4

American Life in theSeventeenth Century

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1607–1692

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before intheir preparation . . . , they had now no friends to wellcome them,

nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, nohouses or much less towns to repaire too, to seeke for succore.

WILLIAM BRADFORD, OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION, C. 1630

As the seventeenth century wore on, the crudeencampments of the first colonists slowly gave

way to permanent settlements. Durable and distinc-tive ways of life emerged, as Europeans and Africansadapted to the New World, and as Native Americansadapted to the newcomers. Even the rigid doctrinesof Puritanism softened somewhat in response to thecircumstances of life in America. And though all thecolonies remained tied to England, and all werestitched tightly into the fabric of an Atlantic econ-omy, regional differences continued to crystallize,notably the increasing importance of slave labor tothe southern way of life.

The Unhealthy Chesapeake

Life in the American wilderness was nasty, brutish,and short for the earliest Chesapeake settlers.Malaria, dysentery, and typhoid took a cruel toll,

cutting ten years off the life expectancy of newcom-ers from England. Half the people born in early Vir-ginia and Maryland did not survive to celebratetheir twentieth birthdays. Few of the remaining halflived to see their fiftieth—or even their fortieth, ifthey were women.

The disease-ravaged settlements of the Chesa-peake grew only slowly in the seventeenth century,mostly through fresh immigration from England.The great majority of immigrants were single men intheir late teens and early twenties, and most per-ished soon after arrival. Surviving males competedfor the affections of the extremely scarce women,whom they outnumbered nearly six to one in 1650and still outnumbered by three to two at the end ofthe century. Eligible women did not remain singlefor long.

Families were both few and fragile in this fero-cious environment. Most men could not find mates.Most marriages were destroyed by the death of a

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partner within seven years. Scarcely any childrenreached adulthood under the care of two parents,and almost no one knew a grandparent. Weak familyties were reflected in the many pregnancies amongunmarried young girls. In one Maryland county,more than a third of all brides were already preg-nant when they wed.

Yet despite these hardships, the Chesapeakecolonies struggled on. The native-born inhabitantseventually acquired immunity to the killer diseasesthat had ravaged the original immigrants. The pres-ence of more women allowed more families to form,and by the end of the seventeenth century the whitepopulation of the Chesapeake was growing on thebasis of its own birthrate. As the eighteenth centuryopened, Virginia, with some fifty-nine thousandpeople, was the most populous colony. Maryland,with about thirty thousand, was the third largest(after Massachusetts).

The Tobacco Economy

Although unhealthy for human life, the Chesapeakewas immensely hospitable to tobacco cultivation.Profit-hungry settlers often planted tobacco to sellbefore they planted corn to eat. But intense tobaccocultivation quickly exhausted the soil, creating anearly insatiable demand for virgin land. Relent-lessly seeking fresh fields to plant in tobacco, com-mercial growers plunged ever farther up the rivervalleys, provoking ever more Indian attacks.

Leaf-laden ships annually hauled some 1.5 mil-lion pounds of tobacco out of Chesapeake Bay by

the 1630s and almost 40 million pounds a year bythe end of the century. This enormous productiondepressed prices, but colonial Chesapeake tobaccogrowers responded to falling prices in the familiarway of farmers: by planting still more acres totobacco and bringing still more product to market.

More tobacco meant more labor, but where wasit to come from? Families procreated too slowly toprovide it by natural population increase. Indiansdied too quickly on contact with whites to be a reli-able labor force. African slaves cost too muchmoney. But England still had a “surplus” of dis-placed farmers, desperate for employment. Many ofthem, as “indentured servants,” voluntarily mort-gaged the sweat of their bodies for several years toChesapeake masters. In exchange they receivedtransatlantic passage and eventual “freedom dues,”including a few barrels of corn, a suit of clothes, andperhaps a small parcel of land.

Both Virginia and Maryland employed the“headright” system to encourage the importation ofservant workers. Under its terms, whoever paid thepassage of a laborer received the right to acquirefifty acres of land. Masters—not the servants them-selves—thus reaped the benefits of landownershipfrom the headright system. Some masters, men whoalready had at least modest financial means, soon

The Importance of Tobacco 67

An agent for the Virginia Company inLondon submitted the following descriptionof the Virginia colony in 1622:

“I found the plantations generally seated uponmere salt marshes full of infectious bogs andmuddy creeks and lakes, and therebysubjected to all those inconveniences anddiseases which are so commonly found in themost unsound and most unhealthy parts ofEngland.”

parlayed their investments in servants into vastholdings in real estate. They became the great mer-chant-planters, lords of sprawling riverfront estatesthat came to dominate the agriculture and com-merce of the southern colonies. Ravenous for bothlabor and land, Chesapeake planters brought some100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700.These “white slaves” represented more than three-quarters of all European immigrants to Virginia andMaryland in the seventeenth century.

Indentured servants led a hard but hopeful lifein the early days of the Chesapeake settlements.They looked forward to becoming free and acquir-ing land of their own after completing their term ofservitude. But as prime land became scarcer, mas-ters became increasingly resistant to including landgrants in “freedom dues.” The servants’ lot grewharsher as the seventeenth century wore on. Misbe-having servants, such as a housemaid who becamepregnant or a laborer who killed a hog, might bepunished with an extended term of service. Evenafter formal freedom was granted, penniless freedworkers often had little choice but to hire them-selves out for pitifully low wages to their formermasters.

Frustrated Freemen and Bacon’s Rebellion

An accumulating mass of footloose, impoverishedfreemen was drifting discontentedly about theChesapeake region by the late seventeenth century.Mostly single young men, they were frustrated bytheir broken hopes of acquiring land, as well as bytheir gnawing failure to find single women to marry.

The swelling numbers of these wretched bache-lors rattled the established planters. The Virginiaassembly in 1670 disfranchised most of the landlessknockabouts, accusing them of “having little inter-est in the country” and causing “tumults at the elec-tion to the disturbance of his majesty’s peace.”Virginia’s Governor William Berkeley lamented hislot as ruler of this rabble: “How miserable that manis that governs a people where six parts of seven atleast are poor, endebted, discontented, and armed.”

Berkeley’s misery soon increased. About a thou-sand Virginians broke out of control in 1676, led by a twenty-nine-year-old planter, Nathaniel Bacon.Many of the rebels were frontiersmen who had beenforced into the untamed backcountry in search of

arable land. They fiercely resented Berkeley’sfriendly policies toward the Indians, whose thrivingfur trade the governor monopolized. When Berkeleyrefused to retaliate for a series of savage Indianattacks on frontier settlements, Bacon and his fol-lowers took matters into their own hands. They fellmurderously upon the Indians, friendly and hostilealike, chased Berkeley from Jamestown, and put thetorch to the capital. Chaos swept the raw colony, as frustrated freemen and resentful servants—described as “a rabble of the basest sort of people”—went on a rampage of plundering and pilfering.

As this civil war in Virginia ground on, Baconsuddenly died of disease, like so many of his fellowcolonists. Berkeley thereupon crushed the uprisingwith brutal cruelty, hanging more than twentyrebels. Back in England Charles II complained,“That old fool has put to death more people in thatnaked country than I did here for the murder of myfather.”

The distant English king could scarcely imaginethe depths of passion and fear that Bacon’s Rebel-lion excited in Virginia. Bacon had ignited the smol-dering unhappiness of landless former servants,and he had pitted the hardscrabble backcountryfrontiersmen against the haughty gentry of the

68 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

Nathaniel Bacon assailed Virginia’s GovernorWilliam Berkeley in 1676

“for having protected, favored, andemboldened the Indians against HisMajesty’s loyal subjects, never contriving,requiring, or appointing any due or propermeans of satisfaction for their manyinvasions, robberies, and murderscommitted upon us.”

For his part, Governor Berkeley declared,

“I have lived thirty-four years amongst you[Virginians], as uncorrupt and diligent asever [a] Governor was, [while] Bacon is a manof two years amongst you, his person andqualities unknown to most of you, and to allmen else, by any virtuous act that ever Iheard of. . . . I will take counsel of wiser menthan myself, but Mr. Bacon has none abouthim but the lowest of the people.”

An Indentured Servant’s Contract, 1746 Legaldocuments, such as this contract signed in Virginia in 1746, not only provide evidence aboutthe ever-changing rules by which societies haveregulated their affairs, but also furnish rich infor-mation about the conditions of life and the termsof human relationships in the past. This agree-ment between Thomas Clayton and James Griffinprovides a reminder that not all indentured ser-vants in early America came from abroad. Indentured servitude could be equivalent to anapprenticeship, in which a young person tradedseveral years of service to a master in exchange forinstruction in the master’s craft. Here Claytonpledges himself to five years in Griffin’s employ inreturn for a promise to initiate the young man intothe "Mystery" of the master’s craft. Why might themaster’s trade be described as a "mystery"? Fromthe evidence of this contract, what are the princi-pal objectives of each of the parties to it? Whatproblems does each anticipate? What obligationsdoes each assume? What does the consent of Clayton’s mother to the contract suggest about theyoung man’s situation?

Examining the Evidence 69

tidewater plantations. The rebellion was now sup-pressed, but these tensions remained. Lordlyplanters, surrounded by a still-seething sea of malcontents, anxiously looked about for less trou-blesome laborers to toil in the restless tobacco kingdom. Their eyes soon lit on Africa.

Colonial Slavery

Perhaps 10 million Africans were carried in chainsto the New World in the three centuries or so follow-ing Columbus’s landing. Only about 400,000 of themended up in North America, the great majority arriv-ing after 1700. Most of the early human cargoes

were hauled to Spanish and Portuguese SouthAmerica or to the sugar-rich West Indies.

Africans had been brought to Jamestown asearly as 1619, but as late as 1670 they numberedonly about 2,000 in Virginia (out of a total popula-tion of some 35,000 persons) and about 7 percent of the 50,000 people in the southern plantationcolonies as a whole. Hard-pinched white colonists,struggling to stay alive and to hack crude clearingsout of the forests, could not afford to pay high pricesfor slaves who might die soon after arrival. Whiteservants might die, too, but they were far less costly.

Drastic change came in the 1680s. Rising wagesin England shrank the pool of penniless folk willing togamble on a new life or an early death as indenturedservants in America. At the same time, the large

70 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

Estimated Slave Imports to the New World, 1601–1810

17th Century 18th Century Total Percent

Spanish America 292,500 578,600 871,100 11.7Brazil 560,000 1,891,400 2,451,400 33British Caribbean 263,700 1,401,000 1,664,700 22.5Dutch Caribbean 40,000 460,000 500,000 6.7French Caribbean 155,800 1,348,400 1,504,200 20.3Danish Caribbean 4,000 24,000 28,000 .4British North America 10,000 390,000 400,000 5.4

and future United StatesTOTAL 7,419,400 100

This table clearly shows the huge concentration of the slave system in the Caribbean and South America. British North America’s southern colonies constituted the extreme northern periphery of this system.[Source: Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)]

planters were growing increasingly fearful of the mul-titudes of potentially mutinous former servants intheir midst. By the mid-1680s, for the first time, blackslaves outnumbered white servants among the plan-tation colonies’ new arrivals. In 1698 the Royal African

Company, first chartered in 1672, lost its crown-granted monopoly on carrying slaves to the colonies.Enterprising Americans, especially Rhode Islanders,rushed to cash in on the lucrative slave trade, and thesupply of slaves rose steeply. More than ten thousandAfricans were pushed ashore in America in thedecade after 1700, and tens of thousands more in thenext half-century. Blacks accounted for nearly halfthe population of Virginia by 1750. In South Carolinathey outnumbered whites two to one.

Most of the slaves who reached North Americacame from the west coast of Africa, especially thearea stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola.They were originally captured by African coastaltribes, who traded them in crude markets on theshimmering tropical beaches to itinerant Euro-pean—and American—flesh merchants. Usuallybranded and bound, the captives were herdedaboard sweltering ships for the gruesome “middlepassage,” on which death rates ran as high as 20 per-cent. Terrified survivors were eventually shovedonto auction blocks in New World ports like New-port, Rhode Island, or Charleston, South Carolina,

The Origins of American Slavery 71

The Mennonites of Germantown,Pennsylvania, recorded the earliest knownprotest against slavery in America in 1688:

“There is a saying, that we should do to allmen like as we will be done ourselves. . . .But to bring men hither, or to rob and sellthem against their will, we stand against. . . .Pray, what thing in the world can be doneworse towards us, than if men should rob orsteal us away, and sell us for slaves tostrange countries, separating husbands fromtheir wives and children?”

Equator

ATLANTIC OCEAN

ATLANTIC OCEAN

CaribbeanSea

PACIFICOCEAN

UNITED STATES

BRAZIL

SENEGALGAMBIA

GUINEA BISSAU SIERRALEONE

GUINEA

LIBERIA

BURKINAFASO

NIGERIA

CAMEROONEQUITORIALGUINEA

GABONCONGO

ANGOLA

GHANA TOGO

CÔTED'IVOIRE

BENIN

WESTINDIES WEST AFRICA

A F R I C A

S O U T HA M E R I C A

Charleston

Sources of Slaves

Present-day boundariesof African countries

Main Sources of African Slaves, c. 1500–1800 The three centuries of the “African diaspora” scatteredblacks all over the New World, with about 400,000 coming to North America.

where a giant slave market traded in human miseryfor more than a century.

A few of the earliest African immigrants gainedtheir freedom, and some even became slaveownersthemselves. But as the number of Africans in theirmidst increased dramatically toward the end of theseventeenth century, white colonists reacted re-morselessly to this supposed racial threat.

Earlier in the century the legal differencebetween a slave and a servant was unclear. But nowthe law began to make sharp distinctions betweenthe two—largely on the basis of race. Beginning inVirginia in 1662, statutes appeared that formallydecreed the iron conditions of slavery for blacks.These earliest “slave codes” made blacks and theirchildren the property (or “chattels”) for life of theirwhite masters. Some colonies made it a crime toteach a slave to read or write. Not even conversion toChristianity could qualify a slave for freedom. Thusdid the God-fearing whites put the fear of God intotheir hapless black laborers. Slavery might havebegun in America for economic reasons, but by theend of the seventeenth century, it was clear thatracial discrimination also powerfully molded theAmerican slave system.

Africans in America

In the deepest South, slave life was especiallysevere. The climate was hostile to health, and thelabor was life-draining. The widely scattered SouthCarolina rice and indigo plantations were lonelyhells on earth where gangs of mostly male Africanstoiled and perished. Only fresh imports could sus-tain the slave population under these loathsomeconditions.

Blacks in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake re-gion had a somewhat easier lot. Tobacco was a lessphysically demanding crop than those of the deeperSouth. Tobacco plantations were larger and closer toone another than rice plantations. The size and prox-imity of these plantations permitted the slaves morefrequent contact with friends and relatives. By about1720 the proportion of females in the Chesapeakeslave population had begun to rise, making family lifepossible. The captive black population of the Chesa-peake area soon began to grow not only through newimports but also through its own fertility—making itone of the few slave societies in history to perpetuateitself by its own natural reproduction.

72 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

Native-born African-Americans contributed tothe growth of a stable and distinctive slave culture, amixture of African and American elements ofspeech, religion, and folkways (see “Makers ofAmerica: From African to African-American,” pp. 74–75). On the sea islands off South Carolina’scoast, blacks evolved a unique language, Gullah(probably a corruption of Angola, the African regionfrom which many of them had come). It blendedEnglish with several African languages, includingYoruba, Ibo, and Hausa. Through it many Africanwords have passed into American speech—such asgoober (peanut), gumbo (okra), and voodoo (witch-craft). The ringshout, a West African religious danceperformed by shuffling in a circle while answering apreacher’s shouts, was brought to colonial Americaby slaves and eventually contributed to the develop-ment of jazz. The banjo and the bongo drum wereother African contributions to American culture.

Slaves also helped mightily to build the countrywith their labor. A few became skilled artisans—car-penters, bricklayers, and tanners. But chiefly theyperformed the sweaty toil of clearing swamps, grub-bing out trees, and other menial tasks. Condemnedto life under the lash, slaves naturally pined for free-dom. A slave revolt erupted in New York City in 1712that cost the lives of a dozen whites and caused theexecution of twenty-one blacks, some of themburned at the stake over a slow fire. More than fiftyresentful South Carolina blacks along the StonoRiver exploded in revolt in 1739 and tried to marchto Spanish Florida, only to be stopped by the localmilitia. But in the end the slaves in the South provedto be a more manageable labor force than the white

indentured servants they gradually replaced. Noslave uprising in American history matched thescale of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Southern Society

As slavery spread, the gaps in the South’s socialstructure widened. The rough equality of povertyand disease of the early days was giving way to adefined hierarchy of wealth and status in the earlyeighteenth century. At the top of this southern socialladder perched a small but powerful covey of greatplanters. Owning gangs of slaves and vast domainsof land, the planters ruled the region’s economy andvirtually monopolized political power. A clutch ofextended clans—such as the Fitzhughs, the Lees,and the Washingtons—possessed among them hori-zonless tracts of Virginia real estate, and togetherthey dominated the House of Burgesses. Just beforethe Revolutionary War, 70 percent of the leaders ofthe Virginia legislature came from families estab-lished in Virginia before 1690—the famed “first fam-ilies of Virginia,” or “FFVs.”

Yet, legend to the contrary, these great seven-teenth-century merchant planters were not silk-swathed cavaliers gallantly imitating the ways ofEnglish country gentlemen. They did eventuallybuild stately riverfront manors, occasionally rode tothe hounds, and some of them even cultivated thearts and accumulated distinguished libraries. Butfor the most part, they were a hard-working, busi-nesslike lot, laboring long hours over the problems

African-American Culture 73

From African to African-American

Dragged in chains from West African shores, thefirst African-Americans struggled to preserve

their diverse heritages from the ravages of slavery.Their children, the first generation of American-bornslaves, melded these various African traditions—Guinean, Ibo, Yoruba, Angolan—into a distinctiveAfrican-American culture. Their achievement sus-tained them during the cruelties of enslavement andhas endured to enrich American life to this day.

With the arrival of the first Africans in the seven-teenth century, a cornucopia of African traditionspoured into the New World: handicrafts and skills innumerous trades; a plethora of languages, musics,and cuisines; even rice-planting techniques thatconquered the inhospitable soil of South Carolina. Itwas North America’s rice paddies, tilled by experi-enced West Africans, that introduced rice into the

English diet and furnished so many English tableswith the sticky staple.

These first American slaves were mostly males.Upon arrival they were sent off to small isolatedfarms, where social contact with other Africans, espe-cially women, was an unheard-of luxury. Yet theirlegal status was at first uncertain. A few slaves wereable to buy their freedom in the seventeenth century.One, Anthony Johnson of Northampton County, Vir-ginia, actually became a slaveholder himself.

But by the beginning of the eighteenth century,a settled slave society was emerging in the southerncolonies. Laws tightened; slave traders stepped uptheir deliveries of human cargo; large plantationsformed. Most significantly, a new generation ofAmerican-born slaves joined their forebears at laborin the fields. By 1740 large groups of slaves livedtogether on sprawling plantations, the American-born outnumbered the African-born, and theimportation of African slaves slowed.

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Forging a common culture and finding a psy-chological weapon with which to resist their mas-ters and preserve their dignity were dauntingchallenges for American-born slaves. Plantation lifewas beastly, an endless cycle of miserable toil in thefield or foundry from sunup to sundown. Femaleslaves were forced to perform double duty. After aday’s backbreaking work, women were expected tosit up for hours spinning, weaving, or sewing toclothe themselves and their families. Enslavedwomen also lived in constant fear of sexual exploita-tion by conscienceless masters.

Yet eventually a vibrant slave culture began toflower. And precisely because of the diversity ofAfrican peoples represented in America, the culturethat emerged was a uniquely New World creation. Itderived from no single African model and incorpo-rated many Western elements, though often withsignificant modifications.

Slave religion illustrates this pattern. Cut offfrom their native African religions, most slavesbecame Christians but fused elements of Africanand Western traditions and drew their own conclu-sions from Scripture. White Christians might pointto Christ’s teachings of humility and obedience toencourage slaves to “stay in their place,” but blackChristians emphasized God’s role in freeing theHebrews from slavery and saw Jesus as the Messiahwho would deliver them from bondage. They alsooften retained an African definition of heaven as

a place where they would be reunited with theirancestors.

At their Sunday and evening-time prayer meet-ings, slaves also patched African remnants ontoconventional Christian ritual. Black Methodists, forexample, ingeniously evaded the traditionalMethodist ban on dancing as sinful: three or fourpeople would stand still in a ring, clapping handsand beating time with their feet (but never crossingtheir legs, thus not officially “dancing”), while otherswalked around the ring, singing in unison. This“ringshout” derived from African practices; modernAmerican dances, including the Charleston, in turnderived from this African-American hybrid.

Christian slaves also often used outwardly reli-gious songs as encoded messages about escape orrebellion. “Good News, the Chariot’s Comin’” mightsound like an innocent hymn about divine deliver-ance, but it could also announce the arrival of aguide to lead fugitives safely to the North. Similarly,“Wade in the Water” taught fleeing slaves one way ofcovering their trail. The “Negro spirituals” that tookshape as a distinctive form of American music thushad their origins in both Christianity and slavery.

Indeed, much American music was born in theslave quarters from African importations. Jazz, withits meandering improvisations and complex synco-pations and rhythms, constitutes the most famousexample. But this rich cultural harvest came at thecost of generations of human agony.

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of plantation management. Few problems weremore vexatious than the unruly, often surly, ser-vants. One Virginia governor had such difficultykeeping his servants sober that he struck a dealallowing them to get drunk the next day if theywould only lay off the liquor long enough to lookafter his guests at a celebration of the queen’s birth-day in 1711.

Beneath the planters—far beneath them inwealth, prestige, and political power—were the smallfarmers, the largest social group. They tilled theirmodest plots and might own one or two slaves, butthey lived a ragged, hand-to-mouth existence. Stilllower on the social scale were the landless whites,most of them luckless former indentured servants.Under them were those persons still serving out theterm of their indenture. Their numbers graduallydiminished as black slaves increasingly replacedwhite indentured servants toward the end of the seventeenth century. The oppressed black slaves, ofcourse, remained enchained in society’s basement.

Few cities sprouted in the colonial South, andconsequently an urban professional class, includinglawyers and financiers, was slow to emerge. South-ern life revolved around the great plantations, dis-

tantly isolated from one another. Waterways pro-vided the principal means of transportation. Roadswere so wretched that in bad weather funeral par-ties could not reach church burial grounds—anobstacle that accounts for the development of fam-ily burial plots in the South, a practice unlike any-thing in old England or New England.

The New England Family

Nature smiled more benignly on pioneer New Eng-landers than on their disease-plagued fellowcolonists to the south. Clean water and cool temper-atures retarded the spread of killer microbes. Instark contrast to the fate of Chesapeake immigrants,settlers in seventeenth-century New England addedten years to their life spans by migrating from theOld World. One settler claimed that “a sip of NewEngland’s air is better than a whole draft of old Eng-land’s ale.” The first generations of Puritan colonistsenjoyed, on the average, about seventy years on thisearth—not very different from the life expectancy ofpresent-day Americans.

76 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

In further contrast with the Chesapeake, NewEnglanders tended to migrate not as single individ-uals but as families, and the family remained at thecenter of New England life. Almost from the outset,New England’s population grew from natural repro-ductive increase. The people were remarkably fer-tile, even if the soil was not.

Early marriage encouraged the booming birth-rate. Women typically wed by their early twentiesand produced babies about every two years there-after until menopause. Ceaseless childbearingdrained the vitality of many pioneer women, as theweather-eroded colonial tombstones eloquentlyreveal. A number of the largest families were borneby several mothers, though claims about the fre-quency of death in childbirth have probably beenexaggerated. But the dread of death in the birthingbed haunted many women, and it was small wonderthat they came to fear pregnancy. A married womancould expect to experience up to ten pregnanciesand rear as many as eight surviving children. Massachusetts governor William Phips was one oftwenty-seven children, all by the same mother. ANew England woman might well have dependentchildren living in her household from the earliestdays of her marriage up until the day of her death,and child raising became in essence her full-timeoccupation.

The longevity of the New Englanders con-tributed to family stability. Children grew up in nur-turing environments where they were expected tolearn habits of obedience, above all. They receivedguidance not only from their parents but from theirgrandparents as well. This novel intergenerationalcontinuity has inspired the observation that NewEngland “invented” grandparents. Family stabilitywas reflected in low premarital pregnancy rates(again in contrast with the Chesapeake) and in thegenerally strong, tranquil social structure character-istic of colonial New England.

Still other contrasts came to differentiate thesouthern and New England ways of life. Oddlyenough, the fragility of southern families advancedthe economic security of southern women, especiallyof women’s property rights. Because southern menfrequently died young, leaving widows with smallchildren to support, the southern colonies generallyallowed married women to retain separate title to

Pioneering New Englanders 77

New England early acquired a reputation asa healthful environment. Urging his fellowEnglishmen to emigrate to MassachusettsBay Colony in 1630, the Reverend John Whitedescribed New England (somewhatfancifully) as follows:

“No country yields a more propitious air forour temper than New England. . . . Many ofour people that have found themselvesalways weak and sickly at home, havebecome strong and healthy there: perhapsby the dryness of the air and constanttemper[ature] of it, which seldom variesfrom cold to heat, as it does with us. . . .Neither are the natives at any time troubledwith pain of teeth, soreness of eyes, or achein their limbs.”

their property and gave widows the right to inherittheir husband’s estates. But in New England, Puritanlawmakers worried that recognizing women’s separate property rights would undercut the unity ofmarried persons by acknowledging conflicting inter-ests between husband and wife. New England womenusually gave up their property rights, therefore, whenthey married. Yet in contrast to old England, the lawsof New England made secure provision for the prop-erty rights of widows—and even extended importantprotections to women within marriage.

“A true wife accounts subjection her honor,”one Massachusetts Puritan leader declared, ex-pressing a sentiment then common in Europe aswell as America. But in the New World, a rudimen-tary conception of women’s rights as individualswas beginning to appear in the seventeenth century.Women still could not vote, and the popular attitudepersisted that they were morally weaker than men—a belief rooted in the biblical tale of Eve’s treacheryin the Garden of Eden. But a husband’s power overhis wife was not absolute. The New England author-ities could and did intervene to restrain abusivespouses. One man was punished for kicking his wifeoff a stool; another was disciplined for drawing an“uncivil” portrait of his mate in the snow. Womenalso had some spheres of autonomy. Midwifery—assisting with childbirths—was a virtual female

monopoly, and midwives often fostered networks ofwomen bonded by the common travails of mother-hood. One Boston midwife alone delivered overthree thousand babies.

Above all, the laws of Puritan New Englandsought to defend the integrity of marriages. Divorcewas exceedingly rare, and the authorities commonlyordered separated couples to reunite. Outrightabandonment was among the very few permissiblegrounds for divorce. Adultery was another. Con-victed adulterers—especially if they were women—were whipped in public and forced forever after towear the capital letter “A” cut out in cloth and sewedon their outer garment—the basis for NathanielHawthorne’s famous 1850 tale, The Scarlet Letter.

Life in the New England Towns

Sturdy New Englanders evolved a tightly knit soci-ety, the basis of which was small villages and farms.This development was natural in a people anchoredby geography and hemmed in by the Indians, theFrench, and the Dutch. Puritanism likewise madefor unity of purpose—and for concern about themoral health of the whole community. It was noaccident that the nineteenth-century crusade for

78 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

abolishing black slavery—with Massachusetts agita-tors at the forefront—sprang in some degree fromthe New England conscience, with its Puritan roots.

In the Chesapeake region, the expansion of set-tlement was somewhat random and was usuallyundertaken by lone-wolf planters on their own ini-tiative, but New England society grew in a moreorderly fashion. New towns were legally charteredby the colonial authorities, and the distribution ofland was entrusted to the steady hands of sober-minded town fathers, or “proprietors.” After receiv-ing a grant of land from the colonial legislature, theproprietors moved themselves and their families tothe designated place and laid out their town. It usu-ally consisted of a meetinghouse, which served asboth the place of worship and the town hall, sur-rounded by houses. Also marked out was a villagegreen, where the militia could drill. Each familyreceived several parcels of land, including a woodlot

for fuel, a tract suitable for growing crops, andanother for pasturing animals.

Towns of more than fifty families were requiredto provide elementary education, and a majority ofthe adults knew how to read and write. As early as1636, just eight years after the colony’s founding, theMassachusetts Puritans established Harvard Col-lege, today the oldest corporation in America, totrain local boys for the ministry. Only in 1693, eighty-six years after staking out Jamestown, did the Virgini-ans establish their first college, William and Mary.

Puritans ran their own churches, and democ-racy in Congregational Church government led logi-cally to democracy in political government. Thetown meeting, in which the adult males mettogether and each man voted, was a showcase and aclassroom for democracy. New England villagersfrom the outset gathered regularly in their meeting-houses to elect their officials, appoint schoolmas-ters, and discuss such mundane matters as roadrepairs. The town meeting, observed Thomas Jeffer-son, was “the best school of political liberty theworld ever saw.”

The Half-Way Covenant and the Salem Witch Trials

Yet worries plagued the God-fearing pioneers ofthese tidy New England settlements. The pressure of a growing population was gradually dispersing

The New England Character 79

The Massachusetts School Law of 1647stated,

“It being one chief project of the old deluder,Satan, to keep men from the knowledge ofthe Scriptures, as in former times by keepingthem in an unknown tongue, it is thereforeordered that every township in thisjurisdiction, after the Lord has increasedthem [in] number to fifty householders, shallthen forthwith appoint one within their townto teach all such children as shall resort tohim to write and read, whose wages shall bepaid either by the parents or masters of suchchildren, or by the inhabitants in general.”

the Puritans onto outlying farms, far from the con-trol of church and neighbors. And although the coreof Puritan belief still burned brightly, the passage oftime was dampening the first generation’s flamingreligious zeal. About the middle of the seventeenthcentury, a new form of sermon began to be heardfrom Puritan pulpits—the “jeremiad.” Taking theircue from the doom-saying Old Testament prophetJeremiah, earnest preachers scolded parishionersfor their waning piety. Especially alarming was theapparent decline in conversions—testimonials byindividuals that they had received God’s grace andtherefore deserved to be admitted to the church asmembers of the elect. Troubled ministers in 1662announced a new formula for church membership,

the Half-Way Covenant. This new arrangementmodified the “covenant,” or the agreement betweenthe church and its adherents, to admit to baptism—but not “full communion”—the unconverted chil-dren of existing members. By conferring partialmembership rights in the once-exclusive Puritancongregations, the Half-Way Covenant weakenedthe distinction between the “elect” and others, fur-ther diluting the spiritual purity of the original set-tlers’ godly community.

The Half-Way Covenant dramatized the diffi-culty of maintaining at fever pitch the religiousdevotion of the founding generation. Jeremiadscontinued to thunder from the pulpits, but as timewent on, the doors of the Puritan churches swungfully open to all comers, whether converted or not.This widening of church membership graduallyerased the distinction between the “elect” and othermembers of society. In effect, strict religious puritywas sacrificed somewhat to the cause of wider reli-gious participation. Interestingly, from about thistime onward, women were in the majority in thePuritan congregations.

Women also played a prominent role in one of New England’s most frightening religious episodes.A group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts,claimed to have been bewitched by certain olderwomen. A hysterical “witch hunt” ensued, leading tothe legal lynching in 1692 of twenty individuals, nine-teen of whom were hanged and one of whom waspressed to death. Two dogs were also hanged.

Larger-scale witchcraft persecutions were thencommon in Europe, and several outbreaks hadalready flared forth in the colonies—often directed atproperty-owning women. But the reign of horror inSalem grew not only from the superstitions and prej-udices of the age but also from the unsettled socialand religious conditions of the rapidly evolving Mas-sachusetts village. Most of the accused witches camefrom families associated with Salem’s burgeoningmarket economy; their accusers came largely fromsubsistence farming families in Salem’s hinterland.The episode thus reflected the widening social strati-fication of New England, as well as the fear of manyreligious traditionalists that the Puritan heritage wasbeing eclipsed by Yankee commercialism.

The witchcraft hysteria eventually ended in 1693when the governor, alarmed by an accusation againsthis own wife and supported by the more responsiblemembers of the clergy, prohibited any further trialsand pardoned those already convicted. Twenty yearslater a penitent Massachusetts legislature annulled

80 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

the “convictions” of the “witches” and made repara-tions to their heirs. The Salem witchcraft delusionmarked an all-time high in the American experienceof popular passions run wild. “Witch-hunting”passed into the American vocabulary as a metaphorfor the often dangerously irrational urge to find ascapegoat for social resentments.

The New England Way of Life

Oddly enough, the story of New England was largelywritten by rocks. The heavily glaciated soil wasstrewn with countless stones, many of which wereforced to the surface after a winter freeze. In a sensethe Puritans did not possess the soil; it possessedthem by shaping their character. Scratching a livingfrom the protesting earth was an early Americansuccess story. Back-bending toil put a premium onindustry and penny-pinching frugality, for whichNew Englanders became famous. Traditionallysharp Yankee traders, some of them palming offwooden nutmegs, made their mark. Connecticutcame in time to be called good-humoredly “the Nut-meg State.” Cynics exaggerated when they said thatthe three stages of progress in New England were “toget on, to get honor, to get honest.”

The grudging land also left colonial New Englandless ethnically mixed than its southern neighbors.European immigrants were not attracted in greatnumbers to a site where the soil was so stony—andthe sermons so sulfurous.

Climate likewise molded New England, wherethe summers were often uncomfortably hot and thewinters cruelly cold. Many early immigrants com-plained of the region’s extremes of weather. Yet thesoil and climate of New England eventually encour-aged a diversified agriculture and industry. Stapleproducts like tobacco did not flourish, as in theSouth. Black slavery, although attempted, could notexist profitably on small farms, especially where thesurest crop was stones. No broad, fertile expansescomparable to those in the tidewater South beck-oned people inland. The mountains ran fairly closeto the shore, and the rivers were generally short andrapid.

And just as the land shaped New Englanders, sothey shaped the land. The Native Americans had left an early imprint on the New England earth.They traditionally beat trails through the woods asthey migrated seasonally for hunting and fishing.

They periodically burned the woodlands to restoreleafy first-growth forests that would sustain the deerpopulation. The Indians recognized the right to usethe land, but the concept of exclusive, individualownership of the land was alien to them.

The English settlers had a different philosophy.They condemned the Indians for “wasting” theearth by underutilizing its bounty and used thislogic to justify their own expropriation of the landfrom the native inhabitants. Consistent with thisoutlook, the Europeans felt a virtual duty to“improve” the land by clearing woodlands for pas-turage and tillage, building roads and fences, andlaying out permanent settlements.

Some of the greatest changes resulted from theintroduction of livestock. The English brought pigs,horses, sheep, and cattle from Europe to the settle-ments. Because the growing herds needed evermore pastureland, the colonists were continuallyclearing forests. The animals’ voracious appetitesand heavy hooves compacted the soil, speeding ero-sion and flooding. In some cases the combinedeffect of these developments actually may havechanged local climates and made some areas evenmore susceptible to extremes of heat and cold.

Repelled by the rocks, the hardy New Englandersturned instinctively to their fine natural harbors.Hacking timber from their dense forests, theybecame experts in shipbuilding and commerce.They also ceaselessly exploited the self-perpetuatingcodfish lode off the coast of Newfoundland—thefishy “gold mines of New England,” which haveyielded more wealth than all the treasure chests ofthe Aztecs. During colonial days the wayfarer seldomgot far from the sound of the ax and hammer, or theswift rush of the ship down the ways to the sea, orthe smell of rotting fish. As a reminder of the impor-tance of fishing, a handsome replica of the “sacredcod” is proudly displayed to this day in the Massa-chusetts Statehouse in Boston.

The combination of Calvinism, soil, and climatein New England made for energy, purposefulness,sternness, stubbornness, self-reliance, and resource-fulness. Righteous New Englanders prided them-selves on being God’s chosen people. They longboasted that Boston was “the hub of the universe”—at least in spirit. A famous jingle of later days ran

I come from the city of BostonThe home of the bean and the codWhere the Cabots speak only to Lowells And the Lowells speak only to God.

Lifestyles of the Early Settlers 81

New England has had an incalculable impact onthe rest of the nation. Ousted by their sterile soil,thousands of New Englanders scattered from Ohioto Oregon and even Hawaii. They sprinkled the landwith new communities modeled on the orderly NewEngland town, with its central green and tidyschoolhouse, and its simple town-meeting democ-racy. “Yankee ingenuity,” originally fostered by theflinty fields and comfortless climate of New Eng-land, came to be claimed by all Americans as aproud national trait. And the fabled “New Englandconscience,” born of the steadfast Puritan heritage,left a legacy of high idealism in the national charac-ter and inspired many later reformers.

The Early Settlers’ Days and Ways

The cycles of the seasons and the sun set the sched-ules of all the earliest American colonists, men aswell as women, blacks as well as whites. The over-whelming majority of colonists were farmers. Theyplanted in the spring, tended their crops in the sum-mer, harvested in the fall, and prepared in the winterto begin the cycle anew. They usually rose at dawnand went to bed at dusk. Chores might be performedafter nightfall only if they were “worth the candle,” aphrase that has persisted in American speech.

Women, slave or free, on southern plantationsor northern farms, wove, cooked, cleaned, andcared for children. Men cleared land; fenced,planted, and cropped it; cut firewood; andbutchered livestock as needed. Children helpedwith all these tasks, while picking up such schoolingas they could.

Life was humble but comfortable by contempo-rary standards. Compared to most seventeenth-century Europeans, Americans lived in affluentabundance. Land was relatively cheap, thoughsomewhat less available in the planter-dominatedSouth than elsewhere. In the northern and middlecolonies, an acre of virgin soil cost about what Amer-ican carpenters could earn in one day as wages,which were roughly three times those of theirEnglish counterparts.

“Dukes don’t emigrate,” the saying goes, for ifpeople enjoy wealth and security, they are not likelyto risk exposing their lives in the wilderness. Simi-larly, the very poorest members of a society may notpossess even the modest means needed to pull upstakes and seek a fresh start in life. Accordingly,most white migrants to early colonial America cameneither from the aristocracy nor from the dregs ofEuropean society—with the partial exception of theimpoverished indentured servants.

Crude frontier life did not in any case permit theflagrant display of class distinctions, and seven-

82 CHAPTER 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

teenth-century society in all the colonies had a cer-tain simple sameness to it, especially in the moreegalitarian New England and middle colonies. Yetmany settlers, who considered themselves to be ofthe “better sort,” tried to re-create on a modifiedscale the social structure they had known in the OldWorld. To some extent they succeeded, thoughyeasty democratic forces frustrated their full tri-umph. Resentment against upper-class pretensionshelped to spark outbursts like Bacon’s Rebellion of1676 in Virginia and the uprising of Maryland’sProtestants toward the end of the seventeenth cen-tury. In New York animosity between lordly land-holders and aspiring merchants fueled Leisler’s

Rebellion, an ill-starred and bloody insurgence thatrocked New York City from 1689 to 1691.

For their part, would-be American blue bloodsresented the pretensions of the “meaner sort” andpassed laws to try to keep them in their place. Mas-sachusetts in 1651 prohibited poorer folk from“wearing gold or silver lace,” and in eighteenth-century Virginia a tailor was fined and jailed forarranging to race his horse—“a sport only for gen-tlemen.” But these efforts to reproduce the finelystratified societies of Europe proved feeble in theearly American wilderness, where equality anddemocracy found fertile soil—at least for white people.

Chronology 83

Chronology

1619 First Africans arrive in Virginia

1636 Harvard College founded

1662 Half-Way Covenant for Congregational Church membership established

1670 Virginia assembly disfranchises landless freeman

1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

1680s Mass expansion of slavery in colonies

1689-1691 Leisler’s Rebellion in New York

1692 Salem witch trials in Massachusetts

1693 College of William and Mary founded

1698 Royal African Company slave trade monopoly ended

1712 New York City slave revolt

1739 South Carolina slave revolt

For further reading, see page A3 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.