Presentation Transcript

1. American Life in the 17th Century

2. Life in the Chesapeake Life in the Chesapeake was unhealthy. Early settlers died in large numbers due to malaria, dysentery, and typhoid. Life expectancy in this region was ten years less than that in England. Half of the people born in Virginia and Maryland did not survive to see their 20th birthday. Settlements in the Chesapeake grew slowly in the 17th century. The majority of immigrants to the region were single men in their late teens and early twenties and most of them died soon after arriving. In 1650, women outnumbered men six to one. Eligible women did not remain single for long. Native-born inhabitants eventually acquired immunity to the killer diseases that had ravaged the original settlers. By the end of the 17th century, the white population of the region was growing on the basis of its own birthrate. By 1700, Virginia was the most populous colony (59,000) and Maryland was 3rd (30,000).
3. Tobacco The Chesapeake was immensely hospitable to the cultivation of tobacco. Profit hungry settlers often planted tobacco to sell before they planted corn to eat. Intense tobacco cultivation quickly exhausted the soil and created an insatiable demand for new lands to farm. Commercial growers plunged even farther up the river valleys and provoked ever more Indian attacks.
4. Tobacco Leaf-laden ships hauled nearly 40 million pounds of tobacco per year by 1700. This enormous production of tobacco required a large labor force to tend and harvest it. England still had a “surplus” of displaced farmers who were desperate for employment. Many of these became “indentured servants”. (Explain indentured servitude) At the end of their term of service, some received tools, food, new clothes and perhaps some land. Even after being freed, most were penniless and had little choice but to hire themselves out to their former masters for very low wages.
5. Tobacco Both Virginia and Maryland employed the “head- right” system to encourage the importation of servant workers. This system allowed whoever paid the passage of the laborer to receive the right to acquire 50 acres of land. Some masters soon parlayed their investments in servants into vast holdings in real estate. They became the great merchant-planters that came to dominate the agriculture and commerce of the southern colonies. Chesapeake planters brought some 100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700.
6. Bacon’s Rebellion By the late 17th century, there was an accumulating mass of impoverished freemen. These freemen drifted discontentedly around the colonies. Most of these men were single, landless, and frustrated. These men rattled the established planters. The Virginia Assembly in 1670 disenfranchised most of these landless men. Virginia governor William Berkley reportedly said “How miserable that man is that governs a people where six parts of seven at least are poor, indebted, discontented, and armed.”
7. Bacon’s Rebellion In 1676, about a thousand Virginians broke out of control and were led by twenty-nine-year-old planter Nathaniel Bacon. Many of the rebels had been forced into the backcountry in search of farmland. They fiercely resented Berkeley’s friendly policies toward the Indians. When Berkeley refused to retaliate for a series of savage Indian attacks on their settlements, Bacon and his followers took matters into their own hands. Bacon and his followers attacked Indians, friendly and hostile alike, chased Berkeley from Jamestown, and burned the city. Chaos swept the colony. Unfortunately for Bacon’s followers, Bacon died suddenly of dysentery. Berkeley came back to Jamestown and crushed the uprising then hanged more than 20 rebels.
8. Bacon’s Rebellion Bacon had ignited the smoldering unhappiness of landless former servants, and he had pitted the hardscrabble frontiersmen against the haughty gentry of the tidewater plantations. Even with the rebellion crushed, the tensions between the groups remained. Planters began to look anxiously for less troublesome laborers to work in the tobacco fields. They soon looked to Africa.
9. Colonial Slavery Nearly 7 million Africans were carried in chains to the New World in the three centuries or so following Columbus’s landing. Only about 400,000 of them ended up in North America, the majority of which arrived after 1700. In the 1680s, rising wages in England shrank the pool of penniless people willing to gamble on a new life or an early death as indentured servants in America. At the same time, the large planters were growing increasingly fearful of the multitudes of restless and unhappy former servants in their midst.
10. Colonial Slavery By the mid-1680s, for the first time, black slaves outnumbered white servants among the plantation colonies new arrivals. More than ten thousand Africans were pushed ashore in America in the decade after 1700. Most of the slaves who reached North America came from the west coast of Africa. Early on, these slaves were captured by African coastal tribes and sold to slave traders. Most slaves were branded and bound then herded aboard sweltering ships for the “middle passage”. Death rates ran as high as 20 percent on these voyages. Survivors were eventually shoved onto auction blocks and sold.
11. Colonial Slavery A few of the earliest African immigrants gained their freedom, and some even became slave owners themselves. As the number of Africans increased dramatically toward the end of the 17th century, white colonists reacted remorselessly to this supposed racial threat. Earlier in the century the legal difference between a slave and a servant was unclear. The law began to make sharp distinctions between the two—largely on the basis of race. In Virginia in 1662 statutes appeared that formally decreed the iron conditions of slavery for blacks.
12. Colonial Slavery New “slave codes” made blacks and their children the property for life of their white masters. Many colonies made it a crime to teach slaves to read and write. Not even conversion to Christianity could qualify a slave for freedom. Slavery might have begun in America for economic reasons, but by the end of the 17th century, it was clear that racial discrimination also powerfully molded the American slave system.
13. Colonial Slavery The captive black population of the Chesapeake area soon began to grow not only through new imports but through reproduction. These native-born African-Americans contributed to the growth of a stable and distinctive slave culture that was a mixture of African and American elements of speech, religion, and traditions. Some blacks invented a new language called Gullah. It blended English with several African dialects. Some Gullah words are still used today: goober (peanut), gumbo (okra), and voodoo (witchcraft). The banjo and bongo drum were also African contributions to American music.
14. Colonial Slavery Some slaves became skilled artisans—carpenters, bricklayers, tanners. Most slaves however were engaged in hard manual labor. Slaves naturally longed for freedom. In New York City in 1712, a slave revolt erupted. 12 whites were killed and 21 blacks were executed. More than 50 resentful South Carolina blacks along the Stono River revolted in 1739. They were trying to reach Spanish Florida were they would be free. Along the way, the slaves burned plantations and caused destruction. Unfortunately, the slaves were stopped by a local militia.
15. Southern Society At the top of Southern society were the planters (plantation owners). They ruled the region’s economy and monopolized political power. Just before the Revolutionary War, 70 percent of the leaders of the Virginia legislature came from families established in Virginia before 1690. For the most part, they were hard-working, businesslike lot, laboring long hours over the problems of plantation management. Beneath the planters were the small farmers, the largest social group. They tilled their modest plots and might own one or two slaves but had a tough existence. Lower on the social scale were the landless whites, most of them luckless former indentured servants. Below these were those people still serving as indentured servants and at the bottom were the slaves. Southern life revolved around the great plantations. Waterways provided the principal means of transportation. Roads were terrible.
16. The New England Family New Englanders enjoyed clean water and cool temperatures that helped to retard the spread of killer diseases. Life in New England added ten years to the life span of people migrating from the Old World. The first generations of Puritan colonists enjoyed life spans of nearly 70 years, about the same as today. New Englanders tended to migrate as families rather than as individuals. Early marriage encouraged the booming birthrate. Women typically wed by their early 20s and gave birth nearly every two years. A married woman could expect to experience up to ten pregnancies and rear as many as eight surviving children. Child raising was their full time job. Children received guidance not only from their parents but grandparents as well.
17. The New England Family Other contrasts between northern and southern colonies existed. The fragility of southern families advanced the economic security of southern women, especially of women’s property rights. Southern colonies generally allowed married women to retain separate title to their property and gave widows the right to inherit their husband’s estates. New England women usually gave up their property rights when they married. In the New World, a basic conception of women’s rights as individuals was beginning to appear in the 17th century. A husband’s power over his wife was not absolute. One husband was punished for kicking his wife off a stool, another was disciplined for drawing an “uncivil” portrait of his wife in the snow! Divorce was extremely rare in New England, and the authorities usually ordered separated couples to reunite.
18. Puritan Religious Decline The pressure of a growing population was gradually dispersing the Puritans onto outlying farms, far from the control of the church and neighbors. As the years passed, the religious fervor of the original settlers was fading. This decline alarmed the Puritan clergy. Also in decline were conversions or evidence that members were becoming part of the elect. In 1662, ministers announced a new formula for church membership called the Half-Way Covenant. The covenant provided a way for the admittance to baptism but not “full communion” the unconverted children of existing members. The half-way covenant weakened the distinction between the “elect” and others.
19. Salem, 1692 A group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women. A hysterical witch hunt ensued leading to the legal lynching in 1692 of 20 individuals. Two dogs were also hanged. The hysteria ended in 1693 when the governor’s wife was accused of being a witch. The governor prohibited further trials. Twenty years later the Massachusetts legislature annulled the convictions and made reparations to their heirs. The Salem witchcraft delusion marked an all-time high in the American experience of popular passions run wild. Witch hunting passed into the American vocabulary as a metaphor for the often dangerously irrational urge to find a scapegoat for social resentments.
20. The New England Way of Life Colonial New England was less ethnically mixed than its southern neighbors. The climate molded New England. The summers were often uncomfortably hot and the winters cruelly cold. Crops like tobacco did not flourish in New England. Slavery was attempted but could not exist profitably on small farms. New Englanders also shaped and changed the land that they lived on. Native Americans believed in the right to use land but the concept of exclusive, individual ownership of the land was alien to them. English settlers condemned the Indians for “wasting” the land by underutilizing the bounty and used this logic to justify taking the land from the Indians. Europeans felt it a duty to “improve” the land by clearing the woodlands for pasture and farmland, building roads and fences and laying out permanent settlements.
21. The New England Way of Life The English brought pigs, horses, sheep and cattle to their settlements. These herds constantly needed more and more land to graze so colonists were continually clearing more forests. The animals also sped the erosion of the land. New Englanders also became experts in shipbuilding and commerce.
22. Common Things Among All Settlers The majority of colonists were farmers. They rose at dawn and retired at dusk. Women, slave or free, wove, cooked, cleaned, and cared for children. Men cleared land, fenced it, planted the crops in it; cut firewood, and butchered livestock as needed. Children helped with all these tasks, while picking up as much schooling as they could. Compared to most 17th century Europeans, Americans lived in affluent abundance and land was relatively cheap. Most white migrants to the colonies came neither from the aristocracy nor from the bottom of European society—with the partial exception of the poor indentured servants.
23. Common Things Among All Settlers Many settlers considered themselves “of the better sort” and tried to recreate on a modified scale the social structure they had known in the Old World. Resentment of these type of people is what touched off Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.