Colonial America
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Socializing was of course an activity that took place across society, regardless of class. By the eighteenth century, though, even the most ordinary kinds of social activities were becoming demarcated by class lines. Taverns are a good example. By the eighteenth century virtually every community along the eastern seaboard had a tavern or an inn, usually run out of somebody's house. In towns and cities, taverns were more numerous. Of course all provided alcoholic beverages, a pleasure that was available on a daily basis, and most catered primarily to men. Provided consumption was not excessive, most men saw no contradiction between going to church in the morning and visiting the tavern at night. Taverns provided them with an opportunity to socialize, talk business, and increasingly discuss political issues after 1760. It was the kind of tavern that one frequented, and the kinds of entertainments offered there, that were now beginning to differentiate these men by class. Taverns aimed at artisans and laborers provided pugilistic contests and covert gaming. Those aimed at the upper classes provided newspapers, billiard tables, playing cards, and rooms for private meetings. Some upper-class men formed clubs that met regularly at such establishments, including the first Masonic lodges in Philadelphia in 1730 and Boston, Charleston, and Savannah shortly afterwards.18
There was at least one type of social occasion that served to reinforce people's common identity as members of a larger group: the celebration of holidays. When the Puritans abolished the celebration of Christmas and other saints' days and replaced them with occasional days of thanksgiving, they had engaged in a conscious attempt to create a shared sense of membership in a biblically ordained, godly commonwealth. Thanks to their efforts, the celebration of saints' days never took hold in the New England colonies. However, after the Glorious Revolution a number of official royal holidays began to be celebrated throughout the British North American colonies. One of these was the king's birthday, which people everywhere commemorated by lighting bonfires, holding parades, shooting off fireworks and drinking toasts. Royal holidays were declared every time a new governor arrived to govern one of the provinces. By the 1730s, new holidays had been declared to celebrate the birthdays of the queen and the Prince of Wales.
Probably the most important of the new British holidays, especially in New England, was the annual celebration of Pope's Day on November 5. Pope's Day commemorated the failure of an event in 1605 known as the Gunpowder Plot, when Catholics led by Guy Fawkes had attempted to blow up Parliament. The anniversary of this event was marked by ceremonies and parades all over Britain, where it was called Guy Fawkes' Day. After the Glorious Revolution it came to be celebrated in many British North American towns and cities as well. Nowhere was Pope's Day embraced more enthusiastically than in the towns and cities of New England, where it became an occasion for demonstrating vociferously against Catholicism. Boston's celebrations were the most colorful. At the beginning of the day church leaders provided sermons denouncing Catholicism. Then artisans and laborers from all over the city organized parades in which they dressed up in costumes, built floats to carry effigies of the pope, the devil, and the deposed king James II (the “Catholic Stuart Pretender”), and paraded to the town common where they burned the effigies in a great bonfire. The celebration was lubricated with plenty of alcohol and by the 1750s came to involve contests between rival gangs from either end of town to see which could more effectively destroy the other's pope.19
Despite the disorder it produced, Pope's Day was widely approved by colonial officials. Like sending children to be educated in England or imitating the manners and clothing of the aristocracy, encouraging Pope's Day celebrations helped to reinforce loyalty to the British empire. Like the people who participated in the revivals of the Great Awakening, urban people who built floats and bonfires on Pope's Day learned that what they all shared was their commitment to the higher cause of defending Protestantism against the Catholic threat. All of these practices changed colonial aspirations and linked people emotionally to a larger entity, what they imagined as a Protestant British empire. It encouraged people to think of themselves as Britons, loyal subjects of a great empire, entitled to the respect and the rights that were due to them as Englishmen. Their future was bright, full of optimism that as Britons, they would continue to grow prosperous and powerful.
1. On the abandonment of the requirement that all candidates relate their conversion experience, see Baird Tipson, “Samuel Stone's Discourse against Requiring Church Relations,” William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (1989), 786–803. Stone was Hooker's deputy at Hartford. The importance of Stoddard is argued by Perry Miller in The New England Mind from Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). This view is challenged by Paul R. Lucas, Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636–1725 (Hanover, NH, 1976). More recently Stoddard's influence has been reasserted by Philip F. Gura in “Going Mr Stoddard's Way: William Williams on Church Privileges, 1693,” William and Mary Quarterly, 45 (1988), 489–98.
2. The view that congregationalism as a form of church government was in decline is challenged by James F. Cooper, Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalist in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999).
3. For the Baptist advance in Virginia, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982).
4. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), has argued that Protestantism provided the unifying force that helped to create a sense of shared British identity in England, Wales, and Scotland after 1707. The same argument has been made recently with respect to the British colonists by Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, 2006).
5. See Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York, 1986); and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Butler argues that, except for New England, the North American colonies were essentially unchurched in the seventeenth century, a situation that began to change only after 1700 with the imposition of more effective discipline and organization. An increase in religious faith was also found by Christine Leigh Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750 (New York, 1985).
6. The term “Great Awakening” was first used in 1841.
7. The suggestion that the Awakening tended to attract the young is made by Peter S. Onuf, “New Lights in New London: A Group Portrait of the Separatists, 1740–1745,” William and Mary Quarterly, 37 (1980), 627–44. The argument that it created divisions between new and old commerce is suggested by Rosalind Remer, “Old Lights and New Money: A Note on Religion, Economics and Social Order in 1740 Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 47 (1990), 566–73. The view that the Awakening stimulated nonelite political consciousness is made by Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia; and Mark Valeri, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (New York, 1994). Valeri points out that class differences affected the ministry itself. Among those writers stressing the movement's wider appeal are Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York, 1957), and James Walsh, “The Great Awakening in the First Church of Woodbury, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 27 (1971), 543–62.
8. For the debate over the origins of the term, see Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction,” Journal of American History, 69 (1982), 305–25. The view that the Great Awakening was largely a publicity stunt is argued by Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, 1999).
9. The thesis that the Great Awakening prepared the way ideologically for the Revolution is advanced most explicitly by Alan Heimert in Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 19
66); William G. McLoughlin, “The Role of Religion in the Revolution,” in S. G. Kurtz and J. H. Hutson, eds, Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1973); and J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1993). The argument that the Awakening stimulated new forms of communication is advanced by Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 34 (1977), 519–41. Millennialism during the Revolutionary era is explored in Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York, 1985). Among those questioning the links are Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, who stresses the Revolution's secular nature; and Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, who affirms both the time lag between the two events and the fact that the Great Awakening occurred during a period of political stability. The international connections with Europe are stressed by Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), and the intercolonial impact by Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1973).
10. The traditional view was that America's commitment to mass education laid the foundations for its phenomenal progress in the past 200 years. See Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, 1960). For the argument that religion remained the basis of education, see Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974).
11. The thesis of anglicization is associated with the work of John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts” (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1966). Other works in this genre are David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1981); and T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 467–99. See also Richard L. Bushman, “American High-Style and Vernacular Cultures,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 345–83. The contrary position is argued by Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), which argues that British North American societies became more modern after 1680, but not more British. Butler stresses the distinctiveness of the North American societies, which were more ethnically diverse and religiously pluralistic and produced higher per capita standards of living and a more participatory form of politics than developed in Britain.
12. The rise of “politeness” or “refinement” in England has been traced to the rise in wealth and political power of the commercial class. In England the middle class, defined as people who made their livings in business, had traditionally been looked down upon by the aristocracy. During the eighteenth century members of this group began to think of themselves as gentlemen, entitled to respect not because of their titles but because of their manners, tastes, and educational achievements. See for example Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989).
13. The doyen of refinement was Lord Chesterfield, though his Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield to His Son, were not published until 1774. Richard Bushman makes the argument about gentility and its contribution to the emergence of an eighteenth-century colonial elite in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).
14. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York, 1999), finds that comportment and physical self-control, both attributes which aspiring members of the middle classes could attain, were increasingly emphasized in the conduct books that circulated in the northern colonies after 1740. Hemphill argues that northern ideals of gentility and refinement were noticeably different from southern ideals, which stressed family connection more than behavior. See her “Manners and Class in the Revolutionary Era: A Transatlantic Comparison,” William and Mary Quarterly, 63 (2006), 345–72. Another aspect of gentility and refinement after 1750 was the display of sensibility, or sympathy for the feelings of others. See Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009).
15. However, the links between science and technology remained relatively weak. See Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1956).
16. The experiment caused considerable controversy at the time, since most people believed that it would spread the disease. These fears subsided only when Boylston subsequently demonstrated that about 15 percent of the naturally infected died, compared with 2.4 percent of those inoculated.
17. The description was offered by Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight, ed. Malcolm Frieberg (Boston, 1972), 20, quoted in Bruce Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York, 1995), 98.
18. For the impact of taverns on colonial society, see especially David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1995); Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1999); and Sharon Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore, 2002). Salinger challenges an earlier view that taverns contributed to social leveling, showing that taverns in fact became increasingly differentiated by class during the eighteenth century. Upper-class men drank with other gentlemen, not with ordinary folks.
19. For the argument that the adoption of these royal holidays helped to generate feelings of loyalty to the monarchy that were even stronger in the colonies than in Britain, see Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces, ch. 2.
Chapter 14
Slavery and the African American Experience, 1689–1760
1619 The first Africans arrive in Virginia.
1638 Slavery is first mentioned in the laws of Maryland.
1662 A Virginia law declares that children take the status of their mother.
1691 South Carolina passes an act for the better ordering of slaves.
1693 Spain offers to free any slave escaping to Florida who becomes a Catholic.
1699 Free African Americans are required to leave Virginia.
1705 Virginia institutes a slave code.
1712 Nine whites are killed by slaves in New York; 18 slaves are executed for allegedly conspiring to assist them.
1720 Slaves become the majority in South Carolina.
1723 Virginia passes an act to deal with slave conspiracies.
1730 A majority of Chesapeake African Americans are now American-born.
1732 South Carolina attempts to ban the import of slaves.
1735 Slavery is banned in Georgia.
1738 Florida acknowledges the freedom of all slaves who escape to Florida.
1739 The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina is put down.
1740 South Carolina revises its slave code.
1741 A slave conspiracy is suspected in New York; 30 slaves and four whites are executed.
1750 Slavery is permitted in Georgia.
1 Slavery: An Evolving Institution
THE STORY OF African American slavery is one of the most important stories in the history of the United States. It has also been one of the most difficult to tell. North American slavery involved unspeakable violence and cruelty, along with endurance and heroic resistance. The slave trade from Africa to the Americas produced one of the greatest diasporas of all time, bringing about the forced relocation of between 9 and 12 million West and west-central Africans to the Americas. Because of slavery, an enormous population of Africans became part of colonial British American societies and collectively asserted a major influence on the development of colonial cultures and social institutions. In the North American colonies, one of every five settlers was of African origin.
In past generations, historians most often told the story of slavery from the point of view of Anglo-Americans. They emphasized the ways that Europeans perceived African people, focused on the things that white enslavers did to African people, or told the story of how a small group of Europeans fought to end slavery. The experiences of Africans themselves were virtually absent from the narrative except as slavery's victims. More recently historians have shifted their focus to include the points of view of enslaved Africans and African Americans themselves. While making clear that the experience of slavery was a terrible ordeal, historians pay more attention now to the ways in which Africans asserted themselves and became embedded within the fabric of British North American societies. This broader gaze has resulted in a new understanding of the ways that African Americans influenced colonial North American culture as a whole and resisted slavery whenever they could. Historians have now also recognized that the institution of slavery was not static, but evolving.
North American slavery changed considerably during the first century of its existence. During the earliest decades of colonial development, we have seen that enslaved people like Anthony Johnson could sometimes become free men, marry, own land, and even own servants or slaves of their own. Slavery as a social and legal institution permitted enough flexibility that some enslaved people could maneuver their way through the system and gain significant control over their own lives.