Lecture 3: Colonial Life in the 18^th Century

Objectives:

- Identify the original thirteen British colonies on a map.

-Understand how settlers’ backgrounds influenced their values, priorities, and daily lives.

-Examine artifacts and make inferences about the people and the historical periods that they represent.

Elements of the Lesson

- Times of Colonies Establishments

-Political Structures of the Colonies

-The Population of the Colonies

-The Fabric of the Colonial Society

-The Naming of the Colonies 

-Types of American Colonies

Times of Colonies Establishments

 

 

    Having established Plymouth in 1620, New Netherland (New York) in 1626 under the leadership of Peter Minuit (for Dutch) Duke of York, and Massachusetts Bay colony under the leadership of John Winthrop, came the turn of Maryland and Rhode Island. It was in Rhode Island that Anne Hutchinson found refuge when she was banned from Boston for leading religious discussions in her home.   

     The Dutch Wedge. While English Puritans were establishing colonies in New England, the Dutch were founding one to the south. As early as 1609, Henry Hudson—an Englishman employed by the Dutch—explored the Hudson River as far as present day Albany, New York. In 1624 the Dutch bought Manhattan Island, at the mouth of the Hudson, from the Indians for trade goods worth about twenty-four dollars. They built a little town there that they named New Amsterdam, after the most important city in Holland.

     By the 1630’s the Dutch had built a number of enormous estates along both sides of the Hudson River. Dutch explorers also ventured as far south as the Delaware River, where they took over a tiny colony of Swedish and Finnish settlers. However, the Dutch were unable to defend their holdings in North America. In 1664 New Amsterdam was taken over by the English, who renamed it New York for the King’s younger brother, the Duke of York. In fact they named the entire Dutch area New York. The duke later gave a portion of this land to two of his friends, and it was named New Jersey for the British island of Jersey.

        Maryland.  When James I died, his son Charles I married a Roman Catholic. One of the major figures at his court, Sir George Calvert, was also a catholic. Calvert had ambitions to found a colony in America. He hoped to profit financially from such a venture, and he also wanted to establish a haven for English Catholics who were an unhappy minority in Protestant England.

    Charles I responded by giving Calvert the part of Virginia that surrounded Chesapeake Bay. Calvert gratefully named the colony Maryland in honor of Charles’ Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria. Calvert died while the charter was still being processed by royal bureaucrats. His son, Lord Baltimore, organized the expedition that left for Chesapeake Bay in 1633. There was no starving time because the Maryland settlers had learned from the sad experience at Jamestown. They brought plenty of provisions with them and soon discovered that tobacco grew as well in Maryland as in Virginia. To avoid any persecution of Protestants in Maryland, the Calvert-Baltimore family requested in 1646, that the Maryland legislation pass the Toleration Act, which provided for freedom of worship. 

The Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

 Other proprietary colony was established for thirty years. From 1642 to 1649, England was torn apart by its great civil war between loyalists to the King and those who were loyal to Parliament, many of whom were Puritans. The armies of Parliament were victories, and Charles I was executed in 1649. For a while, England became a commonwealth, or republic, headed first by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, and then by his son Richard. However, the English grew weary of the rather grim and sober Puritan rule, and in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne of his father. Since Charles II owed political debts to his prominent supporters, he gave several of them proprietary rights to American land.  

     The first permanent settlement in Carolina—from the Latin for “land of Charles”—was begun in 1670. Charles Town, which later became Charleston, was the capital and chief port of the colony. Later the colony split in two, and King made both South Carolina and North Carolina royal colonies.

     Pennsylvania. It was a gift to William Penn, whose late father has supported the King’s return to power. Penn was a Quaker. The Quakers were a radical religious and social group of Protestants. They believed that a person’s love of God could best be shown by brotherly love for every human being. Lately, the Quakers were pacifists, who disapproved of war and refused to serve in the army.

        Penn was interested in establishing a good and a fair society. He did not want Pennsylvania to have a land-owning aristocracy. He wanted it to be a “holy-experiment” in living. So he guaranteed every male settler fifty acres of land, which had to be purchased from the local Indians. Penn also helped plan the city of Philadelphia, which he called the City of the Brotherly Love.

   Penn’s constitution also provided for a separate assembly for the three southern counties along Delaware Bay. Delaware thereby gained a somewhat separate existence. However, it continued to have the same governor as Pennsylvania.

     Georgia. The last of the thirteen colonies to be established was Georgia, named after George II. It had dual purpose. Its founder a social reformer named James Oglethorpe, wanted to found a refuge for people who had been imprisoned for non-payment of debts. The English government wanted a military defense against the Spanish in Florida.

 

Political Structures of the Colonies

        By the end of the seventeenth century, twelve of the thirteen British colonies that would later constitute the United States had been founded. The Group was completed with the establishment of Georgia in 1732. By that time, many of the colonies, like Virginia, had been made royal, or put under the authority of the crown. Others including Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, were proprietary, owned and controlled by individuals who had been granted the colonies by the monarch. Rhode Island and Connecticut remained self-governing throughout the colonial period. Each colony was headed by a governor who was responsible for enforcing British and colonial laws. Assemblies formed of elected representatives, allowed colonists to voice their political demands and participate in the law-making process.

 -Types of American Colonies

Colony	Foundation	Leader	Type of Charter	First Settlement
Virginia	1607	John Smith	Corporate (1607-1624) Royal (1624-1776	Jamestown
Plymouth	1620	W. Bradford	Corporate (1620-1691) Royal (1691-1776)	Plymouth
New Netherland (New York after 1663)	1626	Peter Minuit (for Dutch) Duke of York (for English)	Proprietary (1663-1685) Royal (1685-1776)	New Amsterdam(New York)
Massachusetts Bay	1630	John Winthrop	Corporate (1630-1691) Royal (1691-1776)	Boston
Maryland	1633	George Calvert	Proprietary (1632-1776)	St. Mary’s
Rhode Island	1636	Roger Williams	Corporate (1643-1776)	Providence
Connecticut	1636	Thomas Hooker	Corporate (1643-1776)	Hartford

 

The Population:

   The thirteen colonies were relatively populated throughout the eighteenth century. In 1700, there were only about 250.000 inhabitants without counting the Indians. By 1775, just before the outbreak of the Revolution, the population had grown tremendously, but still only amounted to approximately two and a half million. 18^th century Americans came from fairly diverse ethnic backgrounds. While most of the earliest immigrants were English, with a significant Dutch minority, large groups of Germans, Scots, Irish and Scotch-Irish (Scots who had colonized Northern Ireland in the 17^th century) added significantly to the population after 1700. Others arrived from countries such as France, Switzerland and Wales. The increasing importation of African slaves also helped augmented the total number of inhabitants.

     The Birth of the Agrarian Society

   About 80 ℅ of colonial Americans were members of farming families, and most of the others were involved in activities like carpentry and blacksmithing that served the rural communities. Farms and plantations produced crops such as corn, wheat, tobacco, rice and indigo. Because the relatively low cost of land, half of white farmers owned the acres they cultivated. Some Americans were considered such a society of land-owning farmers as the best possible form of human civilization. One of the supporters of this “agrarian ideal” was Thomas Jefferson, who later would become the third president of the US. He wrote, “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.”

    Colonial Cities (Urban Life)

    If most colonies lived in rural areas, a few cities developed in the coastal regions. The largest of these were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York; Boston, Massachusetts and Charleston, South Carolina. Agricultural products were brought to urban centers to be sold, and English manufactured goods were distributed to farmers from the cities. Despite a steady growth in such trade, by 1770, even the largest colonial city, Philadelphia, had only about 28.000 inhabitants.

References

James A. Henrietta & David Brody. (2010). America A Concise History. 4^th edition. NewYork, Boston, Bedford / St. Martin’s    

Kalman, Bobbie. (1992). Colonial Life.  New York: Crabtree