American Colonies: The Settling of North America

While immigration to the Americas slowed in the 18th century, the gap narrowed between the British colonies and the motherland. Trade expanded and became increasingly complex as Great Britain developed a multilateral trading system with the colonies, Iberia, and the Atlantic islands (304-5). Wheat became the desired crop; the middle colonies boomed, and other colonies, like the Chesapeake, began to farm it as well (306). Economic growth led to a higher standard of living for colonists, especially those who owned slaves, though artisans and farmers in northern colonies also thrived. American colonists paid less taxes than British taxpayers and were generally land-rich and healthy.

But the poor class grew as well. The imperial wars of the late 17th century had created war veterans, and impoverished newcomers arrived from Europe all the time. Reliance on trade with Britain led to destructive bust-and-boom cycles (308). There was also less free land left to claim, unless newcomers undertook dangerous expansion westward. Between 1718 and 1775 the British also transported about 50,000 criminals to the colonies as indentured servants, who supplemented slaves as workers for the elite (315).

American appetite for British consumer goods became a tentpole of British manufacturing (309-10). While many colonists lived on self-sufficient farms, no farm could produce everything. Wealthier colonists also desired finer things to cultivate “gentility” and distinguish themselves from the poor and middle class (310-12). Within “that social tension lay the energy that drove accelerating consumption” (312-13), which in turn drove all classes to buy more than they could afford.

As England sent fewer immigrants to the Americas, Scotland and Germany sent more. Lowland Scots tended to be professional classes, especially doctors. The tough and poverty-stricken Highlanders took up cheap but dangerous frontier land, as did the Ulster Scots, later the Scotch-Irish, who were driven from Northern Ireland by interethnic fighting (316-17).

Germans tended to settle with their families in rural Pennsylvania and, to a lesser extent, South Carolina. Driven to emigrate by heavy taxation in the principalities at home, they were drawn by word of tolerance and wealth in America (317-18). Couriers called Newlanders—returning emigrants who guided immigrants in the process—upped immigration numbers, as did an attractive form of indentured servitude called “redemptioners,” in which German families could not be separated during the period of servitude (319).

William Penn’s Quaker concept of Pennsylvania as a colony of tolerance was tested by these waves of immigration, as was the emigrants’ inclination to self-segregate (320-21). The Germans joined with the Quaker party, who shared their policies of “pacifism, no militia, and low taxes” (321). This put them in opposition to the Scotch-Irish, who wanted a tax-funded militia to protect the frontier (321). Settlers increasingly encroached on Lenni Lenape lands, without the fair sale process of earlier times, and increasingly killed the Indians themselves (322). Colonial swindling of the natives, most glaringly seen in the Walking Purchase of 1737, ended Pennsylvania’s sentiment of “brotherly love” with the local peoples (322-23).

Most 18th-century immigrants were not European but African, brought to America by force. While Europeans rarely seized slaves in Africa themselves, their business enabled and expanded the African practice of slave-trading (325). The hellish journey across the Atlantic, called the middle passage, killed about 20 percent of the slaves (327-29). Once they arrived, southern plantation slaves passively resisted by engaging in a “contest of wills” with their masters, who fancied themselves as benevolent masters while also doling out grueling work schedules and punishments (329-32). Cultural assimilation and smaller numbers meant northern slaves were treated less brutally and given some rights, though they still united in rebellion occasionally (334). Slaves in the West Indies were treated most brutally; those in South Carolina and Georgia, under the “task system,” did not fare much better (335). In the Chesapeake, slave culture united with evangelical Christianity, bringing African musical influences and worship styles to colonial society (336).

While popular myth holds that emigrants to America did so for freedom of religion, in reality many colonists believed that religious uniformity was key to “public mortality, political harmony, and social order” (339). Most colonies’ establishments continued to practice (and enforce the practice of) their particular denomination of Christianity, offering “less religious toleration than did the mother country” (339).

Rifts even began forming within denominations themselves. In New England the chief rift was between evangelicals and rationalists. Evangelicals prioritized the scripture and individual, emotional religion experiences, which they called “experimental religion” (343-44). They blamed declining religious intensity on the Christian rationalists, who looked to science to explain God’s universe. For their part, the rationalists looked down on the evangelicals’ individualism and urged parishioners to look to expert religious middlemen: learned clergy. This conflict set the stage for a movement of religious upheaval in the colonies: the revivals.

Revivals, an emotional experience intended to convert sinners into saints, were a feature of Congregational and Presbyterian worship in the late 1700s. Believing God’s grace alone, not man’s actions, earned salvation, Calvinist ministers used rousing sermons to appeal to the emotions, not to reason. They hoped to bring about a “New Birth,” in which their parishioners experienced a nadir of helplessness then the ecstasy of God’s salvation.

Jonathan Edwards’s account of the Raritan and Connecticut Valley revivals, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, convinced readers that God was moving powerfully in the colonies (346-47). A young Anglican minister and friend of Ben Franklin, George Whitefield, rose in that success to became a transatlantic superstar for his shock-tactic preaching. Supported by evangelical Calvinists, Whitefield effected many conversions, especially in well-read New England, but was distrusted by southern Anglicans for the emotionality of his preaching (348). For his part, Whitefield heavily criticized the rationalists: “The reason why these congregations have been dead is because they had dead men preaching to them” (349).

After Whitefield returned to England in 1741, evangelical ministers continued his work to effect unprecedented conversions of men and young people. These revivals were collectively referred to as the Great Awakening (349). Revivalist ministers concentrated especially on the marginalized (350). Orthodox critics were horrified by what they perceived as social aberrations: “exhorters,” uneducated laity preaching their New Birth, and women preachers, who “claimed freedom from the social restraints placed on their gender” by preaching themselves (351).

While both the evangelicals (who became known as the New Lights) and the rationalists (the Old Lights) drew support across denominational, class, and generational lines, the revival movement had a populist tone, in part because the Old Lights were stalwarts of traditional views (351). They “defended the traditional form of learned sermons,” “despised the emotional and physical outbursts evoked by the revivals,” and “especially distrusted the religious enthusiasm of children and women” (352). The Old Lights thought religion functioned best as a societal stabilizer, not a force of transformative change.

The evangelicals themselves subdivided into moderates and radicals. While the moderates still supported the idea of parishes and clergy, and were uncomfortable with exhorters, the radicals loved the power of “experimental religion” to overwhelm human institutions and authorities, especially hierarchical society. In short, “the radical evangelicals championed individualism, a concept then considered divisive and anarchic” (353).

Some radicals split off to form their own groups. In Virginia, Samuel Davies and the itinerant Baptists quickly expanded their frontier ministry. Their outward sternness “covered a more emotional, intimate, and supportive community for worship” (356) than that provided by the Anglicans, and their class- and race-uniting congregations treated the model of established churches being run by the gentry. But while Indians and slaves were accepted in the community, few evangelicals opposed the institution of slavery (with the Quakers being an important exception) (357-60).

The revivalist movement could not sustain itself long term—radicals gradually entered the fold of traditional congregations, with evangelical groups either “institutionalizing or dissolving” (361). But the ideals they championed made a lasting impression on the colonies’ political and cultural environment.