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Early Colonial Life

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Early Colonial Life Early Colonial Life The 16th century was the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that pushed European nations to acquire as many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England’s surplus population and more religious freedom than England did, but their primary purpose was to make money for their sponsors. The first English settlement in North America was established in 1587, when a group of colonists (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke. Mysteriously, the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants. In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the Virginia Company and the northern half to the Plymouth Company. In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown. The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. It was not until 1616, when Virginia’s settlers learned to grow tobacco and John Smith’s leadership helped the colony survive. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619. (History.com John Smith Videos) The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered. As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they generated new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut. Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone, including Jews, enjoyed complete “liberty in religious concernments.” To the north of the Massachusetts colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire. In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and African slaves. But unlike Virginia’s founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all. In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York, but most of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans who were living there) stayed put. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World. Soon after, York gave New Jersey to royal friends, who sold off their portions, reverting to an official royal colony in 1702. In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn’s North American holdings became the colony of “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania. Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place. After York had granted Penn the lower counties along the Delaware River for access to the Atlantic, Penn granted a separate colonial assembly to those parts unlike Pennsylvania, becoming Delaware in 1701. The Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef, pork, and rice. These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729. In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. Georgia was settled by many indebted prisoners with the purpose of defending against the Spanish. The Great Awakening What historians call the “first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the ideas of the Enlightenment: science, reason, reality based on evidence, natural human rights. The beginnings of the First Great Awakening appeared among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Led by the Tennent family - Reverend William Tennent, a Scots-Irish immigrant, and his four sons, all clergymen - the Presbyterians not only initiated religious revivals in those colonies during the 1730s but also established a seminary to train clergymen whose fervid, heartfelt preaching would convert sinners into “born again Christians.” Originally known as “the Log College,” it is better known today as Princeton University. Religious enthusiasm quickly spread from the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies to the Puritans and Baptists of New England. By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents. In emotionally charged sermons, preachers like Jonathan Edwards evoked vivid, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell. Hence Edwards’s famous description of the sinner as a loathsome spider suspended by a slender thread over a pit of seething brimstone in his best known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” These early revivals in the northern colonies inspired some converts to become missionaries to the American South. In the late 1740s, Presbyterian preachers from New York and New Jersey began proselytizing in the Virginia Piedmont. By the 1750s, some members of a group known as the Separate Baptists moved from New England to central North Carolina and quickly extended their influence to surrounding colonies. By the eve of the American Revolution, their evangelical converts accounted for about ten percent of all southern churchgoers. The First Great Awakening also gained strength from the wide-ranging American travels of an English preacher, George Whitefield. Although Whitefield had been ordained as a minister in the Church of England, he later allied with other Anglican clergymen who shared his evangelical ways, most notably John and Charles Wesley. Together they led a movement to reform the Church of England, which resulted in the founding of the Methodist Church late in the eighteenth century. During his several trips across the Atlantic after 1739, Whitefield preached everywhere in the American colonies, often drawing audiences so large that he was obliged to preach outdoors. What Whitefield preached was nothing more than what other Calvinists had been proclaiming for centuries - that sinful men and women were totally dependent for salvation on the mercy of a pure, all-powerful God. They turned the sermon into a gripping theatrical performance, gesturing dramatically, sometimes weeping openly or thundering out threats of hellfire-and-brimstone. Not everyone approved. Throughout the colonies, conservative and moderate clergymen questioned the emotionalism of evangelicals and charged that the revivals were disorderly and disruptive. They did not appreciate ministers who, like Whitefield, traveled from one community to another, preaching and all too often criticizing the local clergy. Battles raged within congregations and whole denominations over this challenge to clerical authority, as well as the evangelical approach to conversion from “the heart,” rather than “the head.” So the first Great Awakening left colonials sharply polarized along religious lines. Anglicans and Quakers gained new members who disapproved of the revival’s methods and fearful message. The Baptists and the Methodists made even more handsome gains from the ranks of radical evangelical converts. The largest single group of churchgoing Americans remained within the Puritan and Presbyterian denominations, but they divided internally between advocates and opponents of the Awakening, known respectively as “New Lights” and “Old Lights.” The major effect of the Awakening was a rebellion against authoritarian religious rule, which spilled over into other areas of colonial life. The chain of authority no longer ran from God to ruler to people, but from God to people to ruler. The children of revivalism later echoed this radical self-righteousness in the American Revolution, when they turned against the tyrannical ways of King George III.
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