What factors contributed to the growing numbers and wealth of the American colonists in the eighteenth century?

Period 2: (1607-1754)
Chapters 3 & 4
Key Concepts - from College Board

Europeans and American Indians maneuvered and fought for dominance, control, and security in North America, and distinctive colonial and native societies emerged.

Key Concept 2.1: Europeans developed a variety of colonization and migration patterns, influenced by different imperial goals, cultures, and the varied North American environments where they settled, and they competed with each other and American Indians for resources.

I. Spanish, French, Dutch, and British colonizers had different economic and imperial goals involving land and labor that shaped the social and political development of their colonies as well as their relationships with native populations.

A) Spanish efforts to extract wealth from the land led them to develop institutions based on subjugating native populations, converting them to Christianity, and incorporating them, along with enslaved and free Africans, into the Spanish colonial society. B) French and Dutch colonial efforts involved relatively few Europeans and relied on trade alliances and intermarriage with American Indians to build economic and diplomatic relationships and acquire furs and other products for export to Europe. C) English colonization efforts attracted a comparatively large number of male and female British migrants, as well as other European migrants, all of whom sought social mobility, economic prosperity, religious freedom, and improved living conditions. These colonists focused on agriculture and settled on land taken from Native Americans, from whom they lived separately.

Related Thematic Learning Objectives (Focus of Exam Questions)

MIG-1.0: Explain the causes of migration to colonial North America and, later, the United States, and analyze immigration’s effects on U.S. society.
WOR-1.0: Explain how cultural interaction, cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, nations, and peoples have influenced political, economic, and social developments in North America.

II. In the 17th century, early British colonies developed along the Atlantic coast, with regional differences that reflected various environmental, economic, cultural, and demographic factors.

A) The Chesapeake and North Carolina colonies grew prosperous exporting tobacco — a labor-intensive product initially cultivated by white, mostly male indentured servants and later by enslaved Africans. B) The New England colonies, initially settled by Puritans, developed around small towns with family farms and achieved a thriving mixed economy of agriculture and commerce. C) The middle colonies supported a flourishing export economy based on cereal crops and attracted a broad range of European migrants, leading to societies with greater cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity and tolerance. D) The colonies of the southernmost Atlantic coast and the British West Indies used long growing seasons to develop plantation economies based on exporting staple crops. They depended on the labor of enslaved Africans, who often constituted the majority of the population in these areas and developed their own forms of cultural and religious autonomy. E) Distance and Britain’s initially lax attention led to the colonies creating self-governing institutions that were unusually democratic for the era. The New England colonies based power in participatory town meetings, which in turn elected members to their colonial legislatures; in the Southern colonies, elite planters exercised local authority and also dominated the elected assemblies.

Related Thematic Learning Objectives (Focus of Exam Questions)

WXT-2.0: Explain how patterns of exchange, markets, and private enterprise have developed, and analyze ways that governments have responded to economic issues.
MIG-1.0: Explain the causes of migration to colonial North America and, later, the United States, and analyze immigration’s effects on U.S. society.
MIG-2.0: Analyze causes of internal migration and patterns of settlement in what would become the United States, and explain how migration has affected American life.

III. Competition over resources between European rivals and American Indians encouraged industry and trade and led to conflict in the Americas.

A) An Atlantic economy developed in which goods, as well as enslaved Africans and American Indians, were exchanged between Europe, Africa, and the Americas through extensive trade networks. European colonial economies focused on acquiring, producing, and exporting commodities that were valued in Europe and gaining new sources of labor. B) Continuing trade with Europeans increased the flow of goods in and out of American Indian communities, stimulating cultural and economic changes and spreading epidemic diseases that caused radical demographic shifts. C) Interactions between European rivals and American Indian populations fostered both accommodation and conflict. French, Dutch, British, and Spanish colonies allied with and armed American Indian groups, who frequently sought alliances with Europeans against other Indian groups. D) The goals and interests of European leaders and colonists at times diverged, leading to a growing mistrust on both sides of the Atlantic. Colonists, especially in British North America, expressed dissatisfaction over issues including territorial settlements, frontier defense, self-rule, and trade. E) British conflicts with American Indians over land, resources, and political boundaries led to military confrontations, such as Metacom’s War (King Philip’s War) in New England. F) American Indian resistance to Spanish colonizing efforts in North America, particularly after the Pueblo Revolt, led to Spanish accommodation of some aspects of American Indian culture in the Southwest.

Related Thematic Learning Objectives (Focus of Exam Questions)

WXT-2.0: Explain how patterns of exchange, markets, and private enterprise have developed, and analyze ways that governments have responded to economic issues.
CUL-4.0: Explain how different group identities, including racial, ethnic, class, and regional identities, have emerged and changed over time.
WOR-1.0: Explain how cultural interaction, cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, nations, and peoples have influenced political, economic, and social developments in North America.

Key Concept 2.2: The British colonies participated in political, social, cultural, and economic exchanges with Great Britain that encouraged both stronger bonds with Britain and resistance to Britain’s control.

I. Transatlantic commercial, religious, philosophical, and political exchanges led residents of the British colonies to evolve in their political and cultural attitudes as they became increasingly tied to Britain and one another.

A) The presence of different European religious and ethnic groups contributed to a significant degree of pluralism and intellectual exchange, which were later enhanced by the first Great Awakening and the spread of European Enlightenment ideas. B) The British colonies experienced a gradual Anglicization over time, developing autonomous political communities based on English models with influence from intercolonial commercial ties, the emergence of a trans-Atlantic print culture, and the spread of Protestant evangelicalism. C) The British government increasingly attempted to incorporate its North American colonies into a coherent, hierarchical, and imperial structure in order to pursue mercantilist economic aims, but conflicts with colonists and American Indians led to erratic enforcement of imperial policies. D) Colonists’ resistance to imperial control drew on local experiences of self-government, evolving ideas of liberty, the political thought of the Enlightenment, greater religious independence and diversity, and an ideology critical of perceived corruption in the imperial system.

Related Thematic Learning Objectives (Focus of Exam Questions)

NAT-1.0: Explain how ideas about democracy, freedom, and individualism found expression in the development of cultural values, political institutions, and American identity.
POL-1.0: Explain how and why political ideas, beliefs, institutions, party systems, and alignments have developed and changed.
WXT-2.0: Explain how patterns of exchange, markets, and private enterprise have developed, and analyze ways that governments have responded to economic issues.
CUL-1.0: Explain how religious groups and ideas have affected American society and political life.
CUL-2.0: Explain how artistic, philosophical, and scientific ideas have developed and shaped society and institutions.

II. Like other European empires in the Americas that participated in the Atlantic slave trade, the English colonies developed a system of slavery that reflected the specific economic, demographic, and geographic characteristics of those colonies.

A) All the British colonies participated to varying degrees in the Atlantic slave trade due to the abundance of land and a growing European demand for colonial goods, as well as a shortage of indentured servants. Small New England farms used relatively few enslaved laborers, all port cities held significant minorities of enslaved people, and the emerging plantation systems of the Chesapeake and the southernmost Atlantic coast had large numbers of enslaved workers, while the great majority of enslaved Africans were sent to the West Indies. B) As chattel slavery became the dominant labor system in many southern colonies, new laws created a strict racial system that prohibited interracial relationships and defined the descendants of African American mothers as black and enslaved in perpetuity. C) Africans developed both overt and covert means to resist the dehumanizing aspects of slavery and maintain their family and gender systems, culture, and religion.

Related Thematic Learning Objectives (Focus of Exam Questions)

WXT-1.0: Explain how different labor systems developed in North America and the United States, and explain their effects on workers’ lives and U.S. society.
CUL-3.0: Explain how ideas about women’s rights and gender roles have affected society and politics.
CUL-4.0: Explain how different group identities, including racial, ethnic, class, and regional identities, have emerged and changed over time.
WOR-1.0: Explain how cultural interaction, cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, nations, and peoples have influenced political, economic, and social developments in North America.

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Chapter 2 summary from American PageantThe defeat of the Spanish Armada and the exuberant spirit of Elizabethan nationalism finally drew England into the colonial race. After some early failures, the first permanent English colony was established at Jamestown, Virginia. Initially it faced harsh conditions and Indian hostility, but tobacco cultivation finally brought prosperity and population growth. The early encounters of English settlers with the Powhatans in Virginia established many of the patterns that characterized later Indian-white relations in North America. Indian societies underwent their own substantial changes as a result of warfare, disease, trade, and the mingling and migration of Indians from the Atlantic coast to inland areas. Other colonies were established in Maryland and the Carolinas. South Carolina flourished by establishing close ties with the British sugar colonies in the West Indies. It also borrowed the West Indian pattern of harsh slave codes and large plantation agriculture. North Carolina developed somewhat differently,with fewer slaves and more white colonists who owned small farms. Late comer Georgia served initially as a buffer against the Spanish and a haven for debtors.

Despite some differences, all the southern colonies depended on staple plantation agriculture for their survival and on the institutions of indentured servitude and African slavery for their labor. With widely scattered rural settlements, they had relatively weak religious and social institutions and tended to develop hierarchical economicand social orders.

Chapter 3 Summary from American Pageant

The New England colonies were founded by English Puritans. While most Puritans sought to “purify” the Church of England from within, and not to break away from it, a small group of Separatists—the Pilgrims—founded the first small, pious Plymouth Colony in New England. More important was the larger group of non-separating Puritans, led by John Winthrop,who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the “great migration” of Puritans fleeing persecution in England in the 1630s. A strong sense of common purpose among the first settlers shaped the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because of the close alignment of religion and politics in the colony, those who challenged religious orthodoxy, among them Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, were considered guilty of sedition and driven out of Massachusetts. The banished Williams founded Rhode Island, by far the most religiously and politically tolerant of the colonies. Other New England settlements, all originating in Massachusetts Bay, were established in Connecticut, Maine (an extension of Massachusetts -- not an independent colony),and New Hampshire. Although they shared a common way of life, the New England colonies developed with a substantial degree of independence. The middle colonies took shape quite differently. New York, founded as New Netherland by the Dutch and later conquered by England, was economically and ethnically diverse, socially hierarchical, and politically quarrelsome. Pennsylvania, founded as a Quaker haven by William Penn, also attracted an economically ambitious and politically troublesome population of diverse ethnic groups. With their economic variety, ethnic diversity, and political factionalism, the middle colonies were the most typically “American” of England’s thirteen Atlantic seaboard colonies.

Chapter 4 Summary from American Pageant

Life was hard in the seventeenth-century southern colonies. Disease drastically shortened life spans in the Chesapeake region, even for the young single men who made up the majority of settlers. Families were few and fragile, with men greatly outnumbering women, who were much in demand and seldom remained single for long. The tobacco economy first thrived on the labor of white indentured servants, who hoped to work their way up to become landowners and perhaps even become wealthy. But by the late seventeenth century, this hope was increasingly frustrated, and the discontents of the poor whites exploded in Bacon’s Rebellion. With white labor increasingly troublesome, slaves (earlier a small fraction of the workforce) began to be imported from West Africa by the tens of thousands in the 1680s, and soon became essential to the colonial economy. Slaves in the Deep South died rapidly of disease and overwork, but those in the Chesapeake tobacco region survived longer. Their numbers eventually increased by natural reproduction and they developed a distinctive African-American way of life that combined African elements with features developed in the New World.

By contrast with the South, New England’s clean water and cool air contributed to a healthy way of life, which added ten years to the average English life span. The New England way of life centered on strong families and tightly knit towns and churches, which were relatively democratic and equal by seventeenth-century standards. By the late seventeenth century, however, social and religious tensions developed in these narrow communities, as the Salem witch hysteria dramatically illustrates.

Rocky soil forced many New Englanders to turn to fishing and merchant shipping for their livelihoods. Their difficult lives and stern religion made New Englanders tough, idealistic, purposeful, and resourceful. In later years they spread these same values across much of American society. Seventeenth-century American society was still almost entirely simple and agrarian. Would-be aristocrats who tried to recreate the social hierarchies of Europe were generally frustrated.

Ch.5 summary from American Pageant

By 1775 the thirteen American colonies east of the Appalachians were inhabited by a burgeoning population of two million whites and half a million blacks. The white population was increasingly a melting pot of diverse ethnic groups including Germans and the Scots-Irish. Compared with Europe, America was a land of equality and opportunity (for whites), but relative to the seventeenth-century colonies, there was a rising economic hierarchy and increasing social complexity. Ninety percent of Americans remained agriculturalists. But a growing class of wealthy planters and merchants appeared at the top of the social pyramid, in contrast with slaves and “jayle birds” from England, who formed a visible lower class. By the early eighteenth century, the established New England Congregational Church was losing religious fervor. The Great Awakening, sparked by fiery preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, spread a new style of emotional worship that revived religious zeal. Colonial education and culture were generally undistinguished, although science and journalism displayed some vigor. Politics was everywhere an important activity, as representative colonial assemblies battled on equal terms with politically appointed governors from England. Eighteenth-century America is a melting pot of races, cultures, religions, and ethnicities. One half of the people by the late 18th century are English or of English descent. In the 18th century, the triangle trade is essential to trade and commerce in the colonies. Challenges to the institutions and ideologies that dominated Europe and early colonial America emerge. The First Great Awakening leads to the development of American centers of higher learning. That and political and judicial developments and the advent of the American press play a pivotal role in establishing a uniquely American character. The American colonies were a magnet for social, political, ethnic, and religious groups. For example, the Scots-Irish were instrumental in developing more democratic society than they had experienced under the political disenfranchisement and economic exploitation of the British.

Despite claims that the American colonies were more democratic and less socially stratified than Europe, a social class structure had indeed taken hold in America. Slavery had a significant impact on the level of colonial democracy, as did the increasing numbers of indentured servants and lower class immigrants to America.