Criterion 1A - 4 - MasteryCost Thoroughly evaluates at least tw

Criterion 1
A - 4 - Mastery
Cost: Thoroughly evaluates at least two new technologies in
healthcare that reflect future trends specifically for cost in the
present and future. ; Clearly labeled graph or table presents the
information visually and thoroughly supports the message of
this section. ; Visual is integrated smoothly into the document. ;
The reference section is APA formatted.Criterion 2
A - 4 - Mastery
Legal and Ethical: Comprehensively evaluates at least two new
technologies in healthcare that reflect future trends specific to
several legal implications and ethical concerns of implementing
these emerging technologies in the healthcare field.Criterion 3
A - 4 - Mastery
Competitive Advantage: Thoroughly and critically evaluates at
least two new technologies in healthcare that reflect future
trends specifically for benefit of the technology in terms of
competitive advantage for the healthcare company.
Module 3: British North America
Figure 1. Isaac Royall and his family, seen here in a 1741
portrait by Robert Feke, moved to Medford, Massachusetts,
from the
West Indian island of Antigua, bringing their enslaved workers
with them. They were an affluent British colonial family, proud
of
their success and the success of the British Empire.

The eighteenth-century witnessed the birth of Great Britain
(after the union of England and Scotland
in 1707) and the expansion of the British Empire. By the mid-
1700s, Great Britain had developed into
a commercial and military powerhouse; its economic sway
ranged from India, where the British East
India Company had gained control over both trade and territory,
to the West African coast, where
British slave traders predominated, and to the British West
Indies, whose lucrative sugar plantations,
especially in Barbados and Jamaica, provided windfall profits
for British planters. Meanwhile, the
population rose dramatically in Britain’s North American
colonies. In the early 1700s the population in
the colonies had reached 250,000. By 1750, over a million
British migrants and enslaved Africans had
established a near-continuous zone of settlement on the Atlantic
coast from Maine to Georgia.
During this period, the ties between Great Britain and the
American colonies only grew stronger.
Anglo-American colonists considered themselves part of the
British Empire in all ways: politically,
militarily, religiously (as Protestants), intellectually, and
racially. The portrait of the Royall
family exemplifies the colonial American gentry of the
eighteenth century. Successful and well-to-do,
they display fashions, hairstyles, and furnishings that all speak
to their identity as proud and loyal
British subjects.
A civil war in England, along with its ensuing political and
religious turmoil, shifted priorities and
changed the relationship between England and its colonies.
When Charles II ascended the throne in
1660, English subjects on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated

the restoration of the English
monarchy after a decade of living without a king as a result of
the English Civil Wars. Charles II lost
little time in strengthening England’s global power. From the
1660s to the 1680s, Charles II added
more possessions to England’s North American holdings by
establishing the Restoration colonies of
New York and New Jersey (taking these areas from the Dutch)
as well as Pennsylvania and the
Carolinas. In order to reap the greatest economic benefit from
England’s overseas possessions,
Charles II enacted the mercantilist Navigation Acts, although
many colonial merchants ignored them
because enforcement remained lax.
Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-
American colonists’ connection to Great
Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. Both
movements began in Europe, but they
advocated very different ideas: the Great Awakening promoted a
fervent, emotional religiosity, while
the Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all
things. On both sides of the Atlantic, British
subjects grappled with these new ideas.
Turmoil in Britain
GUIDED READING QUESTIONS
• 1. Describe political transitions during the English Civil War
and the Restoration
• 2. Explain the relationship between England and the colonies
during the late 1600s

and early 1700s, including the importance of the Navigation
Acts
Religious violence plagued sixteenth-century England. While
Spain plundered the New World and
built an empire, England struggled as Catholic and Protestant
monarchs vied for supremacy and
attacked their opponents as heretics. Queen Elizabeth cemented
Protestantism as the official religion
of the realm, but questions endured as to what kind of
Protestantism would hold sway. Many Puritans
looked to the New World as an opportunity to create a beacon of
Calvinist Christianity, while others
continued the struggle in England. By the 1640s, political
conflicts between Parliament and the Crown
merged with long-simmering religious tensions. The result was
a bloody civil war. Colonists reacted in
a variety of ways as England waged war on itself, but all were
affected by these decades of turmoil.
Figure 1. This timeline shows major events in England and
British America during the 17th and 18th centuries.
English Civil War
The outbreak of civil war between the King and Parliament in
1642 opened an opportunity for the
English state to consolidate its hold over the American colonies.
The conflict erupted as Charles I
called a parliament in 1640 to assist him in suppressing a
rebellion in Scotland. The Irish rebelled the
following year, and by 1642 strained relations between Charles

and Parliament produced a civil war
in England. The English Civil War lasted from 1642 to 1649 and
pitted the king and his Royalist
supporters against Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentary
forces. After years of fighting, the
Parliamentary forces gained the upper hand, and in 1649, they
charged Charles I with treason and
beheaded him. The monarchy was dissolved, and England
became a republic: a state without a king.
Oliver Cromwell headed the new English Commonwealth, and
the period known as the English
Interregnum, or the time between kings, began.
Figure 2. King Charles I, pictured with the blue sash of the
Order of the Garter, listens to his commanders detail the
strategy for
what would be the first pitched battle of the First English Civil
War. As all previous constitutional compromises between King
Charles and Parliament had broken down, both sides raised
large armies in the hopes of forcing the other side to concede
their
position. The Battle of Edgehill ended with no clear winner,
leading to a prolonged war of over four years and an even
longer
series of wars (known generally as the English Civil War) that
eventually established the Commonwealth of England in 1649.
Though Cromwell enjoyed widespread popularity at first, over
time he appeared to many in England
to be taking on the powers of a military dictator. Dissatisfaction
with Cromwell grew. When he died in

1658 and control passed to his son Richard, who lacked the
political skills of his father, a majority of
the English people feared an alternate hereditary monarchy in
the making. They had had enough and
asked Charles II to be king. In 1660, they welcomed the son of
the executed King Charles I back to
the throne to resume the English monarchy and bring the
interregnum to an end. The return of
Charles II is known as the Restoration.
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Figure 3. The monarchy and Parliament fought for control of
England during the seventeenth century. Though Oliver
Cromwell
(a), shown here in a 1656 portrait by Samuel Cooper, appeared
to offer England a better mode of government, he assumed
broad
powers for himself and disregarded cherished English liberties
established under Magna Carta in 1215. As a result, the English
people welcomed Charles II (b) back to the throne in 1660. This
portrait by John Michael Wright was painted ca. 1660–1665,
soon
after the new king gained the throne.
Charles II was committed to expanding England’s overseas
possessions. His policies in the 1660s

through the 1680s established and supported the Restoration
colonies: the Carolinas, New Jersey,
New York, and Pennsylvania. All the Restoration colonies
started as proprietary colonies, that is, the
king gave each colony to a trusted individual, family, or group.
Changing Relationships with the Colonies
In 1642, no permanent British North American colony was more
than 35 years old. The crown and
various proprietors controlled most of the colonies, but settlers
from Barbados to Maine enjoyed a
great deal of independence. This was especially true in
Massachusetts Bay, where Puritan settlers
governed themselves according to the colony’s 1629 charter.
Trade in tobacco and naval stores tied
the colonies to England economically, as did religion and
political culture, but in general the English
left the colonies to their own devices.
The English civil war forced settlers in America to reconsider
their place within the empire. Older
colonies like Virginia and proprietary colonies like Maryland
sympathized with the crown. Newer
colonies like Massachusetts Bay, populated by religious
dissenters taking part in the Great Migration
of the 1630s, tended to favor Parliament. Yet during the war,
the colonies remained neutral, fearing
that support for either side could involve them in war. Even
Massachusetts Bay, which nurtured ties to
radical Protestants in Parliament, remained neutral.
Charles’s execution in 1649 altered that neutrality. Six colonies,
including Virginia and Barbados,
declared open allegiance to the dead monarch’s son, Charles II.
Parliament responded with an Act in

1650 that leveled an economic embargo on the rebelling
colonies, forcing them to accept
Parliament’s authority. Parliament argued in the Act that
America had been “planted at the Cost, and
settled” by the English nation and that it, as the embodiment of
that commonwealth, possessed
ultimate jurisdiction over the colonies.
The Navigation Acts
Creating wealth for the Empire remained a primary goal, and in
the second half of the seventeenth
century, especially during the Restoration, England attempted to
gain better control of trade with the
American colonies. The mercantilist policies by which it tried
to achieve this control are known as
the Navigation Acts.
The 1651 Navigation Ordinance, a product of Cromwell’s
England, required that only English ships
carry goods between England and the colonies, and that the
captain and three-fourths of the crew
had to be English. The Ordinance further specified “enumerated
articles” that could be transported
only to England or to English colonies, including the most
lucrative commodities like sugar and
tobacco as well as indigo, rice, molasses, and naval stores such
as turpentine. All were valuable
goods not produced in England or were in demand by the British
navy.
Charles II Returns

Over the next few years colonists’ unease about Parliament’s
actions reinforced their own sense of
English identity, one that was predicated on notions of rights
and liberties. When the colonists
declared allegiance to Charles II after the Parliamentarian state
collapsed in 1659 and England
became a monarchy the following year, however, the new king
dashed any hopes that he would
reverse Parliament’s consolidation efforts. The revolution that
had killed his father enabled Charles II
to begin the next phase of empire building in English America.
Figure 4. England found itself in crisis after the death of Oliver
Cromwell in 1658, leading in time to the reestablishment of the
monarchy. On his 30th birthday (May 29, 1660), Charles II
sailed from the Netherlands to his restoration after nine years in
exile.
He was received in London to great acclaim, as depicted in his
contemporary painting.
After ascending the throne, Charles II approved the 1660
Navigation Act, which restated the 1651 act
to ensure a monopoly on imports from the colonies.
Other Navigation Acts included the 1663 Staple Act and the
1673 Plantation Duties Act. The Staple
Act barred colonists from importing goods that had not been
made in England, creating a profitable
monopoly for English exporters and manufacturers. The
Plantation Duties Act taxed enumerated
articles exported from one colony to another, a measure aimed
principally at New Englanders, who
transported great quantities of molasses from the West Indies,

including smuggled molasses from
French-held islands, to make into rum.
In 1675, Charles II organized the Lords of Trade and Plantation,
commonly known as the Lords of
Trade, an administrative body intended to create stronger ties
between the colonial governments and
the crown. However, the 1696 Navigation Act created the Board
of Trade, replacing the Lords of
Trade. This act, meant to strengthen enforcement of customs
laws, also established vice-admiralty
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courts where the crown could prosecute customs violators
without a jury. Under this act, customs
officials were empowered with warrants known as “writs of
assistance” to board and search vessels
suspected of containing smuggled goods.
Despite the Navigation Acts, however, Great Britain exercised
lax control over the English colonies
during most of the eighteenth century because of the policies of
Prime Minister Robert Walpole.
During his long term (1721–1742), Walpole governed according
to his belief that commerce flourished
best when it was not encumbered with restrictions. Historians
have described this lack of strict
enforcement of the Navigation Acts as salutary neglect. In
addition, nothing prevented colonists from
building their own fleet of ships to engage in trade. New
England especially benefited from both

salutary neglect and a vibrant maritime culture made possible
by the scores of trading vessels built in
the northern colonies. The case of the 1733 Molasses Act
illustrates the weaknesses of British
mercantilist policy. The 1733 act placed a sixpence-per-gallon
duty on raw sugar, rum, and molasses
from Britain’s competitors, the French and the Dutch, in order
to give an advantage to British West
Indian producers. Because the British did not enforce the 1733
law, however, New England mariners
routinely smuggled these items from the French and Dutch West
Indies more cheaply than they could
buy them on English islands.
The Glorious Revolution and the English Empire
GUIDED READING QUESTION:
• 3. Explain the causes and outcomes of the Glorious Revolution
Charles II ruled effectively, but his successor, James II, made
several crucial mistakes. Eventually,
Parliament again overthrew the authority of their king, this time
turning to the Dutch Prince William of
Holland and his English bride, Mary, the daughter of James II.
This relatively peaceful coup was
called the Glorious Revolution. English colonists in the era of
the Glorious Revolution experienced
religious and political conflict that reflected transformations in
Europe. It was a time of great anxiety
for the colonists.
King James II
In the 1670s, King Charles II tightened English control over
America, creating the royal colony of New

Hampshire in 1678, and transforming Bermuda into a crown
colony in 1684. The King’s death in 1685
and subsequent rebellions in England and Scotland against the
new Catholic monarch, James II,
threw Bermuda into crisis. Irregular reports made it unclear who
was winning or who would protect
their island. Bermudians were not alone in their wish for greater
protection. On the mainland, Native
Americans led by Metacomet—or as the English called him,
King Philip—devastated New England
between 1675 and 1678 while conflicts over land between
Indigenous people and colonists helped
trigger Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676. Equally
troubling, New France was expanding its
colonial territory, and many colonists were wary of Catholics
gaining political power in Maryland. In
the colonists’ view, Catholics and Native Americans sought to
destroy English America.
Figure 1. James II (shown here in a painting ca. 1690) worked
to centralize the English government. The Catholic king of
France,
Louis XIV, provided a template for James’s policies.
James worked to model his rule on the reign of the French
Catholic King Louis XIV, his cousin. This
meant centralizing English political strength around the throne,
giving the monarchy absolute power.
Also like Louis XIV, James II practiced a strict and intolerant
form of Roman Catholicism after he
converted from Protestantism in the late 1660s. He had a
Catholic wife, and when they had a son, the

potential for a Catholic heir to the English throne became a
threat to English Protestants.
James also worked to modernize the English army and navy.
The fact that the king kept a standing
army in times of peace greatly alarmed the English, who
believed that such a force would be used to
crush their liberty. As James’s strength grew, his opponents
feared their king would turn England into
a Catholic monarchy with absolute power over its people.
The Dominion of New England
In 1686, James II applied his concept of a centralized state to
the colonies by creating an enormous
colony called the Dominion of New England. The Dominion
included all the New England colonies
(Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Connecticut, New
Haven, and Rhode Island), and in
1688 was enlarged by the addition of New York and New
Jersey. James placed in charge Sir
Edmund Andros, a former colonial governor of New York.
Loyal to James II and his family, Andros
had little sympathy for New Englanders. His regime caused
great uneasiness among New England
Puritans when it called into question the many land titles that
did not acknowledge the king and then
imposed fees for their reconfirmation. Andros also committed
himself to enforcing the monopolistic
Navigation Acts, a move that threatened to disrupt the region’s
trade, which was based largely on
smuggling.

The Glorious Revolution
Figure 2. This broadside, signed by several citizens, demands
the surrender of Sir Edmund (spelled here “Edmond”) Andros,
James II’s hand-picked leader of the Dominion of New England.
In England, opponents of James II’s efforts to create a
centralized Catholic state were known as
Whigs. The Whigs worked to depose James, and in late 1688
they succeeded, an event they
celebrated as the Glorious Revolution.
When the king fled to France in December, Parliament invited
William of Orange, the Protestant
Dutch Stadtholder and James’s son-in-law, with his wife Mary,
to take the throne. The colonists in
America declared allegiance to the new monarchs. They did so
in part to maintain order in their
respective colonies. As one Virginia official explained, if there
was “no King in England, there was no
Government here.” A declaration of allegiance was therefore a
means of ensuring stability.
More importantly, colonists declared allegiance for William and
Mary because they believed their
ascension marked the rejection of absolutism and confirmed the
centrality of Protestantism in English
life. Settlers joined in the revolution by overthrowing the
Dominion government, restoring the
provinces to their previous status, and forcing out the Catholic-

dominated Maryland government.
In 1689, Bostonians overthrew the government of the Dominion
of New England and jailed Sir
Edmund Andros as well as other leaders of the regime. The
removal of Andros from power illustrates
New England’s animosity toward the English overlord who
during his tenure had established Church
of England worship in Puritan Boston and vigorously enforced
the Navigation Acts, to the chagrin of
those in port towns. In New York, the same year that Andros
fell from power, Jacob Leisler led a
group of Protestant New Yorkers against the Dominion
government. Acting on his own authority,
Leisler assumed the role of King William’s governor and
organized intercolonial military action
independent of British authority. Leisler’s actions usurped the
crown’s prerogative and, as a result, he
was tried for treason and executed. In 1691, England restored
control over the Province of New York.
For English colonists, it was indeed a “glorious” revolution as it
united them in a Protestant empire
that stood counter to Catholic tyranny, absolutism, and growing
French power on the continent.
Protecting Liberty
The Glorious Revolution led to the establishment of an English
nation that limited the power of the
king and provided protections for English subjects. In October
1689, the same year that William and
Mary took the throne, the 1689 Bill of Rights established a
constitutional monarchy. It demanded

Parliament’s independence from the monarchy and protected a
certain number of Parliament’s rights,
such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to regular
elections, and the right to petition the king.
The 1689 Bill of Rights also guaranteed certain rights to all
English subjects, including trial by jury and
habeas corpus (the requirement that authorities bring an
imprisoned person before a court to
demonstrate the cause of the imprisonment).
John Locke (1632–1704), a doctor and educator who had lived
in exile in Holland during the reign of
James II and returned to England after the Glorious Revolution,
published his Two Treatises of
Government in 1690. In it, he argued that government was a
form of contract between the leaders
and the people, and that representative government existed to
protect “life, liberty and property.”
Locke rejected the divine right of kings and instead advocated
for the central role of Parliament with a
limited monarchy. Locke’s political philosophy had an
enormous impact on future generations of
colonists and established the paramount importance of
representation in government.
William and Mary ruled jointly until her death in 1694. William
remained as the sole monarch until his
own death in 1702. William was followed on the throne by
Mary’s younger sister Anne, the last Stuart
ruler, under whom the Act of Union was created, unifying the
Parliaments of Scotland and England.
From this point in time on, England is referred to as Great
Britain. Because Anne’s heir had
predeceased her, upon her death the English Crown passed to
the nearest Protestant relatives of the
Stuarts, the Electors of Hanover. George I was the first

Hanoverian to take the throne of England. His
grandson George III was the king at the time of the American
Revolution.
The Toleration Act
The Glorious Revolution also led to the English Toleration Act
of 1689, a law passed by Parliament
that allowed for greater religious diversity in the Empire. This
act granted broader religious freedom
to nonconformists such as Trinitarian Protestants (those who
believed in the Holy Trinity of God: the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), Baptists (those who advocated
adult baptism), and Congregationalists
(those who followed the Puritans’ lead in creating independent
churches). While the Church of
England remained the official state religious establishment, the
Toleration Act gave much greater
religious freedom to nonconformists. However, these
allowances did not extend to Catholics, who
were routinely excluded from political power. The 1689
Toleration Act extended to the British
colonies, where several colonies—Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Delaware, and New Jersey—refused
to allow the creation of an established colonial church, a major
step toward greater religious diversity.
The Great Awakening
• 4. Explain the significance of the Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening

Figure 1. This image shows the frontispiece of “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God, A Sermon Preached at Enfield,” July 8,
1741 by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was an evangelical
preacher who led a Protestant revival in New England. This was
his
most famous sermon, the text of which was reprinted often and
distributed widely.
During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced
an outburst of Protestant revivalism
known as the First Great Awakening. (A Second Great
Awakening would take place in the 1800s.)
During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the
ranks of several Protestant
denominations: Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the
Church of England), and
Presbyterians. They rejected what appeared to be sterile, formal
modes of worship in favor of a
vigorous emotional religiosity. Whereas Martin Luther and John
Calvin had preached a doctrine of
predestination and close reading of scripture, new evangelical
ministers spread a message of
personal and experiential faith that rose above mere book
learning. Individuals could bring about their
own salvation by accepting Christ, an especially welcome
message for those who had felt excluded
by traditional, more institutionally sanctioned Protestantism:
women, the young, and people at the
lower end of the social spectrum.
The Great Awakening caused a split between those who
followed the evangelical message (the “New

Lights”) and those who rejected it (the “Old Lights”). The elite
ministers in British America were firmly
Old Lights, and they censured this disruptive new revivalism.
Indeed, the revivals did sometimes lead
to chaotic excesses. In one notorious incident in 1743, an
influential New Light minister named James
Davenport urged his listeners to burn books. The next day, he
told them to burn their clothes as a
sign of their casting off the sinful trappings of the world. He
then took off his own pants and threw
them into the fire, but a woman saved them and tossed them
back to Davenport, telling him he had
gone too far.
Another outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey,
led by a minister of the Dutch
Reformed Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen.
Frelinghuysen’s example inspired other
ministers, including Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant
helped to spark a Presbyterian revival in
the Middle Colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and New
Jersey), in part by founding a seminary to
train other evangelical clergyman. New Lights also founded
colleges in Rhode Island and New
Hampshire that would later become Brown University and
Dartmouth College.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still
another explosion of evangelical fervor.
Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God,” used powerful word imagery
to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding
damnation by personal conversion. One

passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them [sinners],
their damnation don’t slumber, the
pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot,
ready to receive them, the flames do
now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over
them, and the pit hath opened her
mouth under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the
Connecticut River Valley, and news of the
event spread rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his
famous sermon.
The foremost evangelical leader of the Great Awakening was an
Anglican minister named George
Whitefield. Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was
itinerant, traveling the countryside instead
of having his own church and congregation. Between 1739 and
1740, he electrified colonial listeners
with his brilliant oratory.
According to Whitefield, the only type of faith that pleased God
was heartfelt. The established
churches only encouraged apathy. “The Christian World is dead
asleep,” Whitefield explained,
“Nothing but a loud voice can awaken them out of it.” He would
be that voice. Whitefield was a former
actor with a dramatic style of preaching and a simple message.
Thundering against sin and for Jesus
Christ, Whitefield invited everyone to be born again. It worked.
Through the 1730’s he traveled from
New York to South Carolina converting ordinary men, women
and children. “I have seen upwards of a
thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence,”
wrote a socialite in Philadelphia, “broken
only by an occasional half suppressed sob.” A farmer recorded
the powerful impact this rhetoric could
have: “And my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound; by

God’s blessing my old foundation was
broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”
The number of people trying to hear
Whitefield’s message were so large that he preached in the
meadows at the edges of cities.
Contemporaries regularly testified to crowds in the thousands,
and in one case, over 20,000 in
Philadelphia. Whitefield and the other itinerant preachers had
achieved what Edwards could not–
making the revivals popular.
TWO OPPOSING VIEWS OF GEORGE WHITEFIELD
Not everyone embraced George Whitefield and other New
Lights. Many established Old Lights decried the way
the new evangelical religions appealed to people’s passions ,
rather than to traditional religious values. The two
illustrations below present two very different visions of George
Whitefield.
Figure 2. In the 1774 portrait of George Whitefield by engraver
Elisha Gallaudet (a), Whitefield appears with a gentle
expression on his
face. Although his hands are raised in exultation or entreaty, he
does not look particularly roused or rousing. In the 1763 British
political
cartoon to the right, “Dr. Squintum’s Exaltation or the
Reformation” (b), Whitefield’s hands are raised in a similar
position, but there the
similarities end.

Compare the two images above. On the left is an illustration for
Whitefield’s memoirs, while on the right is a
cartoon satirizing the circus-like atmosphere that his preaching
seemed to attract (Dr. Squintum was a
nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed). How do these
two artists portray the same man? What
emotions are the illustration for his memoirs intended to evoke?
What details can you find in the cartoon that
indicate the artist’s distaste for the preacher?
The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant
denominations, including Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Baptists (who emphasized adult baptism of
converted Christians rather than infant
baptism). These new churches gained converts and competed
with older Protestant groups like
Anglicans (members of the Church of England),
Congregationalists (the heirs of Puritanism in
America), and Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant
groups, such as the New England
Congregationalists, declined because of the Great Awakening.
Nonetheless, the Great Awakening
touched the lives of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and
provided a democratizing, shared
experience in the eighteenth-century British Empire.
By the 1760s, the religious revivals had petered out; however,
they left a profound impact on
America. Leaders like Edwards and Whitefield encouraged
individuals to question the world around
them. This idea reformed religion in America and created a
language of individualism that promised to
change everything else. If you challenged the church, what
other authority figures might you
question? The Great Awakening provided a language of

individualism, reinforced in print culture,
which reappeared in the call for independence. While pre-
revolutionary America had profoundly
oligarchical qualities, the groundwork was laid for a more
republican society. However, society did not
transform easily overnight. It would take intense, often
physical, conflict to change colonial life.
The Enlightenment
• 5. Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the
Enlightenment in British
North America
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was an intellectual
and cultural movement in the
eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and
science over blind faith. Using the
power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke,
Isaac Newton, and Voltaire questioned
accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness,
investigation, and religious tolerance
throughout Europe and the Americas. Many consider the
Enlightenment a major turning point in
Western civilization, an age of light replacing an age of
darkness.
Figure 1. In this 1748 portrait by Robert Feke, a forty-year-old
Franklin wears a stylish British wig, as befitted a proud and

loyal
member of the British Empire.
Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including
rationalism, empiricism, progressivism,
and cosmopolitanism. Rationalism is the idea that humans are
capable of using their faculty of reason
to gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the
prevailing idea that people needed to rely on
scripture or church authorities for knowledge. Empiricism
promotes the idea that knowledge comes
from experience and observation of the world. Progressivism is
the belief that through their powers of
reason and observation, humans could make unlimited, linear
progress over time; this belief was
especially important as a response to the carnage and upheaval
of the English Civil Wars in the
seventeenth century. Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected
Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves
as citizens of the world and actively engaged in it, as opposed
to being provincial and close-minded.
In all, Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason,
not prejudice or superstition.
The Freemasons were a fraternal society that advocated
Enlightenment principles of inquiry and
tolerance. Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in
the early eighteenth century, and
Masonic lodges (local units) soon spread throughout Europe and
the British colonies. One prominent
Freemason, Benjamin Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the
Enlightenment in British America.
Born in Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved
to read, although he found little

beyond religious publications in his father’s house. In 1718 he
was apprenticed to his brother to work
in a print shop, where he learned how to be a good w riter by
copying the style he found in
the Spectator, which his brother printed. At the age of
seventeen, the independent-minded Franklin
ran away, eventually ending up in Quaker Philadelphia. There
he began publishing the Pennsylvania
Gazette in the late 1720s, and in 1732 he started his annual
publication, Poor Richard: An Almanack,
in which he gave readers practical advice, such as “Early to bed,
early to rise, makes a man healthy,
wealthy, and wise.”
Franklin subscribed to deism, an Enlightenment-era belief in a
God who created, but had no
continuing involvement in, the world and the events within it.
Deists also advanced the belief that
personal morality—an individual’s moral compass, leading to
good works and actions—is more
important than strict church doctrines. Franklin’s deism guided
his many philanthropic projects. In
1731, he established a reading library that became the Library
Company of Philadelphia. In 1743, he
founded the American Philosophical Society to encourage the
spirit of inquiry. In 1749, he provided
the foundation for the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751,
he helped found Pennsylvania
Hospital.
His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well -
respected. When he retired in 1748, he
devoted himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most
famous work on electricity exemplified

Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning
strikes tended to hit metal objects and
reasoned that he could therefore direct lightning through the
placement of metal objects during an
electrical storm. He used this knowledge to advocate the use of
lightning rods: metal poles connected
to wires directing lightning’s electrical charge into the ground
and saving wooden homes in cities like
Philadelphia from catastrophic fires. He published his findings
in 1751, in Experiments and
Observations on Electricity.
Franklin also wrote a “rags to riches” tale, his Memoir, in the
1770s and 1780s. This story laid the
foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.
As you learned, the years between 1640 and 1660 were ones of
chaos in England. In this period the
king, Charles I, was beheaded, and England converted into a
republic under the leadership of the
Puritan Oliver Cromwell. No new colonies were founded during
this time, though immigrants
continued to move to already-established colonies.
When the son of Charles I, Charles II, was “restored” to the
throne, he brought with him an interest in
colonization as well as an elaborate court life and fiscal
excesses. Between his succession to the
throne in 1660 and his death in 1685, Charles rewarded those
who had been loyal to him and to his
father by bestowing upon them grants of land in the Americas.
During his reign, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Carolina were founded as
proprietary colonies. Most of the North
American colonies, including Virginia, Georgia, North and
South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine,

Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware were
proprietary for at least part of their existence.
Proprietary colonies were not unlike the fiefdoms of the Middle
Ages in that the proprietors were the
ultimate sources of authority in their respective colonies,
controlling all actions and institutions of
government. In the early eighteenth century, Georgia, the last
colony to be established, was under
the control of a Board of Trustees; the trustees envisioned the
colony both as a buffer between
Spanish Florida and the Carolinas and a refuge for English
debtors. By the early eighteenth century,
many of the colonies, including those granted to the proprietors,
had become Royal Colonies, under
the direct control of the English Crown.
THE 13 ORIGINAL COLONIES
The table below from ThoughtCo. shows the year each of the
colonies was founded and by whom.
Table 1. The 13 Original Colonies
Colony Name Year Founded Founded By
Virginia 1607 London Company
Massachusetts
1620 – Plymouth Colony

1630 – Massachusetts Bay
Colony
Puritans
New Hampshire 1623 John Mason
Maryland 1634 Lord Baltimore
Connecticut c. 1635 Thomas Hooker
Rhode Island 1636 Roger Williams
Delaware 1638 Peter Minuit and New Sweden Company
North Carolina 1653 Virginians
South Carolina 1663 Eight Nobles with a Royal Charter from
Charles II
New Jersey 1664 Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret
New York 1664 Duke of York
Pennsylvania 1682 William Penn
Georgia 1732 James Edward Oglethorpe
Colonial Life and Conflict
The Consumer Revolution

• 6. Describe the consumer revolution and its effect on the life
of the colonial gentry
and other settlers
The Consumer Revolution
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https://www.thoughtco.com/new-hampshire-colony-103873
https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-maryland-colony-
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https://www.thoughtco.com/connecticut-colony-103870
https://www.thoughtco.com/rhode-island-colony-103880
https://www.thoughtco.com/key-facts-about-the-delaware-
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https://www.thoughtco.com/north-carolina-colony-103877
https://www.thoughtco.com/south-carolina-colony-103881
https://www.thoughtco.com/new-jersey-colony-103874
https://www.thoughtco.com/new-york-colony-103878
https://www.thoughtco.com/key-facts-about-the-pennsylvania-
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https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-the-georgia-colony-
103872
Transatlantic trade greatly enriched Britain, but it also created
high standards of living for many North
American colonists. This two-way relationship reinforced the
colonial feeling of commonality with
British culture. It was not until trade relations, disturbed by
political changes and the demands of
warfare, became strained in the 1760s that colonists began to
question these ties.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, improvements

in manufacturing, transportation, and
the availability of credit increased the opportunity for colonists
to purchase consumer goods. Instead
of making their own tools, clothes, and utensils, colonists
increasingly purchased luxury items made
by specialized artisans and manufacturers. As the incomes of
colonists rose and the prices of these
commodities fell, these items shifted from luxuries to common
goods. The average person’s ability to
spend money on consumer goods became a sign of their
respectability. Historians have called this
process the “consumer revolution.”
Money and Exchange
Britain relied on the colonies as a source of raw materials, such
as lumber and tobacco. Americans
engaged with new forms of trade and financing that increased
their ability to buy British-made goods.
But the ways in which colonists paid for these goods varied
sharply from those in Britain. When
settlers first arrived in North America, they typically carried
very little hard or metallic British money
with them. Discovering no precious metals (and lacking the
Crown’s authority to mint coins), colonists
relied on barter and nontraditional forms of exchange, including
everything from nails to the wampum
(typically strings of beads made from sea shells) used by Native
American groups in the Northeast.
To deal with the lack of currency, many colonies resorted to
“commodity money,” which varied from
place to place. In Virginia, for example, the colonial legislature
stipulated a rate of exchange for
tobacco, standardizing it as a form of money in the colony.
Commodities could be cumbersome and
difficult to transport, so a system of notes developed. These

notes allowed individuals to deposit a
certain amount of tobacco in a warehouse and receive a note
bearing the value of the deposit that
could be traded as money. In 1690, colonial Massachusetts
became the first place in the Western
world to issue paper bills to be used as money. These notes,
called bills of credit, were issued for
finite periods of time on the colony’s credit and varied in
denomination.
While these notes provided colonists with a much-needed
medium for exchange, the system was not
without its problems. Currency that worked in Virginia might be
worthless in Pennsylvania. Colonists
and officials in Britain debated whether it was right or desirable
to use mere paper, as opposed to
gold or silver, as a medium of exchange. Paper money tended to
lose value quicker than coins and
was often counterfeited. These problems, as well as British
merchants’ reluctance to accept
depreciated paper notes, caused the Board of Trade to restrict
the uses of paper money in the
Currency Acts of 1751 and 1763. Paper money was not the only
medium of exchange, however.
Colonists also used metal coins. Barter and the extension of
credit—which could take the form of bills
of exchange, akin to modern-day personal checks—remained
important forces throughout the
colonial period. Still, trade between colonies was greatly
hampered by the lack of standardized
money.
Businesses on both sides of the Atlantic advertised both their
goods and various policies for
extending credit. The consistent availability of credit allowed
families of modest means to buy

consumer items previously available only to elites. Cheap
consumption allowed middle-class
Americans to match many of the trends in clothing, food, and
household décor that traditionally
marked the wealthiest, aristocratic classes. Provincial
Americans, often seen by their London peers
as less cultivated or “backwater,” could present themselves as
lords and ladies of their own
communities by purchasing and displaying British-made goods.
Visiting the home of a successful businessman in Boston, John
Adams described “the Furniture,
which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling. A seat it is for a
noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey
Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Table, the rich Beds
with crimson Damask Curtains and
Counterpins, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the Spacious
Garden, are the most magnificent of any
thing I have seen.” But many Americans worried about the
consequences of rising consumerism. A
writer for the Boston Evening Post remarked on this new
practice of purchasing status: “For ’tis well
known how Credit is a mighty inducement with many People to
purchase this and the other Thing
which they may well enough do without.” Americans became
more likely to find themselves in debt,
whether to their local shopkeeper or a prominent London
merchant, creating new feelings of
dependence.
The Atlantic Trade
Of course, the thirteen continental colonies were not the only
British colonies in the Western

Hemisphere. In fact, they were considerably less important to
the Crown than the sugar-producing
islands of the Caribbean, including Jamaica, Barbados, the
Leeward Islands, Grenada, St. Vincent,
and Dominica. These British colonies were also inextricably
connected to the continental colonies.
Caribbean plantations dedicated nearly all of their land to the
wildly profitable crop of sugarcane, so
North American colonies sold surplus food and raw materials to
these wealthy island colonies.
Lumber was in high demand, especially in Barbados, where
planters nearly deforested the island to
make room for sugar plantations. To compensate for a lack of
lumber, Barbadian colonists ordered
house frames from New England. These prefabricated frames
were sent via ships from which
planters transported them to their plantations. Caribbean
colonists also relied on the continental
colonies for livestock, purchasing cattle and horses. The most
lucrative exchange was the slave
trade.
Connections between the Caribbean and North America
benefited both sides. Those living on the
continent relied on the Caribbean colonists to satisfy their
craving for sugar and other goods like
mahogany. British colonists in the Caribbean began cultivating
sugar in the 1640s, and sugar took the
Atlantic World by storm. In fact, by 1680, sugar exports from
the tiny island of Barbados valued more
than the total exports of all the continental colonies. Jamaica,
acquired by the Crown in 1655,
surpassed Barbados in sugar production toward the end of the
seventeenth century. North American
colonists, like Britons around the world, craved sugar to
sweeten their tea and food. Colonial elites

also sought to decorate their parlors and dining rooms with the
silky, polished surfaces of rare
mahogany as opposed to local wood. While the bulk of this in-
demand material went to Britain and
Europe, New England merchants imported the wood from the
Caribbean, where it was then
transformed into exquisite furniture for those who could afford
it.
These systems of trade all existed with the purpose of enriching
Great Britain. To ensure that profits
ended up in Britain, Parliament issued taxes on trade under the
Navigation Acts. These taxes
intertwined consumption with politics. Prior to 1763, Britain
found that enforcing the regulatory laws
they passed was difficult and often cost them more than the duty
revenue they would bring in. As a
result, colonists found it relatively easy to violate the law and
trade with foreign nations, pirates, or
smugglers. Customs officials were easily bribed and it was not
uncommon to see Dutch, French, or
West Indian ships laden with prohibited goods in American
ports. When smugglers were caught, their
American peers often acquitted them. British officials estimated
that nearly £700,000 worth of illicit
goods was brought into the American colonies annually. Pirates
also helped to perpetuate the illegal
trading activities by providing a buffer between merchants and
foreign ships.
Growing Cities
The consumer revolution fueled the growth of colonial cities.
Cities in colonial America were

crossroads for the movement of people and goods. One in
twenty colonists lived in cities by
1775. Some cities grew organically over time, while others were
planned from the start. New York’s
and Boston’s seventeenth-century street plans reflected the
haphazard arrangement of medieval
cities in Europe. In other cities like Philadelphia and
Charleston, civic leaders laid out urban plans
according to calculated systems of regular blocks and squares.
Planners in Annapolis and
Williamsburg also imposed regularity and order over their city
streets through the placement of
government, civic, and educational buildings.
By 1775, Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and
Charleston were the five largest cities in
British North America. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and
Charleston had populations of
approximately 40,000, 25,000, 16,000, and 12,000 people,
respectively. Urban society was highly
stratified. At the base of the social ladder were the laboring
classes, which included both enslaved
and free people ranging from apprentices to master craftsmen.
Next came the middling sort:
shopkeepers, artisans, and skilled mariners. Above them stood
the merchant elites, who tended to be
actively involved in the city’s social and political affairs, as
well as in the buying, selling, and trading of
goods. Enslaved men and women had a visible presence in both
northern and southern cities.
The bulk of the enslaved population lived in rural areas and
performed agricultural labor. In port cities,
enslaved laborers often worked as domestic servants and in
skilled trades: distilleries, shipyards,
lumberyards, and ropewalks. Between 1725 and 1775, slavery

became increasingly significant in the
northern colonies as urban residents sought greater participation
in the maritime economy.
Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New
England. New York traced its connections to
slavery and the slave trade back to the Dutch settlers of New
Netherland in the seventeenth century.
Philadelphia also became an active site of the Atlantic slave
trade, and enslaved people accounted
for nearly 8 percent of the city’s population in 1770. In
southern cities, including Charleston, urban
slavery played an important role in the market economy.
Enslaved people, both rural and urban,
made up the majority of the laboring population on the eve of
the American Revolution.
Colonial Gentry
British Americans’ reliance on indentured servitude and slavery
to meet the demand for colonial labor
helped give rise to a wealthy colonial class—the gentry—in the
Chesapeake tobacco colonies and
elsewhere. To be “genteel,” that is, a member of the gentry,
meant to be refined, free of all rudeness.
It also frequently meant that one’s family had its roots in a
landed estate. The British American gentry
modeled themselves on the English aristocracy, who embodied
the ideal of refinement and gentility.
They built elaborate mansions to advertise their status and
power. William Byrd II of Westover,
Virginia, exemplifies the colonial gentry; a wealthy planter and
slaveholder, he is known for founding
Richmond and for his diaries documenting the life of a
gentleman planter.
WILLIAM BYRD’S DIARY

Figure 1. This painting by Hans Hysing, ca. 1724, depicts
William Byrd II. Byrd was a wealthy gentleman planter in
Virginia and a member
of the colonial gentry.
The diary of William Byrd, a Virginia planter, provides a
unique way to better understand colonial life on a
plantation. What does it show about daily life for a gentleman
planter? What does it show about slavery?
August 27, 1709
I rose at 5 o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some
Greek in Josephus. I said my prayers and
ate milk for breakfast. I danced my dance. I had like to have
whipped my maid Anaka for her laziness but I
forgave her. I read a little geometry. I denied my man G-r-l to
go to a horse race because there was nothing
but swearing and drinking there. I ate roast mutton for dinner.
In the afternoon I played at piquet with my
own wife and made her out of humor by cheating her. I read
some Greek in Homer. Then I walked about
the plantation. I lent John H-ch £7 [7 English pounds] in his
distress. I said my prayers and had good health,
good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be to God Almighty.
September 6, 1709
About one o’clock this morning my wife was happily delivered
of a son, thanks be to God Almighty. I was
awake in a blink and rose and my cousin Harrison met me on

the stairs and told me it was a boy. We drank
some French wine and went to bed again and rose at 7 o’clock. I
read a chapter in Hebrew and then drank
chocolate with the women for breakfast. I returned God humble
thanks for so great a blessing and
recommended my young son to His divine protection. . . .
September 15, 1710
I rose at 5 o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some
Greek in Thucydides. I said my prayers and
ate milk and pears for breakfast. About 7 o’clock the negro boy
[or Betty] that ran away was brought home.
My wife against my will caused little Jenny to be burned with a
hot iron, for which I quarreled with her. . . .
Figure 2. This photograph shows the view down the stairway
from the third floor of Westover Plantation, home of William
Byrd II. What
does this image suggest about the lifestyle of the inhabitants of
this house?
Printed Materials
The consumer revolution also made printed materials more
widely available. Before 1680, for
instance, no newspapers had been printed in colonial America.
In the eighteenth century, however, a
flood of journals, books, pamphlets, and other publications

became available to readers on both sides
of the Atlantic. This shared trove of printed matter linked
members of the Empire by creating a
community of shared tastes and ideas.
Cato’s Letters, by Englishmen John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon, was one popular series of 144
pamphlets. These Whig circulars were published between 1720
and 1723 and emphasized the glory
of England, especially its commitment to liberty. However, the
pamphlets cautioned readers to be
ever vigilant and on the lookout for attacks upon that liberty.
Indeed, Cato’s Letters suggested that
there were constant efforts to undermine and destroy it.
Another very popular publication was the English gentlemen’s
magazine the Spectator, published
between 1711 and 1714. In each issue, “Mr. Spectator” observed
and commented on the world
around him. What made the Spectator so wildly popular was its
style; the essays were meant to
persuade, and to cultivate among readers a refined set of
behaviors, rejecting deceit and intolerance
and focusing instead on the polishing of genteel taste and
manners.
Novels, a new type of literature, made their first appearance in
the eighteenth century and proved
very popular in the British Atlantic. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe and Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded found large and
receptive audiences. Reading also
allowed female readers the opportunity to interpret what they
read without depending on a male
authority to tell them what to think. Few women beyond the
colonial gentry, however, had access to

novels.
Pursuing Political, Religious, and Individual Freedom
• 7. Describe political and social developments in the British
colonies
Consumption, trade, and slavery drew the colonies closer to
Great Britain, but politics and
government split them further apart. The democracies in Europe
more closely resembled oligarchies
rather than republics, with only elite members of society
eligible to serve in elected positions. Most
European states did not hold regular elections, with Britain and
the Dutch Republic being the two
major exceptions. However, even in these countries, only
approximately 1% of males could vote. In
the North American colonies, by contrast, White male suffrage
was nearly universal. In addition to
having greater popular involvement, colonial government also
had more power in a variety of areas.
Assemblies and legislatures regulated businesses, imposed new
taxes, cared for the poor in their
communities, built roads and bridges, and made most decisions
concerning education. Colonial
Americans sued often, which in turn led to more power for local
judges and more prestige in jury
service. Thus, lawyers became extremely important in American
society, and in turn, played a greater
role in American politics.
American society was less tightly controlled than European

society. This led to the rise of various
interest groups, each at odds with the other. These diverse
interest groups arose based on common
priorities. Some commonalities arose over class-based
distinctions, while others were due to ethnic or
religious ties. One of the major differences between present-day
politics and colonial political culture
was the lack of distinct, stable, political parties. The most
common disagreement in colonial politics
was between the elected assemblies and the royal governor.
Generally, the colonial legislatures were
divided into factions who either supported or opposed the
current governor’s political ideology.
Politics in the Colonies
As far as political structure, colonies fell under one of three
main categories: provincial, proprietary,
and charter. The provincial colonies included New Hampshire,
New York, Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia. The proprietary colonies included
Pennsylvania, Delaware, New
Jersey, and Maryland. The charter colonies included
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
The provincial colonies were the most tightly controlled by the
crown. The British king appointed all of
the provincial governors. These crown governors could veto any
decision made by the legislative
assemblies in the provincial colonies. The proprietary colonies
had a similar structure, with one
important difference: governors were appointed by a lord
proprietor, an individual who had purchased
or received the rights to the colony from the crown. This
generally led to proprietary colonies having
more freedoms and liberties than other colonies in colonial
America. The charter colonies had the

most complex system of government, formed by political
corporations or interest groups who drew up
a charter that clearly delineated powers between executive,
legislative, and judiciary branches of
government. As opposed to having governors appointed, the
charter colonies elected their own
governors from among the property-owning men in the colony.
Figure 1. A part of the city plan of Philadelphia by Nicholas
Scull
After the governor, colonial government was broken down into
two main divisions: the council and the
assembly. The council was essentially the governor’s cabinet,
often composed of prominent
individuals within the colony, such as the head of the militia, or
the attorney-general of the colony.
The governor appointed these men, often subject to approval
from Parliament. The assembly was
composed of elected, property-owning men whose official goal
was to ensure that colonial law
conformed to English law. The colonial assemblies approved
new taxes and the colonial budgets.
However, many of these assemblies saw it as their duty to check
the power of the governor and
ensure that he did not take too much power within colonial
government. Unlike Parliament, most of
the men who were elected to an assembly came from local
districts, with their constituency able to
hold their elected officials accountable to promises made.
An elected assembly was an offshoot of the idea of civic duty,
the notion that men had a responsibility

to support and uphold the government through voting, paying
taxes, and service in the militia.
Americans firmly accepted the idea of a social contract, the idea
that government was put in place by
the people and derived its legitimacy through their consent.
Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes
and John Locke pioneered this idea, and there is evidence to
suggest that these writers influenced
the colonists. While in practice elites controlled colonial
politics, in theory many colonists believed in
the notion of equality before the law and opposed special
treatment for any members of colonial
society.
.
Women and Family Life
http://www.americanyawp.com/text/wp-content/uploads/Plan-
of-Philly.jpg
Whether or not African-Americans, Native Americans, and
women would also be included in this
notion of equality before the law was far less clear. In
particular, women’s role in the family became
more complicated. Many historians view this period as a
significant time of transition. Importantly,
Anglo-American families during the colonial period differed
from their European counterparts. Widely
available land and plentiful natural resources allowed for
greater fertility and thus encouraged more
people to marry earlier in life. Yet while young marriages and
large families were common throughout
the colonial period, family sizes started to shrink by the end of
the 1700s as wives asserted more

control over their own bodies.
New ideas governing romantic love helped to change the nature
of husband-wife relationships.
Deriving their views in part from the sentimental literary
movement, many Americans began to view
marriage as an emotionally fulfilling relationship rather than a
strictly economic partnership. Referring
to one another as “Beloved of my Soul” or “My More than
Friend,” newspaper editor John Fenno and
his wife Mary Curtis Fenno illustrate what some historians refer
to as the “companionate ideal.” While
away from his wife, John felt a “vacuum in my existence,” a
sentiment returned by Mary’s “Doting
Heart.” Indeed, after independence, wives began to not only
provide emotional sustenance to their
husbands, but to inculcate the principles of republican
citizenship as “republican wives.”
Marriage opened up new emotional realms for some but
remained oppressive for others. For the
millions of Americans bound in chattel slavery, marriage
remained an informal arrangement rather
than a codified legal relationship. For White women, the legal
practice of coverture meant that women
lost all of their political and economic rights to their husband.
Divorce rates rose throughout the
1790s, as did less formal cases of abandonment. Newspapers
published advertisements by deserted
men and women denouncing their partners publically. Known as
“elopement notices,” they cataloged
the various sorts of misbehavior of deviant spouses, such as
wives’ “indecent manner,” a way of
implying sexual impropriety. As violence and inequality
continued in many American marriages, wives

in return highlighted their husbands’ “drunken fits” and violent
rages. One woman noted how her
partner “presented his gun at my breast… and swore he would
kill me.”
Newspapers and Printing
That couples would turn to newspapers as a source of
expression illustrates the importance of what
historians call print culture. Print culture includes the wide
range of factors contributing to how books
and other printed objects are made, including the relationship
between the author and the publisher,
the technical constraints of the printer, and the tastes of readers.
In colonial America, regional
differences in daily life impacted the way colonists made and
used printed matter. However, all the
colonies dealt with threats of censorship and control from
imperial supervision. In particular, political
content stirred the most controversy.
From the establishment of Virginia in 1607, printing was
regarded either as unnecessary within such
harsh living conditions or it was actively discouraged. The
governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley,
summed up the attitude of the ruling class in 1671: “I thank God
there are no free schools nor
printing…for learning has brought disobedience, and
heresy…and printing has divulged them.”
Ironically, the circulation of hand-written tracts contributed to
Berkeley’s undoing. The popularity of
Nathaniel Bacon’s uprising was in part due to widely circulated
tracts questioning Berkeley’s
competence. Berkeley’s harsh repression of Bacon’s Rebellion
was equally well documented. It was

only after Berkeley’s death in 1677 that the idea of printing in
the Southern colonies was revived.
William Nuthead, an experienced English printer, set up shop in
1682, although the next governor of
the colony, Thomas Culpeper forbade Nuthead from completing
a single project. It wasn’t until
file:///C:/Users/Joe/Documents/American%20Yawp%20Material
/Final%20Yawp%20Chapters/4%20-
%20Colonial%20Society.docx%23_ftn1
William Parks set up his printing shop in Annapolis in 1726 that
the Chesapeake had a stable local
trade in printing and books.
Print culture was very different in New England. Puritans had
an established respect for print from the
very beginning. Unfortunately, New England’s authors were
content to publish in London, making the
foundations of Stephen Daye’s first print shop in 1639 very
shaky. Typically printers made their
money from printing sheets, not books to be bound. The case
was similar in Massachusetts, where
the first printed work was a Freeman’s Oath. The first book was
not issued until 1640, the Bay Psalm
Book, of which 11 known copies survive. His contemporaries

recognized the significance of Daye’s
printing, and he was awarded 140 acres of land. The next large
project, the first bible to be printed in
America, was undertaken by Samuel Green and Marmaduke
Johnson, published 1660. That same
year, the Eliot Bible, named for its translator John Eliot, was
printed in the Natick dialect of the local
Algonquin tribes.
Massachusetts remained the center of colonial printing for a
hundred years, until Philadelphia
overtook Boston in 1770. Philadelphia’s rise as the printing
capital of the colonies began with two
important features: first, the arrival of Benjamin Franklin in
1723, equal parts scholar and
businessman, and second, waves of German immigrants created
a demand for German-language
press. From the mid-1730s, Christopher Sauer, and later his son,
wholly met this demand with
German-language newspapers and religious texts. Nevertheless,
Franklin was a one-man culture of
print, revolutionizing the book trade in addition to creating
public learning initiatives such as the
Library Company and the Academy of Philadelphia. His
Autobiography offers one of the most detailed
glimpses of life in a print shop available. Given the flurry of
newspapers, pamphlets, and books for
sale in Franklin’s Philadelphia, it is little wonder that in 1775
Thomas Paine had his Common
Sense printed in hundreds of thousands of copies with the
Philadelphia printer Robert Bell.
Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin and David Hall, printers,
Pennsylvania Currency, 1764.

http://www.americanyawp.com/text/wp-content/uploads/PA-
Currency.jpg
Wars with Native Americans: Pequot and King Philip’s War
• 8. Describe major conflicts between New England colonists
and Native Americans,
including Pequot and King Philip’s War
Puritan Relationships with Native Peoples
Like their Spanish and French Catholic rivals, English Puritans
in America took steps to convert
Native peoples to their version of Christianity. John Eliot, the
leading Puritan missionary in New
England, urged Natives in Massachusetts to live in “praying
towns” established by English authorities
for converts who would ostensibly adopt the Puritan emphasis
on the centrality of the Bible. In
keeping with the Protestant focus on reading scripture, he
translated the Bible into the local
Algonquian language and published his work in 1663. Eliot
hoped that as a result of his efforts, some
of New England’s native inhabitants would become preachers.
Tensions had existed from the beginning between the Puritans
and the Native people who controlled
southern New England. Relationships deteriorated as the
Puritans continued to expand their
settlements aggressively and as European ways increasingly

disrupted native life. These strains led
to King Philip’s War (1675–1676), a massive regional conflict
that was nearly successful in pushing
the English out of New England.
The Pequot War
When the Puritans began to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, local
Algonquian peoples had viewed
them as potential allies in the conflicts already simmering
between rival native groups. In 1621, the
Wampanoag, led by Massasoit, negotiated a peace treaty with
the Pilgrims at Plymouth. In the 1630s,
the Puritans in Massachusetts and Plymouth allied themselves
with the Narragansett and Mohegan
people against the Pequot, who had recently expanded their
claims into southern New England.
In May 1637, an armed contingent of English Puritans from
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and
Connecticut colonies trekked into the New England wilderness.
Referring to themselves as the
“Sword of the Lord,” this military force intended to attack “that
insolent and barbarous Nation, called
the Pequots.” In the resulting violence, Puritans put the Mystic
community to the torch, beginning with
the north and south ends of the town. As Pequot men, women,
and children tried to escape the blaze,
other soldiers waited with swords and guns. One commander
estimated that of the “four hundred
souls in this Fort…not above five of them escaped out of our
hands,” although another counted near
“six or seven hundred” dead. In a span of less than two months,
the English Puritans boasted that the
Pequot “were drove out of their country, and slain by the sword,
to the number of fifteen hundred.”

The foundations of the war lay within the rivalry between the
Pequot, the Narragansett, and Mohegan,
who battled for control of the fur and wampum trades. This
rivalry eventually forced the English and
Dutch to choose sides. The war remained a conflict of native
interests and initiative, especially as the
Mohegan hedged their bets on the English and reaped the
rewards that came with displacing the
Pequot.
Victory over the Pequot not only provided security and stability
for the English colonies, but also
propelled the Mohegan to new heights of political and economic
influence as the primary power in
New England.
King Philip’s War
By the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritans had pushed their
way further into the interior of New
England, establishing outposts along the Connecticut River
Valley. There seemed no end to their
expansion. Wampanoag leader Metacom or Metacomet, also
known as King Philip among the
English, was determined to stop the encroachment. The
Wampanoag, along with the Nipmuck,
Pocumtuck, and Narragansett, took up the hatchet to drive the
English from the land. In the ensuing
conflict, called King Philip’s War, native forces succeeded in
destroying half of the frontier Puritan
towns; however, in the end, the English (aided by Mohegans and
Indigenous Christian converts)
prevailed and sold many captives into slavery in the West

Indies.
Figure 1. This map indicates the domains of New England’s
native inhabitants in 1670, a few years before King Philip’s
War.
In the winter of 1675, the body of John Sassamon, a Christian,
Harvard-educated Wampanoag, was
found under the ice of a nearby pond. A fellow Native Christian
convert informed English authorities
that three warriors under the local sachem, Metacom, known to
the English as King Philip, had killed
Sassamon, who had previously accused Metacom of planning an
insurrection against the English.
The three alleged killers appeared before the Plymouth court in
June 1675, were found guilty of
murder, and executed. Several weeks later, a group of
Wampanoags killed nine English colonists in
the town of Swansea.
Metacom—like most other New England sachems—had entered
into covenants of “submission” to
various colonies, viewing the arrangements as relationships of
protection and reciprocity rather than
subjugation. Indians and English lived, traded, worshiped, and
arbitrated disputes in close proximity
before 1675, but the execution of three of Metacom’s men at the
hands of Plymouth Colony
epitomized what many Indigenous people viewed as a growing
inequality of that relationship. The
Wampanoags who attacked Swansea may have sought to restore
balance, or to retaliate for the
recent executions. Neither they nor anyone else sought to engulf
all of New England in war, but that
is precisely what happened. Authorities in Plymouth sprung into

action, enlisting help from the
neighboring colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Metacom and his followers eluded colonial forces in the
summer of 1675, striking more Plymouth
towns as they moved northwest. Some groups joined his forces,
while others remained neutral or
supported the English. The war badly divided some tribal
communities. Metacom himself had little
control over events, as panic and violence spread throughout
New England in the autumn of 1675.
English mistrust of neutral tribes, sometimes accompanied by
demands they surrender their
weapons, pushed many into open war. By the end of 1675, most
of the Natives of western and
central Massachusetts had entered the war, laying waste to
nearby English towns like Deerfield,
Hadley, and Brookfield. Hapless colonial forces, spurning the
military assistance of Native allies such
as the Mohegans, proved unable to locate more mobile native
villages or intercept attacks.
The English compounded their problems by attacking the
powerful and neutral Narragansetts of
Rhode Island in December 1675. In an action called the Great
Swamp Fight, a thousand Englishmen
put the main Narragansett village to the torch, gunning down as
many as a thousand Narragansett
men, women, and children as they fled the maelstrom. The
surviving Narragansetts joined the Native
forces already in rebellion against the English. Betw een
February and April 1676, rebels devastated a
succession of English towns closer and closer to Boston.

MARY ROWLANDSON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE
Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman whom native tribes
captured and imprisoned for several weeks during
King Philip’s War. After her release, she wrote The Narrative of
the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson, which was published in 1682. The book was
an immediate sensation that was reissued in
multiple editions for over a century.
Figure 2. Puritan woman Mary Rowlandson wrote her captivity
narrative, the front cover of which is shown here (a), after her
imprisonment
during King Philip’s War. In her narrative, she tells of her
treatment by the Indians holding her as well as of her meetings
with the
Wampanoag leader Metacom (b), shown in a contemporary
portrait.
But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the town,
and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I
knew
not whither. It is not my tongue, or pen, can express the sorrows
of my heart, and bitterness of my spirit that I had at this
departure:
but God was with me in a wonderful manner, carrying me along,
and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite fail. One of the
Indians carried my poor wounded babe upon a horse; it went

moaning all along, “I shall die, I shall die.” I went on foot after
it, with
sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the
horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed, and I
fell down
with it. Then they set me upon a horse with my wounded child
in my lap, and there being no furniture upon the horse’s back,
as
we were going down a steep hill we both fell over the horse’s
head, at which they, like inhumane creatures, laughed, and
rejoiced
to see it, though I thought we should there have ended our days,
as overcome with so many difficulties. But the Lord renewed
my
strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of His
power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I
not
experienced it.
In the spring of 1676, the tide turned. The New England
colonies took the advice of men like
Benjamin Church, who urged the greater use of native allies to
find and fight the mobile rebels.
Unable to plant crops and forced to live off the land, the rebels’
will to fight waned as companies of
English and native allies pursued them. Growing numbers of
rebels fled the region, switched sides, or
surrendered in the spring and summer. The English sold many

of the latter group into slavery.
Colonial forces finally caught up with Metacom in August 1676,
and the sachem was slain by an
Indigenous Christian convert fighting with the English. After
his death, his wife and nine-year-old son
were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. Philip’s head was
mounted on a pike at the entrance
to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where it remained for more than
two decades.
The war permanently altered the political and demographic
landscape of New England. Between 800
and 1000 English and at least 3000 Indigenous people perished
in the 14-month conflict. Thousands
of other Natives fled the region or were sold into slavery. In
1670, Native Americans comprised
roughly 25 percent of New England’s population; a decade later,
they made up perhaps 10 percent.
The war’s brutality also encouraged a growing hatred of all
Natives among many New England
colonists; from then on, Puritan writers took great pains to
vilify the natives as bloodthirsty savages. A
new type of racial hatred became a defining feature of
Indigenous-English relationships in the
Northeast. Though the fighting ceased in 1676, the bitter legacy
of King Philip’s War lived on.
Native-English Relations in the 18th Century
The late seventeenth century was a time of great violence and
turmoil. Bacon’s Rebellion turned
White Virginians against one another, King Philip’s War
shattered Native resistance in New England,
and the Pueblo Revolt (the 1680 revolt when several thousand
Puebloans seized Santa Fe) struck a
major blow to Spanish power. It would take several more

decades before similar patterns erupted in
Carolina and Pennsylvania, but the constant advance of
European settlements provoked conflict in
these areas as well.
Yamasee War
In 1715, The Yamasees, Carolina’s closest allies and most
lucrative trading partners, turned against
the colony and very nearly destroyed it all. Writing from
Carolina to London, the settler George Rodd
believed they wanted nothing less than “the whole continent and
to kill us or chase us all out.”
Yamasees would eventually advance within miles of Charles
Town.
The Yamasee War’s first victims were traders. The governor
had dispatched two of the colony’s most
prominent men to visit and pacify a Yamasee council following
rumors of native unrest. Yamasees
quickly proved the fears well founded by killing the emissaries
and every English trader they could
corral.
Yamasees, like many other natives, had come to depend on
English courts as much as the flintlock
rifles and ammunition traders offered them for slaves and
animal skins. Feuds between English
agents in Native territory had crippled the court of trade and
shut down all diplomacy, provoking the
violent Yamasee reprisal. Most native villages in the southeast
sent at least a few warriors to join
what quickly became a pan-tribal cause against the colony.

Yet Charles Town ultimately survived the onslaught by
preserving one crucial alliance with the
Cherokees. By 1717, the conflict had largely dried up, and the
only remaining menace was roaming
Yamasee bands operating from Spanish Florida. Most native
villages returned to terms with Carolina
and resumed trading. The lucrative trade in Indigenous slaves,
however, which had consumed 50,000
souls in five decades, largely dwindled after the war. The
danger was too high for traders, and the
colonies discovered even greater profits by importing Africans
to work new rice plantations. Herein
lies the birth of the “Old South,” that hoard of plantations that
created untold wealth and misery.
Indigenous people retained the strongest militaries in the
region, but they never again threatened the
survival of English colonies.
Native and Colonist Relations in Pennsylvania
If there were a colony where peace with Indigenous people
might continue, it would be in
Pennsylvania, where William Penn created a religious
imperative for the peaceful treatment of
Indians. His successors, sons John, Thomas, and Richard,
continued the practice but increased
immigration, and booming land speculation increased the
demand for land. The Walking Purchase of
1737, a deal made between members of the Delaware tribe and
the proprietary government in an
effort to secure a large tract of land for the colony north of
Philadelphia in the Delaware and Lehigh
River valleys, became emblematic of both colonials’ desire for
cheap land and the changing
relationship between Pennsylvanians and their native neighbors.

Through treaty negotiation in 1737, native Delaware leaders
agreed to sell Pennsylvania all of the
land that a man could walk in a day and a half, a common
measurement utilized by Delawares in
evaluating distances. John and Thomas Penn, joined by the land
speculator James Logan, hired a
team of skilled runners to complete the “walk” on a prepared
trail. The runners traveled from
Wrightstown to present-day Jim Thorpe and proprietary
officials then drew the new boundary line
perpendicular to the runners’ route, extending northeast to the
Delaware River. The colonial
government thus measured out a tract much larger than the
Delawares had originally intended to sell,
roughly 1200 square miles. As a result, Delaware-proprietary
relations suffered. Many Delawares left
the lands in question and migrated westward to join Shawnees
and other Delawares already living in
the Ohio Valley. There, they established diplomatic and trade
relationships with the French. Memories
of the suspect purchase endured into the 1750s and became a
chief point of contention between the
Pennsylvanian government and Delawares during the upcoming
Seven Years War.
Bacon’s Rebellion and Other Conflicts
• 9. Explain the role of Bacon’s Rebellion in the rise of chattel
slavery in Virginia
The Rise of Slavery in the Chesapeake Bay Colonies
The transition from indentured servitude to slavery as the main
labor source for some English

colonies happened first in the West Indies. On the small island
of Barbados, colonized in the 1620s,
English planters first grew tobacco as their main export crop,
but in the 1640s, they converted to
sugarcane and began increasingly to rely on African slaves. In
1655, England wrestled control of
Jamaica from the Spanish and quickly turned it into a lucrative
sugar island, run on slave labor, for its
expanding empire. While slavery was slower to take hold in the
Chesapeake colonies, by the end of
the seventeenth century, both Virginia and Maryland had also
adopted chattel slavery—which legally
defined Africans as property and not people—as the dominant
form of labor to grow tobacco.
Chesapeake colonists also enslaved Native people.
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery—
which did not exist in England—had not
yet become an institution in colonial America. Many Africans
worked as servants and, like their White
counterparts, could acquire land of their own. Some Africans
who converted to Christianity became
free landowners with White servants. The change in the status
of Africans in the Chesapeake to that
of enslaved persons occurred in the last decades of the
seventeenth century.
Tensions in Chesapeake Bay
Native American communities in Virginia had already been
decimated by wars in 1622 and 1644. But
in the same year that New Englanders crushed Metacom’s
forces, a new clash arose in Virginia. This

conflict, knows as Bacon’s Rebellion, grew out of tensions
between Native Americans and English
settlers as well as tensions between wealthy English landowners
and the poor settlers who
continually pushed west into Native territory.
Susquehannock War
Bacon’s Rebellion began, appropriately enough, with an
argument over a pig. In the summer of 1675,
a group from the Doeg tribe visited Thomas Mathew on his
plantation in northern Virginia to collect a
debt that he owed them. When Mathew refused to pay, they took
some of his pigs to settle the debt.
This “theft” sparked a series of raids and counter-raids. The
Susquehannocks were caught in the
crossfire when the colonial militia mistook them for Doegs,
leaving fourteen dead. A similar pattern of
escalating violence then repeated: the Susquehannocks
retaliated by killing colonists in Virginia and
Maryland, and the English marshaled their forces and laid siege
to the Susquehannocks. The conflict
became uglier after the militia executed a delegation of
Susquehannock ambassadors under a flag of
truce. A few parties of warriors intent on revenge launched
raids along the frontier and killed dozens
of English colonists.
The sudden and unpredictable violence of the Susquehannock
War triggered a political crisis in
Virginia. Panicked colonists fled en masse from the vulnerable
frontiers, flooding into coastal
communities and begging the government for help. But the
cautious governor, Sir William Berkeley,
did not send an army after the Susquehannocks. He worried that
a full-scale war would inevitably

drag other Indigenous groups into the conflict, turning allies
into deadly enemies. Berkeley, therefore,
insisted on a defensive strategy centered around a string of new
fortifications to protect the frontier
and strict instructions not to antagonize friendly Native people.
It was a sound military policy but a
public relations disaster. Terrified colonists condemned
Berkeley. Building contracts for the forts went
to Berkeley’s wealthy friends, who conveniently decided that
their own plantations were the most
strategically vital. Colonists also condemned the governor and
his allies as a corrupt band of
oligarchs more interested in lining their pockets than protecting
their people.
Bacon’s Rebellion
By the spring of 1676, a small group of frontier colonists took
matters into their own hands. Naming
the charismatic young Nathaniel Bacon as their leader, these
self-styled “volunteers” proclaimed that
they took up arms in defense of their homes and families. They
took pains to assure Berkeley that
they intended no disloyalty, but Berkeley feared a coup and
branded them traitors. Berkeley finally
mobilized an army—not to pursue Susquehannocks, but to crush
the rebellion. His drastic response
catapulted a small band of anti-Native vigilantes into full-
fledged rebels whose survival necessitated
bringing down the local colonial government.
Bacon and the rebels stalked the Susquehannock as well as
friendly Native people like the

Pamunkeys and the Occaneechis. The rebels became convinced
that there was a massive Native
conspiracy to destroy the English and viewed themselves as
heroes to frightened Virginians.
Berkeley’s stubborn persistence in defending friendly Native
people and destroying the Native-fighting
rebels led Bacon to accuse the governor of conspiring with a
“powerful cabal” of elite planters and
with “the protected and darling Indians” to slaughter his English
enemies.
In the early summer of 1676, Bacon’s neighbors elected him
their burgess and sent him to
Jamestown to confront Berkeley. The governor promptly
arrested him and forced him into the
humiliating position of publicly begging forgiveness for his
treason. Bacon swallowed this indignity,
but turned the tables by gathering an army of followers and
surrounding the State House, demanding
that Berkeley name him the General of Virginia and bless his
universal war against the native people.
Instead, the 70-year old governor stepped onto the field in front
of the crowd of angry men, unafraid,
and called Bacon a traitor to his face. Then he tore open his
shirt and dared Bacon to shoot him in the
heart if he was so intent on overthrowing his government.
“Here!” he shouted before the crowd,
“Shoot me, before God, it is a fair mark. Shoot!” When Bacon
hesitated, Berkeley drew his sword and
challenged the young man to a duel, knowing that Bacon could
neither back down from a challenge
without looking like a coward nor kill him without making
himself into a villain. Instead, Bacon resorted
to bluster and blasphemy. Threatening to slaughter the entire
Assembly if necessary, he cursed, “God
damn my blood, I came for a commission, and a commission I

will have before I go.” Berkeley stood
defiant, but the cowed burgesses finally prevailed upon him to
grant Bacon’s request. Virginia had its
general, and Bacon had his war.
After this dramatic showdown in Jamestown, Bacon’s Rebellion
quickly spiraled out of control.
Berkeley slowly rebuilt his loyalist army, forcing Bacon to
divert his attention to the coasts and away
from the natives. But most rebels were more interested in
defending their homes and families than in
fighting other Englishmen, and deserted Bacon in droves at
every rumor of native activity. In many
places, the “rebellion” was less an organized military campaign
than a collection of local grievances
and personal rivalries. Both rebels and loyalists smelled the
opportunities for plunder, seizing their
rivals’ estates and confiscating their property.
For a small but vocal minority of rebels, however, the rebellion
became an ideological revolution:
Sarah Drummond, wife of rebel leader William Drummond,
advocated independence from England
and the formation of a Virginian Republic, declaring “I fear the
power of England no more than a
broken straw.” Others struggled for a different kind of
independence: White servants and Black
enslaved people fought side by side in both armies after
promises of freedom for military service.
Everyone accused everyone else of treason, rebels and loyalists
switched sides depending on which
side was winning, and the whole Chesapeake disintegrated into
a confused melee of secret plots and
grandiose crusades, sordid vendettas and desperate gambits,
with Natives and English alike
struggling for supremacy and survival. One Virginian summed

up the rebellion as “our time of
anarchy.”
The rebels steadily lost ground and ultimately suffered a
crushing defeat. Bacon died of typhus in the
autumn of 1676, and his successors surrendered to Berkeley i n
January 1677. Berkeley summarily
tried and executed the rebel leadership in a succession of
kangaroo courts-martial. Before long,
however, the royal fleet arrived, bearing over a thousand red-
coated troops and a royal commission
of investigation charged with restoring order to the colony. The
commissioners replaced the governor
and dispatched Berkeley to London, where he died in disgrace.
But the conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion was uncertain, and the
maintenance of order remained
precarious for years afterward. The garrison of royal troops
discouraged both incursions by hostile
Natives and insurrection by discontented colonists, allowing the
king to continue profiting from
tobacco revenues. The end of armed resistance did not mean a
resolution to the underlying tensions
destabilizing colonial society. Natives inside Virginia remained
an embattled minority and Natives
outside Virginia remained a terrifying threat. Elite planters
continued to grow rich by exploiting their
indentured servants and marginalizing small farmers.
The vast majority of Virginians continued to resent their
exploitation with a simmering fury and
meaningful reform was nowhere on the horizon. Bacon’s
Rebellion, in the words of one historian, was
“a rebellion with abundant causes but without a cause,” and its

legacy was little more than a return to
the status quo. However, the conflict between poor farmers and
wealthy planters may have
persuaded a few leaders to look for a less volatile labor force.
Indentured servants eventually became
free farmers, competing for land and power, while enslaved
Africans did not. For this reason, Bacon’s
Rebellion further motivated the turn to slave labor in the
Chesapeake.
Slave Labor in the Chesapeake
Bacon’s Rebellion helped to catalyze the creation of a system of
racial slavery in the Chesapeake
colonies. At the time of the rebellion, indentured servants made
up the majority of laborers in the
region. Wealthy Whites worried over the presence of this large
class of laborers and the relative
freedom they enjoyed, as well as the alliance that Black and
White servants had forged in the course
of the rebellion. Replacing indentured servitude with Black
slavery diminished these risks, alleviating
the reliance on White indentured servants, who were often
dissatisfied and troublesome, and creating
a caste of racially defined laborers whose movements were
strictly controlled. It also lessened the
possibility of further alliances between Black and White
workers. Racial slavery even served to heal
some of the divisions between wealthy and poor Whites, who
could now unite as members of a
“superior” racial group.
While colonial laws in the tobacco colonies had made slavery a
legal institution before Bacon’s
Rebellion, new laws passed in the wake of the rebellion
severely curtailed Black freedom and laid the

foundation for racial slavery. Virginia passed a law in 1680
prohibiting free Blacks and enslaved
people from bearing arms, banning Blacks from congregating in
large numbers, and establishing
harsh punishments for enslaved people who assaulted Christians
or attempted escape. Two years
later, another Virginia law stipulated that all Africans brought
to the colony would be enslaved for life.
Thus, the increasing reliance on enslaved people in the tobacco
colonies—and the draconian laws
instituted to control them—not only helped planters meet labor
demands, but also served to assuage
English fears of further uprisings and alleviate class tensions
between rich and poor Whites.
Slavery and Resistance in the Colonies
• 10. Explain the effects of the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the
1741 New York
Conspiracy Trials
By 1750, slavery was legal in every North American colony, but
local economic imperatives,
demographic trends, and cultural practices all contributed to
distinct colonial variants of slavery.
Slavery was more than a labor system; it also influenced every
aspect of colonial thought and culture.
The uneven relationship it engendered gave White colonists an
exaggerated sense of their own
status. English liberty gained greater meaning and coherence for
Whites when they contrasted their

status to that of the unfree class of Black enslaved persons in
British America. African slavery
provided Whites in the colonies with a shared racial bond and
identity.
Figure 1. The 1686 English guinea shows the logo of the Royal
African Company, an elephant and castle, beneath a bust of
King
James II. The coins were commonly called guineas because
most British gold came from Guinea in West Africa.
Virginia, the oldest of the English mainland colonies, imported
its first enslaved laborers in 1619.
Virginia planters built larger and larger estates and guaranteed
that these estates would remain intact
through the use of primogeniture (in which a family’s estate
would descend to the eldest male heir)
and the entail (a legal procedure that prevented the breakup and
sale of estates). This distribution of
property, which kept wealth and property consolidated,
guaranteed that the great planters would
dominate social and economic life in the Chesapeake. This
system also fostered an economy
dominated by tobacco. By 1750, there were approximately one
hundred thousand enslaved Africans
in Virginia, at least 40 percent of the colony’s total population.
Most of these enslaved people worked
on large estates under the gang system of labor, working from
dawn to dusk in groups with close
supervision by a White overseer or enslaved “driver” who could
use physical force to compel labor.
Virginians used the law to protect the interests of enslavers. In
1705 the House of Burgesses passed

its first comprehensive slave code. Earlier laws had already
guaranteed that the children of enslaved
women would be born enslaved, conversion to Christianity
would not lead to freedom, and enslavers
could not free their enslaved laborers unless they transported
them out of the colony. Enslavers could
not be convicted of murder for killing an enslaved person;
conversely, any Black Virginian who struck
a White colonist would be severely whipped. Virginia planters
used the law to maximize the
profitability of their enslaved laborers and closely regulate
every aspect of their daily lives.
In South Carolina and Georgia, slavery was also central to
colonial life, but specific local conditions
created a very different system. Georgia was founded by the
philanthropist James Oglethorpe, who
originally banned slavery from the colony. But by 1750, slavery
was legal throughout the region.
South Carolina had been a slave colony from its founding and,
by 1750, was the only mainland
colony with a majority enslaved African population. The
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,
coauthored by the philosopher John Locke in 1669, explicitly
legalized slavery from the very
beginning. Many early settlers in Carolina were enslavers from
British Caribbean sugar islands, and
they brought their brutal slave codes with them. Defiant
enslaved people could legally be beaten,
branded, mutilated, even castrated. In 1740 a new law stated
that killing a rebellious enslaved person
was not a crime and even the murder of an enslaved person was
treated as a minor misdemeanor.
South Carolina also banned the freeing of enslaved laborers
unless the freed person left the colony.

Despite this brutal regime, a number of factors combined to
give enslaved people in South Carolina
more independence in their daily lives. Rice, the staple crop
underpinning the early Carolina
economy, was widely cultivated in West Africa, and planters
commonly requested that merchants sell
them enslaved laborers skilled in the complex process of rice
cultivation. Enslaved people from
Senegambia were particularly prized. The expertise of these
enslaved people contributed to one of
the most lucrative economies in the colonies. The swampy
conditions of rice plantations, however,
fostered dangerous diseases. Malaria and other tropical diseases
spread and caused many enslavers
to live away from their plantations. These elites, who commonly
owned a number of plantations,
typically lived in Charleston town houses to avoid the diseases
of the rice fields. West Africans,
however, were far more likely to have a level of immunity to
malaria (due to a genetic trait that also
contributes to higher levels of sickle cell anemia), reinforcing
planters’ racial belief that Africans were
particularly suited to labor in tropical environments.
With plantation owners often far from home, Carolina enslaved
laborers had less direct oversight than
those in the Chesapeake. Furthermore, many Carolina rice
plantations used the task system to
organize enslaved laborers. Under this system, enslaved
laborers were given a number of specific
tasks to complete in a day. Once those tasks were complete,
enslaved people often had time to grow
their own crops on garden plots allotted by their enslavers.

Criterion 1A - 4 - MasteryCost Thoroughly evaluates at least tw

Criterion 1A - 4 - MasteryCost Thoroughly evaluates at least tw

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Criterion 1A - 4 - MasteryCost Thoroughly evaluates at least tw