AP Outline Notes – Pages 66-83
Chapter 4 – American Life in the Seventeenth Century – 1607-1692
As the 17th century continued, more permanent settlements evolved in America. Europeans and Africans were adapting to the New World, and Native Americans were adapting to the newcomers. Even rigid Puritanism had to change somewhat in response to the circumstances of American life. Though all of the colonies were tied to England, all were part of the Atlantic economy. Regional differences continued to evolve, most notably in the growing importance of slave labor to life in the southern colonies.
- The Unhealthy Chesapeake
1)Malaria, dysentery, and typhoid were some of the biggest problems that faced British settlers in the Chesapeake area, shortening the lives of many.
a)The average lifespan of the British settler in this area was reduced by 10 years.
b)Half of the people born in the early days of Virginia and Maryland did not reach age 20.
c)The Chesapeake settlements thus grow only slowly in the 1600s, and mostly by new immigration from England.
2)The great majority of immigrants were single men in their late teens and early twenties, most of whomdied shortly after their arrival.
a)Those males that did survive competed for the relatively small number women, whom they outnumbered almost six to one in 1650. Most males could not find mates.
b)Families were few and weak in this difficult environment. Most marriages ended within seven years due to the death of one of the partners.
c)Hardly any children attained adulthood while under the care of two parents, and almost no one knew a grandparent.
d)Many out of wedlock pregnancies took place.
3)But, the Chesapeake colonies persevered – by the beginning of the 18th century, Virginia, with 59,000 people was the most populated colony, and Maryland was the third most populated.
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- The Tobacco Economy
1)Tobacco became the lifeblood of Jamestown, and the settlers pushed further up the river valleys to put more land into production.
a)This further aggravated relations with the Indians, and provoked more Indian attacks.
b)With more and more tobacco being grown, prices fell.
c)Tobacco growers responded to this situation by growing more tobacco.
d)This required a growing demand for abundant and cheaplabor.
1) African slaves were expensive, and England still had a surplus of displaced farmers looking for employment.
2)Many of these young males came over from England to America as indentured servants.
3)In exchange for usually five to seven years of labor to their ‘master’, the indentured servant would receive his fare to America, and at the end of his indenture, he would receive ‘freedom dues’ which typically included a few barrels of corn, a suit of clothes, and maybe a small parcel of land.
4)Virginia and Maryland used the ‘headright’ system, which provided that whoever paid the passage for a laborer to come over from Britain would receive 50 acres of land – thus masters, not the servants, received the benefits of landownership through the headright system.
5)Some masters thus became huge merchant-planters, acquiring huge riverfront plantations that came to dominate the agriculture and commerce of the southern colonies.
6)Hungry for land and labor, Chesapeake planters brought about 100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700.
7)These indentured servants amounted to more than 3/4s of all European immigrants to Virginia and Maryland by the middle of the 17th century.
8)Indentured servants led hard lives, but looked forward to the end of their indenture, where they could make a start on their own in America.
9)But, as land became scarcer, masters became less inclined to include land in the servant’s ‘freedom dues.’
- Frustrated Freeman and Bacon’s Rebellion
1)By the late 17th century, more and more poor former indentured servants were drifting unhappily around the Chesapeake area.
2)These were mostly single young men, who were embittered by their disappointment in not obtaining land and their failure to find single women to marry.
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3)1670 – The Virginia Assembly disfranchised most of these disgruntled drifters.
4)1676 – Bacon’s Rebellion –
a)Led by Nathaniel Bacon, a young planter.
b)Many of the rebels were frontiersmen, who had been forced to seek less preferable land on the frontier, which brought about conflicts with the frontier Indians.
c)The rebels deeply resented Va Governor Berkeley’s refusal to stand up for them against the Indians (Berkeley wanted to maintain friendly relations with the Indians because of the fur trade.)
d)When Berkeley refused to respond in defense of the frontiersmen after they experience brutal Indian attacks, these frontiersmen rebelled.
e)They attacked both friendly and unfriendly Indians, and attacked Jamestown itself, causing Berkeley to flee.
f)They burned Jamestown.
g)Both freed former indentured servants and current indentured servants were included in Bacon’s ranks.
h)Bacon suddenly died from disease, whereupon Berkeley assumed the upper hand, and put down the rebellion, hanging more than 20 of the rebels.
i)THE MOST IMPORTANT EFFECT OF BACON’S REBELLION WAS THAT IT MADE THE WEALTHY PLANTATION OWNERS DISINCLINED TO OBTAIN MORE INDENTURED SERVANTS AS A SOURCE OF LABOR. BETTER THEY THOUGHT, TO HAVE SLAVES THAT WOULD NOT HAVE A CHANCE TO BECOME FREE, AND THUS WOULD NOT BE TROUBLE MAKERS. SO, AFRICA WOULD NOT BECOME THE MAIN FOCUS AS A SOURCE OF LABOR – SLAVE LABOR NOW – TO WORK IN THE TOBACCO FIELDS.
- Colonial Slavery
1)Of the approximately 10 million Africans who were taken from Africa to the New World as slaves in the 300 years or so that followed Columbus’ arrival, only about 400,000 of them arrived in North America (most arriving after 1700). Most of the early slaves were brought from Africa to Spanish and Portuguese South America or to the sugar islands of the West Indies.
2)Africans were first brought to Jamestown in 1619 to work in the tobacco fields.
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3)As late as 1670, there were only about 2,000 blacks in Virginia out of a total population of about 35,000.
4)Most southerners could not afford to purchase slaves.
5)Huge change took place in the 1680s as rising wages in England shrank the pool of poor people willing to risk a new life and an early death as an indentured servant in America.
6)This coincided with large planters being less inclined to want indentured servants for reasons stated above.
7)By the mid 1680s, black slaves were arriving for the first time in greater numbers than white indentured servants.
8)1698 – The Royal African Company, first chartered in 1672, lost its monopoly on carrying slaves to the colonies.
a)Others seized the opportunity to become involved in the slave trade, and the numbers of new slave arrivals in America greatly increased.
b)More than 10,000 Africans arrived as slaves in America in the decade after 1700. Tens of thousands more arrived in the next fifty years.
c)By 1750, blacks made up about half of the population of Virginia. They outnumbered whites in South Carolina by 2 to 1.
d)Most of the slaves who were sent to North America came from the west coast of Africa, along the Gold Coast.
e)They were originally captured by African coastal tribes who traded them in coastal markets to slave merchants.
f)‘middle passage’ – that leg of triangular trade in which blacks were forcibly brought form Africa to the Americas on slave ships, and typically in horrible conditions in which many died.
g)Survivors of middle passage were put on auction blocks in New World ports such as Newport, Rhode Island or Charleston, South Carolina, where for more than a century the slave trade would be conducted.
h)In the 1662 – statutes begin appearing that formally define slavery. The first ‘slave code’ was enacted in Virginia.
1)These slave codes made black slaves and their children the property of their master for life.
2)Some of these slave codes made it a crime to teach a slave to read or write.
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3)Though slavery might have started in America for economic reasons, by the end of the 17th century racial discrimination was a powerful force in the maintenance and perpetuation of the American slave system.
- Africans in America
1)Life for the slave was hardest in the Deep South.
a)The conditions were oppressively hot and dangerous.
b)The rice and indigo plantations in South Carolina were hells on earth, where many of the typically young male slaves died.
c)Fresh imports of slaves were necessary to maintain the slave population under these conditions.
2)Slaves in the tobacco growing Chesapeake area had somewhat better conditions.
a)Tobacco was not as physically demanding a crop to produce as those crops of the deeper south (such as rice and indigo.)
b)Tobacco plantations were larger and closer to one another than were the rice plantations, which permitted the slaves more frequent contact with friends and relatives.
c)By about 1720, the proportion of females in the Chesapeake slave population began to rise, making slave family life possible.
d)Soon the slave population in the Chesapeake area would be growing by means of natural reproduction as well as through new imports, making it one of the few slave societies in history to perpetuate itself through natural reproduction.
e)A stable and distinctive slave culture developed, which had a mixture of African and American elements of speech, folkways, and religion.
1)On the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina, blacks developed a unique language – Gullah. It blended several African languages with English. Many African words have become part of American speech – goober, gumbo, and voodoo are all examples.
2)The ringshoot, a West African religious dance, was brought to colonial America by slaves and eventually contributed to the development of jazz.
3)The banjo and the bongo drum were also African contributions to American culture.
4)A few slaves became skilled artisans – carpenters, tanners, and bricklayers.
5)But, most of the slaves were forced to perform menial tasks.
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f)Slave revolts
1)1712 – New York City, in which dozens of whites were killed, and 21 blacks were executed.
2)1739 – StonoRiver revolt in South Carolina, stopped by local militia.
3)More slave revolts took place in the 18th century.
4)In the end though, slaves would provide a more manageable source of labor than the white indenture servants did. No slave uprising in American history was of the scale or magnitude of Bacon’s Rebellion.
- Southern Society
1)The relative equality created by the poverty and disease that afflicted the early Southerners was giving way to a hierarchy based on wealth and status in the early 1700s.
2)At the top of the social ladder were a group of small but powerful slave-owning planters.
3)These wealthy landowners dominated the region’s economy and enjoyed a virtual monopoly over political power.
4)A relative handful of extended families such as the Fitzhughs, the Lees, and the Washingtons, held huge tracts of Virginia land, and together dominated the House of Burgesses.
a)Thus, Virginia was virtually run by a ‘cousinocracy.’, or the ‘FFVs” – the ‘first families of Virginia.’
b)For the most part, these 17th century planters were hard-working, business-like men dealing the problems of plantation management.
5)Below the planters in this hierarchy were the small farmers – the largest social group.
6)They might own one or two slaves to work on their small plots, and had a hard, hand-to-mouth kind of existence.
7)On the next lower level were the landless whites, most of whom were former indentured servants.
8)On the next lower level were the indentured servants who were still completing their indenture.
9)At the bottom level of the social structure were the black slaves.
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10)Southern life revolved around these plantations that were typically large distances apart.
a)Waterways were the principle means of transportation.
b)Family burial plots in non-central cemeteries were common in the South, because of transportation issues.
- The New England Family
1)Clean water and cooler temperatures slowed the spread of disease microbes in New England, thus limiting the amount of disease.
2)17th century settlers in New England added ten years to their lives by migrating from the Old World.
a)Early generations of New England Puritans had a life expectancy of about 70 years – very similar to the life expectancy of an American today.
3)New Englanders tended to migrate from the Old World as families, rather than single individuals.
a)The family remained the center of New England life.
b)From almost the outset, population in New England was perpetuated by natural means.
c)Early marriage helped to create the booming birthrate.
d)Women were typically married by their early 20s and had babies about every two years thereafter until menopause.
4)The long life of New Englanders contributed to the stability of their families. Family stability was reflected in low rates of premarital pregnancy and in the generally strong and stable New England social structure.
a)Children were raised in nurturing environments, and were expected to learn habits of obedience.
b)Grandparents, as well as parents, were models for children.
5)Interestingly, the weakness of the southern family tended to strengthen some of the rights of women.
a)Because many men in the South died early and were survived by their wives and small children, the southern colonies generally permitted married women to retain separate title to their property, and gave widows the right to inherit their husband’s estates.
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b)In New England, Puritan lawmakers believed that allowing married women to have their own title to property would create disunity in the marriage. Thus, New England women generally surrendered their property rights when they married.
1)But, New England, in contrast to old England, had legal provisions for the property rights of widows and even granted important protections to women within marriage.
c)In America in the 17th century, a basic notion of women’s rights was beginning to appear.
1)Still, the popular attitude persisted that women were morally weaker than men.
2)Women still could not vote.
3)But, a husband’s power over his wife was limited somewhat, as New England authorities could intervene to restrain abusive spouses.
4)Women had some spheres of autonomy, such as in mid-wifery, in which women enjoyed a virtual monopoly.
d)Above all, Puritan New England laws sought to defend the integrity of marriage – divorce was very rare.
1)Separated couples were commonly ordered by authorities to reunite.
2)Outright abandonment, and adultery, were two of the very few grounds that existed for granting a divorce.
3)Convicted adulterers were required to wear a capital “A” on their outer clothing – the basis for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter.
- Life in New England Towns
1)Small villages and farms were the basis of the tightly-knit New England society.
2)Puritanism bread unity, both in its tenets and by the fact that as a people they were anchored in their geography, and enclosed by the Indians, the French, and the Dutch. (NOTE: IT’S LITTLE WONDER THAT THE 19th CENTURY REFORM CRUSADE TO ABOLISH SLAVERY WAS CENTERED IN MASSACHUSETTS, WITH ROOTS IN THE PURITAN CONSCIENCE.)
3)In the South, expansion was usually achieved randomly, and usually by a planter on his own initiative.
a)In New England, society grew in a more orderly fashion.
1)New towns were legally chartered by colonial authorities, and distribution of land was handled by town fathers or ‘proprietors.’
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2)After receiving a grant of land from the colonial legislature, proprietors moved along with their families to the designated area and laid out their town.
3)The town usually had a meetinghouse, which usually served as a house of worship and a town hall, and was surrounded by houses.
4)Also there was typically a village green, where militia could drill.
5)Each family received several parcels of land, including a woodlot, a tract for growing crops, and one for pasturing animals.
6)Towns of more than 50 families were required to provide elementary education, thus a majority of adults would know how to read and write.
7)1636 – HarvardCollege was founded by Massachusetts Puritans, to train local boys for the ministry.
8)1693 – the College of William and Mary became the first college established in Virginia (Jefferson graduated from William and Mary.)
9)Puritans ran their own churches. Democracy in the Congregational Church government naturally led to democracy in political government.
a)The New England town meeting – a from of direct democracy, where adult males came together at a meeting and made their own policies and laws – it was, as Jefferson put it, a laboratory for democracy. And, it was an example of true democracy.