Life in the English Colonies

Life in the English Colonies Chapter 6

Working and Trading Lesson 1

As an apprentice rope maker in the early 1700s, William Mathews had ten years of hard work ahead of him. • Apprentice—a young person who learns a skill from a more experienced person. • Apprentices could expect to work long hours—often more than twelve hours a day. • They had very little free time and rarely got a day off.

In spite of the hardships, becoming an apprentice could be a great opportunity. • For many young people in the colonies, this was the only way to become an artisan. • Artisan—a skilled worker who makes things by hand • A rope maker, blacksmith, or carpenter is an artisan.

Young surgeons also learned their jobs working as an apprentice. • As a surgeon’s apprentice, you would help carry medical instruments and observe the doctor at work. • You also had the important responsibility of holding down patients during painful operations.

As the colonial economy grew during the early and mid 1700s, there was a growing need for artisans. • This created new opportunities for thousands of young apprentices. • Young girls learned trade like cooking and sewing.

Not all young people in colonial times worked as apprentices. • Most children grew up on farms, where they had just as much work to do as apprentices in towns and cities. • From a very young age, children were given jobs like gathering wood for fires, serving food, and helping in the garden. • As they grew older, boys hunted, chopped firewood, and joined their fathers at work in the fields.

Girls helped their mothers make household products like soap, candles, clothing, and food for the family. • These were hard jobs. • Candles, for example, were made from the fat of sheep or cows. • First the candle maker melted the chunks of fat in an iron kettle. • Then she dipped the candle wick in the fat and let it harden. • She did this over and over until she had a thick candle. • These candles gave off plenty of light, but they gave off something else too—a bad smell. • Colonists were very happy when they discovered they could make candles out of pleasant-smelling wax from wild berries.

Colonial Jobs

Different parts of the 13 colonies were rich in different natural resources. • Therefore, the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies each developed a different type of economy.

The New England economy was based on products from the forests and sea. • Timber was a valuable export—especially to England, where most of the forests had been cut down. • Trees from the New England forests were also used to build houses, ships, and barrels. • Barrels were needed to store everything from wine to wheat to dried fish. • Once colonists had their own ships, they could fish in the rich waters off the New England coast. • Fishing and whaling quickly became important industries.

The economy of the Middle Colonies was based on farm products and valuable minerals, such as iron. • Middle Colony farms grew so much wheat, the region became known as “the breadbasket of the colonies.” • Mills were built to grind grain into flour. • The mills were powered by running water or wind. • From the mills, flour was shipped to other colonies and exported to other countries.

The Southern Colonies had rich soil, warm climate, and plenty of rain, and they developed an economy based on farming. • Farms ranged in size from small family farms to large plantations powered by the work of slaves. • Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and indigo, a plant used to make a blue dye.

As the colonial economy grew, cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston became thriving trading centers. • An important part of colonial trade was the slave trade. • In this type of trade, ships brought captive Africans to the colonies, where they were sold and forced to work as slaves.

Some trade routes became known as triangular trade routes. • These routes were called “triangular” because they were shaped like giant triangles.

On one common triangular trade route, ships began in New England. • They carried guns and other goods to ports on the coast of West Africa. • Here they traded these goods for gold and captive Africans.

The ship then sailed for the West Indies. • Because this was the second leg of the voyage, it was known as the Middle Passage. • Captive Africans suffered terribly during the Middle Passage. • Many died as a result of hunger, thirst, disease, or cruel treatment. • A West African boy named Olaudah Equiano was probably brought to North America on a trading ship in about 1756. • He later wrote a book about the Middle Passage, writing that people were “so crowded that each had scarcely had room to turn himself…many died.”

In the West Indies, the ships traded the captive Africans and gold for sugar and molasses, a syrup made from sugarcane. • The ships completed the triangle by carrying sugar and molasses back to colonial ports. • The molasses were used to make rum. • With this rum, trading ships set sail for Africa, beginning the triangular trade routes again.

Many Africans were enslaved in the West Indies, where they were forced to work on sugar plantations. • Others were brought to the 13 Colonies.

Cities, Towns, and Farms Lesson 2

Benjamin Franklin needed to live in a city. • He wanted to be a printer, and printing businesses were only found in cities. • When he could not find work in his hometown of Boston, he looked elsewhere.

Franklin arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1723. • He found a growing city with a diverse population. • There were people of different ethnic backgrounds and religions. • There was a busy port on the Delaware River. • Most importantly for Franklin, there was a printer who gave him a job.

Population of Colonial Cities, 1760

By the middle 1700s, Philadelphia was the largest city in the 13 Colonies. • Benjamin Franklin had a lot to do with the success of the city. • He founded the city’s first newspaper. • He established the city’s first public library. • He established the city’s first hospital. • To help fight dangerous fires, he started the first volunteer fire department in the 13 Colonies.Fires were a very serious problem in colonial cities where most buildings were made of wood.

In about 1760, a traveler named Andrew Burnaby visited Philadelphia. • He wrote that the city was thriving. • “The streets are crowded with people, and the river with vessels [boats].”

The Puritans built towns in Massachusetts in the 1630s. • Throughout colonial times, similar small towns were established all over New England.

Many New England towns were self-sufficient. • Self-sufficient—ability to rely on oneself for most of what one needs • The food came from the fields surrounding the town. • Families who lived in town owned small plots of land, where they grew crops and raised animals. • Other work was done in town. • Workshops belonging to the blacksmith, cooper, and shoemaker were often found around the town common. • Town common—an open space where cattle and sheep could graze • Meeting house—the most important building in town where ordinary citizens could help make decisions at the town meetings and attend church on Sundays

The Middle Colonies also had many small towns. • Here, towns often served as busy market places. • Farmers came to sell their crops and buy things such as clothing and tools. • The town’s general store might have imported goods, such as tea and sugar. • Like New England towns, many Middle Colony towns had workshops and a mill where grain could be turned into flour.

While there were many small farms in the Southern Colonies, this region was also home to a different kind of farm—the plantation. • Southern plantations were large farms where cash crops such as tobacco, rice, and indigo were grown. • Most of the work on plantations was done by enslaved Africans. • Plantations were similar to small towns. • Like small towns, plantations were largely self-sufficient.

Plantations were owned by wealthy landowners known as planters. • Planters were usually men, though women also ran plantations.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney • Eliza Lucas Pinckney began managing plantations in South Carolina when she was still a teenager. • In 1744, she became the first person in the 13 colonies to raise a successful crop of indigo.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney • At age 16, Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney, called Eliza, had already lived in England and the West Indies. • Now she had just arrived in South Carolina. • Eliza’s mother was sick, and her father hoped that a new life on a plantation would help her get better. • Soon after the family arrived, Eliza’s father, and officer in England’s army, was called away. • He left his daughter in charge of the family’s plantation. • Eliza loved the challenge of her new role. • On a typical day, she would get up at 5 A.M., read until 7 A.M., then go to the fields to look over the plantation, all before breakfast. • The rest of her busy day included teaching her sister and two girls who were enslaved on the plantation how to read. • Eliza even studied law and helped her neighbors write their wills. • She wrote to a friend that running a plantation “requires much writing and more business and fatigue [tiredness]…than you can imagine.” • Eliza Pinckney believed that she could make the plantation—and all of South Carolina—richer by experimenting with new crops. • She was especially interested in indigo, a plant that makes blue dye that was very valuable in Europe. • Eliza wrote: “I had greater hopes from the Indigo…than any of the rest of the things that I had tried.” • After several years of hard work, Pinckney successfully grew indigo on her plantation. • Soon she gave indigo seeds to her neighbors. • Indigo became a major export of South Carolina for many years. • By 1754, South Carolina was exporting more than 1 million pounds of indigo every year.

The day-to-day work on the plantation was directed by the plantation manager, known as the overseer. • The overseer gave the slaves orders. • The slaves could be beaten as punishment for not doing what they were told. • Many slaves had to work from morning to night planting and harvesting crops. • Others, often women and children, cooked and cleaned in the planter’s house. • Enslaved people also worked in blacksmith and carpentry workshops, smokehouses, bakeries, laundry buildings, and stables.

From New Hampshire to Georgia, most colonists, free and slave, lived on small family farms. • No matter where they lived, all farming families had one thing in common— • Hard work

Poem from Ruth Belknap: “Up in the morning I must rise Before I’ve time to rub my eyes… But, Oh! It makes my heart to ache, I have no bread till I can bake, And then, alas! It makes me sputter, For I must churn or have no butter.”

Ruth Belknap lived and worked on a small farm in New Hampshire in the 1700s. • As her poem illustrates, farming families had to make or grow most of what they needed.

Everyday Life in the Colonies Lesson 3

Education was very important to early settlers in New England. • In 1647, the leaders of Massachusetts passed a law requiring towns to establish free and public schools. • For most colonists, this was a new idea. • Free schools did not exist in Europe at this time.

In the years that followed, small public schools were built throughout the colonies. • Schools in colonial times were very different from schools today. • Most schools had just one room. • Students of different ages sat together. • They learned the basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Students also learned the rules of polite behavior. • When George Washington was a young student in Virginia, he copied a list of rules into his notebook. • He wrote down rules such as: • “Every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present.” • “Be careful to keep your promise.”

Most students did not stay in school for as many years as children do today. • When they reached their early teens, many boys and girls started working full time on family farms.

Others began apprenticeships.

Only a small percentage of students went to college. • Harvard, established near Boston, Massachusetts, in 1636, is the oldest college in the United States. • The next was the College of William and Mary, which opened in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1693.

Life in the English Colonies