Lecture 3 Regions of British America I: New England

First Wave Migrations 1607 1660

Comparing the Three Colonies in 1660
Total Populations
Racial composition
Natural Increase
Age-Sex structure of immigrants
Mortality rates
Wealth distribution
What did the Puritans believe?
(Protestant 1519/Least Radical) Reformation- Anglicans (church) reforms were inadequate, the
church corrupt and permitted favoritism. Other reform movements included the Pilgrims (1620s
separatists) and the Quakers (most radical).
City on the Hillutopian idealized settlements, where the good of the community would be more
important than the right or ambitions of individuals. Believed competition and corruption in
English society made it difficult for even the most pious to achieve the ideal.
Deferencebelieved in a hierarchically structured society in which superiors were owed
deference to their authority. The Puritan system of deference was based on patriarchy. Husbands
held authority over wives and fathers over their children.
Chain of Beingthe puritans rejected both Roman Catholic and Anglican notions of hierarchy
between man on earth and God. They believed individuals had a personal relationship with God.
They did, however, find ideas of a hierarchy of humanity and the animals useful, especially in
their relationships with other ethnic and religious groups. In Example: the Irish and Native
Americans were viewed as savages or pagans in contrast to the self-defined civilized and
Christian Englishmen.
PredestinationPuritans believe that God predetermines those who will receive salvation, the
elect or visible saints.
Original sinall people are born with original sin a literal interpretation of the Bible which
attributes mankinds fall to Eves temptation in the Garden of Edenwomen are the weaker
vessel.

Visible saintsindividuals who know or are presumed to among Gods elect. This was
demonstrated by their behavior and economic well being. Church membership was limited to
visible saints. Puritans uncertain status were members of the congregation.

The Great Migration (1630 1643)

John Winthrop

(religious and political leader) Puritan Reverend

Was Puritan Society a theocracy?

Church and the Government is the same
Characteristics of the City on the Hill
1. Individual Challenges to Puritan Society
1635

Roger Williams expelled to Rhode Island for dissident beliefs

1.

Puritans not truly separated form the Church, they were still trying to reforms it.

2. Puritans should have tolerance for other religious beliefs

3. Government officials should not interfere in religious matters and church officials
not interfere in government matters separation of church and state
4.Puritans were illegally intruding on Indian land.
1636

Thomas Hooker questioned the extent of power of the leadership and believed that
suffrage (the right to vote) should not be restricted to male Church members.
Was expelled to Connecticut River and founded Hartford.

1637

Anne Hutchinson expelled from Massachusetts for religious beliefs. A mother of seven
and a highly respected midwife, healer and spiritual advisor. She had persuaded her
merchant husband to follow a charismatic minister to New England. Hutchinson was
critical of the absence of the holy spirit in teachings and stressed the mystical
nature of Gods gift of grace.

2. Demographic Challenges
Rapid Population Growth by Natural Increase
Factors affecting fertility

More balanced sex ratio

Early marriage for women 18-20

Low mortality rates for infants, children and adults

Factors affecting mortality

Disease Environment, Sanitation

Food Supply

Large number of Children per marriage 8 10 born and 6 8 surviving to adulthood

Large numbers of heirs to family estate

Primogeniture replaced with partible inheritance (egually heirs) (men-land,womenmarriage gift)

Long life expectancy of older generation delays transfer of property
Large Number of Heirs
+ partible inheritance
+ long life expectancy of older generation
+ poor farm land
________________________________________
Loosening of generational bonds (and geographic mobility)

3. Economic Challenges to the City on the Hill

Development of a commercial manufacturing based society 1660
Periodizing New Englands colonial History
1620 1660 subsistence agriculture and staple search
1660 fishing, fur trade, spread effects of the export sector
Models for Understanding Changes in Puritan Society
Declension vs Development
Declension-Historians who focus on the fracturing of the religious and social structures created
by the Puritans in the City on the Hill
Development- Historians who focus on the changes brought to Puritan society by economic
modernization, manufacturing, commerce and urbanization.

Lecture 4 5 The Regions of British America II: The Chesapeake

Comparing the Three Colonies in 1660
Total Populations
Racial composition
Natural increase
Age/Sex structure of immigrants
Mortality rates
Wealth distribution
Comparison of family types
New England Patriarchal the loss of parental power
Chesapeake

High Mortality remarriages

complex families
orphans

Tobacco Production and the Growth of the Colony

Total Population

1620
1640
1660
1700

2200
10,000
35,000
100,000

Characteristics of Tobacco Production and How they shaped the Colony

1. history based on supply and demand
Supply Lead > Prices are high as supply is lower than demand
Demand Led> Prices are low or flat as supply reaches or exceeds demand
1620>1660 Supply Lead
1660>1700 equilibrium prices stable
1700> Demand Lead Prices
2. labor intensive, multiple day crop use of unfree (bonded) labor
Indentured servants
Enslaved Africans and African Americans
3. does not respond well to Economies of Scale
Fuels the growth of a yeoman farmer class
4. rivers provide both rich soil and transportation
5. fails to generate linkages role of the Scottish factors- guys who associate everything
with marketing, they own the ships and sort grade of tobacco.

European Immigration and the Opportunity Myth

Planterslave-owners
Yeoman farmer- independent ownership
Tenant farmer or sharecropper
Wage laborer
Indentured servant (5-7) years/ [1620-1640]-farmland

Periodizing Chesapeake Economic and Social History

1607 1620 Virginia Company failed bullionism staple search + subsistence
1620 1670 tobacco and indentured servants
1670 1690 transition from servants to slaves
1690 1720 tobacco and slaves
1720 1780 wheat, mixed agriculture, commerce and slaves
1670 1690 What caused the transition from servants to slaves?
1. Morgans Thesis
Bacons Rebellion (1676)
Late comer
Nathaniel Bacon
Landless
Supporters and the opportunity myth
Former indentured servants Conflict of interests of the core and the periphery
2. Russell Menards Thesis
Supply of indentured servants in England shifting
New opportunities in second wave (1660>) colonies NY, PA (1740-1750s)
and the Carolinas
3. Relative Cost of slaves and tobacco profits
Why Slavery? Why Africans?
1. Labor Intensive and Multiple day crops
2. Slavery and the Atlantic System
Portuguese and the feitorias system
Spanish and Portuguese sugar plantations Old WorldNew World
Why not enslave Native Americans?
1. Depopulation

2. Home filed advantage

1700 about 10 % of South Carolina slaves were Native Americans
Why not Englishmen?
Ethnocentrism
Convicts to all colonies Georgia originally established as a penal colony
Australia
What were the mechanisms of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Early institution of slavery in Africa and the Middle East

Feitorias

trading cities (originally developed by Portuguese, now competed for by other

Europeans)

Middle Passage
tight pack vs loose pack
seasoning
British policy on Sex ratio of slaves exported to New World

2: 1

How many Enslaved Africans were shipped to the New World?

Phillip Curtain The Atlantic Slaves Trade: A Census about 10 million
How revising the estimates upward

Percentage of slaves brought into each region

US
4.5 %
Sugar Islands
42.2 %
Sp south America 5.5 %

Mexico
Brazil

Why did the US receive proportionately so few slaves?

2.1 %
38.1 %

Natural increase of the population

Secondary slave market improved sex ratios higher fertility
Lower Mortality 1. disease environment
2. non-sugar labor regime
What was the impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa and African Peoples?
1. Increased internal conflicts among African people (wars a means of capturing slaves)

2. Regional Depopulation? Plural Marriage

3. Increased Dependence on European Trade Goods

What was the impact on People who were enslaved (Primary source)
The Memoir of Florence Hall

How did the Chesapeakes changing economy Tobacco mixed agriculture (1720 1780)
impact the lives of enslaved people?
After 1720 Owners efforts to make slavery profitable
-- increase the skill level of slaves
-- urban industrial slavery (renting slaves to the city labor market)
-- manumission (freeing slaves)
-- sale
Consequences of these actions for enslaved people
-- increase skills escape from the tedium of field work
better working conditions
use skills to improve life and opportunity to accumulate cash
maybe even self-purchase
-- urban industrial slavery cash accumulation sell labor
autonomy virtual freedom of city life
-- manumission freedom from slavery
Origins of the Chesapeakes free black populations
By 1860 1/2 Marylands African Americans were free

By 1860 1/4 Virginias African Americans were free

-- sale separation from family and community
removal to area of poorer health or labor conditions
Lecture 6 - 7 Plantation Economies and Slave Resistance -- British West Indies and South
Carolina
Periodizing Economic History of British West Indies (Barbados, Jamaica)
1620 - 1640
1640

tobacco and indentured servants

sugar and enslaved Africans

Features of Sugar Production

Population Growth of the Two Major British Sugar Islands

Barbados

1655
1675
1685
1712

Jamaica

European

African

23,000
21,700
19,500
12,500

20,000
32,500
46,600
42,000

European
1660
1673
1680
1700
1713

2,500
4,050
12,000
7,000
7,000

African
514
9,504
15,000
40,000
55,000

Impact of the transition to sugar

1.
2.
3.
4. replacement mentality in purchase of enslaved workers.
5. creation of severe slave code death, mutilation for minor property crimes.

Important Demographic Characteristics of Sugar Island Enslaved Populations

1. Large units of production 200 workers

2. Extremely High rates of Mortality

life expectancy 5 - 7 years
seasoning
3. skewed sex ratios few women
4. low fertility rates among enslaved women (poor health, hard work, abortion)
5. large percentage of Africans in the population
--dependence on Atlantic slave trade
New World Slave Experiences Modes of Accommodation and Resistance
Assimilation

Acculturation

absorbed in the dominant culture

Veracruz, Mexico examples- Where the Europeans started growing sugar.
adopted the cultural norms of the dominating culture
Speak language-- English
Convert to religionChristianity

Cultural Resistance (Autonomy) resisted adopting (or fully adopting) dominating culture
1. African Cultural carryover (substance of cultural element from Africa)

Physical Resistance
indirect or "day to day" resistance
-small non-confrontational acts which were psychologically lifting
direct resistance ie running away, revolts, thefts, poisoning
Sustained Physical Resistance Political Autonomy
Haiti 1790s
Jamaica's maroons
Enslaved Life and Slave Resistance features of Slave Life in Jamaica which promoted
Cultural and Physical Resistance
1. Demographic male dominated sex ratio
Large % of recently enslaved Africans
Density of slave pop in rural areas
2. Labor System Large units of production
Gang vs Task labor
Sunup > sundown [solidarity/trust]
Should to shoulder (gang labor)
(task labor)
Close supervision

is individual/ rice plantation

3. Island Geography

mountainous interior maroons

small size of political entity

Slave Revolts in Jamaica

1655

Spanish defeated by British abandon enslaved workers in Jamaica

Freed slaves known cimarrons or maroons

1660 - 1739

guerilla warfare against British known as First Maroon War

1739

Maroon Treaty
1. Created politically independent zones in interior of island including
judicial authority.
2. British to send ambassadorial representatives
3. Maroons promised to reject slave runaways
4. Maroons promised not to join forces with foreign powers

1760

Tacky's Rebellion >political revolution

1795

Second Maroon War (response to the Haitian slave revolt)

Deportation to Nova Scotia

Why Didn't the British West Indies Join in the American Revolution?
Political Implications of the Caribbean system--closer ties to England
1. absenteeism -- owners in England or Scotland
2. cultural and material dependence on English manufactured imports
3. White demographic regime meant no native born European population
emerged parallel to that which developed to the north
4. Wealth of sugar planters more closely allied with the powers in London
5. Fears of slave revolts--dependence on British military protection
Slavery in the British West Indies after 1800
1807

Abolition of Atlantic slave trade (lead to amelioration of slave conditions)

1831 -1833

Abolition of Slavery with compensation

1838

Abolition of Apprenticeship

1840s

Attempts to import indentured workers from East Indies Asian immigration

to islands

Why British abolition? Williams Thesis

Capital generated by sugar trade and Atlantic slave trade invested

In English industrialization

South Carolina Second Wave Migration (1660)

South Carolina West Indies (Barbados) small planters arrived with slaves
Periodizing South Carolina Economic History
1660 - 1700 staple search (sugar, silk worms, wine, long staple cotton) + subsistence
farming, foodstuff for export, cattle, naval stores with slave labor.
1700 Low Country rice (African crop and expertise) + indigo and slaves
1700 Back Country substance farming and family operating farms.
1660 - 1700 South Carolina's efforts to make slavery economically efficient
1.
2.
3.
4.

diversification
low profits, side by side work egalitarian society in terms of material conditions
food exports to BWI and linkages
urbanization -- 1700 1/3 of SC 6000 residents lived in Charleston

Features of Rice Production

Labor intensive and multiple day crops
Responds well to economies of scale
Geographic limits, fields along "tidally" effected rivers
Task labor
Impact of rice on South Carolina Society
1

1. increase in % of slaves in the colony 1700

1740

1/2 slaves
2/3 slaves

Cooper and Ashley region 80 - 90 % slave

2. reversed tendency towards diversification of economy and skills of slaves
3. sharply reduced opportunity for European or late Barbadian immigrants
4. increased gaps in wealth distribution 2 class society
5. seasonal absenteeism

Modes of Slave Resistance in South Carolina

Cultural Resistance

Physical resistance
Stono Rebellion (1739)

South Carolina's responses to Stono

1. limitations on importation of Africans
2. Comprehensive Negro Act of 1740