This lecture is
best viewed with screen resolution set at 1440 x 900.ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Lecture 2: Colonial Society in Transition
This lecture is
best viewed with screen resolution set at 1440 x 900.| Land, Growth, and Changing Values |
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| Cities |
Even
though only five percent of the 18th century
colonists
lived in cities (and none of the cities exceeded 16,000 in 1750), the
commercial capitals of coastal North America were on the cutting edge
of economic, social, and political change. It was here that the
economy first changed from a barter to a commercial economy, where a
competitive social order replaced one based on ascribed status, where a
hierarchical and deferential polity gave way to a participatory and
contentious civic life, and where factory production first began to
replace small-scale artisanal production. In the half century between 1690 and 1750 Boston, New York, and Philadelphia blossomed into commercial centers that rivaled such British provincial ports as Hull, Bristol, and Glasgow. This urban growth reflected the development of the hinterlands to which they were commercially linked. These seaports were also being drawn into the international market and were less self-sufficient than before. Many of the economic decisions affecting the livelihood of people in these cities were now being made in far-off places. The wider market was indifferent to individuals or communities, and the price of goods, labor, and land were dictated by invisible laws of the international marketplace. So long as times were prosperous, though, people did not seem to notice or care. Not until a crisis occurred would they begin to re-examine their new circumstances and lament the loss of their earlier values of community and concern for the "common weal." Such a crisis occurred in Boston during the first of England's continental wars in the 18th century: Queen Anne's War (1702-1713). During this war, Andrew Belcher, one of the town's largest grain merchants, decided to ship large quantities of wheat to the West Indies, where prices were higher than Massachusetts. This threatened the locals with a bread shortage. Leading townsmen were appalled that a merchant would put profit ahead of the welfare of the community. ordinary Bostonians took matters into their own hands. They descended upon one of Belcher's ships, which was loaded with grain for the Indies, and sabotaged it by sawing through the rudder. They then tried to run the ship aground in order to liberate the grain from the ship's holds. Such food shortages rarely occurred in the American colonies, usually happening only in wartime, but when they did, urban people demanded to be fed at prices they could afford, regardless of modern notions of a free market ruled by supply and demand. The urban social strain grew with the spread of the individualistic and entrepreneurial ethic, and became more evident in the European wars that followed Queen Anne's War. These wars drained New England of manpower and resources during King George's War (1739-1747), when the colonists attempted to overwhelm the French enemy to the North. But the war also offered opportunities for merchants and other to run up profits through war contracts and privateering. This only advanced the "every man for himself" spirit and further eroded any feeling of community. People in Boston began to turn away from their professions and became buyers and butchers of livestock. They understood that by buying out the supplies of livestock and holding onto it for awhile, they could drive up prices. This resulted in a kind of economic warfare between rural and urban society. The breakdown of an interdependent economic community was equally visible in other cities during King George's War. Food exporters in New York and Philadelphia piled up profits by illegally trading with the French and Spanish enemy in the West Indies. They diverted food supplies for New England to the Caribbean, where the enemy paid higher prices in order to feed their slave populations. Here was the ultimate betrayal of the public good by private interests, a betrayal reflected in the food bill of every Bostonian. War had spurred the growing tendency of the free market, with everyone seeking to capitalize on the new opportunities for private gain. By throwing off the governmental and ideological restraints of the past, by glorifying the concept of self-interest, the colonists were in fact bringing together what for them was the perfect relationship between a people blessed with vast areas of abundant natural resources and a people accustomed to dealing with situations on their own and developing new responses to unique situations. The new system of values growing out of this marriage legitimated private profit-seeking, promoted the abandonment of economic regulation, and projected a future in which men's energies would be cut looses from age-old mercantilist controls instituted from above to promote the good of all. This, many colonists argued, would produce a common good far better than the old. Needless to say, not all colonists agreed--particularly those who were fighting to buy bread or meat at reasonable prices. However, these two ideas--one, that economic life should be regulated for the common good, or that economic life should be left alone and naturally regulate itself according to supply and demand--were competing for ascendancy in the colonial mind. It was in the cities that shopkeepers, merchants, land speculators and others first developed a philosophical rationale to justify their new economic circumstances. This thinking paralleled a similar train of social thought in England an Europe. There, too, a new model of economic and social life had emerged, predicated on the notion that the market mentality was preferable to the older corporate society of persons finely attuned to the public good because the idealistic model refused to take men as they really were. Self-denial, moral rectitude, and the subordination of private to public interests were good in theory, but in reality they acted as dead weights on the economic order. National prosperity required a different way of thinking--it required encouragement of acquisitive appetites and acceptance of the notion that the self-seeking drive was more powerful than institutional efforts when it came to molding people's actions. In England, the new formula for national prosperity assumed that if each individual sought his or her own improvement, all these separate efforts would produce, through a mysterious process later described by Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations, as the "invisible hand," a natural harmony and a prosperous, free society. They said that men could not be compelled to work for the good of the whole, but, if left to sort out their own wants and to pursue their own material desires in open competition, they would collectively form an impersonal market that would regulate human affairs to everyone's advantage. Finally, in this new system, labor was more valuable than land in producing wealth. (Given the labor situation in America, you can see why they would like this theory.) |
| Changing
Social Structure Click here to read in greater detail the statistics illustrating the economic gap in Boston. |
Population
growth and economic
development, carried
on for a century and a half by aggressive and opportunistic
individuals,
changed both the structure of colonial society and the attitudes of the
people
toward social structure -- but changed them in opposite
directions.
17th century Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the
naturalness
of hierarchy in human affairs, the inevitability of poverty, and the
right
of those in the upper stratum of society to rule those below
them.
The belief was that this system was not only sanctioned by God but that
it
was also essential to the maintenance of social stability and cohesion. In spite of the philosophical commitment to hierarchy, the early immigrants to America were very undifferentiated in their makeup. Emigrant society was strongly lower middle class, and the availability of land, combined with the lack of opportunity to amass great fortunes in the early years, the spectrum of wealth relatively narrow throughout most of the 17th century. Even in the cities, where redistribution of wealth proceeded swiftly, colonial society was overwhelmingly middle class. In the 18th century, however, and especially in the half century before the Revolution, the customary commitment to hierarchy and deference waned at the same time that social stratification was increasing. Social attitudes and social structure were moving in opposite directions. Below the elite, free whites developed the idea of egalitarianism. Visiting Europeans often exaggerated the degree of egalitarianism they witnessed by contrasting it with what they knew at home. But it was true that most American colonists believed they were creating a society where a wealthy aristocracy did not dominate and no masses of poor whites were ground into the dust. The ideal was a rough economic equality where each person would have enough and a social equality in which discrimination would be abolished. This was the belief; this was the ideal. The reality, in fact, was that 18th century society was moving away from the ideal. [Note that the more social reality changes, the persistent ideal is trumpeted that much louder.] As the old deferential attitudes gave way to harsh, assertive, individualistic modes of thought and behavior--what became known as the "democratic personality: -society became more divided into truly wealthy and truly poor. The aggrandizement of wealth was happening everywhere, but was most apparent in the cities, especially those coastal cities such as Boston and Philadelphia that were engaged in international trade. While the rich raised new townhouses and invested in luxury items like silver tea sets and expensive china, townsmen were forced to erect almshouses and poorhouses for the indigent numbers of people left impoverished by the cycles of trade. Between 1725 and 1760, the poor in the cities increased more rapidly than the urban population as a whole, and after 1750 poverty was no longer confined to the old or physically depleted. Boston, the first utopian settlement in Anglo-America, was the first to feel the pinch of economic hardship. The city had grown to 12,000 in 1720 and increased to 16,000 during the next two decades. But from 1740 until the Revolution, the population stagnated as other coastal towns such as Salem, Marblehead, and Newbury captured some of the shipping industry and the New England economy in general entered a period of declining productivity. Expenditures for poor relief edged upward in the 1730s and grew faster than the population in the 1740s. Inevitably, the expanding economy and the individualistic values incorporated in the society tended to favor the aggressive and able in their drive for material success. The greater the opportunities--a primary characteristic of a democratic society--the greater the gulf became between the rich and the poor. The growth of cultural and political egalitarianism was accompanied by, and indirectly sanctioned, the decline of economic equality. An open society with ample opportunities and relatively few restraints led paradoxically to a concentration of power in the hands of a thin upper layer of society. Society was becoming a place where the individual and not the common weal was the central concern. The white population of colonial America was transforming what they thought to be uniquely American into what resembled more and more the European conditions they had fled. |
| Life on the Frontier | If
poverty touched the lives of a growing part of the urban laboring
class, it was the normal condition on the frontier. Here the gap
between rich and poor hardly existed because no one was rich. The
social order on the 18th-century frontier was even cruder than it had
been a century earlier.
Frontier society was composed of small farmers and rural artisans who
all
stood roughly on the same plane. They purchased land cheaply and
struggled
to carve farms from the wilderness. Most only hoped to get enough
land under cultivation to be able to sell surplus crops for markets,
but
with only the help of one's sons and a few farm animals this task often
consumed an entire lifetime of labor. Others struggled to make a
piece
of land attractive enough to sell it to the next wave of settlers. On the New England frontier, where people pushed westward in groups, they founded new towns and churches as they went, quickly reproducing the institutions of eastern society. But southward, along the Appalachians, the inhabitants of the backcountry remained in a semi-barbarous state. The mainly Scotch-Irish settlers, unlike previous groups, were fiercely independent and had little desire for community. They were not agriculturalists, but semi-nomads. They let their hogs run wild in the woods and hunted for other food. They might grow a few meager crops for their own consumption, but they were definitely not interested in farming for profit. An Anglican minister, Charles Woodmason, who traveled the Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, was appalled at what he found. Through want of ministers to marry, he said, and the licentiousness of the people, many hundreds were living together outside of marriage, swapping wives as cattle and living in a state of nature more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians. Being English, of course, Woodmason already harbored prejudices against the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish, but there is no doubt that many of his observations were true. When Woodmason tried to preach, he observed that nearly all the company were drunk before he even finished his sermon. Woodmason considered that in their manners and morals they were hardly one degree removed from the Indians, and in fact, the other settlers of the area referred to them as "white Indians." |
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