CHAPTER 4Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire, to 176

CHAPTER 4
Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire, to 1763
Prof. Marcella Bencivenni
Hostos Community College
Copyright © 2020 W. W. Norton & Company
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Lecture Topics
Slavery and Empire
Slave Cultures and Slave Resistance
An Empire of Freedom
The Public Sphere
The Great Awakening
Imperial Rivalries
Battle for the Continent
The subtopics for this lecture are listed on the screen.
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Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative
The frontispiece of Olaudah Equiano’s account of his life, the
best-known narrative by an eighteenth-century slave. The
portrait of Equiano in European dress and holding a Bible
challenges stereotypes of blacks as “savages” incapable of
becoming civilized.

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Sometime in the mid-1750s, Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped by
slave traders and sold to a plantation owner in Virginia. He was
then purchased by a British sea captain and accompanied his
owner on numerous voyages on Atlantic trading vessels. While
still a slave, he enrolled in a school in England, where he
learned to read and write, enlisted in the Royal Navy, and
served during the Seven Years’ War. In 1763, however, Equiano
was sold once again, but three years later, he was able to
purchase his freedom. After vast travels, Equiano eventually
settled in London, and in 1789 he published The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
the African. In the book, he condemned the idea that Africans
were inferior to Europeans and therefore deserved to be slaves.
The book became the era’s most widely read account by a slave
of his own experiences.
Equiano’s rich variety of experience was no doubt unusual, but
his life illuminates broad patterns of eighteenth-century
American history, including colonial growth and the
development of the Atlantic world. Further, as European powers
jockeyed for advantage in North America, colonists were drawn
into an almost continuous series of wars with France and its
Indian allies, which reinforced their sense of identification
with, and dependence on, Great Britain. Equiano’s life also
underscores the greatest irony or contradiction in the history of
the eighteenth century—the simultaneous expansion of freedom
and slavery. This was the era when the idea of the “freeborn
Englishman” became powerfully entrenched in the outlook of
both colonists and Britons. More than any other principle,
liberty was seen as what made the British empire distinct. Yet
the eighteenth century was also the height of the Atlantic slave
trade, a commerce increasingly dominated by British merchants
and ships. Although concentrated in the Chesapeake and areas

farther south, slavery existed in every colony of British North
America. And unlike Equiano, very few slaves were fortunate
enough to gain their freedom.
Discussion Question:
How did Olaudah Equiano’s experiences both illustrate the
norms of British colonial life and defy them?
Slavery and Empire
Focus Question:
How did African slavery differ regionally in eighteenth-century
North America?
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Atlantic slave trade
vital part of world economy
Triangular trade routes moved people and goods around Atlantic
Slavery becoming more entrenched
African rulers involved in the slave trade
The Middle Passage
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The Atlantic slave trade flourished in the 1700s. In this century
alone more than half of the estimated 7.7 million Africans
transported to the New World between 1492 and 1820 arrived.
The immensely profitable slave trade was a vital part of world
commerce. In the eighteenth-century British empire, slavery,
not wage labor, was the norm. Slave plantations contributed
greatly to British economic development, and the first mass

consumer goods in international trade, namely, sugar, rice,
coffee, and tobacco, were produced by slaves and stimulated the
growth of the slave trade.
Though the Caribbean continued to be the British empire’s
commercial center and the crown’s major revenue producer,
slave-grown products from the mainland increased as a share of
Atlantic trade. The Atlantic Ocean’s triangular trading routes
carried British manufactured goods to Africa and the colonies,
brought colonial products including tobacco, indigo, sugar, and
rice to Europe, and shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas.
Most colonial vessels went back and forth from the mainland to
the West Indies, however, shipping agricultural and other goods
that the islands couldn’t produce in exchange for plantation
crops and slaves. Even merchants from New York,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island participated in, and profited
from, the slave trade. In Britain, the slave trade also stimulated
the rise of port cities such as Liverpool and Bristol, fostered the
growth of banking, shipbuilding, and insurance, and helped
finance the early industrial revolution. As slavery became more
and more entrenched, so too, as the Quaker abolitionist John
Woolman commented in 1762, did “the idea of slavery being
connected with the black color, and liberty with the white.”
In the eighteenth century, slavery in West African societies
shifted from being a minor institution to a central one. Most
African rulers participated in the slave trade, often in ways most
beneficial to them. The slave trade made Africa a major market
for European goods, especially textiles and guns. This disrupted
relations within and among African societies in ways that
encouraged the growth of the slave trade and exacerbated
conflict among African societies competing for power, goods,
and access to slaves. Of course, the loss of tens of thousands of
men and women to the slave trade weakened and distorted West
Africa’s economy and society.

The voyage across the Atlantic, known as “the Middle Passage,”
was a harrowing experience for slaves. Since slaves could be
sold in America for twenty or thirty times their price in Africa,
slave traders crammed them on the ships as tightly as possible.
Given such conditions, including the spread of disease, about
one in five slaves died before the ships reached the Americas.
Of those who survived, only a small percentage were sold and
stayed in the North American colonies, which had a lower death
rate than colonies in the West Indies and Brazil, where slave
plantation conditions and work were more brutal. The British
colonies of North America imported between 400,000 and
600,000 slaves, and by 1770, due to slaves’ natural
reproduction, one-fifth of the 2.3 million people in the English
colonies (not including Indians) were Africans and their
descendants.
What was the role of the slave trade in the Atlantic economy?
We often consider the impact of the slave trade only on the
United States, but its impact extended much further. How did it
affect West African nations and society, other regions of the
New World, and the nations of Europe?
Atlantic Trading Routes
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A series of trading routes crisscrossed the Atlantic, bringing
manufactured goods to Africa and Britain’s American colonies,
slaves to the New World, and colonial products to Europe.
Atlantic World Slave Trade

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The Atlantic slave trade expanded rapidly in the eighteenth
century. The mainland colonies received only a tiny proportion
of the Africans brought to the New World, most of whom were
transported to Brazil and the West Indies.
Slave Trading Vessel
The cargo carried in barrels, generally guns, cloth, and metal
goods, were to be traded for slaves. The third image from the
left depicts the conditions under which slaves endured the
Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The ship carried over 300
slaves. The broadside also included a calculation of the profit of
the voyage.
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Slave Systems in British North America
Chesapeake Slavery
Tobacco plantation system
The Rice Kingdom, Carolina and Georgia
Ironically, Africans taught English settlers how to cultivate rice
“Task” system
Assigned daily jobs
If completed, allowed time for leisure or to cultivate their own
crops

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By the mid-eighteenth century, there were three distinct slave
systems in British North America: tobacco-based plantation
slavery in the Chesapeake, rice-based plantation slavery in
South Carolina and Georgia, and non-plantation slavery in New
England and the Middle Colonies.
The tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake, where nearly half
the region’s population in 1770 consisted of slaves, was the
largest and oldest of the three systems. Extending deep inland,
slavery in Virginia existed on large plantations and many small
farms. Slavery had created the Chesapeake elite, a landed gentry
who dominated the region’s society and politics in conjunction
with merchants in the tobacco trade and lawyers defending the
interests of slaveholders. Slavery transformed Chesapeake
society into an elaborate hierarchy of degrees of freedom: large
planters at the top, lesser planters and landowning yeomen
below them, and a large population of indentured servants,
tenant farmers, convicts, and slaves at the bottom.
Though planters made more laws enhancing the power of
masters over their slave property, violence, such as whipping,
was at the center of the institution and its perpetuation. As
slavery became entrenched, race became a more significant line
of social division. Whites increasingly saw free blacks as
dangerous and unwanted and restricted the rights that had been
given earlier, such as gun ownership for blacks and the vote for
free landowning blacks. Because by law, Virginia required freed
slaves to leave the colony, free blacks remained a very small
part of the population. The concepts of “free” and “white” had
become virtually identical.
Rice cultivation in the low country of South Carolina prompted
the importation of African slaves there and led to a growing
racial divide between whites and blacks. South Carolina was the
first colony to have a black majority. By the 1730s, when North

Carolina became its own colony, two-thirds of its population
was black. Indigo, used for blue dye, also became a staple crop
there in the 1740s and was cultivated on slave plantations.
Africans were familiar with the crop at home and actually
taught the colonists how to grow rice. As opposed to the
Chesapeake, where slaves worked constantly in gangs, slaves on
the rice plantations worked according to the “task” system,
under which they were assigned daily jobs. Once the jobs were
completed, they had time for leisure or for growing crops of
their own.
How did slavery transform the law and society of the
Chesapeake?
How did the difference between rice and tobacco cultivation
lead to differing plantation systems?
Slavery in the North
Less central to the economy, but not marginal to northern
colonial life
lower numbers of slaves made them less of a threat in the eyes
of whites
Skilled labor and domestic workers
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Rice cultivation also developed in Georgia, having been
commenced in 1733 by philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe,
a wealthy reformer who favored the abolition of slavery.
Oglethorpe wanted to create a colony in which the “worthy
poor” of England could find economic opportunity; the British
government wanted the colony as a defensive barrier against the
Spanish and their Indian allies in Florida. Although the colony
initially banned liquor and slaves, many of its settlers wanted

both, and by the 1740s, colonists were appealing for the English
liberty of self-government in order to have slaves. In 1751,
Georgia’s proprietors surrendered the colony to the crown,
which repealed the ban on slavery and liquor. Georgia quickly
came to resemble South Carolina, with large rice plantations
supporting a wealthy planter class that dominated the colony.
Compared to the plantation areas, New England and the Middle
Colonies were mostly areas of small farms where slavery was
not central. Slaves were only a small percentage of the
population, and even wealthy families rarely owned more than
one slave. Slaves worked as farm labor, in artisan shops, on the
docks, and as personal servants. Slaves in the North sometimes
had more legal rights than their southern counterparts; in New
England, slaves could not be severely physically punished,
slaves could bring suits in court, and slave marriages were
recognized. A significant number of slaves were present in New
York and Philadelphia, although many employers of slave labor
turned to wage labor in the years before the American
Revolution.
What role did slavery play in northern society?
Colonial Slave Population, 1770
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This table shows the slave population as percentage of the total
population of the original thirteen colonies.
Ayuba Diallo
a Muslim merchant in Senegal who became a victim of the slave

trade in 1731 and was transported to Maryland. He escaped in
1733 and with the help of wealthy patrons regained his freedom.
Because of Diallo’s unusual talents—he knew both English and
Arabic—he became a celebrity in England, which he visited in
1733. He sat for two portraits by the noted artist William Hoare.
This is the earliest known painting of an African who
experienced slavery in Britain’s North American colonies.
Diallo returned to his homeland in 1734
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Slave Cultures and Slave Resistance
Focus Question:
What factors led to distinct African-American cultures in the
eighteenth century?
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Slave Cultures
Becoming African-American
Slavery became the bonding experience among different
Africans
New identity forged from a mix of African traditions, European
elements, and new conditions in America
African-American Cultures
Family – Religion - Gullah

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Africans brought to the mainland colonies in the eighteenth
century were very diverse, coming from different African
cultures with different languages and religions. For most of the
eighteenth century, the majority of American slaves were born
in Africa, and a truly “African-American” people with a
cohesive culture shaped by African, European, and American
influences emerged only very gradually, through the common
experience of slavery.
One of the most difficult transitions for enslaved Africans was
the forced change from traditional religions to that of
Christianity—the dominant religion of their colonial captors.
While many of the forced migrants believed in a universal
creator, the similarities between the various African religious
practices seemed to resemble certain Native American
communities more than Christianity. While some enslaved
individuals were familiar with Christianity and/or Islam, most
who ended up in British North America came from the more
isolated forest regions of West Africa. Even in the eighteenth
century many continued to practice traditional African religious
or melded them with Protestant forms of Christianity or with
Roman Catholicism—depending on the dominant religion in the
region of the Americas.
The three different slave systems in British North America
produced distinct African-American cultures. In the
Chesapeake, a healthy climate led to the natural reproduction of
the slave population, allowing for a balanced sex ratio that
created family-centered slave communities. Slaves were
continuously exposed to white culture, so they learned English
and were influenced by religious revivalism. In South Carolina
and Georgia, however, the harsh rice plantations created a very
different culture. Their low birthrate led to continuous slave
imports, and since slaves seldom encountered whites and had
more autonomy than those on other kinds of plantations, they

were able to create a more African culture. In the northern
colonies, where slaves were a small part of the population and
dispersed as individuals or small groups throughout the white
population, a distinctive African-American culture developed
slowly.
Three distinct slave systems were well entrenched in Britain’s
mainland colonies. Describe the main characteristics of each
system.
The Old Plantation
slaves dancing in a plantation’s slave quarters, perhaps at a
wedding. The musical instruments and pottery are African in
origin while much of the clothing is of European manufacture,
indicating the mixing of African and white cultures among the
era’s slaves.
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Slave Resistance
Resistance to Slavery
Desire for freedom
Runaway slaves
Slave uprisings
New York City, 1712
Louisiana, 1731
Stono Rebellion

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Despite differences between African-American cultures, all
were linked by the experience of slavery and hopes for freedom.
The most common form of slave resistance was to run away, and
in some colonies, fugitive slaves found it easy to assume the
identity of free black individuals. Much less common were slave
uprisings. The first occurred in New York in 1712, in which a
group of slaves burned buildings, killed whites who arrived, and
were later executed, with some being tortured and burned alive
as a warning to the city’s slave population. Imperial wars in the
1730s and 1740s opened the door for slave resistance in
Louisiana and the West Indies.
In 1739, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, between England and Spain,
prompted a group of South Carolina slaves to seize arms at
Stono. They marched toward the safety of Spanish Florida,
which offered security to escaped British slaves, killing whites
and shouting “Liberty!” as they went. The Stono Rebellion was
crushed by colonial militia and led to the tightening of South
Carolina’s slave laws.
In 1741, in New York City, a panic induced by a series of fires
led to rumors that slaves were planning to mount a rebellion
with white allies and turn the city over to the Spanish. More
than 150 blacks and a few whites were arrested, and thirty-four
people, including four whites, were executed.
How was an African-American collective identity created in
these years, and what role did slave rebellions play in that
process?
Runaway Slaves
An advertisement seeking the return of four runaway slaves
from New York City. Note the careful description of the

fugitives’ clothing. The reward offered is a substantial amount
of money in the colonial era.
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An Empire of Freedom
Focus Question:
What were the meanings of British liberty in the eighteenth
century?
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The Evolving British Empire
British Patriotism
The British Constitution
Liberty central to British identity
Rule of the common law
Representation in government
Rights, including trial by jury
Restraints on political authority
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Although slavery was vital to the British empire, the British
people in the eighteenth century believed theirs was the most
free and advanced nation in the world. Great Britain was the
world’s greatest commercial and naval power and had a complex
government with a powerful Parliament representing the

interests of a landed aristocracy and merchant class. London,
the political, cultural, and economic capital of the empire, was
the largest city in Europe, with nearly 1 million residents. The
empire enjoyed a common law, common language, and, despite
small numbers of Catholics, Jews, and Africans, a common
devotion to Protestantism. Britain often found itself at war with
France, which replaced Spain as its European Catholic rival.
This stimulated a large military establishment, high taxes, and a
Bank of England to help finance its wars in Europe and the
empire. These wars helped develop a sense of national identity
forged against common foes. Britain was celebrated by its
people as a nation with a rapidly expanding economy that united
both Britons and colonists. Especially in contrast to France,
individual liberty, the rule of law, and the Protestant faith were
all points of British pride.
Liberty, especially as it was embodied in what came to be called
the British Constitution, was central to this emerging British
identity. Britons believed that the legacy of the English Civil
War and the Glorious Revolution had bestowed upon them a
unique and ideal political order of institutions that guaranteed
their freedoms: the rule of law, legislation consented to by
representatives, restraints on arbitrary authority, and individual
rights such as trial by jury, enshrined in the common law.
Writers in mainland Europe looked to England as a model
government, and thinkers such as French political philosopher
Baron Montesquieu praised Britain for its “balanced
constitution,” in which the House of Commons, the House of
Lords, and the king checked one another’s power. In Great
Britain, no man, not even the king, was above the law, and
Britons believed their political system prevented the tyranny,
“popery,” and barbarism that they believed “enslaved” others
elsewhere in Europe and the world.
On both sides of the Atlantic, every political cause, it seemed,
wrapped itself in the language of liberty and claimed to be
defending the “rights of Englishmen.” With the presence of

slavery in the empire and large portions of the population
disenfranchised, liberty was hardly universal within the British
realm. But British notions of liberty were practiced through
various forms of participation beyond the directly political,
whereby even those who could not vote influenced public life.
Ideas of British liberty expanded beyond the “political
nation”—those who voted, held office, and engaged in
structured political debate—to all members of British society,
including laborers, sailors, artisans, and even slaves. Liberty
came to mean more than just privileges derived from
membership in a distinct social class. It became defined as a
general right to resist arbitrary government, and ordinary people
invoked liberty and critiqued tyranny in collective actions,
sometimes against merchants charging above a “just price,” or
officers of the Royal Navy engaged in “impressment”:
kidnapping poor men in public for service on the navy’s ships.
How did the notion of liberty affect British relations with each
other and other Europeans in the eighteenth century?
British Patriotism and Liberty, 1770
Paul Revere illustrates the association of British patriotism and
liberty. Britannia sits with a liberty cap and her national shield,
and releases a bird from a cage
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Liberty and Freedom
Republicanism
participation in public life as essence of liberty

virtue
Strong association btw. property rights and liberty
Economic independence key to freedom
Liberalism
Individual and private
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Liberty was central to two sets of political ideas in the Anglo-
American world. Today, they are called “republicanism” and
“liberalism” by scholars, but these terms were not used in this
way at the time. Republicanism celebrated participation in
public life by economically independent citizens as the basis of
liberty. Republicans believed that only citizens who owned
property had “virtue,” defined as the willingness to subordinate
self-interest to a common public good. In eighteenth-century
Britain, this body of thought about freedom was most closely
associated with a group of critics of the established political
order known as the “Country Party” because much of their
support arose from the landed gentry. “Country Party publicists
John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and others had little impact in
Britain, but their ideas were heavily favored by the elites of the
American colonies who associated land ownership with liberty
and political power as a danger to that liberty.
Liberalism in the eighteenth-century British empire meant
something quite different from “liberalism” as it is defined
today. While republicanism had a public and social quality,
liberalism was individual and private. John Locke was
liberalism’s leading philosopher, and his Two Treatises of
Government, written in 1680, were very influential in the
1700s. Locke argued that governments were constituted through
a “social contract” mutually agreed to by equals (here, male
heads of households), in which these individuals surrendered
part of their right to govern themselves in order to enjoy
benefits of the rule of law: security of life, liberty, and

property. Protecting these spheres required limiting the
interference of the state in religious, family, and economic life.
Lockean ideas of individual rights, the consent of the governed,
and the right to rebel against unjust or oppressive government
became familiar in Britain and its colonies. Nevertheless,
Locke’s idea of liberty as a universal right seemed to exclude
many from its benefits, as its imagined free individual was, in
both theory and practice, the propertied white man.
Republicanism and liberalism, while distinct bodies of thought,
overlapped and reinforced each other, and both came to
influence and inspire Americans, who came to resist the rule of
the British empire.
How did the ideas of republicanism and liberalism differ in
eighteenth-century British North America?
Two Treatises of Government
John Locke’s influential book that introduced the ideas of a
“social contract”
Individual rights,
consent of the governed,
right of rebellion against oppressive government
Notion of natural rights opened the door to marginalized people
although that was not Locke’s intention
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The Public Sphere
Focus Question:
What concepts and institutions dominated colonial politics in

the eighteenth century?
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Eighteenth-Century Colonial America
The Right to Vote
Property qualification
Larger percentage of men in colonial America voted than in
Britain
Political Cultures
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In some ways, politics in eighteenth-century colonial America
seemed more democratic than in Britain. As in Britain, property
ownership was the qualification for voting, ensuring that men
with an economic stake in society and the independence of
judgment that came with property determined government
policies. Dependents, who lacked their own will—such as
slaves, servants, adult sons living in their parents’ homes, the
poor, and women—were all ineligible to vote. But the wide
distribution of landownership in America meant that a far
higher percentage of the population had the right to vote than to
Europe: an estimated 50 to 80 percent of adult white men in
colonial America could vote, as opposed to fewer than 5 percent
in Britain. In some colonies, free blacks with property could
vote. Some colonies also denied the vote to religious minorities
such as Jews, Catholics, and dissenting Protestants, while
Indians everywhere were generally prohibited from voting.
However, in colonial America, “the people” existed only on

Election Day. Competitive elections were rare, and those who
voted usually deferred to their social betters in their
community, who expected voters to support them because of
their patronage, reputation, or social status. Real power resided
in officials who were appointed, not elected. Governors and
councils were appointed by the crown or proprietors everywhere
except Rhode Island and Connecticut, where they were elected.
In some colonies, such as South Carolina, the property
qualification for holding office was far higher than that for the
franchise, ensuring that only the wealthy could be elected. Few
ordinary Americans pursued elective office or were active in
public affairs. An ingrained tradition of “deference”—the
assumption among ordinary people that wealth, education, and
social prominence carried a right to public office—limited
choices in elections, and often meant leadership roles went to
the wealthiest landowners frequently in a generational cycle
within the same families.
Explain the purpose behind the property qualification
requirement and why it differed for voting and officeholding.
Colonial Government
The Rise of the Assemblies
Politics in Public
Expansion of the “public sphere”
Clubs provide public discussion of public affairs
The Colonial Press
Widespread literacy
Political broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers
Libraries

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Concerned with events in Europe and imperial rivalries, British
governments in the first half of the eighteenth century followed
a policy of “salutary neglect,” allowing the American colonies
to mostly govern themselves. This, in effect, gave large
landowners, merchants, and lawyers more power to control local
colonial politics, while elected representatives in colonial
assemblies believed they represented the popular will, and used
their power over colonial finance and taxes to influence policy
and appointed officials.
In the eighteenth century, as economic development increased
the power of American elites, colonial assemblies became more
assertive and insisted that they controlled local affairs in the
colonies as much as the House of Commons did in Britain. The
most successful governors accommodated the ascendant
assemblies and used patronage, such as land grants, to win
support. Eliminating the governor’s council, Pennsylvania’s
legislature was most powerful, but New York, Virginia, South
Carolina, and especially Massachusetts also had powerful
assemblies. Colonial representatives invoked liberal and
republican notions of liberty in making their claims on colonial
and imperial officials.
This language gradually reached beyond the “political nation,”
which was dominated by a wealthy and educated American
gentry. Particularly in colonial towns and cities, the “public
sphere” expanded. This was the space in which political
organization and debate independent of the government took
place, in which an informed citizenry openly discussed
questions previously addressed only by officials. In Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia, clubs emerged that debated
literary, philosophical, scientific, and political issues. The best
known was a club known as the “Junto,” founded by Benjamin
Franklin in Philadelphia in 1727, which later became the
American Philosophical Society.
Compared to other European colonies in the Western

Hemisphere, British North America had a very literate
population and a vibrant press. Newspapers and circulating
libraries were especially important in spreading information and
ideas and expanding the public sphere, and by the 1730s,
political commentary was prevalent in American newspapers.
The best-edited newspaper was probably Benjamin Franklin’s
Pennsylvania Gazette, founded in 1728, which in its peak had a
readership of 2,000.
How did literacy affect the political culture of colonial
America?
Free Speech
Freedom of Expression and Its Limits
The Trial of Zenger
Most famous colonial court case involving freedom of the press
John Peter Zenger’s newspaper the Weekly Journal criticized
New York’s governor
Tried for seditious libel but found not guilty
Began popularizing the idea of freedom of expression
26
Even though America had a vibrant press, free expression and
free speech were not the norm in America, and not a traditional
right for ordinary Britons. Freedom of speech had developed in
Britain in the 1500s as a right for legislators in Parliament, as a
means for facilitating representation; outside of Parliament, free
speech had no legal protection. Governments in Britain and the
colonies viewed freedom of the press as quite dangerous. Until
1695, it was possible to print a newspaper, book, or pamphlet
without government permission; after this, the government

could censor print matter only after it had been published.
Editors of colonial newspapers that criticized officials or
legislators were frequently punished, leading some Americans
to call for a freedom of the press, which was not very often
observed.
The most famous court case in the colonies regarding freedom
of the press showed that most colonists opposed prosecutions
for criticizing public officials. In 1735, the German-born printer
John Peter Zenger, who accused New York’s governor of
corruption, was arrested for seditious libel. His lawyer,
Alexander Hamilton, asked the jury to judge the accuracy of
Zenger’s statements, not whether he printed them, and he was
found not guilty. While libel remained a crime, the trial’s
outcome spread in the colonies the belief that newspapers
should be allowed to print the truth without fear of punishment
and helped popularize the idea of free expression.
How did the freedom of expression function in colonial
America?
Enlightenment
The American Enlightenment
sought to apply the scientific method to political and social life
Reaction against religious wars in Europe
Reason
Deism
Benjamin Franklin
27
In the eighteenth century, many educated Americans began to be
influenced by the European Enlightenment, a philosophical
movement with origins in France, which sought to apply to
political and social life the scientific method of investigation

and experimentation. Enlightenment thinkers demanded that
every human institution, authority, and tradition be judged by
the measure of reason. Benjamin Franklin—who established a
newspaper, debating club, and library, published Poor Richard’s
Almanack, and conducted experiments that showed that
lightning is electricity—embodied the spirit of Enlightenment.
Critical of the religious wars that had engulfed Europe,
Enlightenment thinkers hoped that reason, not religious
enthusiasm, would rule human affairs. These philosophers,
being skeptical of all traditions and authorities, easily criticized
established churches. Many prominent Americans embraced
Arminianism, which taught that reason alone could form the
basis of religion, or Deism, a belief that God had withdrew from
the world after creating it, leaving it to function according to
“natural,” scientific laws without divine intervention.
In the 1600s, the English scientist Isaac Newton had discovered
and demonstrated the natural laws that governed the universe.
While many Protestants affirmed Newton’s findings—arguing
that it was evidence of God’s work and maintai ning their
piety—Deists believed that the best form of religious devotion
was to study nature, not worship in organized churches.
Prominent American Deists in the late colonial era included
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Give two examples of how Benjamin Franklin exemplified the
Enlightenment spirit.
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin conducted pioneering experiments in 1752 that
demonstrated the electrical nature of lightning. West shows him
seated on clouds, surrounded by angelic assistants.

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The Great Awakening
Focus Question:
How did the Great Awakening challenge the religious and social
structure of British North America?
29
Causes and Impact of the Great Awakening
Religious Revivals
Religion remained central to eighteenth-century American life
Great Awakening
A more emotional and personal Christianity
The Preaching of Whitefield
emotional preaching
Revivals were the first major intercolonial events in North
American history
Broadened the range of religious alternatives
30
Religion was central to eighteenth-century colonial American
life. Bibles and other religious publications were the largest
category of printed matter, and religious disputes often garnered
more attention than political issues. By the 1720s and 1730s,
however, many ministers feared that westward expansion, a lack
of individual engagement in church activities, and the growth of
commerce and Enlightenment rationalism threatened religious
devotion. These fears helped inspire a series of revivals ac ross

the colonies, later known as the Great Awakening, that were
less a coordinated movement than local events committed to a
“religion of the heart,” or a more emotional and personal
Christianity.
The eighteenth-century revival affected religion across the
world: for Islam, Wahhabism called for a return to earlier
practices, and Hasidic Jews in Eastern Europe emphasized faith
and religious joy in opposition to what they considered an
overly academic, study-based conventional Judaism. In Western
Europe, Methodism and other forms of enthusiastic religion
flourished. Like other intellectual currents, the Great
Awakening was transatlantic in nature. Ministers such as the
Massachusetts Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards pioneered
an emotional form of preaching, portraying man in his sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, as a sinner on the verge
of being condemned to damnation at any moment. Only by
experiencing a “new birth” could one be saved.
Particularly important to spreading the revivals was the English
minister George Whitefield, who spread the Great Awakening
through the colonies during a two-year tour of America starting
in 1739. Newspapers promoted his tour, and tens of thousands
flocked to hear him in what was the first major intercolonial
event in North American history. Many members of the
established churches criticized the revivalists for their lack of
theological training, emotionalism, and the disorder they
caused. But the Great Awakening transformed the religious life
of America, splitting the Old Light (traditionalist) churches and
causing New Light (revivalist) groups such as the Baptists,
Methodists, and Presbyterians to emerge. The Awakening was,
to a great extent, supported by the poor and disenfranchised,
and by the time it subsided in the 1760s, it had already caused
many people to question other authorities and institutions in
colonial America.
The revivals were primarily a spiritual matter, but they reflected
existing social tensions, mostly attracting men and women of
modest means. Concretely emphasizing salvation rather than

profit, ministers often challenged the commercially driven
structure of colonial society. New Light ministers in New
England criticized the greed of merchants who lured people into
debt. In the South, Baptists and Methodists warned against the
worldliness of wealthy planters, attacking gambling, horse
racing, and lavish entertainment on the Sabbath as sinful
practices. Some preachers explicitly denounced slavery, and
while most slaveholders reconciled the institution with
Christianity to themselves, and a few, such as the grandson of
Robert “King” Carter, emancipated their slaves after concluding
that black and white were brothers in Christ. More often,
especially in the Chesapeake, the revivals Christianized slaves,
contributing to an important aspect of the development of
African American culture.
Some blacks and women began preaching as well, shattering the
white male monopoly on the practice. Overall, the revivals
broadened the religious alternatives available to colonists,
further subdividing society, but simultaneously integrating it
further into transatlantic religious developments. The Great
Awakening spawned publication wars, expanded the circulation
of print materials, and led people to develop and follow their
own views over those of elites. Self-educated preachers engaged
in intense religious discussions, and colonists asserted their
rights to individual judgement. Though spiritual salvation was
the objective, rather than social or political revolution, the
independent mindset encouraged by the revivals would have
significant political consequences.
What ideas generated by the American Enlightenment and the
Great Awakening prompted challenges to religious, social, and
political authorities in the British colonies?
George Whitefield
George Whitefield, the English evangelist who helped to spark

the Great Awakening in the colonies. Painted around 1742, the
work depicts Whitefield’s powerful effect on male and female
listeners.
31
Imperial Rivalries
Focus Question:
How did the Spanish and French empires in America develop in
the eighteenth century?
32
The Spanish in the New World
Spanish North America
The Spanish in California
Imperial competition between Spain and Russia
Established missions that negatively affected California’s native
population
Father Junípero Serra
33
As Britain’s North American colonies grew, imperial rivalries
over North America intensified. But while the colonies of
France and Spain were territorially very large, they were much
smaller in population and less economically developed. The

Spanish empire stretched from the Pacific coast to New Mexico
and the Great Plains, Texas, and Florida, and, after 1763,
Louisiana, but its presence consisted of only a few small
outposts. Spanish efforts to reinvigorate its older colonies in the
early 1700s foundered.
During the second half of the century, the Spanish attempted
again to control the region by stabilizing relations with the
Comanche and Apache, while those groups continued to
compete with one another, displace other communities, and
interact with the French in Texas and New Mexico.
Enlightenment monarchs attempted to learn more about the
region for purposes of greater control and determining how
Indians were to be integrated into the Spanish Empire. They
also condemned the Black Legend of uniquely Spanish cruelty,
while simultaneously pointing out that a far larger proportion of
the Spanish Empire consisted of Indians than the English
American colonies. Despite efforts at reform, no coherent
policy was developed, and Spanish power did not eliminate
native power. The settler population remained low, and though
ranching expanded, the primary commercial activity continued
to be trade with the surviving Indian populations. In light of
Spain’s military struggles in Europe, colonial commanders often
failed to receive reinforcements, and the Comanche and Apache
continued to dominate large parts of northern New Spain.
Fearing Russian settlement, Spain successfully colonized much
of the coast of California with missions and presidios. But the
diseases they introduced and their resettlement of Indians
resulted in the near total devastation of California’s native
population. Also, even more so than other regions of northern
New Spain, California drew few settlers, while ranching,
Christianizing, and trade made up the primary purposes of
Spanish settlement in the region. A densely populated region
upon Spanish arrival, the combination of disease and low settler
immigration meant that the region was only sparsely populated
by the end of Spanish rule in 1821.

How did imperial competition play out on the west coast of
what would become the United States?
Father Junípero Serra
Serra conducted missionary work in present-day California.
34
European Empires in North America
35
Three great empires—the British, French, and Spanish—
competed for influence in North America for much of the
eighteenth century.
New France
The French Empire
Expansion of trade and territory
Small population
Challenge to British
The French were a far greater threat to British power in North
America than the Spanish. During the eighteenth century, the
French population and economy of Canada expanded, while
French traders pushed south from the Great Lakes and north
from Mobile and New Orleans. By 1750, 10,000 French
colonists and slaves lived in Louisiana, mostly working around

sugar plantations. Although much smaller in population and
economic power than the British colonies, the French colonies,
especially in their alliances with powerful Native American
tribes, posed a real threat to British Americans.
Why was the French empire a greater threat to Britain than the
Spanish empire?
36
The Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763
After brutal backcountry fighting, the British emerged
victorious
A World Transformed
Global balance of power shifted
Peace of Paris (1763)
37
The western frontier of British America, particularly the Ohio
Valley, was a battleground that saw nearly constant conflict
between France, Britain, and their Indian allies, mostly tribes
that had been pushed there by European settlement. On this
“middle ground” between European empires and Indian
sovereignty, Indians from various tribes lived together,
alongside European traders and missionaries. Indians of the
Ohio Valley both learned to play the British and French off each
other in a dangerous diplomatic game, and were victims of their
European and Indian enemies and the cultural changes they
wrought.
In 1749, as white settlers began moving into the Ohio Valley,
Virginia awarded an immense grant of land there to the Ohio
Company, who could sell the land to settlers. The grant
threatened the Valley’s Indians and caused the French to
reinforce their presence. The Ohio Company’s demand for

French recognition of its land claims inaugurated the Seven
Years’ War (known in the colonies as the p.
The British had fought its rivals France and Spain in three
inconclusive wars earlier in the eighteenth century, and to
finance these wars Britain’s public expenditures, taxes, and
national debt had greatly increased, inspiring discontent at
home and in the colonies. The Seven Years’ War saw fighting
among these global empires across the entire globe, in what w as
truly a first world war. It started in 1754 with British efforts to
dislodge the French from forts in western Pennsylvania
guarding the Ohio Valley. When a small force of soldiers led by
George Washington entered the area, conflict ensued.
For the first two years of the war, French and Indian forces
successfully attacked the frontiers of the British colonies in
North America. Only in 1757, under prime minster William
Pitt’s leadership, did the British government turn the tide.
Britain funded Prussia and Austria’s campaigns against France
and its ally Spain in Europe, while the British struck back in the
colonies. By 1760, British forces had captured the major
outposts of New France, seized French possessions in the
Caribbean, and established control of India. In the Peace of
Paris in 1763, France ceded Canada to Britain, and received in
return the sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Spain
ceded Florida to Britain in return for the Philippines and Cuba,
which the British had seized during the war. Spain also acquired
Louisiana from the French. France’s empire in North America
was finished. But attempts to pay for the costs of the war led to
events that precipitated the French and American revolutions.
How did Great Britain’s position in North America change
relative to the other European powers during the first three-
quarters of the eighteenth century?
“Join, or Die”

Benjamin Franklin produced this famous cartoon in 1754,
calling on Britain’s North American colonies to unite against
the French.
38
The Proclamation Line
New Indian Identities
Emergence of a distinct Native American identity after religious
revivals and experiences of war
Indians became more dependent on Britain than ever before
Pontiac’s Rebellion
Neolin
Preached a rejection of European ways of life
Used a new pan-Indian identity
39
The French defeat upset the balance-of-power diplomacy that
had enabled Indian groups like the Iroquois to maintain a degree
of autonomy, and they saw Britain’s victory and its colonies as
a threat. The French conceded lands that Indians controlled to
the British, without their consent, and the Treaty of Paris
caused confusion about land claims, control of the fur trade, and
tribal relations in general. In 1763, Indians in the Ohio Valley
and Great Lakes regions rebelled against British rule. Although
named Pontiac’s Rebellion after an Ottawa warrior, in fact
Neolin, a Delaware religious prophet, inspired much of the
rebellion with visions that urged Indians to reject European
technologies, commercial relations, and alcohol, and to expel
the British from their lands. He also encouraged Indians of

different tribes to consider themselves all Indians, forging a
pan-Indian identity for the first time.
By the end of 1763, British forces had quelled the rebellion. But
the British government tried to quiet tensions between white
settlers in the colonies and Indians by declaring the
Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting further colonial settlement in
the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, which were
reserved for Indians. It also banned the sale of Indian lands to
private individuals, allowing sales only to colonial
governments. The new policy enraged settlers and speculators
who wanted these lands, and many colonists, including George
Washington, ignored the policy and purchased land anyway,
illegally. Rather than solving the issue of westward expansion,
the act instead exacerbated settler–Indian relations.
How did a distinct Native American identity start to emerge
after the Seven Years’ War?
Eastern North America after the Peace of Paris, 1763
The end of the war left all of North America east of the
Mississippi in British hands, ending the French presence.
of 1763 prohibited further colonial settlement west of the
Appalachian Mountains and banned the sale of Indian land to
private individuals
40
After the Seven Years’ War
Frontier tension led authorities to adopt a more aggressive
stance toward the Indians

Paxton Boys commit multiple Indian massacres
Ended any sense of “true friendship and amity”
Bolstered British pride but also resentment against higher taxes
and land restrictions
41
The Seven Years’ War changed all the American colonies, but
none more so than Pennsylvania. The war shattered the rule of
the old Quaker elite and ended their policy of accommodating
the Indians. Many western settlers pushed the colony’s
government into a more aggressive stance toward Indians during
the war, and the brutal warfare on the colony’s frontier
deepened western farmers’ antagonism toward the Indians.
During Pontiac’s Rebellion, the Paxton Boys, a group of armed
western farmers from the Pennsylvania town of Paxton, marched
on Philadelphia, attacking and massacring Indians along the
way. They successfully pressured the governor into expelling
peaceful Indians in that city, and by the end of the 1760s,
Penn’s “holy experiment” and his quest for peace between
Europeans and Indians was over.
The colonists also emerged from the war with a greater sense of
collective identity. Before the war, the colonies had been
isolated from one another. Had it had been approved in 1754,
the Albany Plan of Union, which was drafted by Benjamin
Franklin, would have created an intercolonial legislature
consisting of delegates from each colony, with powers to levy
taxes and conduct diplomacy with Indian tribes, but it was
rejected by the colonial assemblies.
Although some tensions had arisen between American and
British soldiers and officers during the war, the war mostly
intensified American colonists’ sense of themselves as Britons,
with all the benefits that came from being British. American

colonists believed that British triumph in the war was a victory
for “Protestant freedom” against “Popish slavery.” France’s
defeat reinforced the conflation of British identity with
Protestantism and freedom. Soon, American colonists would
come to believe that they could no longer protect their
particularly British liberties within the British empire.
Discussion Questions:
How and why did the colonists’ sense of a collective British
identity change during the years before and after 1764?
· Reflect on the specific socioeconomic, spiritual, lifestyle, and
other cultural factors related to the health of the pati ent
assigned to you.
· Consider how you would build a health history for the patient.
What questions would you ask, and how would you frame them
to be sensitive to the patient’s background, lifestyle, and
culture? Develop five targeted questions you would ask the
patient to build his or her health history and to assess his or her
health risks.
· Think about the challenges associated with communicating
with patients from a variety of specific populations. What
strategies can you as a nurse employ to be sensitive to different
cultural factors while gathering the pertinent information?
Write an explanation of the specific socioeconomic, spiritual,
lifestyle, and other cultural factors associated with the patient
you were assigned. Explain the issues that you would need to be
sensitive to when interacting with the patient, and why. Provide
at least five targeted questions you would ask the patient to
build his or her health history and to assess his or her health
risks. Add 3 APA references/ Citation no older than 5 years.
Case study
1. CASE STUDY AG is a 54-year-old Caucasian male who was
referred to your clinic to establish care after a recent
hospitalization after having a seizure related to alcohol

withdrawal. He has hypertension and a history of alcohol and
cocaine abuse. He is homeless and is currently living at a local
homeless shelter. He reports that he is out of his amlodipine 10
mg which he takes for hypertension. He reports he is abstaining
from alcohol and cocaine but needs to smoke cigarettes to calm
down since he is not drinking anymore.

CHAPTER 4Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire, to 176

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CHAPTER 4Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire, to 176