Discussion Board 5 US HISTORY
Based on what you have learned from the textbook (Chapter 3, "Origins of American slavery," and Chapter 4, "Slavery and Empire") and the audiovisuals posted on blackboard, discuss what strikes you the most about American slavery and slave life. What have you learned that you did not already know? Is there anything about slavery you would you like to know more about? Please be specific and provide citations for any factual information you provide.
CHAPTER 4 Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire, to 1763
Prof. Marcella Bencivenni
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Hostos Community College
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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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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.
Discussion Question:
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
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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.
Discussion Question:
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
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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 maintaining 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.
Discussion Question:
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?
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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
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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 across 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.
Discussion Question:
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.
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Imperial Rivalries
Focus Question:
How did the Spanish and French empires in America develop in the eighteenth century?
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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
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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.
Discussion Question:
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.
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European Empires in North America
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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.
Discussion Question:
Why was the French empire a greater threat to Britain than the Spanish empire?
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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)
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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 was 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.
Discussion Question:
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.
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The Proclamation Line
New Indian Identities
The Proclamation Line
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
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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.
Discussion Question:
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.
The Proclamation Line
of 1763 prohibited further colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains and banned the sale of Indian land to private individuals
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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
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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?
