Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  In any event, Scots-Irish settlers were sufficiently numerous to make up 10 percent of the population by the end of the colonial period. Their presence was especially noticeable in Pennsylvania, where they constituted over 30 percent of the population. In time this influence was to have a profound effect on the politics of that province. Until 1760, however, the newcomers were too isolated and underrepresented to have much impact in Philadelphia, let alone in the southern colonies, though the evidence from Opequon Creek in Frederick County, Virginia, suggests that they played their part in local government as justices of the peace and members of the militia, along with their German neighbors.7

  Compared with the Germans, the Scots-Irish were not good farmers. They were more like earlier English settlers, concerned only with exploiting the land quickly. They preferred to cut the trees down, build a crude log cabin, and grow whatever was possible regardless of the long-term consequences for the land. This attitude explains why so many of them moved after a few years. The French visitor J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur later commented that, on average, out of every 12 families emigrating to America, nine Germans succeeded, seven Scots, but only four Scots-Irish. However, when making his comparison, Crèvecoeur selected the Mennonites, who were exceptional even among the Germans, and more recent work suggests that, where the Scots-Irish secured good land, their farming practices differed little from those of other European settlers.8

  The Scots-Irish have enjoyed a reputation as frontierspeople. Certainly a number of them did excel as traders and frontierspeople, though not all Irish frontierspeople were of Scots-Irish descent. George Croghan, for example, came from Dublin of Anglican parents. But the vast majority of the Scots-Irish stayed on the eastern side of the Allegheny Mountains, since conditions in Tyrone and Fermanagh bore little resemblence to the terrain and climate of North America. As one settler from Belfast commented on arriving in South Carolina: “We were oppressed with fears, on divers account, especially of being massacred by the Indians, or bitten by snakes, or torn by wild beasts, or being lost and perishing in the woods.” Settling one frontier in Ireland did not necessarily qualify them to do so again.9

  In reality the Scots-Irish, like most groups, became frontier settlers only by necessity. The frontier was where the land was cheapest or could be squatted on without payment of rent. Once settled, the Scots-Irish, like all Europeans, did their best to destroy the frontier by cutting down the trees, plowing the land, and building roads, houses, and churches. They, too, wanted to send their surplus produce to market so that they could enjoy a better standard of living. Roaming the woods had little attraction in itself, except for the tiny minority who traded with the native peoples. For the Presbyterian Scots-Irish, as for the Puritans of New England, the wilderness was a dark, forbidding place, occupied only by savages and wild beasts. They began leaving their communities in the Shenandoah Valley, for example, only when the growth of population by 1783 required members of the third generation to find new lands in Kentucky and Tennessee.

  Not surprisingly, one effect of the Scots-Irish settlement was the deterioration in relations with the Native Americans. The Quakers, as already mentioned, did their best to deal fairly with the indigenous inhabitants. No such compunction swayed the Presbyterian Scots-Irish. For them a Native American was a heathen outside the moral law. Like most European settlers, they believed the native peoples to be guilty of ignoring the parable of the talents. As one squatter told the proprietary land agent, “It was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on.” James Logan noticed early on how the Scots-Irish were “very rough” with the Delawares. The result was a bitter harvest of trouble in the 1750s, when the battle to control the Ohio Valley began.

  2 The Founding of Georgia

  The settling of the backcountry was not the only expansion taking place at this time. In the 1730s a more formal colony was begun on the southern flank of South Carolina and named Georgia in honor of the king. The prime mover behind this scheme was Colonel (later General) James Oglethorpe.

  A number of considerations prompted his design. After a career in the army Oglethorpe devoted himself to helping the poor of London, notably those imprisoned for debt. He suggested settling them in North America, just as the Elizabethans had sought to do with their beggars. But there were other considerations too. South Carolina, which had become an important colony, was isolated from the other provinces and had many potential enemies. A new settlement on its southern border would offer valuable protection. Several plans had been proposed since the Yamasee War but had failed for want of money. The need for action remained, however. The land south of the Savannah River had until the 1680s been controlled by Spain through its missions with the Guale or Yamasee peoples, and the British government feared that the Spanish might revive their influence. Settlement of a new colony would help to consolidate British claims to the region as well as providing a buffer for South Carolina.

  Since money was required, Oglethorpe took his scheme to Parliament. Funding was duly agreed to, though a charter still had to be obtained from the Crown. The charter was issued on June 9, 1732, to a group of 20 trustees, headed by John Viscount Percival. The trustees were granted the status of a corporation with power to elect their own council, grant lands, enact laws, and raise taxes. To avoid a conflict of interest with their charitable aims, however, no trustees could hold any paid office or receive land. In addition, their responsibilities were to terminate after 21 years in favor of the Crown. In the meantime they had to make regular reports to the Secretary of State and Board of Trade and to cooperate with the Crown's revenue officers.

  The device of appointing trustees indicated a shift in public attitudes; crude profiteering in the manner of the seventeenth century was no longer acceptable as a model for colonization, though the commercial motives behind the scheme had some similarities with past endeavors. In this case the climate of Georgia was thought to be suitable for growing the mulberry trees on which silkworms spin their cocoons, and every farm was to have 50 bushes. Similar hopes were entertained for potash and viticulture. Moral arguments also resurfaced; the settlement would provide Native Americans with a Christian example and give the colonists an opportunity to redeem themselves by hard work. However, the new venture would not have an established church. Liberty of conscience would be granted to all except papists.

  Since the scheme was to benefit the poor, Oglethorpe and Percival placed a limit on the size of landholdings. They were determined that this settlement should not follow the example of the other southern colonies, with their large plantations and discrepancies of wealth. No grant of land was to exceed 500 acres. In addition, the settlers in receipt of charity who had not purchased their lands could neither sell nor alienate their holdings, nor divide them into portions of less than 50 acres. This restriction was designed to avoid the creation of a class of either very rich or very poor people. Georgia was to remain a land of yeoman farmers.

  Figure 32 View of Savannah, March 29, 1734. Engraving by P. Fourdrinier, circa 1735. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  The paternalistic nature of the settlement was reflected in one other respect. There was to be no assembly, even though such bodies were now established in all the other mainland colonies. The power of making laws was to remain with the trustees, though their enactments had to “be reasonable and not contrary or repugnant to the laws” of England. Finally, the scheme placed considerable emphasis on defense. The new colony was to be laid out in compact townships to which everyone would be confined, thus facilitating defense in general and the formation of a militia in particular.

  Prospective settlers were to receive free passage and be given cattle, land, and subsistence until they established themselves. The period of support was not expected to be more than 12 months, for the situation was quite different from that which prevailed in the seventeenth century. As Oglethorpe argued, “Carolina abounds with provisions, the climate is
known, and there are men to instruct in the seasons and nature of cultivating the soil.” He concluded: “By such a colony many families who would otherwise starve will be provided for … the people of Great Britain to whom these necessitous families were a burden will be relieved; numbers of manufacturers will be here employed for supplying them with clothes, working tools and other necessaries; and the power of Britain … will be increased by the addition of so many religious and industrious inhabitants.”

  The first batch of 114 settlers left England with Oglethorpe towards the end of 1732, arriving at the Savannah River early in 1733. Few of the new arrivals were released debtors, the trustees having vetted the settlers so carefully as to eliminate such people. The passage had been well organized and only two emigrants had died on the voyage, a great improvement over the experience of pioneers a century earlier. Also propitious was Oglethorpe's choice of an easily defensible bluff as the site for the first town, which he then proceeded to survey in a military fashion. The new settlement, Savannah, was laid out as a series of squares, which were in turn divided into house lots, with gardens and farms to the rear.

  The settlement received an unexpected boon when the leader of a local Indian village offered to broker an alliance between the British colonists and the Creek Indians. Following the Yamasee War, most of the Guales and Yamasees had withdrawn towards St. Augustine, but a clan of Creeks known as the Yamacraws remained, under their sachem, Tomochichi. Relations between the Yamacraws, the Yamasees, and the Creeks were strained. Hence Tomochichi sought an alliance with the British as a way to bolster his own prestige and enable him to negotiate a reconciliation between his own followers and their Creek kin. Along with Mary Musgrove, the half-Creek wife of a South Carolina trader, Tomochichi helped negotiate a treaty with the main Creek nation recognizing the right of the emigrants to settle. The Creeks in turn welcomed the British as a counterbalance to the Spanish in Florida and the French along the Gulf at Biloxi and Mobile.10

  Meanwhile the settlers, organized in gangs, began clearing the ground and building houses, spurred by the knowledge that within a year they would be laboring on their own behalf. Soon other groups arrived. Among them were some Moravians from Austria and a boatload of Sephardic Jews from London. Oglethorpe was not pleased about the appearance of the latter, since like most of his countrymen he was deeply anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he accepted them, since they included several doctors and other individuals with valuable skills.

  However promising the initial 12 months, North America was soon to prove once more the graveyard of European experiments in social engineering. The trustees expected gratitude from the recipients of their charity. Instead the settlers grumbled, not least at the restrictions on where they could settle and what they could do with their land. They were particularly alienated by the decision in January 1735 to prohibit slavery. The trustees believed that this ban would encourage the settlement of “English and Christian inhabitants” who alone could be relied on in war. If the dream of a white yeoman society was to be realized, then slavery must be excluded, a point seemingly reinforced by the Stono Rebellion in 1739.11

  The settlers took a very different view. Most of those arriving in Georgia after the first few years were South Carolinians who viewed being yeoman farmers as a recipe for poverty. They wanted to become large-scale planters and, based on the experience of other colonies, believed that the use of slaves was the only means of rapid expansion.

  The trustees' paternalism was also evident in their attempt to prevent the importation of rum and other spirits. The trustees claimed that the Creeks desired such a ban because of the “great disorders among them occasioned by the use of the said liquors.” In reality the trustees feared the effect alcohol might have on their own settlers, some of whom had only recently been plucked from the streets of London, where gin cost a penny a gallon and disorder was equally prevalent.

  For a time criticism was diverted by the war against Spain. But after the fighting died down in the early 1740s, the trustees slowly had to give way on various aspects of their model society. The attempt to settle people in compact towns had never been a success. Now the restrictions on both the size of farms and the right to sell had to be removed. From 1742 holdings of up to 2,000 acres were allowed. That same July the ban on liquor was removed, if only to help Georgian merchants trading with the West Indies.

  Finally, in August 1750 the trustees conceded the right to own slaves as “an encouragement to the inhabitants.” For a time their antislavery views had been supported by Scottish settlers in the community of Darien and German Moravians in the community of Ebenezer. But the South Carolinians in Savannah, the colony's main settlement, kept up their demands. One last straw may have been the encouragement they received from George Whitefield, who argued on one of his revivalist tours that the colony would never prosper unless slavery was adopted. Not that the trustees gave in completely, for under their new decree anyone keeping four slaves had to employ at least one able-bodied white male servant; also, no African Americans were to be trained as apprentices, so as to encourage the creation of a skilled white workforce. In addition, the trustees tried to revive their plans for a silk industry by requiring slave-owners to keep one female trained “in the art of winding or reeling of silk.” Lastly an import duty was to be levied on all slaves entering the colony to support the government and pay for a Christian ministry.

  These concessions in fact represented almost the last act of the trustees. Two years later they handed over their authority to the Crown and Georgia became a royal colony, with a governor, council, and provincial assembly.

  The trustees' stewardship was not without result. By 1752, 4,500 whites and 1,500 Africans had been settled in Georgia. Parliament, however, had expended £137,000 in the process. The trustees' idealistic hopes had faded. Some silk was produced at Ebenezer for a few years, but little remained of the plan to resettle London's poor, develop compact towns, or create a new class of yeoman farmer. Georgia quickly adopted the pattern of South Carolina. Rice plantations, owned by a wealthy elite and worked by African slaves, dominated the tidewater, while small struggling farms were the norm elsewhere.

  3 The Urban Frontier

  While the backcountry and frontier areas were being developed, a rather different expansion was taking place in the east. The growth of the British North American town was underway. Until the eighteenth century British colonial towns were little more than villages, except for Boston, which by 1689 had a population of 7,000 inhabitants. No other settlement had more than 3,000 people, the figure usually set by demographers today as the minimum necessary for an urban environment.

  Figure 33 A Northeast View of Boston, attributed to William Burgis, circa 1723. Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts 1163.

  After 1715 other towns began to grow, shedding off their village origins. By 1720 Boston had 12,000 people but Philadelphia, with some 10,000 inhabitants, was catching up fast. New York had a population of 7,000, while Newport and Charleston each contained close to 4,000 people.

  The reason for this pattern of growth was the role these settlements played in the economies of their respective areas. Their first-class harbors provided an entrepôt for their respective hinterlands, both for the marketing of their produce and the distribution of imported goods. This commerce in turn supported a growing number of laborers, artisans, and other craftsmen, together with a professional class of, for example, lawyers and doctors. Hence by 1760 Philadelphia had 23,000 inhabitants, New York 18,000, Boston 16,000, Charleston 8,000, and Newport 7,500. Only Boston had failed to sustain a rapid rate of growth, having already reached a population of 16,000 by 1740. Its restricted hinterland and competition for its traditional trades had resulted in a prolonged period of stagnation.

  Growth was not limited to these five towns; by 1760 two more Massachusetts seaports, Salem and Marblehead, exceeded 3,000 inhabitants, while a number of other towns were approaching this figure. In New England these included
Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Newburyport, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; and New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut. In the middle colonies, Albany in New York and Lancaster in southeast Pennsylvania were similar in size. In the South, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Savannah were also approaching 3,000 inhabitants. Historians have also detected signs of urban activity in the piedmont of Virginia and North Carolina, where the growing wheat trade was creating centers of commerce.12

  All these places were ports on the coast or on large rivers leading to the sea. Only Lancaster was a genuine inland center, the result of the rapid influx of German and Scots-Irish settlers. Nevertheless, impressive as the growth of towns was, the number of people living in them as a proportion of the total population had actually declined, from nine percent to six percent. As fast as the towns had expanded, the countryside had grown even faster. Apparently the prospect of farm life remained more compelling to most immigrants and settlers' children than the alternative of learning a craft and becoming a self-employed urban artisan.

  Figure 34 Southeast Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, by Peter Cooper, circa 1720. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

  The five major towns posed special problems for their inhabitants, the most serious of which was fire. Boston suffered several bad fires in the seventeenth century, notably in 1676 and 1679, leading to the town's purchase of the first fire engine in British North America equipped with buckets and hand pumps. In 1691 the general court passed an ordinance that all buildings in the town were to be of brick. Still the fires raged, and in 1717 the town organized its first volunteer fire company to replace the militia units which had formerly been used. A bonus of £5 was paid to the first one arriving at the scene of a conflagration. Since the act of 1691 was frequently ignored, their services continued to be in demand. The year 1760 witnessed the worst fire of all, in which 400 houses were destroyed.