America. The thirteen colonies later formed the United States of America. Contemporaries did not distinguish them from Britain's Caribbean or other mainland settlements. All except Georgia, founded in 1732, resulted from 17th-cent. crown grants, mainly to companies or proprietors. Most were eventually taken under crown control, so that by 1750 they had similar institutional and political systems. The original Indian inhabitants were gradually dispossessed and marginalized by armed, aggressive settlers.
In the south, Virginia (1607) became a royal province in 1624. Its neighbour, Maryland (see
Baltimore), was taken under royal control, but reverted to proprietary rule in 1715. Tobacco, a major export crop, shaped the development of both colonies. The demand for labour was met by indentured servants from the British Isles, young persons who worked for a term of years in return for a free passage and the promise of future benefits. After about 1680 African slaves gradually displaced them. In South Carolina (1663) rice became the great export crop; here slavery was more concentrated and harsher. South Carolina and North Carolina, which had pockets of slavery and of free subsistence farmers, became royal colonies. In Georgia, founded by humanitarians as a refuge for poor persons and oppressed protestants, attempts to ban slavery and strong drink failed; it developed as a plantation-based society.
In the north, no staples dominated. Families rather than indentured servants went to Massachusetts (see
Massachusetts Bay Company), and to Connecticut, which received a royal charter in 1662. In both, the religious convictions of the early settlers and a congregational church system helped shape social and political institutions. Hostilities between congregationalists, baptists, and quakers played a major role in the development of religious toleration in Rhode Island, settled from 1636. New Hampshire, first settled by New England congregationalists and by more latitudinarian Anglican colonists, was chartered in 1679. These northern colonies had economies based on farming and maritime undertakings, including shipbuilding (and timber exports from New Hampshire).
The middle colonies, founded after 1660, became the great receptacles of continuing white migration, of both independent families and servants. New York was granted to James, duke of York (later James II) in 1664. From it he granted New Jersey, in which there was a substantial Presbyterian Scottish interest, to a number of proprietors. Both territories later came under direct royal control. Pennsylvania's (see
Penn, William) early life was dominated by members of the Society of Friends. The Penns held it until the American Revolution. Its southern neighbour, Delaware, was formed from Pennsylvania's three lower counties. New York City and, especially, Philadelphia became substantial urban centres; their hinterlands and the region generally were characterized by successful farming, with a surplus of foodstuffs finding markets elsewhere.
In the 17th cent. the colonies were seen in Britain as receptacles for a surplus population. Traditional arguments that migration would relieve unemployment and reduce poverty as well as create markets for British goods and provide valuable sources of precious metals and raw materials persisted. By the end of the century, the need for a large labour force at home was stressed. Although immigration continued from mainland Britain, its major sources became northern Ireland and protestant Germany. This led to increasing religious diversity as Ulster presbyterians (‘Scotch-Irish’) and a variety of German baptists, Lutherans, and Moravians arrived. Even so, natural increase more than migration fed population growth. This was formidable, a distinguishing feature in the development of the colonies, underpinning a burgeoning self-confidence and a conviction that because of the availability of land a modest independence was attainable by the majority of white males in the New World, as it was not in the Old.
| 1660 | 1720 | 1740 | 1780 |
|---|
New England | | | | |
White | 30,594 | 166,937 | 281,163 | 650,832 |
Black | 562 | 3,956 | 8,541 | 14,377 |
Middle colonies | | | | |
White | 4,846 | 92,259 | 204,093 | 680,493 |
Black | 630 | 10,825 | 16,452 | 42,365 |
Southern colonies | | | | |
White | 34,718 | 138,110 | 270,283 | 779,754 |
Black | 1,728 | 54,098 | 125,031 | 509,928 |
Totals | | | | |
Whites | 70,158 | 397,306 | 755,539 | 2,111,079 |
Blacks | 2,920 | 68,879 | 150,024 | 566,670 |
All | 73,078 | 466,185 | 905,563 | 2,677,749 |
Westwards expansion and the settlement of the interior valleys filled the ‘back country’ from western Pennsylvania to South Carolina and settlers also moved into western New York and the Ohio region. Land speculation became a fact of colonial life. Land companies with American and British participants sought political favours from the colonial authorities and from the British government, while population pressures in the older settled regions caused social tensions. Intercolonial and back-country versus seaboard rivalries lasted to and beyond the American Revolution. From the 1750s the British government began to increase its attempts to create an imperial policy embracing western settlement and Indian relations.
British opinion was that the colonies were primarily of value to the development of a profitable maritime commercial empire. An appreciation of the trading interdependence of the Atlantic colonies, for which southern Europe also became an important market, and of their direct trade with Great Britain, including their great potential as markets for English manufactured goods, grew in the century after 1650. Regulatory measures included various acts of trade (
‘Navigation Acts’) from 1651 onwards in the face of Dutch competition. Foreign-built and/or -crewed ships were excluded from colonial trade and most exports and imports were to be carried via English and (after 1707) Scottish ports. From 1673 a Customs Service was created in the colonies. In 1696 the foundation of the Board of
Trade provided a focus for colonial administration and attempts were made to tighten British control, especially during times of war.
These were not continued with any force under Sir Robert
Walpole and the duke of
Newcastle, a period characterized as one of ‘salutary neglect’. Only renewed struggles with Spain and France, particularly from the late 1740s, and the rise of a group of imperially minded politicians and colonial governors, created demands for stronger executive control and greater colonial obedience. By this time colonial political identities were almost fully formed. The original crown charters had conferred large powers of self-government on the colonies, notably in allowing them representative assemblies with substantial legislative powers, chosen by wide electorates. These assemblies assumed fiscal authority and control of local government, a process shaped by the concurrent emergence of élite groups of successful families.
Such developments were accompanied by the growth of a political culture, with roots in English opposition to Stuart absolutism, drawing on 17th-cent. puritanism and vulgarized Lockianism, later mingled with the opposition rhetoric of country against court, and against Walpole's system, and a belief in New World purity and British corruption. The Great Awakening of the 1740s also revitalized protestant dissent and further distanced many Americans from the claims of an Anglican political and church establishment to authority. But denominational and other interest group rivalries, like those over land, caused internal conflicts. Yet a degree of cultural cohesion and awareness of shared political, commercial, and economic interests was stimulated by the productions of the colonial printing presses, particularly by newspapers. Virginians and New Englanders recounted their short histories as the successful creation of quasi-independent New World societies.
Warfare between France and England in North America in 1754, arising from rivalries in the Ohio valley, therefore necessitated co-operation between a mother country and colonies whose differences were masked by shared ambitions for commercial and territorial victory over a catholic power believed to be seeking universal monarchy. British plans for colonial union in 1754 failed in the colonial assemblies. The course of the
Seven Years War revealed the jealous self-interest of the colonial assemblies towards each other and towards London, despite royal governors' and English ministers' orders. Overwhelming advantages in terms of wealth and population enjoyed, for example, by New York and New England over French Canada, together with the deployment of British regular troops, failed to bring victory until 1759–60.
Success brought rejoicing for a God-ordained triumph of protestantism and liberty, even prophecies of a forthcoming millennium. The reality was a huge increase in the British national debt, provoking anxieties about bankruptcy and fears that colonial expansion, no longer checked by the French and their Indian allies, would precipate expensive new conflicts with the frontier tribes, concerns fed by the Cherokee War (1759–61) and by a major middle-colony Indian war in 1763. These and British official memories of colonial military non-cooperation and illegal trade during the Seven Years War suggested that colonial dependence on crown and Parliament might need to be ensured by new British measures. The mood in America also altered as wartime spending was succeeded by deflation and depression and as credit crises in the mother country were increasingly felt. When British ministers introduced new measures to raise larger revenues from America, colonial political awareness was stimulated and diffused and intercolonial co-operation increased. Resistance and then revolution followed.
The loss of the thirteen colonies occurred, however, as British–American trade was again increasing and as British politicians were becoming more involved in schemes to profit from the opening up of western lands. Tobacco imports were changing Glasgow's commerce, Chesapeake wheat was beginning to feed Britain's own growing population, and enormous quantities of American products were being shipped to the sugar islands. British manufactured goods were also pouring into America, leading some historians to claim that the colonies were experiencing a ‘consumer revolution’. Benjamin Franklin believed that the future prosperity of Britain depended on America and that the centre of the British empire might one day be found there. Isaac
Barré told the House of Commons in March 1774 that ‘You have not a loom nor an anvil but what is stamped with America.’ Even George III mused on the interdependence of commerce and power, prophesying the West Indies following the Americans ‘not [into] Independence but must for its own interest be dependent on North America: then Ireland would soon follow the same plan … then this Island would be reduced to itself, and soon would be a poor Island indeed, for reduced in her Trade Merchants would retire with their Wealth to climates more to their Advantage, and Shoals of Manufacturers would leave this country for the New Empire.’
Such views illustrate the impact of successful colonial growth on some contemporaries and hinted at the need for an imaginative readjustment of the view that the colonies were still the dependent children of the mother country. But the political nation upheld the sovereignty of crown and Parliament over America. This must not be sacrificed to colonial or trading interests. Schemes on both sides of the Atlantic, either for granting the colonial assemblies a form of equality with the British Parliament or for managing the thirteen colonies by admitting their representatives to the British Parliament, as Scotland had been managed since the Act of Union, found no vital support. In 1776 the thirteen colonies, bolstered by the experience of more than a century of successful growth and a large degree of self-government, declared themselves ‘free and independent states absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the crown and parliament of Great Britain’.
Richard C. Simmons
Bibliography
Greene, J. P., and Pole, J. R. (eds.), Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984);
Simmons, R. C. , The American Colonies from Settlement to Independence (New York, 1976).
