independence clearly reflects Locke's teachings. His Two Treatises of Government (1690) were written to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, and his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) was written with a plain and easy urbanity, in contrast to the baroque eloquence of Hobbes. Locke was a scholar, physician, and man of affairs, well-experienced in politics and business. As a philosopher he accepted strict limitations for mind, and his political philosophy is moderate and sensible, aimed at a balance among executive, judicial, and legislative powers, although with a bias toward the last. Page 94

Voltaire - François-Marie d'Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed. Page 94

George Whitefield - Charismatic Enlightenment "boy preacher" from England who spoke up and down the colonial coast, contributing to the Great Awakening. George Whitefield was probably the most famous religious figure of the eighteenth century. Newspapers called him the "marvel of the age." Whitefield was a preacher capable of commanding thousands on two continents through the sheer power of his oratory. In his lifetime, he preached at least 18,000 times to perhaps 10 million hearers. In 1739, Whitefield set out for a preaching tour of the American colonies. Whitefield selected Philadelphia—the most cosmopolitan city in the New World—as his first American stop. But even the largest churches could not hold the 8,000 who came to see him, so he took them outdoors. Every stop along Whitefield's trip was marked by record audiences, often exceeding the population of the towns in which he preached. Whitefield was often surprised at how crowds "so scattered abroad, can be gathered at so short a warning." The crowds were also aggressive in spirit. As one account tells it, crowds "elbowed, shoved, and trampled over themselves to hear of 'divine things' from the famed Whitefield." Once Whitefield started speaking, however, the frenzied mobs were spellbound. "Even in London," Whitefield remarked, "I never observed so profound a silence." Though mentored by the Wesley’s, Whitefield set his own theological course: he was a convinced Calvinist. His main theme was the necessity of the "new birth," by which he meant a conversion experience. He never pleaded with people to convert, but only announced, and dramatized, his message. Page 94

Jonathan Edwards - Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) 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. The first is articulated in Edwards' defense of theological determinism, in a doctrine of occasionalism, and in his insistence that physical objects are only collections of sensible “ideas” while finite minds are mere assemblages of “thoughts” or “perceptions.” As the only real cause or substance underlying physical and mental phenomena, God is “being in general,” the “sum of all being.” Page 94

Philosophes - The leading figures of the Enlightenment, the philosophes, stressed the power of human reason to promote progress by revealing the laws that governed both nature and society. Few colonial readers had the interest or the background necessary to tackle the learned writings of Enlightenment philosophes. Page 94

Awakened church member - The Great Awakening, first appeared in the 1730s among Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the Middle Colonies and New England. Many ministers in these churches preached an “evangelical” message, emphasizing the need for individuals to experience “a new birth” through religious conversion. These local revivals of the 1730s were mere tremors compared to the earthquake of religious enthusiasm that shook the colonies with the arrival in the fall of 1739 of George Whitefield. This handsome (though cross-eyed) “boy preacher” from England electrified crowds from Georgia to New Hampshire during his two-year tour of the colonies. He and his many imitators among colonial ministers turned the church into a theater, enlivening sermons with dramatic gestures, flowing tears, and gruesome depictions of hell. The drama of such performances appealed to people of all classes, ethnic groups, and races. By the time Whitefield sailed back to England in 1741, thousands of awakened souls were joining older churches or forming new ones. Whitefield also left behind a raging storm of controversy. Many “awakened” church members now openly criticized their ministers as cold, unconverted, and uninspiring. Page 95

Itinerants – Ministers who preach the basic Christian redemption message while traveling around to different groups of people within a relatively short period of time. Page 95

Middling sort - In the 18th century, a new group, the "middling sort" or middle class, gained a larger role in society and government. These men and women worked in trades - blacksmithing, silversmithing, printing, and millinery, for example. They worked as professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, or merchants who owned stores. Page 96

Balanced constitution – View that England's constitution gave every part of English society some voice in the workings of its government. Page 97

Benign neglect – The policy, also known as "salutary neglect," pursued by the British empire in governing its American colonies until the end of the Seven Years' War. Page 97

Autonomy – The condition of being independent or, in the case of a political structure, the right of self-government. Page 97

John Dickinson - Often referred to as the "penman of the Revolution," John Dickinson was an American statesman, delegate to the Continental Congress and one of the writers of the Articles of Confederation. He won fame in 1767 as the author of "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies." The letters helped turn public opinion against the Townshend Acts created by British Parliament. Dickinson also helped draft the Articles of Confederation and craft the U.S. Constitution.  As Dickinson sought footing in the political arena, the British government in London, in deep debt from the Seven Years War, began looking for ways to generate revenue. It started with the Stamp Act of 1765, which sought to impose a direct tax on the colonies. Predictably, it met with fierce opposition in the colonies, who refused to pay the tax and boycotted English goods. Dickinson had a strong, measured voice in the debate, and he was chosen to represent Pennsylvania at the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, where he drafted the body's anti–Stamp Act resolution (which had little effect on London). In the face of London's lack of cooperation, in December 1768, Dickinson began (under a pseudonym) publishing in the Pennsylvania Chronicle his "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies." The letters pointed out the Stamp Act's violations of traditional English liberties and were universally read on both sides of the Atlantic, going on to wide fame and playing a part in the act's ultimate rejection. Page 97

Sample Quiz

1. The chapter introduction tells the story of the intercolonial Albany Congress to make the point that:

A) Ominous French activities in Europe and the West Indies created a growing recognition that Americans had much in common and needed to unite.

B) The Iroquois League provided a model of unification that the American colonies adopted when they gained independence.

C) Benjamin Franklin was both a representative eighteenth-century American and ahead of his time.

D) Benjamin Franklin's plan of union failed because Americans in the mid-1700s were a diverse and divided people.

2. The three largest groups of non-English immigrants coming to the American colonies in the 1700s were:

                        A) Africans, Scots-Irish, and Germans.

                        B) Africans, Germans, and Dutch.

                        C) Scots-Irish, Dutch, and Africans.

                        D) Scots-Irish, Germans, and Dutch.

3. Forces of division in the colonies included all of the following EXCEPT:

                        A) The issue of loyalty to the British crown.

                        B) Ethnic and regional differences.

                        C) Racial and religious differences.

                        D) Vast distance, poor transportation and poor communications.

4. Why did colonists and immigrants settle the backcountry or frontier in the eighteenth century?

A) Due to population growth, older rural communities could not absorb additional population.

                        B) British imperial policy required the establishment of new towns in the West.

                        C) They tried to escape the increasing social diversity of the seaport cities and older                          rural areas.

                        D) Colonies took steps to defend their frontiers against French expansion.         

5. Backcountry settlements:

                        A) Quickly established a social hierarchy that provided consistent local leadership.

                        B) Relied on churches to maintain law and order.

                        C) Created cultures based on a strong sense of egalitarianism.

                        D) Became a new source of land for planters with large contingents of slaves.

6. The colonial seaports were not only centers for overseas trade, they were also places where:

A) Enterprising merchants organized and controlled the commerce of the surrounding region.

                        B) Religious revivals had their first major effects.

                        C) British imperial authority remained visible and strong.

                        D) Slavery was first outlawed.

7.  Unlike the slaves on Carolina plantations, those in the Chesapeake:

                        A) Had less contact with whites.

                        B) Enjoyed greater autonomy because of the "task system. "

                        C) Lived on smaller plantations with fewer slaves.

                        D) Were mostly African-born.

8. Native-born African Americans:

                        A) Had an advantage over African-born slaves in procuring a wife.

                        B) Generally got along well with their African-born counterparts.

                        C) Had a similar mortality to African-born slaves.

D) Remained a clearly distinct segment of the slave community throughout the eighteenth century.

9. The direct influence of the Enlightenment in America was:

                        A) Widespread, affecting all classes and regions.

                        B) Widespread, affecting all except the poorest backcountry farmers.

                        C) Confined mainly to the clergy.

                        D) Confined mainly to some skilled artisans and elite planters and merchants.

10. The Great Awakening would be best described as:

                        A) An intellectual movement, based primarily on new discoveries in science.                                                B) A humanitarian movement, which sought to improve the quality of life for the poor.

C) A rationalist, religious movement, which had its greatest impact among the well-educated in eastern seaboard cities.

D) An emotional, revivalist movement, which had its greatest impact both in the coastal regions and the backcountry.

11. The Great Awakening caused each of the following EXCEPT:

                        A) The creation of a culture of common experience throughout the colonies.

B) A further division among the regions of colonial North America upon religious grounds.

                        C) A revival of the influence of a Calvinist vision of God as terrifying and punishing.

                        D) A furthering of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

12. American reservations about English society included all of the following EXCEPT:

                        A) Anxieties that gross inequalities in wealth would endanger liberty.

                        B) Rejection of the concept of social hierarchy expressed in the English class structure.

                        C) Uneasiness over the extravagance and manners of the upper class.

                        D) Alarm at the corrupt workings of English politics.

13. English and American politics differed in all of the following ways EXCEPT:

                        A) Unlike England, most colonies had unicameral legislatures.

B) The electorate in America encompassed a much larger proportion of white, adult males than did England's electorate.

                        C) Representation was apportioned more fairly and directly in America.

D) The royal governor lacked the patronage resources of English monarchs and their ministers.

14. British administration of its empire in America was impaired by all of the following difficulties EXCEPT:

                        A) The Board of Trade was only an advisory body with no real power.

B) Real authority over the colonies was scattered among an array of agencies, none of which paid much attention to American affairs.

                        C) Many British officials in America were dishonest, indifferent, and incompetent.

D) Parliament intervened constantly in colonial affairs, often battling with the monarchy over authority and jurisdiction.

15. Despite any reservations about English society, most colonials liked being English because:

A) The English government left them alone, giving them the best of being both English and a colonial.

                        B) The English government assisted them in finding alternative markets for their goods.

                        C) The English government assisted in the creation of domestic industries.

                        D) all of the above.

16. The opening story in the chapter deals with the Albany Congress, at which colonial representatives:

                        A) officially declared war on all Indian tribes except the Iroquois.

B) approved a Plan of Union for all the colonies to create "one general government" for British North America.

                        C) hotly debated Benjamin Franklin's proposal for gradual independence.

D)declared a temporary truce with the French in order to focus their military force against the Iroquois.

17. During the early- and mid-1700s, immigration into the colonies:

                        A) slowed to a trickle, but the general population grew.

                        B) slowed to a trickle, and the general population leveled off.

                        C) grew tremendously, and the general population grew even more.

                        D) grew tremendously, but the general population grew only moderately.

18. Scotch-Irish and German immigrants were LEAST likely to immigrate to:

                        A) New England.

                        B) the Carolinas.

                        C) Pennsylvania.

                        D) Virginia.

19. The Paxton Boys' protest and the Regulation movements symbolized:

                        A) bitter opposition by the English colonists to German immigration.

B) growing conflicts between those who lived in the backcountry and those in a colony's eastern seaboard.

                        C) a rising discontent among the landless poor in seaports.

                        D) a growing concern for the plight of the Native Americans.

20. "Negro Election Day" was:

                        A) a code phrase for public auctions of African slaves.

B) an annual festival celebrated by African-Americans, similar to ones held in West Africa.

C) established in most northern colonies for free Africans to cast legitimate votes for local offices.

D) the date set by plantation owners for slaves to mediate grievances and disputes between themselves.

21. Among colonial women who lived in seaport towns:

A) over half of them worked outside their homes as tavernkeepers, domestic servants, laundresses, etc..)

                        B) even wealthy women planted their own gardens due to a lack of available servants.

                        C) widows were not allowed to manage places of business.

                        D)midwifery and dressmaking were high-paid occupations.

22. African slaves in the Chesapeake region would be more likely than those in the Carolinas to:

                        A) work on a larger plantation with more than 20 slaves.

                        B) come into daily contact with more whites.

C) have absentee owners who left white overseers and black drivers to run their plantations.

                        D) have been born in Africa.

23. The Stono Rebellion of 1739:

                        A) was the largest slave revolt of the colonial period.

                        B) ignited the last major Indian war in the Chesapeake.

C) convinced colonial governments to extend political rights to those living in the frontier regions.

                        D) was an early sign of tensions between colonists and British troops.

24. The First Great Awakening:

A) reflected a celebration of new rational ideas about religion promoted by the Enlightenment.

                        B) led to a more invigorated, stable religious life.

                        C) left colonial Americans more divided than ever.

                        D) came and went quickly with little lasting impact.

25. In the decades before the Seven Years' War, most American colonists could be described as:

                        A) proud to be part of the British empire.

                        B) indifferent to their place in the British empire.

C) unhappy with their place in the British empire, but not yet interested in independence.

D) very unhappy with their place in the British empire and nearly ready to revolt and form a free nation.

26. By 1750, royal governors in the British colonies:

                        A) were elected by each colony's eligible voters.

                        B) had almost dictatorial powers over the colonial assemblies.

                        C) had tremendous power in theory, but more limited power in practice.

                        D) enjoyed virtually no power, and had to accept whatever colonial assemblies dictated.

27. As another war with the French approached in the 1750s, the English politician William Pitt hoped it would result in:

                        A) limiting the French control in North America.

                        B) total British control over North America.

                        C) the colonists abandoning their talk of independence.

                        D) a new, independent country emerging.

           

28. Rivalry for control of the upper Ohio Valley plunged Britain and France into war in the 1750s, another war in a series dating back to the late 1600s. What, at bottom, was at stake in this competition for empire?

A) which religious system—Protestantism or Catholicism—would dominate North

B) which empire would achieve international supremacy

                        C) control over trade overseas

                        D) political stability undergirding the monarch’s rule in the home country

29. In the Anglo-French rivalry in America, France had the advantage of :

A) outnumbering the English.

B) superior naval power.

C) a chain of forts encircling English settlement.

D) an alliance with the League of the Iroquois.

  

30. American population grew dramatically in the 1700s for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) a high birth rate.

B) long life expectancy.

C) absorption of French and Spanish colonials as the British empire expandeD)

D) large numbers of non-English immigrants.

31. Among the various ethnic groups who came to British America in the 1700s, which was most likely to settle on the frontier?

A) the Scots-Irish

B) the Germans

C) the Dutch

D) the English

32. Those who made up the majority of eighteenth-century immigrants came from the ranks of all the following EXCEPT:

A) indentured servants.

B) merchant adventurers.

C) convict laborers.

D) the poor.

33. Why did new kinds of communities have to be created in the eighteenth century?

A) Due to decreasing opportunities, older rural communities could not absorb additional population.

B) British imperial policy directed the establishment of new towns.

C) The more diverse cultures of Americans in the 1700s inclined them to move away from groups unlike their own.

D) Colonies took steps to place stockaded communities on the frontier to protect against French expansion.

34. Three distinctive kinds of new communities existed in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, including all the following EXCEPT:

A) urban seaports.

B) mill towns.

C) raw frontier pioneer farms.

D) plantation communities (both masters and slaves).

35. All of the following are examples of sharp divisions in colonial society in the 1700s, EXCEPT:

A) backcountry against seaport

B) revivalistic “heart religion” against rationalistic “head religion”

C) pride in English politics against hatred of English culture

D) colony against colony

36. The society of the eighteenth-century backcountry was characterized by all the following EXCEPT:

A) frequent moves.

B) economic equality.

C) isolation.

D) stability.

37. What was the primary reason so many families migrated into the backcountry?

A) to escape governmental authority

B) to worship in freedom

C) to find a healthier environment

D) to obtain cheap land

38. Which group dominated the political and economic life of the seaport towns?

A) descendants of the original founding families

B) the numerous middle class artisans

C) merchants

D) aristocratic crown officials

39. Conflicts in the seaport towns of the early to mid-1700s included all the following EXCEPT:

A) class resentments.

B) clashes between citizens and British redcoats.

C) ethnic and religious strife played out in politics.

D) political struggles and ethnic tensions with the backcountry.

40. By the mid-1700s, slaves in the seaport cities:

A) often gained their freedom.

B) were practically nonexistent.

C) were more likely to be recent arrivals from Africa.

D) frequently fought for their freedom.

41. By the mid-1700s, slaves on southern plantations:

A) were most likely to be native-born.

B) found little opportunity to create an African-American culture.

C) had mostly all gained their freedom.

D) were more likely to be recent arrivals from Africa.

42. Which of the following statements is NOT true about slave communities on southern plantations?

A) With few slaves imported directly from Africa, African folkways soon disappeared.

B) Slave marriages were not legally recognized.

C) Resistance to slavery ran the gamut from subtle sabotage and flight to outright violent rebellion.

D) Black family life was sustained despite the high possibility that a family member would have to be sold due to a master’s death or indebtedness.

43. Which would most likely NOT be true of Americans who were influenced by the Enlightenment?

A) They would have faith that society could be improved by human effort.

B) They would be from the educated upper class.

C) They would hold to a religion that believed human beings could, under a benevolent God, follow Jesus’ moral teachings.

D) They would understand knowledge as valuable for its own sake, independent of any practical usefulness.

44. Among the effects of the Great Awakening, all of the following are correctly stated EXCEPT:

A) Americans became more sharply polarized along religious lines.

B) Many westerners embraced evangelical Protestantism and swelled the denominations of the Baptists and the Presbyterians.

C) Many urban easterners embraced evangelical Protestantism and thus swelled such denominations as Quakers and Anglicans.

D) Though divisive, it also had a unifying effect since it was the only experience that many people

throughout all the colonies had in common.

45. The doctrine known as “Rational Christianity” stressed which of the following beliefs?

A) predestination

B) conversion

C) the benevolence of God

D) the reasons for innate human sinfulness

46. One of the important distinctions between eighteenth-century English and American social structure was:

A) while England had a large lower class, there were no poor people in America.

B) while England had a large lower class, their more industrialized economy created more opportunities for upward mobility than did agrarian America.

C) while England’s aristocrats claimed titles and legal privileges by hereditary right, only a few American elites inherited titles and political power.

D) while less than one-third of England’s inhabitants belonged to the “middling sort,” three-quarters of white Americans could be described as “middle class.”

47. The theory of the “balanced constitution” refers to:

A) separation of government powers into executive, legislative, and judicial functions.

B) equilibrium of power in government among monarchy, aristocracy, and common people.

C) use of “influence” or patronage by the executive officials to win support for its policies among

legislators.

D) the restriction of the franchise to adult males owning a certain amount of property.

48. Which of the following is the correct listing of the colonies and their items of export?

A) New England—sugar, indigo, grains

B) Southern colonies—tobacco, rice, indigo

C) Middle colonies—rice, grains, furs

D) New England—fish, rice, tobacco

Practice Test

1. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought:                     

A.     emphasized the importance of religious faith.

B.     rejected most religious thought.

C.     had little influence on American intellectual thought.

D.     challenged concepts such as "natural laws."

E.      suggested that people had considerable control over their own lives.

2. Attempts by the French government to draw colonists to the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana proved futile because the area experienced:

A.     hurricanes

B.     regular Indian attacks

C.     scourges of malaria and yellow

D.     All of the above

3. During the eighteenth century Spanish officials turned their attention to the outer fringes of their empire because feared the encroachment of rival European countries. Which of the following areas is incorrectly matched with the group posing the greatest threat?

A.     California-Russia

B.     Texas- England

C.     Florida-France

D.     New Mexico-Navajos

4. What was the primary reason so many families migrated into the backcountry?

A.     to escape governmental authority

B.     to worship in freedom

C.     to find a healthier environment

D.     to obtain land

5. The doctrine known as "rational Christianity" stressed which of the following beliefs?

A.     predestination

B.     conversion

C.     the benevolence of God

D.     the reasons for innate human sinfulness

6. By the 1770s, the two largest port cities in colonial North America were

A.     Philadelphia and New York.

B.     Boston and Newport.

C.     Philadelphia and Charleston.

D.     New York and Boston.

E.      Boston and Charleston.

7. George Whitfield is associated with the:

A.     growth of American Catholicism.

B.     founding of the American Baptist Church.

C.     Quakers.

D.     Great Awakening.

E.      Enlightenment.

8.  Which group dominated the political and economic life of the seaport towns?

A.     descendants of the original founding families

B.     the numerous middle-class artisans

C.     merchants

D.     aristocratic crown officials

9. The "middle ground" was an area ________.

A.     where most of the fighting between whites and Indians occurred

B.     where whites and Indians interacted on a basis of mutual compromise

C.     inhabited by renegades, half-breeds, and runaway slaves

D.     of metaphorical stasis, symbolic of a culture that was part European and part Indian

E.      designated by treaty as a demilitarized zone

10. The largest contingent of immigrants during the colonial period were the:

A.     French Huguenots.

B.     Scotch-Irish.

C.     Moravians and Mennonites.

D.     Irish Catholics.

E.      Palatinate Germans.

11. The most numerous of the non-English European immigrants to British North America were the Scotch-Irish.

A.     True

B.     False

12. The outstanding preacher of the Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards.

A.     True

B.     False

13. After the 1650s, natural increase became the most important source of population growth in New England.

A.     True

B.     False

14. Some enslaved Africans became skilled crafts workers.

A.     True

B.     False

15. Immigration was the most important factor accounting for New England's colonial population growth.

A.     True

B.     False

16. ________ was an intellectual movement in both Europe and America that celebrated the power of human reason.

The Enlightenment

17.  Nowhere did the French seem more menacing than in ________, one of the many blank spots on Spanish maps.

Texas

18. The Native American people we know as the Comanches referred to themselves as Nemene, or "________."

the People

19. The most outstanding Great Awakening preacher was New England Congregationalist ________.

Jonathan Edwards

20. The most serious colonial slave revolt, called the ________, took place in South Carolina in 1739.

Stono Rebellion

21. The first American college, established in 1636, was ________.

Harvard

22. Authorities in Paris hoped to establish a colony on the Gulf Coast that could be more profitable and more ________ than their colonial efforts in Canada.

French

23. Despite grand colonial claims, most eighteenth-century French-Americans lived along the ________ River.

St. Lawrence

24. No group in the government in London cared less about the American colonies in the early to mid-1700s than ________.

Parliament

25. The "boy preacher" from England who stirred revival fires up and down the colonial seaboard was ________.

George Whitefield

 

CHAPTER TEST

1. Backcountry communities ________.

A.    were rigidly governed by the colonial governments

B.     incorporated some aspects of Indian culture into their own way of life

C.     tended to be very crowded because land was scarce

D.    tended to live in isolation and were very self-sufficient

2. Which region was NOT considered part of the eighteenth-century Spanish borderlands?

A.    California

B.     New Mexico

C.     Louisiana

D.    Texas

E.     Florida

3.  The factor most responsible for the growth of the colonial population between 1700 and 1770 was ________.

A.    the natural reproduction of colonial families

B.     the great wave of immigration during that period

C.     the program of forced migration instituted by the monarchy

D.    the dramatic upsurge in the importation of slaves

E.     the intermarriage between settlers and Native Americans

4. The Stono Rebellion:

A.    led to the death of dozens of white Virginian colonists.

B.     saw slaves in South Carolina attempt to escape from the colony.

C.     led to the banning of the slave trade in Maryland.

D.    prompted Georgia to strengthen its laws on slavery.

E.     led planters to resume hiring indentured servants for their labor needs.

5. Although England's lower classes were larger and worse off than those in the colonies, England had a much larger middle class (traders, professionals, and artisans) than the colonies.

A.    True

B.     False

6. The "middle ground" refers a pattern of creative, mutual compromises  that  characterized French-Indian relations in North America.

A.    True

B.     False

7. Which provides the strongest evidence that eighteenth-century slavery was based on racist views?

A.    Slave status depended entirely on the amount of money a person had, and blacks had little money.

B.     The status of a person as a slave depended on where the person was born, and being born in Africa made a person a slave.

C.     The status of a person as a slave depended entirely on skin color.

D.    The status of a person as a slave depended partly on skin color and partly on intelligence.

E.     The status of a person as a slave depended entirely on social class.

8. There were no significant slave rebellions during the colonial era.

A.    True

B.     False

9. By the mid-eighteenth century, a distinct colonial merchant class came into existence because of:

A.    the abolishment of the British Navigation Acts.

B.     the development of a substantial colonial manufacturing industry.

C.     all major colonial cities were seaports, and commerce, the lifeblood of seaport economies was managed by merchants.

D.    ready access to manufactured goods.

E.     All these answers are correct.

10. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s:

A.    began as a call for young men to become ministers.

B.     appealed to people of all classes, ethnic groups, and races

C.     united the traditional northern churces

D.    failed to take root in southern colonies.

11. Regarding colonial life expectancy during the seventeenth century,

A.    backcountry settlers had a similar life expectancy as settlers in coastal areas.

B.     life expectancy was highest in the southern colonies.

C.     one in two white children in the Chesapeake died in infancy.

D.    men had a shorter life expectancy than women.

E.     life expectancy in New England was unusually high.

12. Since whites outnumbered blacks in all of Britain's mainland colonies except for South Carolina, throughout the eighteenth century slave rebellions occurred far less frequently on the mainland of North America than in the Caribbean and Brazil.

A.    True

B.     False

13. The first American college was:

A.    Columbia.

B.     Harvard.

C.     Yale.

D.    William and Mary.

E.     Princeton.

14. The most numerous of the non-English immigrants were the:

A.    Scotch-Irish.

B.     Pennsylvania Dutch.

C.     French Huguenots.

D.    Scottish Highlanders.

E.     Germans.

15. Because for the most part Parliament made no effort to assert its authority in America until 1754, the colonies experienced a great deal of freedom in handling their local affairs.

A.    True

B.     False