THE people of this province,” said the Pennsylvania Journal in 1756, “are generally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much upon a level. They are chiefly industrious farmers, artificers or men in trade; they enjoy and are fond of freedom, and the meanest among them thinks he has a right to civility from the greatest.”1 As always, when class relations are discussed in America, one catches a note of exaggeration. Yet what is exaggerated is only the truth, here a profound truth. What we must envisage in order to comprehend eighteenth-century America is a middle-class world. When one speaks of the middle class in a society so imperfectly measured by economic historians, one speaks inevitably with imprecision. As a first approximation, the middle class can be defined only as a stratum of propertied people who were neither conspicuously rich nor distressingly poor, and the definition can be made progressively more explicit only by enumeration and description.
There are, of course, some qualifications that must instantly be made when this society is described as middle class. It was, as we shall see, a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes. Some of the qualifications are regional: there were sharper divisions in the towns than in most of the countryside, and especially in New York and South Carolina one has to reckon with potent provincial aristocracies. There were everywhere significant differences of wealth and opportunity, and there is some evidence to suggest that in most places wealth at mid-eighteenth century was becoming somewhat less evenly distributed. In any case, when one speaks of a complex society as being substantially middle class, one conveys an implicit comparison with other societies that are less so; and the comparison made here is not with some imaginary, uniformly middle-class utopia, but with the actual societies that have appeared on the globe, and in particular with contemporaneous European societies, whose travelers here were so often struck by the middle-class quality of American life.
In this society, as in all complex societies, there were the rich and the poor, and as in all such societies the poor were disproportionately miserable and the rich disproportionately powerful. What distinguished the colonial world of the mainland was that here, much more than elsewhere, the thoughts of both rich and poor were so much directed toward the middle. Here, more than elsewhere, the poor man, if white, could really hope to edge his way into the middle class. And here, more than elsewhere, the rich man had to exercise his power in the knowledge that his way of doing so must not irritate a numerous, relatively aggressive, and largely enfranchised middle-class public. Here there were harassed governors, but no Court; there were rich men and influential councillors, but no nobility; there were churches, two of them with the thin legal claims of establishments, but no Church with a full hierarchical panoply and a deeply rooted place in the texture of the society; here there were struggling colleges, competently educating the future rulers and ministers of the provinces, but no ancient universities fit to serve as the hiving places of boisterous young aristocrats; here there were stunningly large tracts of lands put at the disposal of favorites and speculators, but on them were no magnificent estates manned by scores of servants and capable of feeding scores of brilliant and fashionable guests. This was a scene in which the basic institutions of Old World society were represented by shadowy substitutes, but in which the simpler agencies of the middle class were in strong evidence: the little churches of the dissenting sects, the taverns (then known as “ordinaries”), the societies for self-improvement and “philosophical” inquiry, the increasingly eclectic little colleges; the contumacious newspapers, the county courthouses and town halls, the how-to-do books, the Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Eighteenth-century colonials recognized classes in their own realistic way by speaking quite routinely of “the better sort,” “the middling sort,” and “the meaner sort.” Still, what made colonial mainland society a preponderantly middle-class world was not the absence of other classes but the overwhelming weight and presence of the middle class, by the standards of the time—a weight and presence measured not only in numbers and in exemplary influence, but in politics and the suffrage, in the prevalent manners and political ideas. The qualities of an aristocracy were, to be sure, not altogether missing: there were pockets of inherited family pride and privilege and, with allowances for the American scale of things, of aggrandized wealth. There was also a significant measure everywhere of elite solidarity and control. But there was only a slender sense of the personal prerogative, the code of honor, or the grand extravagance in life-style that goes with a hereditary aristocracy. What one saw in constant evidence—and one saw it even among the upper classes and the lower—was the disciplined ethic of work, the individual assertiveness, the progressive outlook, the preference for dissenting religions, and the calculating and materialistic way of life associated with the middle class.
Middle-class aspirations not only caused the upper classes to temper their ways, but penetrated white society at its less affluent levels. And not unrealistically: eighteenth-century French observers of England commented with surprise and envy at the readiness with which an Englishman of vigor and resourcefulness could move from one class to another; but English observers of the colonies, as well as boastful natives, made the same comparisons between the colonies and the home country. In the colonies goodly numbers of those starting life below the middle class not only shared its aspirations but had a significant chance to realize them within a lifetime. And in this America was supreme. Open the work of an English historian writing a general history of the eighteenth century, and you will soon be in the midst of a strong and necessary preoccupation with the grinding, unremitting poverty of the small farmer or the pestiferous, deadly squalor of the urban poor. Open the work of his American counterpart, and you are as likely as not to find an equally strong preoccupation with the process by which the propertyless man or the small farmer arrived at more comfortable circumstances.
But of course this was a middle-class world with a difference, which sets it off from post-industrial worlds: it was a middle-class rural society, peopled mainly by farmers and small planters and by those who bought from them, supplied them, worked for or slaved for them. Perhaps eight out of ten of its people made their living from farming, the rest as artisans or in extractive industries. Its middle class was based less upon shopkeeping, industry, or urban services than upon the widespread ownership of the land, which in America was easier to get and keep, to work and inherit, than anywhere else in the world. Still a harsh society for those without land, skill, and freedom, the society of the mainland colonies put land in remarkable quantities into the hands of a sizable proportion of its people, paid more for industrial skills than it desired to, and honored freedom more generously the more it exploited its slaves.
The colonial world was no more homogeneous in regional economies than it was in religious and ethnic stocks. The five substantial towns of the seaboard marked its most significant urban enclaves; and in addition to these we can distinguish a number of major variations on the basic rural theme: the New England villages, the Hudson River estates, the Chesapeake society, the South Carolina planting society, and the backcountry.
The major urban enclaves in rural America, the five seaboard cities, throve by exporting rural surpluses. Philadelphia, which grew fastest, did so because of the richness of the interior it served in exportable wheat, flour, bread, beef, pork, butter, iron, lumber, and furs—goods which were conveyed by its merchants to the West Indies and to northern and southern Europe. Boston, by contrast, serving an interior without an abundance of surpluses, failed to grow at all; the other ports, New York, Newport, and Charles Town, grew moderately. By mid-century each of these cities had developed its own commercial gentry, knowledgeable in the ways of the world’s markets, busy in coastal trade with each other, and engaged in strengthening their familial and cultural ties. Visitors were often impressed by these cities. Peter Kalm noted in 1748 that Philadelphia had come into existence within the lifetime of one man: “And yet its natural advantages, trade, riches and power, are by no means inferior to any, even of the most ancient towns in Europe.” “The nobleness of the town,” confessed an English naval officer eight years later concerning New York, “surprised me more than the fertile appearance of the country. I had no idea of finding a place in America, consisting of near 2,000 houses, elegantly built of brick, raised on an eminence and the streets paved and spacious, furnished with commodious keys and warehouses, and employing some hundreds of vessels in its foreign trade and fisheries—but such is this city that very few in England can rival it in its show.”2
In cities so highly developed it was impossible for candid observers to pretend that there was no class system. Arthur Browne, an Anglican clergyman who had lived in Newport, Boston, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, took pleasure in pointing out that utopian aspirations toward classlessness were belied even by American experience: “The inhabitants of the town by more information, better polish and greater intercourse with strangers, insensibly acquired an ascendancy over the farmer of the country; the richer merchants of these towns, together with the clergy, lawyers, physicians and officers of the English navy who had occasionally settled there, were considered as gentry: even being a member of the Church of England gave a kind of distinctive fashion. A superior order thus formed by better property and more information existed even to a degree sufficient to excite jealousy in the agricultural system, and to be a gentleman was sufficient in some parts of the country to expose the bearer of the name to mockery and rudeness …”3
There is a reason, moreover, to suppose that during the century preceding the Revolution urban inequalities increased in some respects. James Henretta’s researches, based on Boston’s tax records for 1687 and 1771, show that the proportion of its adult males without taxable property had increased over this long span of time from 14 per cent to 29 per cent. The standard of living of craftsmen, small shopkeepers, and laborers had undoubtedly improved considerably with the economic development of the community as a whole, but their relative position vis-à-vis the richer merchants was somewhat poorer. In 1687 the richest quarter of the taxable population had had 66 per cent of the assessed wealth; by the eve of the Revolution it had 78 per cent. The mercantile elite was growing more prominent and somewhat more exclusive.4 Whether this trend, mapped out in a static city whose population declined between the early 1740’s and 1760 and did not significantly rise again until after the Revolution, was duplicated in the more dynamic cities of the seaboard is still uncertain.
Yet when all this is said, it must be remembered that the mercantile upper crust in the American cities was an open class with few other barriers to acceptance beyond wealth, and that wealth acquired through a series of good strokes of business or a fortunate marriage could bring a family from obscurity to prominence in two generations or even in one. “A man who has money here,” said a Rhode Island sea captain in 1748, “no matter how he came by it, he is everything, and wanting that he’s a mere nothing, let his conduct be ever so irreproachable. Money is here the true fuller’s earth for reputation, there is not a spot or stain but it will take out.”5 This is rather like what Defoe had written about England a half century earlier:
Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes
Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes:
Antiquity and birth are needless here;
’Tis impudence and money makes a peer.
In Europe, especially in England, the aristocracy modified itself over time by intermarriage with the business class. In America the aristocracy, such as it was, constituted itself out of the business class—a proposition which is true even of the South when full regard is given to the entrepreneurial ways of most planters. And the emergent middle class carried its pristine bourgeois standards upward with it. The middle-class search for comfort and convenience was more in evidence than the search for elegance and display, and so were its rather calculating morals and discipline, its manners, and its political ideas. Cadwallader Colden, who himself held no low station in the society of New York, celebrated not the standards of the upper segment to which he belonged but those of the class just beneath it. “Riches,” he pronounced, “are not always acquired by the honestest means, nor are they always accompanied by the greatest integrity of mind, with the most knowledge, or with the most generous sentiments and public spirit … the middling rank of mankind in all countries and in all ages, have justly obtain’d the character, to be generally the most honest.… And I am likewise fully persuaded that we may much more safely trust our liberty and property with our neighbors of middling rank than with those of the greatest riches who are thereby tempted to lord it over their neighbors.” Benjamin Franklin, planning for his son William at sixteen, envisaged for him a way of life rooted not in those topmost colonial strata to which Franklin had access but in the middle ranks from which he had come. “I don’t want him to be what is commonly called a gentleman,” Franklin wrote a friend. “I want to put him to some business by which he may, with care and industry, get a temperate and reasonable living.”6 Hence the philosophy, the political values, the moral commitments of the townspeople, even into the upper ranks, remained middle class.
The situation of propertyless wage workers is never enviable, and the seaboard cities were filling with a working class subject to all the hazards of the economy. Merchant seamen, though their wages in good times were higher than the average for other workers, followed a particularly miserable trade which subjected them to grave mistreatment. Yet by the lights of the time, free labor in every segment in the economy from the seaboard cities to the hamlets of the interior was well paid, and had been from the beginning, justifying the summary verdict of Judge William Allen: “You may depend upon it that this is one of the best poor man’s countries in the world.”7 In the early days of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop had complained that workmen took advantage of their scarcity to “raise their wages to an excessive rate,” and at the end of the seventeenth century a Pennsylvania observer reported that if high wages were refused them, laborers “would quickly set up by themselves, for they can have provisions very cheap, and land for a very small matter, or next to nothing in comparison of the purchase of lands in England.”8 Hence the working class too could aspire to a proprietary condition and to joining the ranks of the “middling sort” with considerably better chances of real success than anywhere else.
The employing classes, living under the guidance of the prevailing mercantilist theories, had no hesitation about setting maximum wage rates by law. But such laws were all but hopeless in America where the machinery of law was notably feeble. The laws, drawn solely with the interests of employers in mind, put labor at a disadvantage; but the market was on labor’s side, and the market was stronger. Wages were, by the common estimate of contemporaries, often two or three times what they were in England,9 but even the margin between wages and land costs was so slender that proprietorship was always tempting.1 This made labor undependable, and enterprises were known to fail not for lack of cheap materials or good markets but because their labor supply evaporated in the open American air. Laws, particularly common in the Southern colonies, requiring men to stick to their trades and not abandon them for farming were another insufficient and unenforceable remedy. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that employers seized upon indentured servants who were bound to serve out a term of labor and in the South eagerly imported slaves bound for life.
A labor force relatively free from dire need was also free from a spirit of subservience. “When we hire any of these people,” said Crèvecoeur, drawing a contrast between England and America, “we rather pray and entreat them. You must give them what they ask.… They must be at your table and feed … on the best you have.” In New Jersey the teacher Philip Fithian saw “gentlemen, when they are not actually engaged in the public service, on their farms, setting a laborious example to their domestics, and on the other hand we see labourers at the tables and in the parlours of their betters enjoying the advantage, and honour of their society and conversation.” A British official reported in 1760 that “under forms of a democratical government, all mortifying distinctions of rank are lost in common equality; and … the ways of wealth and preferment are alike open to all men.”2 Patently an exaggeration, this statement nevertheless marked out the direction of American society, its deviation from what decent Englishmen thought right. The reports of royal governors on the state of American politics in the 1760’s rumble with anxiety about the effects upon civic life of an aggressive and self-confident lower class. Governor William Bull of South Carolina not long before the outbreak of the Revolution found city politics taking a direction “inclined more to the democratical than regal scale.” Concerning Boston, Governor William Shirley complained after the anti-impressment riot of 1747 that “the principal cause of the mobbish turn in this town is in its Constitution; by which the management of it is devolved upon the populace assembled in their town meetings; where … the meanest inhabitants who by their constant attendance there are generally in the majority and outvote the gentlemen, merchants, substantial traders and all the better part of the inhabitants to whom it is irksome to attend.”3
It is tempting to think of New England simply as a region of obdurate villagers, homogeneously English and Congregationalist. Certainly it showed a more recognizable likeness to the mother country than could be seen anywhere among the more mixed peoples to the south. The anonymous author of American Husbandry saw “in many respects a great resemblance between New England and Great Britain,” which in the most cultivated parts might make a traveler think himself not far from home, while a British officer after a colonial tour in the 1760’s thought Boston “more like an English old town than any in America—the language and manners of the people, very much resemble the old country.”4
Yet for all this, the New England colonies differed markedly from England and all of Europe in their social structure and class relations; they also differed significantly from each other, not least in their economies. Striking as the social distance might be between a Boston or Newport merchant and the poorest of the inland villagers, New Englanders had quite unwittingly devised an economy as close to egalitarian as anything in the Western world. While the early Puritan ministers and civic leaders had gone on honing their denunciations of democracy to a sharp edge, the religious and communal aspirations, the land policies, and the social composition of their hearers had silently put the society on the path toward a relatively democratic polity.
In 1772 Benjamin Franklin made a tour of Ireland and Scotland, where he was impressed by the state of “landlords, great noblemen, and gentlemen, extremely opulent, living in the highest affluence and magnificence,” and at the same time appalled at the condition of “the bulk of the people tenants, extremely poor, living in the most sordid wretchedness, in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags.” In contrast, “I thought often of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family.”5 “We in New England,” wrote Joseph Trumbull of Connecticut from England in 1764, “know nothing of poverty and want, we have no idea of the thing, how much better do our poor people live than ⅞ of the people of this much famed island.”6
The author of American Husbandry agreed. “Respecting the lower classes of New England,” he wrote, “there is scarcely any part of the world in which they are better off. The price of labour is very high, and they have with this advantage another no less valuable, of being able to take up a tract of land whenever they are able to settle it.… This great ease of gaining a farm, renders the lower class of people very industrious; which, with the high price of labour, banishes every thing that has the least appearance of begging, or that wondering, destitute state of poverty, which we see so common in England.” As for substantial farmers, he found those of Britain “incomparably richer” than those of New England, but when he turned to the lower class of farmers, he thought that there was not “a more miserable set of men to be found than the little farmers in Britain … whereas in New England, the little freeholders and farmers live in the midst of plenty of all the necessaries of life; they do not acquire wealth, but they have comforts and abundance.”7
New England had always been set off by certain methods of colonization—a measured approach to the settlement of the western wilderness, the careful preliminary survey of new lands, the creation of new towns under a system in which the lands were divided—though not equally—largely among resident proprietors, a soberly marshaled progression based upon relatively compact settlement. New England village society, with its town church and its town meeting and its sense of moral community, seemed determined, at least for its first century and more—there would be grave changes in the eighteenth century—to edge its way slowly into the resistant wild lands, keeping its old ways as intact as possible. Most New Englanders were general farmers, very few of them on a large scale. And although they were tilling a soil that was—with some notable regional exceptions in Rhode Island and Connecticut—rocky and relatively infertile, and tilling it with methods that fell far short of the best then known, they managed to create and sustain a strikingly peaceful and comfortable rural society. Unlike farmers in other colonies they did so without a substantial force of indentured servants at their beck—New England had somehow always been relatively unreceptive to them8—or of slaves.
On the seacoast, of course, New England made good use of its opportunities in the fisheries, shipbuilding, distilling (rum, the traders of Massachusetts claimed in 1748, was “the great support of all their trade and fishery; without which they can no longer subsist”9) and slave trading. Massachusetts, though a society of farmers, was actually importing wheat in the 1750’s; but Connecticut and Rhode Island had soil rich enough to produce cereals beyond local needs and to provide grain and cattle, beef, pork, and horses for the export trade. All New England had timber, and New Hampshire had enormous white pine trees suitable for great masts, produced at a striking profit. Yet little of the commercial wealth reaped on the seaboard, which was by far the most inegalitarian of the regions of New England, reached the interior. The commonly observed comfort and solidity of the general farming regions of New England must be traced to other foundations. Its broadly shared land must surely be one of them. An outstanding feature of New England rural society was the relatively small proportion of landless men, which, even in the eastern Massachusetts counties, did not usually exceed 20 per cent.1 This, of course, suggests a common minimum of comfort rather than flat equality. In Massachusetts as a whole, it is estimated that the wealthiest 10 per cent at mid-century and shortly after owned about half the inventoried property—a soale of distribution which, though far from egalitarian, is considerably more so than that which was shown in the United States at the mid-twentieth century.2 Yet it must be remembered that this figure incorporates the sharp inequalities of the towns, and that the distribution of wealth in rural New England was notably more equitable.
The New England system of compact settlement made it much more feasible for the people of its interior to take advantage of the division of labor than in other colonial regions. In the rural South, by contrast, the vast diffusion of the population through the countryside made it extremely difficult for artisans to find a settled market for their skills, to maintain standards, and to get a satisfactory living from their trades. Rather quickly they drifted into the ranks of the farmers. A few wealthy townsmen and great planters might provide for their needs by importing highly skilled craftsmen as indentured servants, or by training slaves. But the great majority of the smaller planters and farmers had to improvise, do without, or buy expensive imported wares.3 In New England better markets were to be had for the craftsman’s skills, and the entire population benefited accordingly. Compact village conditions were more consistently to be found. Connecticut, for example, in the curiously limited sense in which we must use the term for the eighteenth century, was the most “urban” of the colonies, as measured by the number of towns having about four thousand people.4 Where a blacksmith, a cooper, a cobbler, a carpenter were lacking, they were often procured by common town effort, often with a handsome portion of land as a special inducement. Ingenuity and crafts and skills flourished.5 What was true in this respect of New England was also true on the whole of the more compactly settled areas of the rural North generally; but in New England, where long, closed-in winters and folkish habits of industry and inventiveness both conspired to develop indoor skills, they flowered.
When a satisfactory account of its early economic development is written, the industriousness of the New England population may well rank along with these other forces as an explanation of the region’s high standard of comfort. Its work habits were those of a disciplined population which, contemplating its opportunities to get ahead, had first-rate incentives. New England also had behind it the moral impulsions of a disciplined community which looked upon work as having a quasi-religious merit and upon worldly success as a possible token of God’s favor. Comparing New England with New France, the Jesuit Charlevoix made note of the prudential economics of the New Englanders. In New France, he said, “there reigns an opulence by which the people seem not to know how to profit; while … poverty is hidden under an air of ease which appears entirely natural. The English colonist keeps as much and spends as little as possible; the French colonist enjoys what he has got, and often makes a display of what he has not got. The one labors for his heirs; the other leaves them to get on as they can, like himself.”6 Living in a compact community, and surrounded by a large body of grandparents, uncles, and cousins, the young New Englander beginning a search for a livelihood had the props of kinship to assure him of an occasional helping hand and a respectable place in the community. If he chose to cut himself off from these bonds by moving to a newly settled area, he might only be trading them for the significant advantages of the early resident-proprietor of a new town. Finally, even the political structure of the towns was conducive to pride and self-respect: there were so many official functions, major and minor, especially in the early phases of town development, and these were so often rotated, that to exercise at least minor authority and responsibility was part of the experience of an extraordinarily high proportion of the adult males of the New England village.7
In the decades following the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, the New England colonies underwent a period of phenomenal growth. By mid-century there were signs of a new and critical phase in the economic development of older New England, which was now reaching the limits of its internal land supply. Recent demographic studies have all pointed to a similar pattern in the land supply: town lands were ample for the first resident generation, and remained sufficient to accommodate the second; but by the third a pinch was felt, and emigration began to be necessary.8 For example, the frontier town of Kent, Connecticut, situated in the northwest corner of the state, was founded in 1738. Its land supply accommodated the second generation, the sons of the original residents, as they came of age in the 1750’s and 1760’s, even though individuals had less land to work than their fathers. The third generation, reaching adulthood after 1770, found themselves inheriting much smaller slices. The pressure of population on the land began to be felt acutely, large numbers emigrated, and those who stayed behind found themselves in declining circumstances.9 Many villages to the east had gone earlier through a similar cycle of development. As long as their internal supply of ungranted land held out, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island had been able to contain these pressures, but the extraordinary population growth of the early eighteenth century brought them to the point of more or less saturated settlement by about 1755, except for some tracts remaining in northwest Massachusetts.1 In the 1760’s, as soon as the war with France was over on the American continent and frontier uncertainties were removed, a new thrust began into Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, but these regions did not long suffice, and in 1781, at the end of the military action of the Revolutionary War, New England settlement once again would begin to make great new leaps that carried it into upstate and western New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and then beyond.
By mid-century land speculation was raging through Massachusetts and Connecticut. The practice of limiting land grants for new towns to congregations had already broken down in Connecticut at the end of the seventeenth century, and government need for income from land sales pushed the process forward, so that it now became increasingly easy for individual speculators to acquire land.2 Massachusetts followed suit, especially after 1725, and before long land speculation was rampant in New England, undermining the old steady pattern of town settlement and shifting the attention of villagers from cultivating the land to cultivating land values. In 1753 a group of Connecticut entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the broad terms of Connecticut’s charter which had promised land from sea to sea, made a questionable purchase of about two hundred square miles in Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River from the Indians, organized as the Susquehanna Company, and distributed stock shares widely among leading personages in the colony. Large proprietors, of course, benefited from the land rage, though in nothing like the dimensions that prevailed outside New England; but the passion for speculation reached down to the level of the ordinary farmers.3 The urge to exploit the land was changing the old order, the Yankee entrepreneur was replacing the Puritan villager, and that desire for novelty, for moving from place to place, already so strongly manifested in other colonies and among other stocks, was now becoming characteristic of New Englanders as well.
The Hudson River was like a dagger cutting a swath of land monopoly and aristocratic domination between New England and the colonies to the south and west. The Dutch had attempted to import into New York a quasi-feudal system of ownership and control in the huge patroonships of the Hudson Valley, and the early English governors had not only confirmed the patroons’ titles but had outdone the Dutch in showing favoritism to land monopolists. Near the end of the seventeenth century, after a short interval during which grants of moderate size were common, Governor Benjamin Fletcher had handed out to favorites grants of such insolent and flamboyant extravagance that his successor, the Earl of Bellomont, found it was now all but impossible to settle the country with inhabitants, “there being no land but what must be purchased from his few grantees.” “This whole Province,” he complained, “is given away to about thirty persons in effect,” and he was not surprised to find settlers flowing out of New York when men could “buy the fee-simple lands in the Jerseys for £5 per hundred acres, and I believe as cheaply in Pennsylvania.”4 Hence, along the eastern and southern borders of New York, there were carved out in a helter-skelter fashion great blocks of land whose boundaries were drawn by fraud and maladministration as much as by design, the region along the Hudson of Pelham Manor, Scarsdale Manor, Fordham Manor, Morrisania, Cortlandt Manor, Livingston Manor, and others; and, between the Hudson and the east branch of the Delaware, another series of patents running up to as much as 300,000 acres in size. The Hardenburgh Patent in Ulster County was estimated in 1749 at over one million acres. Livingston Manor, one of the best managed of the Hudson estates, had almost 160,000.
New York landlords preferred renting to selling, and tried to hold land prices up to artificial levels which were highly unrealistic by American standards. They were sustained in this practice by the tax policies of the province, which, by not taxing unimproved lands, made it possible to hold on to large tracts for long periods without prohibitive cost. Richard Peters, the Secretary of Pennsylvania, was appalled at the contrasting policy that prevailed beyond his colony’s northern border: “I’m vastly surprised that this monstrous monopoly has never been taken notice of when the remedy appears so plain and effectual, nothing more than a tax upon each 100 acres of unimproved land which would render it impracticable for any single man to hold a very large tract, and would very soon divide these vast bodies into more useful parts.”5
But the manor lords had little difficulty in dominating the Assembly, and, counting tenants, hired laborers, indentured servants, and slaves, New York developed a numerous landless and relatively poor population. Since word had gone out that this colony was no place for a poor man, New York shared but lightly in the population boom of the post-Utrecht period, until about 1750 when it began to attract settlers, many of whom were squatters, from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. New York then entered upon a period of growth and turbulence which arose from the incongruity between its land policies and those of its neighbors. This era was marked by boundary disputes and by memorable land riots which British regulars had to be called in to quell.
In agricultural management New York tended to share the defects of its neighbors, but in industry it was relatively inactive. A modest amount of iron was extracted on Livingston Manor, beaver hats were made, and there were rum distilleries ancillary to the trade with the Indians and Africa. The fur trade, centered in Albany, was an important focus of colonial enterprise, tapping a large area of the north country and Canada, and yielding handsome profits to rich Albany enterprisers. The Albany merchants enjoyed a bad reputation for swilling the Indians with rum so they could buy pelts for cheap trinkets and trifles; they were even accused in the 1740’s, not least by Governor George Clinton, of egging on French-allied Indians to plunder New England settlements, hoping to profit from the loot. The traveler Peter Kalm thought: “The avarice, selfishness, immeasurable love of money of the inhabitants of Albany are well known throughout all North America.”6
South of New York lay the heartland of the rural middle-class society of the colonies—the region of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, an area characterized in the main by agrarian prosperity, and by repeated bursts of self-satisfaction which seem on the whole to have been warranted. Its center, Pennsylvania, was still growing apace as Germans and Ulstermen overtook the English and Quaker population. As complex ethnically as New England was simple, Pennsylvania was proud of the masterless self-sufficiency of its propertied farmers. It was a saying there, Gottlieb Mittelberger reported, that Pennsylvania was “heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”7 The geographer and surveyor Lewis Evans attributed the well-being of Pennsylvania to its land policies. “What the world has imputed to the happiness of our constitution, is with more justice to be ascribed to the happy management of the land offices,” he wrote. At these offices cheap land could be had through simple procedures, and one could be sure of firm and unchallengeable land titles. “Every man is glad to hold immediately under the Chief Lord of the Soil. And if we add to this the great ease, and dispatch that business has been done with in our offices, we need not wonder to see so many strangers flock thither to partake of our happiness.”8
Mittelberger credited Pennsylvania’s extraordinary heritage of religious freedom with its liberality and well-being. Among the dozen and more distinct religious groups in the province, he reported, he seldom heard or saw a quarrel. “Even strangers trust each other more than acquaintances in Europe. People are far more sincere and generous than in Germany; therefore our Americans live more quietly and peacefully together than the Europeans; and all this is the result of the liberty which they enjoy and which makes them all equal.” He found the rural Pennsylvanians quick to share their abundance. One could travel about the province “for a whole year without spending a kreuzer,” he wrote; upon arrival at a house the traveler “is asked whether he wishes to have anything to eat. Then the stranger is given a piece of cold meat, generally left over from a meal. In addition he is given plenty of bread, butter or cheese, as well as drink. If he wants to stay overnight, he and his horse can do so, free of charge.”9
Travelers in the rural areas of Pennsylvania and the other Middle Colonies often commented on the absence of great estates and the comfortable condition of those living even on the smallest. In the most commercially successful farming areas of this region, however, as in other regions, there is some reason to believe that settlement and economic development led to somewhat greater inequalities of possession. At least one area, Chester County, with good soil, good markets, and good transportation, appears to have undergone a gradual but steady concentration of wealth during the eighteenth century, though at the same time there may also have been a gradual improvement in the living standards of the poorest farmers. In 1715 the poorest 60 per cent of the taxpayers there owned 36 per cent of the assessed taxable wealth; by 1760 they owned 26.8 per cent, and while their share of the whole continued to go down thereafter the total amount of their income rose.1
Delaware and New Jersey shared in large part the character of Pennsylvania, their lands being given over to general small-scale farming, much of it on good soil, with relatively few grand estates. Economically and politically they were both somewhat anomalous, since they were appendages of Pennsylvania and New York. New Jersey shared the misfortune of having New York’s governors until 1738 when it became a separate colony. Economically and culturally it was split in two, East Jersey, oriented economically toward the port of New York and religiously toward New England Congregationalism and New York Presbyterianism, and West Jersey, strongly influenced by its seventeenth-century Quaker proprietors, sharing Pennsylvania’s Quaker heritage, and marketing its produce in Philadelphia. Delaware’s port was Philadelphia and its governor Pennsylvania’s. It could hardly be said that these two colonies were overgoverned. New York’s governors were preoccupied with that province, while Delaware’s existence as a province separate from Pennsylvania rested on shaky legal foundations. With its Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, English Quakers, Scotch-Irish, and New England émigrés, the area was notably heterogeneous, and yet largely free of sectarian controversy. In 1742 Governor Lewis Morris of New Jersey described the people of his province as “the most easy and happy people of any colony in North America.”2 But if he had lived some years longer (he died in 1746) he would have seen more than a score of riots in East Jersey out of conflicts between squatters and proprietors, a series of emphatic exclamation points appended to the effort, here again unsuccessful, to transplant to America the prerogatives of feudalism.
Observers with some knowledge of the Northern Colonies commented on the greater social and economic inequality they saw in the upper South.3 They also noted the extraordinarily thin dispersal of the population through this countryside, where self-sufficiency of a sort was the goal of all good managers and where even a modest farm or plantation might occupy two hundred acres. Here, after the compact villages of New England and the pocket-scale urbanity of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, was a society truly and thoroughly rural. Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia, was a hamlet of some two hundred houses and about a thousand people, white and black. Richmond, a county seat, was a tiny village. Of Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, which was even smaller than Williamsburg, the English vicar Andrew Burnaby, who saw it in 1759, remarked: “None of the streets are paved, and the few public buildings here are not worth mentioning. The church is a very poor one, the stadt-house but indifferent, and the governor’s palace is not finished.”4
Yet here, in the tobacco country, lay the center of gravity of the colonial population, and here were the mainland provinces most prized in the mother country. Chesapeake society—the area that stretched across provincial boundaries from Maryland through Virginia to embrace the Albemarle section of North Carolina—produced the colonies’ richest staple, their most valued export. They were also experiencing a most startling and momentous social change, as their white bonded labor was fast receding before waves of blacks. Coming from the Northern colonies, the alert traveler could sense, even though no one yet spoke of Southerners or a Southern accent, the outlines of a distinctly different civilization. The historical image of the colonial South has been fixed upon the great planters, the large slaveholders, the Dulanys and Carrolls of Maryland, the Carters and Byrds of Virginia. These men, along with their cousins, associates, and allies in the planter class, set the tone of Southern societies, established the articulate traditions, and had the lion’s share of making the ruling decisions. But in sheer numbers, even in the tidewater plantation counties, the men who made up the bulk of Chesapeake society were small planters and yeoman farmers, many of the latter holding no slaves, men of slender means but strikingly little social discontent, men who lived limited lives bound to the annual rhythms of the tobacco crop. Passed over by historians, this middle stratum was eminently visible to contemporaries and vital to the economic and political order.
In the older commercial counties of Virginia where lands had undergone much subdivision, only about 5 per cent of the white population could be called great planters. Two-thirds of the whites there had farms of two hundred acres or less.5 The poorest—those with meager estates worth less than £50—were perhaps a fifth of the whole white population. The majority fell somewhere between, a broad middle layer with varying prospects and a wide range of living standards. In Maryland, whose social strata have been studied in more detail than those of Virginia, nine out of ten planting families at mid-century had estates worth less than £500. These planters would be producing at least some tobacco for sale, but the cash returns of those in the bottom ranks were hardly more than enough to supply the next year’s cash needs, and supported little more than a “country living,” a crude abundance based on home-grown cows and pigs, corn and vegetables. Moving upward on this scale, one passes gradually from this rude sufficiency to solid comfort, to planters who had bonded labor to serve them, substantial and amply equipped houses, and sufficient income to permit savings and investment and to offer some assurance that their children could be launched upon equally comfortable lives.6
As for the planters near the top, they were by this time beginning to feel the pressure of a voracious staple that had now been cultivated for well over a century, and that usually could be planted only one year in three on one patch of soil. The ceaseless clearing of fresh lands enforced by the nutritional demands of the tobacco plant had driven the Virginians deep into the interior and had strained the backs of generations of indentured servants and now of slaves. The lavish ways of the leading families, inherited from the days of fresher soils and better markets, were already putting many of them in debt, and those who relied on tobacco alone to finance their high standard of living were in serious trouble. In Maryland the large planting fortunes had always depended to a considerable degree on something besides tobacco—land speculation, mercantile activities, moneylending, iron manufacturing, flour milling. The practice of law was a steady and valuable source of cash in itself, but, more important, led to personal connections and to knowledge of business trends and conditions, of the drift of the land market, all of which could be converted into speculative profits.7 By 1750 Virginia was well launched into a final burst of pre-Revolutionary expansion and speculation: between 1743 and 1760 its Council granted over three million acres of western land to groups and individuals. Wealth and status were converted into office and political influence, which in turn was converted into privileged access to the land. Speculators leased some of their lands over long terms to tenants in return for contractually specified improvements—a practice enormously profitable to landlords. Otherwise, speculators could hold a portion of their lands for appreciation, selling parcels of several hundred acres to new planters when prices reached an acceptable level. Representative patents of the period ran to 50,000 and 100,000 acres. In 1745, a provincial councillor, Thomas Lee, along with a group of associates and one prominent London merchant, organized themselves as the Ohio Company of Virginia, and were given the right to receive and survey a tract of 200,000 acres along the Ohio; they were promised another 300,000 if within seven years they would build a fort and garrison it and settle a hundred families. In 1749 grants to the Loyal Land Company totaled 800,000 acres.8
But land so easily come by could not, as it turned out, be sold extortionately; there was simply too much competition. Over a period of thirty-two years the Beverley family sold 71,000 acres at an average price of less than a shilling an acre. William Byrd sold land at one or two pounds for a hundred acres. Since land was available at such prices and on installment, men of moderate skill could acquire a substantial acreage with the proceeds of a few months’ labor.9 Land speculation touched small owners as well as large patent holders. Not only craftsmen and artisans but merchants and professionals were drawn into the land boom. The case of Jonathan Boucher, known to history chiefly as a Loyalist spokesman, typifies the nature of the opportunities and the appeal of the land. Six years of work in England had brought him only to the position of a tutor at £30 a year, but when he came to Virginia as a schoolmaster in 1759 he received £60 sterling together with room and board and the privilege of taking four extra students at his own price. By 1763, now an Anglican minister, Boucher also had bought a plantation and ran a small school. Shortly thereafter he reported an annual income of £250 and a net worth of £700. Land was so readily acquired that during the 1740’s and 1750’s the governors complained periodically that they could not recruit men for the army because there was no class of landless idlers to draw from. Explaining his failure to raise men in 1759, Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia complained: “Every man in this colony has land and none but Negroes are laborers.”1
Thus, between the dominant and flamboyantly wealthy upper crust of planters and, on the lowest level, the modest number of poor whites and the mass of blacks stood a broad class of white farmers, moderately prosperous or at least comfortable, many owning their own slaves and all feeling the decisive bond of whiteness in a society rapidly growing blacker. The problem of class in Virginia was complex, and class relationships and manners were changing. Probably the best description of the common people of Virginia was written by the Reverend Devereux Jarratt, a notably successful Anglican revivalist in the later decades of the century. Born in 1732 in the Piedmont, Jarratt was the son of a country carpenter whose family lived in a rural abundance quite bare of luxuries. Simple and uneducated, they thought of themselves as occupying a very low station in the social hierarchy, although Jarratt’s paternal grandfather owned and his father inherited 1,200 acres. The Jarratts thought of gentlefolk as superior beings, “A periwig, in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk—when I saw a man riding the road … with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears … that, I daresay, I would run off, as for my life.”2 Significantly, this sense of awe of the gentry, which Jarratt thought universal among his rank and age, had so changed by the end of his life when he wrote his memoirs that he thought the opposite pattern had come to prevail. And certainly a kind of deference had long been carefully paid by the upper class to the lower class of whites, in part as a necessity of politics, in part as a way of cementing the social bonds of white men.3
For if the gentry had learned, as Virginia’s political practices suggest, to defer in their manner to the enfranchised small planters and farmers, it was not solely to win office but to hold white society together. One other aspiration that surely held it together was the desire to arrive at the point, already reached by so many and surely within the reach of many more, at which one’s life was eased and fattened, made more endurable, by owning bonded labor—a desire curiously put by one Virginian who disliked slavery but conceded: “This is part of our grievance, but to live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”4 No one can say how much the incoming tide of blacks, setting desire and fear on the same side of the scale, eliminated friction between whites. But it can be said that Maryland and Virginia, which had had their full share of turbulence in the seventeenth century, were notably tranquil in the middle of the eighteenth. The energies of the people now went into personal advancement rather than class or group conflict. And the ways of this world were readily accepted by white newcomers. A group of Maryland Germans, writing to urge their countrymen to join them, reported in 1746: “We here enjoy full liberty of conscience … the law of the land is so constituted, that every man is secure in the enjoyment of his property, the meanest person is out of reach of oppression from the most powerful, nor can anything be taken from him without his receiving satisfaction for it.”5 In the Chesapeake society, under a ruling gentry reasonably united and enjoying the support and acceptance of the lesser planters, there were suppressed anxieties based upon problems of economic solvency and of race, but there was a notable absence of tumult and mordant discontent.6
“The planters,” said Henry Laurens in 1750, “are full of money,”7 and if the South Carolina Assembly had taken the trouble to provide itself with a statehouse instead of meeting in private homes, this might have been a suitably emblematic phrase to put over its entrance. South Carolina in its heyday enjoyed a prosperity that surpassed anything seen in the other colonies, its leaders rejoicing in their well-being at a time when Virginians were beginning to worry about their debts. As compared with Virginia, South Carolina was a new colony, an upstart, whose first permanent settlement had been made when Virginia had been growing for more than sixty years. Even in 1730 South Carolina had only about 12,000 inhabitants, and at the time Laurens spoke it was still filling with newcomers, its upper ranks swelling with the newly rich. Profitable rice culture on a considerable scale began only with the eighteenth century and the indigo crop in the 1740’s; the economy had only lately grown rich on these staples and on its trade in deerskins, livestock, and timber.
By comparison with Charles Town’s elite, old Boston’s upper crust looked poor and flimsy,8 and the hedonistic life of the South Carolina capital put the other seaboard towns in the shade. Josiah Quincy, Jr., looking at South Carolina with the cool eye of an alien New Englander, found it “divided into opulent and lordly planters, poor and spiritless peasants and vile slaves.”9 But he missed the secret of the province’s strength: it lacked the vigorous middle class of several of the other colonies, but it compensated for that lack in good measure by the extraordinary size of its upper class, and by the uncommon prosperity that percolated down through the lower ranks of its whites. At mid-century Governor James Glen estimated that the white population of the province embraced 5,000 people who had “plenty of the good things of life,” another 5,000 who had “some of the conveniencies of life,” 10,000 with the “necessaries of life,” and about 5,000 or 6,000 who had a “bare subsistence.”1 A modern student of its social structure, looking at the colony on the eve of the Revolution, substantially confirms this estimate, finding a wealthy class that controlled nearly 60 per cent of the personal property, but also a poor white class that constituted “scarcely one-seventh of the white population.”2 Three out of five whites were farmers; and four out of five farmers held property worth at least £200; of the typical poor low-country planters, half held slaves.3 It was, of course, upon the slaves, who considerably outnumbered the whites, that all this generalized white prosperity rested. But South Carolina had other advantages. It was selling its rice in relatively noncompetitive markets. Its taxes were extraordinarily low, and despite the rigors of their labors, its slaves were rapidly multiplying. The grain and pork produced by its inland farmers gave it a balanced economy. Even the costs of its defense were undertaken by backcountry troops paid out of the royal treasury.4
A foreign traveler, taking a more indulgent view of the Carolinians than Quincy, found that the secure planter class appeared to “think and act precisely as do the nobility in other countries.”5 South Carolina had been much influenced in its beginnings by a strong influx of Barbadian émigrés, who brought with them the slave-driving ways of the West Indians and the upper-class aspirations common alike to the English gentry and the West Indian planters. Even when the colony became more heterogeneous, with an influx of Huguenots, Swiss, Ulstermen, and Germans, the English and Barbadian tradition still held. South Carolina, as it fattened on its slaves and staples, developed the most lordly and most leisured ruling class in America. Rice planters found it most economic to set up relatively small units, cultivated by about thirty slaves and one overseer, and the richest of them might have a dozen or more such establishments. Putting their overseers in charge, they enjoyed a good deal more leisure than the normally hardworking planters of the Chesapeake country, and this leisure went into the pleasurable life of Charles Town. Unlike the would-be grandees of New York, perhaps their closest parallel in the colonies, they had no sharply feuding elite factions in politics; unlike the Virginians, they developed no passion for politics and government, and very little sense of civic responsibility. Where, for a Virginian, much of masculine social life was beginning to be centered in politics and the county courthouse, the South Carolinian found the clubs, theaters, races, and balls of Charles Town enormously engrossing. Although the province’s broad suffrage gave ample opportunity for the lower class to mount an opposition in the Commons House, it was an opportunity that was not seized, and the top families fell rather easily into control of politics. So lax were they, however, that many planters were not eager to have the honor of serving, and it was hard to persuade them to fill the seats.6 Local government simply failed to develop under this pervasive negligence; the vestries and the parish road commissions were the only functioning local officials. Outside Charles Town there were no courts or judges except for justices of the peace with authority over trifling matters. It was not until the Regulator movement of the 1760’s, which was brought about in large part by the failure of local government, that the South Carolina elite was wakened from its political somnolence.
South Carolina was flanked north and south by provinces that bore little resemblance to it. Among the southernmost colonies, North Carolina was closest to the farming country of the North, though it probably had more marginal and impoverished farmers. At the end of the colonial period it was probably the most rural of all the colonies; only about 2 per cent of its population (or less than 5,000 persons) lived in urban settlements, and its leading metropolis, New Bern, was a thriving town with about 150 buildings.7 Three enclaves of enterprise stood out among its general farms: in the northeast, the Albemarle country, there was an area which seemed like an extension of the Chesapeake tobacco economy though its planters were smaller and less pretentious; in the southeast, the Cape Fear region was given over, like South Carolina, to rice and indigo cultivation; and in the west, the pine barren belt, rich in forests of longleaf pine, was the base of a rich and distinctive naval store industry and put North Carolina in the lead in producing resin, pitch, tar, and turpentine. Slaves were employed extensively in all three of these regions, but even in the rice-indigo region where concentrations were greatest, it was a very rare household that held more than twenty slaves. In the western portions of the colony only about one of ten households had slaves, and even they had only a few each.8
Its cheap land, and the health and beauty of its interior regions, gave North Carolina a far-flung reputation which brought down from the North that horde of settlers which almost trebled its population between 1750 and 1770. In other quarters, however, especially among officials, the colony was long disdained as a refuge of debtors and criminals, and for its turbulence and anarchy. Land titles were often in a state of confusion, squatters abounded, and uncertainties attending the enormous Granville Grant, an inheritance of the proprietary period, added to the difficulties. Even as early as the 1720’s an unlucky Anglican minister who had been assigned to the Albemarle region was relieved, when he left, to get away from “an obscure corner of the world inhabited by the dregs and gleanings of all other English colonies.”9 When George Burrington took his commission as governor in 1724, Colonel William Byrd warned him that he was taking over a “people accustomed to live without law or gospel”; and wished him good luck “in bringing the chaos into form and reducing that anarchy into a regular government.” And as late as 1775 Governor Arthur Dobbs complained to the Assembly that armed deserters who had run off from the militia or had stolen horses appeared boldly and with impunity in public, “and the jails are so weak without any jailor or person to guard them, that no criminal can be secured.”1
Yet the majority—the ubiquitous Germans and Scotch-Irish, the English Quakers and sober Moravians—came to the colony simply in quest of farms on which they could honestly support their families; and the interior was filled, by and large, with farms that were sold or allotted by headright in parcels of one hundred to three hundred acres. A holding of more than six hundred acres there was a rarity indeed; and although good soils and good grazing lands supported a system of productive general farming, interior North Carolina reared a population of husbandmen who were richer in land than in most other goods. Indeed, the presence of an unusually large rural middle class, and a comparatively even distribution of wealth, made North Carolina decidedly different from the other Southern colonies.2
The history of the youngest colony, Georgia, showed that a neo-classic utopia was no better a model than a feudal estate for resisting the unregulated rural bourgeois order that held sway in America. Planted as a social experiment, and at the same time expected to act as a buffer state between Spanish Florida and English South Carolina, Georgia was the offspring of a strange marriage of humanitarian enthusiasm and imperial strategy. When an English law of 1729 released a large number of unfortunate debtors from prison, General James Oglethorpe and other men of a philanthropic cast of mind conceived of the notion of planting on the southern border of South Carolina a colony of handy yeomen, newly rescued from debt, who would be capable of springing to arms from their plows when the necessities of empire called them. A charter was secured in 1732, Parliament supplied some funds, and well-meaning philanthropists rushed to offer donations. A first contingent of carefully recruited unfortunates—few of them were in fact debtors—arrived at the south bank of the Savannah in 1733, and were soon followed by others, both English and German. By 1744, about 2,500 Protestants had been lured to Georgia to take part in the experiment.
Experiment it was in every sense, carefully regulated by Oglethorpe and the other Trustees in London for the first eighteen years of its existence. The poor settlers were not expected to have the capacity to govern themselves or to realize without supervision the ideal that glimmered in the minds of their benefactors. Georgia was planned rather on the scheme of a military fief, whose people must always be ready to shoulder arms. Lands were therefore granted in tail-male—that is, when a male heir was lacking, the land would revert to the Trustees. Female heirs would be otherwise compensated, but each plot of land was to be in the hands of a potential soldier. Moreover, each plot was to be small—fifty acres was estimated to be the amount a man could cultivate without servants—though those settlers who emigrated at their own expense bringing menservants with them could receive as much as five hundred acres. Rum was forbidden—a ban much at odds with the habits and the economy of an American colony—and, even more troublesome, so was slavery. The ban on slavery was not humanitarian but military and prudential in conception. If slaves were permitted, a society of large planters would quickly develop, as South Carolina’s had. Such a society, far from breeding numbers of fighting yeomen, would foster a few plantation-bound whites and a menacingly large number of blacks. Precariously perched on the border, such a Georgia would be extremely vulnerable in wartime to foreign provocation of slave insurrections—a fear which haunted the South Carolinians. The last thing the empire-minded Oglethorpe and his associates wanted was to spend their efforts and the funds entrusted to them on the establishment of another South Carolina with its peculiar vulnerabilities.3
Almost from the beginning, however, the idealistic imperatives of the Trustees were at odds with the aims of the colonists who had to carry them out. The Georgia settlers engaged in the formidable heavy labor incident to the first settling of a colony knew that just across the Savannah in South Carolina there were planters living in comparative idleness while the work was done by blacks. Because of the law prohibiting rum, they could not economically trade with the West Indies, their most obvious outlet, and hence could not sell their most readily available commercial product, lumber. To make matters worse, some bold South Carolinian planters moved southward into Georgia with their slaves and began to establish the plantation regime that was forbidden to Georgians, their illegality winked at by sympathetic officials. All this was quite a provocation to a people situated directly on the border in a position of maximum exposure. In fact, when war did begin between England and Spain, Georgia began to break up; some planters fled to South Carolina, and a pacifistic colony of Moravians left for North Carolina and Pennsylvania. In the course of the war Oglethorpe, transmuted again from philanthropist and administrator to commander, failed to capture Saint Augustine from the Spaniards, but he did manage to save the new colony from Spanish conquest in 1742.
By the early 1740’s the colony was rife with discontent, and gradually, under continual pressure from the inhabitants, the Trustees gave up the essential features of their experiment. In 1740 freeholders were permitted to rent their lands to tenants and the maximum landholding was raised from 500 to 2,000 acres. In 1741 the tail-male proviso was abandoned in favor of general inheritance. The effort at prohibiting rum, already being widely violated, was abandoned in practice the next year, and in law the year after that. The ban on slavery remained, and a few high-minded Georgians hoped to keep it. But one of them, Martin Bolsius, the antislavery pastor to the Salzburgers who had settled at Ebenezer, found that his Georgia neighbors “all from the highest to the lowest vote for Negroes and look upon me as a stone in their way toward which they direct all their spite and they will, I suppose, not rest until they have removed it one way or another.”4 Reluctantly, and after prolonged resistance, the Trustees gave way on this, the last of their venturesome negations, and in the summer of 1750 the antislavery law was repealed. Georgia, despite its relatively equalitarian beginnings, was now a true Southern colony, and when its real growth began in the 1750’s and 1760’s it became a planter society, less noted, to be sure, for its aristocracy than South Carolina but well on its way toward increasing inequalities that seemed to come in the course of the economic development of the colonies.
In histories of American society the influence of the frontier has often been heavily overestimated. Yet in the colonial period, when there was so much frontier and so little society, the leverage of the frontier was at its greatest, and it cannot be minimized. For those who were willing to face the hardships and hazards of the backcountry, an escape from landless poverty into proprietary comfort on cheap land was a tempting prospect. On the frontier a substantial and vital portion of the white population regularly edged its way upward into the middle class. An enormous movement of frontier expansion went on in the two decades before the Revolution, varying from place to place in intensity and in its effects on the more settled parts of society.
It was not in the Northern Colonies that the most striking frontier advances were made between 1740 and the 1760’s. New England had sprouted westward with great rapidity during the forty years that followed the Peace of Utrecht, but by mid-century had come to a pause. By 1750, when war with the French seemed imminent, Rhode Island and Connecticut were filled to their western borders, and, except for some tracts in its northwest corner, Massachusetts also. Settlement in thin lines had reached southeast Vermont and southern New Hampshire, and had stretched up along the Maine coast beyond the forty-fourth parallel.5 The need for further expansion to accommodate her growing rural population was great, but New England had vivid memories of fierce wars and Indian massacres, and the next episode of expansion began, at first slowly and then with increasing momentum, only after the fall of Quebec in 1759.
In New York and Pennsylvania, frontier advances in the 1750’s were relatively modest. The further settlement of New York was opposed by the Albany fur traders, who had no desire to see a tide of settlers drive off the animals or the Indians who trapped them. But a greater barrier was New York’s ungenerous land policy, forbidding as it was to new settlers who knew land could be acquired on easier terms to the south. The Pennsylvania frontier too was approaching a moment of temporary saturation. Settlements had already reached and passed the Susquehanna River. They were now approaching the point where a string of English forts had been set up as a barrier to French and Indian encroachments, a dangerous area fated to be an early cockpit of a stupendous imperial struggle. It made little sense to push westward into this no-man’s-land when land to the south was known to be safer and cheaper. By the 1740’s the great flow from the North to the Southern hinterland was already under way.
The deepest penetration of the interior took place in the Southern backcountry where the fall line had been reached as early as the 1660’s and where movement into the Shenandoah Valley had begun in the second decade of the eighteenth century. The Southern backcountry, taking its several parts together, was a large area varying in width from as little as 20 to as much as 160 miles and running in length about 600 miles from the northern boundary of Maryland to the Savannah River. In 1730 still the province of the Indian and an occasional white fur trader or hunter, by the time of the Revolution this enormous region had an estimated population of a quarter of a million; and in every Southern colony but Georgia the people of the backcountry had come to constitute an important part of the whole population.6
In the middle of the century, when the entire Virginia and Carolina Piedmont was still in private hands, land speculators began to look hopefully to the Great Valley of the interior, where the Palatines, Scotch-Irish, and other immigrant peoples were streaming southward from Pennsylvania, following the heavily traveled Great Wagon Road, an enlarged Indian trail which carried them toward cheaper land. As they moved into the Southern backcountry, they were sometimes joined by settlers of English stock coming westward from the Piedmont or the tidewater areas. As the settlers moved on, the Germans hugging the Shenandoah River Valley and settling on good soils, the Scotch-Irish venturing farther westward toward the forbiddingly steep barrier of the Alleghenies, they drove before them the hunters and fur traders and the rapidly thinning ranks of deer, beaver, and bear. The forest world provided good subsistence, and on the whole the early frontier settlers, though crudely housed, ate heartily and cheaply, deer and bear meat supplementing their corn and vegetables. To the English and Scotch-Irish settlers the trees in this thickly forested area were like enemies; as their predecessors farther eastward had done, they solved the exasperating task of clearing the land by simply girdling the trees, shutting off the sap, and choking them to death, so that they could be pushed over. The Germans, more mindful of sound farming practice, carefully and laboriously cut them down and rooted out the stumps.
Two pictures of the frontier have come down from early travelers and observers, one portraying a deterioration of life to almost barbaric conditions, the other picturing a largely self-sufficient benign pastoral scene. Both are true, since the state of life in any part of the backcountry depended upon the duration of its settlement, the ethnic background of the frontier people, and their farming practices. A visitor to the wilderness settlements of the Scotch-Irish in the deep interior of North Carolina found them living in a primitive state: “The clothes of the people consist of deerskins, their food of johnnycakes, deer and bear meat. A kind of white people are found here who live like savages. Hunting is their chief occupation.”7 Yet accounts of the German farmers of the Shenandoah portray a life of measured comfort and an enviable regime of pastoral order and plenty.
Both pictures, though not untrue, are misleading. Barbarization was limited mainly to the fringe of the frontier; and the pastoral democracy of the self-sufficing honest yeoman, which did indeed sometimes exist, was only a transitional stage in the development of a commercial society.8 Most frontier families came, to be sure, in relative poverty: a few horses or a yoke of oxen, a few cows and hogs, some poultry—such would be the property of the more substantial among them; and there were many single men who came with little more than the essential ax and rifle. But all looked forward to the day when they could shift from subsistence farming and turn at least a modest profit from the cash-crop production that was emerging in their region. The ideal of the simple yeoman living close to nature, applying himself with loving care to the soil, and supplying virtually all his modest needs with his own labor and that of his family was an ideal first of the educated elite who read pastoral poetry and later of agrarian ideologues and politicians who wanted to claim a moral superiority for the farmer. It was never an ideal of the yeoman farmers themselves. They might pride themselves on being able to meet the demands of self-sufficiency, but they were in haste to get out of their original lean-tos and log cabins into comfortable frame houses which they might hope to furnish with a respectable share of the world’s comforts such as they had seen in Europe, Pennsylvania, or the tidewater country. Carl Bridenbaugh, in a penetrating brief account of the Southern backcountry, finds “a backwoods existence that was constantly becoming rural in imitation of or in extension of Pennsylvania and of the Chesapeake and Carolina societies.”9 In large portions of the Southern backcountry the preconditions for a quick transition from subsistence farming to the commercial farm or small plantation were widely available. Some slaves, numbering perhaps one-twelfth of the frontier population, were brought in. The rivers provided a ready means for sending the agricultural surplus to market, and in some parts of the Southern interior, outlets to the seacoast by roads, bridges, and ferries were developed in the third quarter of the century.1
It would be a mistake to assume that the Southern frontier produced a thoroughly egalitarian society. A great deal of the land passed through the hands of speculators before it passed to common farmers and small planters, and the inequalities brought to the frontier by the settlers themselves tended to be perpetuated or increased. It has been estimated2 that, counting slaves and whites together, about one-third of the Southern frontiersmen were landless workers, though not all of them were poor and though the prospects of a young man with a family to set up a farm of his own were extraordinarily good.3 At one extreme, on the Northern Neck of Virginia where the Fairfax grant had put five million acres into a single hand, planters bought large tracts of land to be rented to tenants or worked by slaves. Far more representative of the frontier was Lunenberg County, Virginia, which was just emerging from the frontier phase in the early 1760’s. The richest 10 per cent of the men held about 40 per cent of the land. Such a distribution, characteristic of the more democratic portions of the Southern frontier, was low for the South but would have been high in the North. Landless whites were about a third of the population in Lunenberg County, but less than twenty years later about four out of five of these appear to have secured land there or elsewhere.4 In North Carolina’s large interior, where fewer opportunities for commercialization existed than in other parts of the Southern frontier, a broad distribution of land rather similar to that of the Northern Colonies was common.5
Settlers were not long upon the ground before they were followed by gentleman farmers and planters with slaves, small merchants and artisans, lawyers and preachers, and above all by those commanding adventurers who, with one foot in polities and one in land speculation, everywhere appear and reappear in the history of the frontier. Soon, around the county courthouse, the mill, the village store, the ferry landing, the crossings of main roads, and other places of necessary resort, there formed a string of inland towns and villages running from Frederick and Hagerstown, Maryland, to Winchester and Staunton in Virginia, to Salem, Hillsboro, and Charlotte in North Carolina, and ending with Camden and Augusta in South Carolina and Georgia. Out of the ranks of the better-established husbandmen and planters, the outstanding ministers, the more charismatic speculators and adventurers, there arose a gentry which, much in the manner of their counterparts to the east, sought and won the deference and the votes of the common farmers. With great rapidity between the 1740’s and the eve of the Revolution, the pattern of eastern society, though visibly modified, was reproduced in surprisingly faithful detail in the west.
1. Quoted in Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1953), 106.
2. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt (1955), 3, 42.
3. Ibid., 137.
4. James A. Henretta, “Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 22 (1965), 75–92.
5. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 140.
6. Ibid., 148–9; for Franklin, 148.
7. Ibid., 148.
8. Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (1925), 33.
9. American Husbandry (1775; ed. by Harry J. Carman, 1939), 66.
1. Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (1965), 166–76.
2. Quotations are from Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past (1959), 46, 49–50.
3. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 224, 116.
4. American Husbandry, 46; Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, III (rev. edn. 1960), 5n; ibid., 4–5.
5. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. by Albert H. Smyth (1906), V, 362.
6. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage (1960), 39.
7. American Husbandry, 52–3, 67; cf. 46.
8. Abbott E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage (1947), 4, 28–9.
9. Gipson, III, 3, 16.
1. Main, 21.
2. Ibid., 42.
3. Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (1950), 7–32, esp. 29–32.
4. Gipson, III, 74n, 75.
5. Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman, 37–53.
6. W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, II, 512, quoting Parkman, Old Regime, 393.
7. Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (1961); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms (1970); see also Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village (1963).
8. Philip Greven, Four Generations; Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970); Grant; and Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (1970).
9. Grant, chapter 6.
1. Lois K. Mathews, The Expansion of New England (1909), map facing 98.
2. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee (1967), chapters 5 and 6.
3. Grant; James Truslow Adams, Revolutionary New England (1941); Bushman.
4. Bidwell and Falconer, 64.
5. Gipson, III, 113.
6. Gipson, III, 119–20.
7. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania (edn. 1960), ed. and trans. by Oscar Handlin and John Clive, 48.
8. Gipson, III, 181–2.
9. Mittelberger, 73–4.
1. James T. Lemon and Gary B. Nash, “The Distribution of Wealth in Eighteenth-Century America: A Century of Change in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1693–1882,” Journal of Social History, 2c (1968), 1–24.
2. Gipson, III, 128.
3. Main, 227–8.
4. Andrew Burnaby, Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North-America (1775; edn. 1960), 47.
5. Main, 62, 65–6; Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia, 1705–1786; Aristocracy or Democracu? (1964), 12, 15.
6. Aubrey C. Land, “Economic Base and Social Structure: The Northern Chesapeake in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 25 (1965), 639–54.
7. Ibid., see also Land’s The Dulanys of Maryland (1955), esp. chapter 2.
8. Gipson, II, 4–7.
9. Brown and Brown, 16–22.
1. Ibid., 9.
2. Gipson, II, 44.
3. Brown and Brown, 34; cf. Charles S. Sydnor, Gentleman Freeholders, Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (1952), esp. chapters 3 and 4.
4. Gipson, II, 14n.
5. Ibid., 56. See Dieter Cunz, Maryland Germans: A History (1948).
6. Cf. Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities (1952), 18.
7. Ibid., 67.
8. Main, 57 ff.
9. Ibid., 227.
1. M. Eugene Sirmans, Cultural South Carolina (1966), 228.
2. Main, 64.
3. Ibid., 64–5; Sirmans, 227.
4. Gipson, II, 130–8, 150–1.
5. Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 66, quoting from Johann D. Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, ed. Andrew J. Morrison (1911), II, 205.
6. Sirmans, 245, 255.
7. R. H. Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century (1964), 142, 147–9.
8. Ibid., 74–81, 129–30.
9. Ibid., 33.
1. Gipson, II, 115.
2. Main, 66.
3. Herbert L. Osgood, American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (1924), III, 61–6.
4. Gipson, II, 175.
5. Mathews, passim; see esp. the map of New England settlement in 1754, facing 98.
6. Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 120–1.
7. Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949), 93.
8. See Robert L. Meriwether on the backcountry, in The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (1940), chapter 13.
9. Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 195.
1. Ibid., 144–7; cf. Merrens, 144–5.
2. Main, 49.
3. Ibid.; on mobility in the frontier South, 168–80.
4. Ibid., 170–3.
5. Ibid., 48–9, 53–4, 66.