Political growth

The distance separating England and America, the powerful pressures exerted on royal officials by Americans, and the inevitable inefficiency of any large bureaucracy all served to weaken royal power and to strengthen the hold of provincial leaders on the affairs of their respective colonies. During the 18th century the colonial legislatures gained control over their own parliamentary prerogatives, achieved primary responsibility for legislation affecting taxation and defense, and ultimately took control over the salaries paid to royal officials. Provincial leaders also made significant inroads into the governor’s patronage powers. Although theoretically the governor continued to control the appointments of local officials, in reality he most often automatically followed the recommendations of the provincial leaders in the localities in question. Similarly, the governor’s councils, theoretically agents of royal authority, came to be dominated by prominent provincial leaders who tended to reflect the interests of the leadership of the lower house of assembly rather than those of the royal government in London.

Thus, by the mid-18th century most political power in America was concentrated in the hands of provincial rather than royal officials. These provincial leaders undoubtedly represented the interests of their constituents more faithfully than any royal official could, but it is clear that the politics of provincial America were hardly democratic by modern standards. In general, both social prestige and political power tended to be determined by economic standing, and the economic resources of colonial America, though not as unevenly distributed as in Europe, were nevertheless controlled by relatively few men.

In the Chesapeake Bay societies of Virginia and Maryland, and particularly in the regions east of the Blue Ridge mountains, a planter class came to dominate nearly every aspect of those colonies’ economic life. These same planters, joined by a few prominent merchants and lawyers, dominated the two most important agencies of local government—the county courts and the provincial assemblies. This extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few occurred in spite of the fact that a large percentage of the free adult male population (some have estimated as high as 80 to 90 percent) was able to participate in the political process. The ordinary citizens of the Chesapeake society, and those of most colonies, nevertheless continued to defer to those whom they considered to be their “betters.” Although the societal ethic that enabled power to be concentrated in the hands of a few was hardly a democratic one, there is little evidence, at least for Virginia and Maryland, that the people of those societies were dissatisfied with their rulers. In general, they believed that their local officials ruled responsively.

In the Carolinas a small group of rice and indigo planters monopolized much of the wealth. As in Virginia and Maryland, the planter class came to constitute a social elite. As a rule, the planter class of the Carolinas did not have the same long tradition of responsible government as did the ruling oligarchies of Virginia and Maryland, and, as a consequence, they tended to be absentee landlords and governors, often passing much of their time in Charleston, away from their plantations and their political responsibilities.

The western regions of both the Chesapeake and Carolina societies displayed distinctive characteristics of their own. Ruling traditions were fewer, accumulations of land and wealth less striking, and the social hierarchy less rigid in the west. In fact, in some western areas antagonism toward the restrictiveness of the east and toward eastern control of the political structure led to actual conflict. In both North and South Carolina armed risings of varying intensity erupted against the unresponsive nature of the eastern ruling elite. As the 18th century progressed, however, and as more men accumulated wealth and social prestige, the societies of the west came more closely to resemble those of the east.

New England society was more diverse and the political system less oligarchic than that of the South. In New England the mechanisms of town government served to broaden popular participation in government beyond the narrow base of the county courts.

The town meetings, which elected the members of the provincial assemblies, were open to nearly all free adult males. Despite this, a relatively small group of men dominated the provincial governments of New England. As in the South, men of high occupational status and social prestige were closely concentrated in leadership positions in their respective colonies; in New England, merchants, lawyers, and to a lesser extent clergymen made up the bulk of the social and political elite.

The social and political structure of the middle colonies was more diverse than that of any other region in America. New York, with its extensive system of manors and manor lords, often displayed genuinely feudal characteristics. The tenants on large manors often found it impossible to escape the influence of their manor lords. The administration of justice, the election of representatives, and the collection of taxes often took place on the manor itself. As a consequence, the large landowning families exercised an inordinate amount of economic and political power. The Great Rebellion of 1766, a short-lived outburst directed against the manor lords, was a symptom of the widespread discontent among the lower and middle classes. By contrast, Pennsylvania’s governmental system was more open and responsive than that of any other colony in America. A unicameral legislature, free from the restraints imposed by a powerful governor’s council, allowed Pennsylvania to be relatively independent of the influence of both the crown and the proprietor. This fact, in combination with the tolerant and relatively egalitarian bent of the early Quaker settlers and the subsequent immigration of large numbers of Europeans, made the social and political structure of Pennsylvania more democratic but more faction-ridden than that of any other colony.

Population growth

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The increasing political autonomy of the American colonies was a natural reflection of their increased stature in the overall scheme of the British Empire. In 1650 the population of the colonies had been about 52,000; in 1700 it was perhaps 250,000, and by 1760 it was approaching 1,700,000. Virginia had increased from about 54,000 in 1700 to approximately 340,000 in 1760. Pennsylvania had begun with about 500 settlers in 1681 and had attracted at least 250,000 people by 1760. And America’s cities were beginning to grow as well. By 1765 Boston had reached 15,000; New York City, 16,000–17,000; and Philadelphia, the largest city in the colonies, 20,000.

Part of that population growth was the result of the involuntary immigration of enslaved Africans. During the 17th century, enslaved persons remained a tiny minority of the population. By the mid-18th century, after Southern colonists discovered that the profits generated by their plantations could support the relatively large initial investments needed for slave labor, the volume of the slave trade increased markedly. In Virginia the enslaved population leaped from about 2,000 in 1670 to perhaps 23,000 in 1715 and reached 150,000 on the eve of the American Revolution. In South Carolina it was even more dramatic. In 1700 there were probably no more than 2,500 Blacks in the population; by 1765 there were 80,000–90,000, with Blacks outnumbering whites by about 2 to 1.

One of the principal attractions for the immigrants who moved to America voluntarily was the availability of inexpensive arable land. The westward migration to America’s frontier—in the early 17th century all of America was a frontier, and by the 18th century the frontier ranged anywhere from 10 to 200 miles (15 to 320 km) from the coastline—was to become one of the distinctive elements in American history. English Puritans, beginning in 1629 and continuing through 1640, were the first to immigrate in large numbers to America. Throughout the 17th century most of the immigrants were English; but, beginning in the second decade of the 18th century, a wave of Germans, principally from the Rhineland Palatinate, arrived in America: by 1770 between 225,000 and 250,000 Germans had immigrated to America, more than 70 percent of them settling in the middle colonies, where generous land policies and religious toleration made life more comfortable for them. The Scotch-Irish and Irish immigration, which began on a large scale after 1713 and continued past the American Revolution, was more evenly distributed. By 1750 both Scotch-Irish and Irish could be found in the western portions of nearly every colony. In almost all the regions in which Europeans sought greater economic opportunity, however, that same quest for independence and self-sufficiency led to tragic conflict with Indians over the control of land. And in nearly every instance the outcome was similar: the Europeans, failing to respect Indian claims either to land or to cultural autonomy, pushed the Indians of North America farther and farther into the periphery.

Economic growth

Provincial America came to be less dependent upon subsistence agriculture and more on the cultivation and manufacture of products for the world market. Land, which initially served only individual needs, came to be the fundamental source of economic enterprise. The independent yeoman farmer continued to exist, particularly in New England and the middle colonies, but most settled land in North America by 1750 was devoted to the cultivation of a cash crop. New England turned its land over to the raising of meat products for export. The middle colonies were the principal producers of grains. By 1700 Philadelphia exported more than 350,000 bushels of wheat and more than 18,000 tons of flour annually. The Southern colonies were, of course, even more closely tied to the cash crop system. South Carolina, aided by British incentives, turned to the production of rice and indigo. North Carolina, although less oriented toward the market economy than South Carolina, was nevertheless one of the principal suppliers of naval stores. Virginia and Maryland steadily increased their economic dependence on tobacco and on the London merchants who purchased that tobacco, and for the most part they ignored those who recommended that they diversify their economies by turning part of their land over to the cultivation of wheat. Their near-total dependence upon the world tobacco price would ultimately prove disastrous, but for most of the 18th century Virginia and Maryland soil remained productive enough to make a single-crop system reasonably profitable.

As America evolved from subsistence to commercial agriculture, an influential commercial class increased its power in nearly every colony. Boston was the center of the merchant elite of New England, who not only dominated economic life but also wielded social and political power as well. Merchants such as James De Lancey and Philip Livingston in New York and Joseph Galloway, Robert Morris, and Thomas Wharton in Philadelphia exerted an influence far beyond the confines of their occupations. In Charleston the Pinckney, Rutledge, and Lowndes families controlled much of the trade that passed through that port. Even in Virginia, where a strong merchant class was nonexistent, those people with the most economic and political power were those commercial farmers who best combined the occupations of merchant and farmer. And it is clear that the commercial importance of the colonies was increasing. During the years 1700–10, approximately £265,000 sterling was exported annually to Great Britain from the colonies, with roughly the same amount being imported by the Americans from Great Britain. By the decade 1760–70, that figure had risen to more than £1,000,000 sterling of goods exported annually to Great Britain and £1,760,000 annually imported from Great Britain.

Land, labor, and independence

Although Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “frontier thesis”—that American democracy was the result of an abundance of free land—has long been seriously challenged and modified, it is clear that the plentifulness of virgin acres and the lack of workers to till them did cause a loosening of the constraints of authority in the colonial and early national periods. Once it became clear that the easiest path to success for Britain’s New World “plantations” lay in raising export crops, there was a constant demand for agricultural labor, which in turn spurred practices that—with the notable exception of slavery—compromised a strictly hierarchical social order.

In all the colonies, whether governed directly by the king, by proprietors, or by chartered corporations, it was essential to attract settlers, and what governors had most plentifully to offer was land. Sometimes large grants were made to entire religious communities numbering in the hundreds or more. Sometimes tracts were allotted to wealthy men on the “head rights” (literally “per capita”) system of so many acres for each family member they brought over. Few Englishmen or Europeans had the means to buy farms outright, so the simple sale of homesteads by large-scale grantees was less common than renting. But there was another well-traveled road to individual proprietorship that also provided a workforce: the system of contract labor known as indentured service. Under it, an impecunious new arrival would sign on with a landowner for a period of service—commonly seven years—binding him to work in return for subsistence and sometimes for the repayment of his passage money to the ship captain who had taken him across the Atlantic (such immigrants were called “redemptioners”). At the end of this term, the indentured servant would in many cases be rewarded by the colony itself with “freedom dues,” a title to 50 or more acres of land in a yet-unsettled area. This somewhat biblically inspired precapitalist system of transfer was not unlike apprenticeship, the economic and social tool that added to the supply of skilled labor. The apprentice system called for a prepubescent boy to be “bound out” to a craftsman who would take him into his own home and there teach him his art while serving as a surrogate parent. (Girls were perennially “apprenticed” to their mothers as homemakers.) Both indentured servants and apprentices were subject to the discipline of the master, and their lot varied with his generosity or hard-fistedness. There must have been plenty of the latter type of master, as running away was common. The first Africans taken to Virginia, or at least some of them, appear to have worked as indentured servants. Not until the case of John Punch in the 1640s did it become legally established that Black “servants” were to remain such for life. Having escaped, been caught, and brought to trial, Punch, an indentured servant of African descent, and two other indentured servants of European descent received very different sentences, with Punch’s punishment being servitude for the “rest of his natural life” while that for the other two was merely an extension of their service.

The harshness of New England’s climate and topography meant that for most of its people the road to economic independence lay in trade, seafaring, fishing, or craftsmanship. But the craving for an individually owned subsistence farm grew stronger as the first generations of religious settlers who had “planted” by congregation died off. In the process the communal holding of land by townships—with small allotted family garden plots and common grazing and orchard lands, much in the style of medieval communities—yielded gradually to the more conventional privately owned fenced farm. The invitation that available land offered—individual control of one’s life—was irresistible. Property in land also conferred civic privileges, so an unusually large number of male colonists were qualified for suffrage by the Revolution’s eve, even though not all of them exercised the vote freely or without traditional deference to the elite.

Slavery was the backbone of large-scale cultivation of such crops as tobacco and hence took strongest root in the Southern colonies. But thousands of white freeholders of small acreages also lived in those colonies; moreover, slavery on a small scale (mainly in domestic service and unskilled labor) was implanted in the North. The line between a free and a slaveholding America had not yet been sharply drawn.

One truly destabilizing system of acquiring land was simply “squatting.” On the western fringes of settlement, it was not possible for colonial administrators to use police powers to expel those who helped themselves to acres technically owned by proprietors in the seaboard counties. Far from seeing themselves as outlaws, the squatters believed that they were doing civilization’s work in putting new land into production, and they saw themselves as the moral superiors of eastern “owners” for whom land was a mere speculative commodity that they did not, with great danger and hardship, cultivate themselves. Squatting became a regular feature of westward expansion throughout early U.S. history.