Chapter 3 – Society and Culture in Provincial America

The Colonial Population

•  Immigration and natural increase
• Indentured Servitude
  • Social problems of indentured servitude
  • Growing reliance on slavery
• Birth and Death
  • Factors in population growth
    • Differences in the South
  • Toward a balanced sex ratio
• Medicine in the Colonies
  • Midwifery
  • “Humoralism”

Life in the American Colonies

• This colored engraving shows the domestic life of Americans during the eighteenth century.
• Depicted are family members at work in their cozy surroundings. The industriousness they show was a virtue of the era.
• Women and Families in the Colonies

• • Early marriages
  • New England and Chesapeake families compared
• The Beginnings of Slavery in English America
  • The slave trade
    • The “middle passage”
  • Surging slave population
  • Emergence of a race-based system
  • Slave codes
• Changing Sources of European Immigration
  • Huguenot refugees
  • Scotch-Irish

Immigrant Groups in Colonial America, 1760

• Even though the entire Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States had become a series of British colonies by 1760, the population consisted of people from many nations. 

The Colonial Economies

• The Southern Economy
  • Boom-and-bust tobacco economy
  • The South’s cash-crop economy
• Northern Economic and Technological Life
  • Colonial artisans and entrepreneurs
  • Saugus Ironworks
• The Extent and Limits of Technology
  
  • Persistent colonial poverty
  • Myth of colonial self-sufficiency
• The Rise of Colonial Commerce
  • Obstacles to trade
  • The triangular trade
  • An emerging merchant class

The Triangular Trade

• The Atlantic trade was not a simple exchange between America and Europe, but a complex network of exchanges involving the Caribbean, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Not shown but also important to colonial commerce was a large coastal trade among the various regions of British North America.

The Rise of Consumerism

• Reasons for growing consumerism
• Advertising and agents of urban merchants
• Class differences and consumerism
• New social ideals of refinement

Patterns of Society

• Social mobility
• Masters and Slaves on the Plantation
  • Realities of plantation life
  • Slave communities
  • Stono Rebellion
    African Population as a Proportion of
    Total Population, ca. 1775
    This map illustrates the parts of the colonies in which slaves made up a large proportion of the population—in some areas, a majority. The slave population in this period was smallest in the western regions of the southern colonies and in the area north of the Chesapeake, although there remained a significant African population in parts of New Jersey and New York (some slave, some free).
    Patterns of Society (Continued)
    • The Puritan Community
    – Puritan democracy
    – Close-knit communities
    – Communal strains and tensions
    – Salem witch trials
    The New England Town: Sudbury, Massachusetts,
    Seventeenth Century
    Just as the plantation was a characteristic social form in the southern colonies, the town was the most common social unit in New England. This map shows the organization of Sudbury, Massachusetts, a town just west of Boston, in its early years in the seventeenth century.
    Patterns of Society (Continued, 2)
    • Cities
    – Colonial cities
    – Taverns and coffeehouses
    • Inequality
    – Economic stratification
    – The cities and the countryside
    Awakenings and Enlightenments
    • The Pattern of Religions
    – Numerous sects
    – Rights of Catholics
    – Rights of Jews
    – Declining piety
    Awakenings and Enlightenments (Continued)
    • The Great Awakening
    – Wesleys, Whitefield, and Edwards
    – “New Lights” and “Old Lights”
    • The Enlightenment
    – “Natural law”
    Awakenings and Enlightenments (Continued, 2)
    • Literacy and Technology
    – Almanacs
    – First newspaper
    Awakenings and Enlightenments (Continued, 3)
    • Education
    – Public schools
    – First colleges
    • The Spread of Science
    – Growing interest
    – Scientific societies
    – Cotton Mather and vaccines
    Awakenings and Enlightenments (Continued, 4)
    • Concepts of Law and Politics
    – John Peter Zenger
    – Powerful colonial legislatures
    Colonial Punishment
    American communities prescribed a wide range of punishments for misconduct and crime. Among the more common punishments were public humiliations—placing offenders in stocks, forcing them to wear badges of shame, or, as in this woodcut, binding them into a “ducking stool” and immersing them in water.
    © Fotosearch/Getty Images
    Consider the Source
    • Gottlieb Mittelberger,
    The Passage of Indentured Servants (1750)
    Debating the Past
    • The Origins of Slavery
    • The Witchcraft Trials
    The Unfinished Nation, 8th Edition
    Next: Chapter 4
    The Empire in Transition