Eighteenth-Century America

1
Eighteenth-Century America

• Chapter 1

2
Overview Colonial Society in 1700

• Not a homogeneous society
• Ethnic and religious diversity
• Free and unfree
• No national identity
• No common culture
• French vs. English
• battle for control

3
Labor in the Colonies

• Plantation economy depended upon manual labor.
• Indentured Servants (debt slavery)
• Worked 4 to 7 years.
• Accounted for half the white settlers in all
  colonies outside New England.
• Slavery (chattel slavery) (1619 Jamestown)
• Increased staple crops for commercial markets.
• Mortality rate improved.
• Racist rationalization based on color differences
  or heathenism.
• Perpetual black slavery became the custom and the
  law of the land.

4
The Middle Passage

• About 21 million people captured in West Africa
  between 1700 and 1850.
• Millions died during the Atlantic crossing and as
  many as 7 million remained slaves in Africa.
• Slaves were captured by other Africans within the
  interior, brought to the coast, sold to
  Europeans.
• Packed together in slave ships and subjected to a
  4 to 6 week passage. So brutal that 1 in 7 died
  en route.
• Once in America they were thrown indiscriminately
  together and treated like work animals.

5
The Atlantic Slave Trade (Middle Passage)
6

7
Slavery in British North America

• Great Ethnic Diversity in Slave Population.
• Before 1750 Slave importation.
• 17th century Brazil Caribbean
• 18th century Directly from Africa
• After 1750 Native-born population.
• Distinctively African-American culture
• 20 of colonial population. (40 in south)
• British North America bought less than 5 percent
  of the total slave imports to the Western
  Hemisphere (1500-1800).
• 400,000 out of 9.5 million however, had a better
  chance for survival.

8
The Slave Family and Community

• The differences among blacks lessened as slave
  importation tapered off and the black population
  grew through natural increase.
• Black families remained vulnerable.
• Slave marriages had no legal status and family
  members were often separated by deaths or debts
  of masters.

9
Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South

• Tense and embattled regions.
• Salve resistance
• More frequent
• More successful

10
Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South

• Slavery and Colonial Society in French Louisiana
• Natchez Revolt (1729)
• Africans challenged French control / importation
  of slave stopped
• Greater freedom for blacks in Louisiana
• Freedom granted to those who served in French
  militia. Became the core of Louisianas free
  black community.
• Slave Resistance in 18th-Century British N.
  America
• The Stono Rebellion (1739) (South Carolina)
• The largest slave revolt of the colonial period.
• Nearly 100 slaves killed several whites before
  being caught and killed by the white militia.

11
The Enlightenment

• A scientific revolution that swept through Europe
  during the 17th century.
• Assumptions
• The world is an orderly place. (Natural Law)
• Humans can understand order.
• Influence in America
• Diets God made world and then left alone
• Skepticism Questioned everything
• Laws of nature
• John Locke and tabula rosa (people can be
  corrupted)
• Reason and virtue

12
The Great Awakening

• Causes
• Challenges to religion (Enlightenment), competing
  denominations, westward expansion
• Changes in society and tradition
• Revivals (1730s) A wave of evangelism that
  swept through the colonies.
• Jonathan Edwards
• George Whitefield Emphasized new birth

13
Jonathan Edwards(1703-1758)

• Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts.
• Feared religion had become too intellectual and
  had lost its animating force.

• The God that holds you over the pit of hell,
  much as one holds a spider or some other
  loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is
  dreadfully provoked.
• Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

14
The Great Awakening

• Influence on Colonists
• Old Light (structure)
• Intended the Great Awakening to bolster church
  discipline and order. (Edwards Whitefield)
• New Light (emotion)
• Radical evangelists that attacked the established
  clergy and appealed to the lower classes.
• Short term results
• New religious groups and the split of more
  Calvinistic churches Baptists, Methodists, etc.
• New England Puritanism fragmented

15
The Great Awakening

• Long term results
• American style evangelism and revivalism
• Denominational colleges
• Undermining of state-sponsored churches
  toleration of dissent
• Individual judgment Fewer willing to defer to
  the ruling social and political elite. Emphasized
  popular resistance to established authority.

16
The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening

• Both emphasized the power and right of individual
  choice and popular resistance to established
  authority.
• Both aroused hopes that America could become the
  promised land.
• Fewer and fewer people were willing to defer to
  the ruling social and political elite.

17
Society

• Population Growth
• Doubled every 25 years
• Cities
• Small and isolated from one another.
• Education
• Rapid expansion.

18
The Settlement of the Backcountry

• Isolation of the backcountry
• Frontier women
• Social Conflict on the Frontier
• The Paxton Boys (1763)
• Regulation movements (1760s)
• Ethnic conflicts
• Germans, Scots-Irish, etc.
• Boundary Disputes and Tenant Wars
• Green Mountain boys (1760s)

19
Eighteenth-Century Seaports

• Increasingly sharp class stratification
• The commercial classes
• Free and bound workers
• Women in cities
• Urban diversions and hazards
• Plays, taverns, private social clubs, fraternal
  societies.
• Problems of traffic, fire, and crime
• Social Conflict in Seaports
• Religious tension
• Class resentment

20
Politics

• Royal colonies
• British crown responsible for defense.
• British crown regulated external trade.
• Elected lower houses
• Home rule
• Self-government in the colonies became first a
  habit, then a right.

21
Economy Mercantilism (self-sufficient)

• Worlds gold and silver supply fixed.
• Nations could gain wealth only at the expense of
  another country by seizing its gold and silver
  and dominating its trade.
• Colonies were part of an empire.
• Source of raw materials.
• Market for finished goods.

22
AtlanticTrade

• Growing economy
• Unfavorable balance
• of trade
• Shortage of
• hard money
• Ton of debt

23
Navigation Acts (1651, 1660, 1663)

• Terms
• All imported goods to be shipped in English
  vessels.
• Enumerated articles could only be shipped to
  England or other English colonies.
• All goods imported by the colonies come through
  England.
• The Imperial System before 1760
• The benefits of benign neglect