Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (65 page)

There were therefore wide variations in the pattern of slave-holding - variations that reveal potential limits to the institutionalization of chattel bondage, although it still remained unclear in the middle decades of the century, both in British and Iberian America, how strong the demarcation lines would be between slave and free societies, and where those lines would eventually be drawn. Slavery is too easily equated with the presence of plantation economies, and urban slavery remains an underrated and understudied phenomenon.166 In the event, in spite of the extensive use of slaves in the cities of the British Atlantic seaboard, and the spread of slavery to rural New York and Pennsylvania, the Middle and Northern Colonies of North America would not follow the path taken by the Caribbean islands, the Southern Colonies and Brazil. After a period of prevarication the mid-Atlantic colonies, with their rapidly expanding white populations and their very varied employment needs, opted for a wage-labour system that proved cheaper than bound labour. Rural New England, for its part, remained firmly wedded to its system of family labour supplemented by hired help. 167

While all the colonies along the North American seaboard responded to the growth of population and the opportunities arising from the rapid expansion of the British Atlantic economy by increasing their total output,168 the extent of the social and political dislocation created by economic development and demographic change varied from place to place and region to region. In general, the Northern and Southern Colonies displayed greater stability than the mid-Atlantic Colonies, which struggled over the middle decades of the century to find an equilibrium. 169

Between 1720 and 1750 the total white and black population of New England rose from around 170,000 to 360,000, largely through natural increase rather than as the result of immigration, but it experienced much less of an economic transformation than the other mainland regions. 170 It already possessed a closely integrated commercial economy, based on farming, fishing, and trade in animal and timber products. Although the buoyancy of the Atlantic economy benefited New England's ship construction and its coastal and carrying trades, the region's growth was held back by its inability to increase the agricultural output of the stony New England soil sufficiently to keep pace with the growth of population.

New England's currency troubles threw into sharp relief the economic problems confronting the region. Its permanently adverse balance of trade with Britain meant a constant drain of specie, which colonial legislatures attempted to offset by an over-enthusiastic printing of paper notes. The crisis came to a head in Massachusetts in the years around 1740, when an acute shortfall in the monetary supply led to the revival of a scheme for backing the issue of paper currency through a privately funded Land Bank. The proposal, which led to the new Land Bank releasing bills without first securing legislative approval, set off a bitter debate in a society in which the traditional values of the common weal had long been locked in battle with the self-interested and acquisitive instincts of an increasingly commercialized society 171

The tensions generated by the region's economic difficulties were felt most acutely in the teeming port city of Boston, which was particularly vulnerable to the fluctuations produced by the wartime expansion of 1739 to 1748 and the postwar depression that followed. Political and social unrest was compounded by the wave of religious revivalism, later to be known as the Great Awakening, that swept through the Northern Colonies in the mid-1730s and early 1740s, challenging traditional authority and bringing to the massed audiences of George Whitefield and his fellow revivalist preachers the exciting message of the primacy of individual choice." Yet in spite of sporadic manifestations of unrest in the streets of Boston and some lively pamphleteering, Massachusetts in the middle years of the century retained a high degree of stability. New England's communal traditions were firmly based, town meetings and regular elections provided an opportunity for the organized expression of dissent, and the well-entrenched image of the `godly ruler' helped maintain a measure of deference to the region's governing elite. 13

The Southern Colonies, too, enjoyed a high degree of stability, although this would come to be challenged, particularly in South Carolina, as new tides of immigrants moved inland to settle the backcountry. The stability here, however, derived from the successful dominance by the planter elite of a hierarchical society with slavery at its base. In Virginia, where perhaps 70 per cent of adult free males qualified for the franchise, the elite took its responsibilities seriously, and was careful to court electors when election time approached. There were obvious tensions in this patriarchal world, but they were successfully contained.'74 In South Carolina, which became a royal colony in 1720, the relatively new elite of planters and merchants was anxious to prove, not least to itself, its worthiness to be accepted as a virtuous ruling class on the model of Whig England. With its social and political power firmly concentrated in Charles Town, the elite maintained an authority which became increasingly ragged the further away from the coastal region the frontiers of settlement moved. 175

It was in the Middle Colonies - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania - that the achievement of political order and social stability proved most elusive. This was the region of the North American mainland that displayed the greatest ethnic and religious diversity. New immigrants, Germans, Scots and Scots-Irish, jostled with older-established populations, not only the English, but also the Dutch in the Hudson Valley and Scandinavians around the Delaware. Some of the new immigrant communities, especially the Huguenot French, blended easily with the surrounding population, but others did not.

Ethnic or national antagonisms were compounded by religious animosity. Feuding between Quakers, Presbyterians, Anglicans and the newer evangelical sects had a profound impact on the struggle for power and influence in both New York and Pennsylvania. 176 There were also sharp clashes between the Dutch Reformed Church and the Church of England. The English and the Dutch had long had a strained relationship, reaching back to the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664 and before. The continuous pressure on the Dutch of New York to accept the anglicization of their culture was intensified by the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1701 and the development of a more aggressive Anglicanism. Dutch children were taught the Anglican catechism in the Society's schools, and Anglican missionaries worked hard to win converts from the Dutch Reformed Church. A letter from Lord Cornbury, as governor of New York, points to the collusion between church and state in the promotion of anglicization. `This', he wrote, asking for a minister to be sent to Albany County, `will be a means to make the growing Generation English men. 1177

In the aftermath of Leisler's rebellion '171 many lower-class Dutch left New York City and Long Island for the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey, where they clung to a religious and cultural tradition that was eventually absorbed by the pietism of the Moravian immigrants and the enthusiasm of the revivalist sects. Yet in spite of the departure of this disaffected sector of the Dutch population from New York, the traditional antagonism between the Dutch and English communities continued to colour New York city politics. By mid-century, however, the campaign for anglicization had largely succeeded. Especially at the elite level, Dutch culture had conceded defeat.179

For all its disruptive effects, and the factional politics to which it so often gave rise, pluralism also created an environment conducive to the generation of new ideas and new forms of political organization. 180 The sheer attempt to impose order on potential anarchy forced members of the elite to bid for popular support in a highly competitive political and religious arena. Over the first half of the century, the persistent erosion of the authority of the royal governors of New York by the assembly" meant that provincial and city politics were conducted within an increasingly autonomous framework. In order to seize power, or buttress their position, rival New York families, like the Mortises and the Philipses, turned to artisans, shopkeepers and labourers to provide them with electoral support. On the model of contemporary British politics, they engaged in heated political warfare through the medium of pamphlets and the press, and developed during the 1730s party platforms and incipient party organization in their efforts to mobilize on their behalf a volatile and unpredictable urban electorate. 112 The Quakers of Philadelphia were faced with the same necessity if they were to hold on to power, and turned especially to the new German immigrants to secure additional political support as they found themselves being outnumbered by adherents of other faiths.183

By grouping the disparate units of a fragmented urban society under the banner of a cause, the resort to such tactics had its own stabilizing effects. The `Quaker party' succeeded in dominating Pennsylvania's political life from the late 1730s to the mid-1750s, and in the same period New York's politics were dominated by the Anglican-based DeLancey coalition, which reached out to leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church. Stability, however, was not the same as stagnation. In couching their appeals to the electorate in terms of the people's rights, the elite were unleashing a force which they might one day find themselves unable to control.

The message of political liberty was reinforced by the message of religious liberty carried through the Middle Colonies by the revivalist movements of the Great Awakening. Some of these were inspired by German pietism, others by the activities of the Baptists, and others by the movement for renewal within Calvinism itself, at a moment when Calvinist immigrants from Scotland, Ireland and continental Europe were flocking into Pennsylvania. In an already competitive religious environment, evangelical revivalism, with its insistence on the conversion experience and the achievement of personal salvation, sharpened the edge of competition between the churches, while also generating schisms within churches of the same faith. Enthusiasm was a heady experience, and the thousands who turned out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in 1739-40 to hear the rousing sermons of George Whitefield were caught up in a movement that may have risen and fallen like the waves of the sea, but which changed many individual lives and had a lasting impact on colonial society as a whole.

Given the diversity of religion, politics and society in colonial British America, the effects of this revivalist movement were as varied and contradictory as its origins, and could as easily strengthen as weaken the authority of the churches. 114 At heart, however, the revivalism represented a return to the radical tradition within the Protestant Reformation, with its egalitarian and democratizing tendencies.185 This was a tradition calculated to appeal to the small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and labourers who were trying to carve out new lives for themselves in America, and resented the dominance of wealthy urban elites and powerful country landowners, like the great barons owning estates along the Hudson River. As the course of the Protestant Reformation in Germany two centuries earlier had already demonstrated '116 demands for political liberty and social equality are liable to flourish in a radical religious environment.

The original settlers from England had brought with them a powerful conviction of their `right' to English liberties - a conviction contested in vain by judge Joseph Dudley in that dangerous year 1687 when he asserted that `they must not think the privileges of Englishmen would follow them to the end of the world. 1187 As new waves of immigrants arrived, carrying with them little or no feeling of allegiance to the British crown, the God-given rights of Englishmen were permeated, and ultimately transcended, by a conviction that rights were God's gift to humanity as a whole - the right to religious choice, personal freedom, social justice, and happiness on earth. The immigrants, and the communities they joined, shared the conviction that they were endowed with the right to make what they could of their own lives, untrammelled by authority. It was a conviction that linked Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, with his message of self-improvement, hard work and personal responsibility, to the urban artisan, the Pennsylvania farmer and the backcountry settler. While the pursuit of individual liberty and the wish for independence could represent divisive forces in a society already splintered into a multitude of ethnicities and faiths, they were also capable, if the situation required it, of generating mutual association and solidarity in support of a common cause.

The inherent sense of liberty permeating the mainland colonies in the mideighteenth century stopped short of the rapidly increasing black population on North American soil. Freedom and servitude, it seems, were doomed to walk hand in hand. Yet for all their shortcomings - the sharpening racial divisions, the growing social inequalities, and the strident acquisitiveness of people on the make - the societies of mid-century British America possessed a political vitality and a religious effervescence that differentiated them from the Spanish American societies to the south. Racially, these societies might be more mixed, but religiously and politically they tended towards the monochrome. While the first half of the eighteenth century saw accelerating movement - demographic, social and economic - throughout the hemisphere, the sheer diversity of peoples, creeds and traditions that distinguished the mainland societies of British America suggested that here, more than anywhere, change was in the air.

The great international conflict known to the colonists as the French and Indian War, and to Europeans as the Seven Years War, was a struggle for global primacy between Britain and France. In that struggle, in which Bourbon Spain was to be directly involved in its closing stages, the fate of North America would be decided. Not only were the lives and prospects of millions of North Americans - the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, French Canadians, colonial Britons, West Indian planters and their slaves - to be changed for ever by the conflict and its aftermath, but its impact would be felt throughout the hemisphere, even in Spanish territories as far away as Chile and Peru. War, even war at second or third remove, was to be the catalyst of change in British and Spanish America alike.