American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

In 1720 some Ulster Scots in New Hampshire bristled that they were “termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our all, for the British crown and liberties against the Irish Papists.” As a compromise, they became known in America as the Scotch-Irish.

Outnumbering the English emigrants, the 100,000 Germans were second only to the Scots as eighteenth-century immigrants to British America. Most were Protestants, but they were divided into multiple denominations: Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Baptists, and Pietists of many stripes.

The colonial emigration was a modest subset of a much larger movement of Germans out of the Rhineland. Between 1680 and 1780 about 500,000 southwestern Germans emigrated, but only a fifth went to British America. Many more headed east, seeking opportunities in Prussia, Hungary, and Russia.

No united realm, Germany was subdivided into many small principalities, frequently embroiled in the great wars of the continent. To build palaces and conduct war, the authoritarian princes heavily taxed their subjects and conscripted their young men. Most princes also demanded religious conformity from their subjects, inflicting fines and imprisonment on dissidents. In addition, a swelling population pressed against the limits of the rural economy, blighting the prospects of thousands of young peasants and artisans.

for the overall death rate for the voyage was only about 3 percent, a bit better than the 4 percent rate for convicts and far better than the 10 to 20 percent suffered by enslaved Africans.

Thanks primarily to the new waves of Scotch-Irish and German emigrants, Pennsylvania’s population exploded from 18,000 in 1700 to 120,000 by 1750.

With German votes, the Quaker party retained control over the Pennsylvania assembly, to the dismay of the Scotch-Irish, who felt ignored and maligned by the new coalition.

Clustered on the frontier, the Scotch-Irish especially resented the refusal of the Quakers and Germans, who dwelled safely and prosperously around Philadelphia, to fund a frontier militia to attack the Indians.

In return for generous presents from Pennsylvania’s leaders, the Iroquois bluntly ordered the Lenni Lenape to move.

During the eighteenth century, the British colonies imported 1.5 million slaves—more than three times the number of free immigrants. And almost all of the imported Africans remained slaves for life, passing the status on to their children. Only about 1 percent of the blacks living in the British colonies became free prior to the American Revolution.

The slave trade diminished the inhabitants of West Africa, who declined from 25 million in 1700 to 20 million in 1820. At least two million people died in slave-raiding wars and another six million captives went to the New World as slaves.

During the eighteenth century, the British seized a commanding lead in the transatlantic slave trade, carrying about 2.5 million slaves, compared with the 1.8 million borne by the second-place Portuguese (primarily to Brazil) and the 1.2 million transported by the third-place French.

At first the West Indies consumed almost all of the slaves imported into British America: 96 percent of the 275,000 brought in the seventeenth century.

During the next century, the West Indian proportion slipped to 81 percent, as the growing volume and competition of the slave trade carried more slaves (19 percent of the British imports) on to the Chesapeake and Carolinas.

It is revealing that after emancipation in the nineteenth century, the West Indian black population began to grow rapidly from natural increase.

Popular myth has it that the Europeans obtained their slaves by attacking and seizing Africans. In fact, the shippers almost always bought their slaves from African middlemen, generally the leading merchants and chiefs of the coastal kingdoms.

And during the eighteenth century the Africans had the power to defeat Europeans who failed to cooperate. Contrary to the stereotype of shrewd Europeans cheating weak and gullible natives, the European traders had to pay premium, and rising, prices to African chiefs and traders, who drove a hard bargain. During the 1760s, traders paid about £20 per slave, compared with £17 during the 1710s.

Although they did not directly seize slaves, the European traders indirectly promoted the wars and kidnapping gangs by offering premium prices for captives.

Some kingdoms, principally Ashanti and Dahomey, became wealthy and powerful by slave-raiding their poorly armed neighbors.

Seventeenth-century slave voyages probably killed about 20 percent of the slaves. During the eighteenth century, modest improvements in food, water, and cleanliness gradually cut the mortality rate in half to about 10 percent by the 1780s. Nonetheless, a 10 percent mortality was still a high rate for a population of young men, ordinarily the healthiest group. By comparison, only about 4 percent of the English convicts died during their passages across the Atlantic.

During the mid-eighteenth century, African slaves were small minorities in New England (about 2 percent) and the middle colonies (about 8 percent). Most northern slaves lived and worked in the countryside as farmhands or as laborers in the rural ironworks of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But, given the overwhelmingly rural nature of the colonial population in general, northern slaves were disproportionately urban.

Urban slaves generally belonged to wealthy families and served them either as domestic servants or as dockworkers and laundresses. They dwelled in back rooms, lofts, and alley shacks.

In 1750 the Chesapeake hosted the great majority of slaves in mainland British America: 150,000 compared with 60,000 in the low country and 33,000 in the northern colonies. Slaves constituted about 40 percent of the population in Maryland and Virginia—a proportion large enough to concern, but rarely to terrify, their masters, and large enough to preserve some but not most African ways and words.

Although it was very hard work, cultivating tobacco was less brutal than slogging in a rice field or broiling in a cane field, and it exposed the worker to fewer mosquitoes bearing malaria and yellow fever. Chesapeake slaves also lived in sufficient concentrations to find marriage partners and bear children, in contrast to many northern slaves. Consequently, natural increase swelled the Chesapeake slave population, which enabled the planters to reduce their African imports after 1750.

Myth insists that the seventeenth-century English colonists fled from religious persecution into a land of religious freedom. In addition to omitting economic considerations, the myth grossly simplifies the diverse religious motives for emigration. Not all colonists had felt persecuted at home, and few wanted to live in a society that tolerated a plurality of religions.

And although some English dissenters, principally the Quakers, did seek in America a general religious freedom, many more emigrants wanted their own denomination to dominate, to the prejudice of all others. Indeed, at the end of the seventeenth century, most colonies offered less religious toleration than did the mother country.

Not until 1693 did Anglicans found the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and it remained small, weak, and underfunded. Because an Anglican minister required ordination by a bishop and the colonies had no bishops, aspiring pastors faced the considerable expense and trouble of a transatlantic voyage for ordination in London.

By 1750 the middle colonies sustained one congregation for every 470 colonists, compared with one per 600 in New England and one per 1,050 in the south.

During his 1739–41 tour from Maine to Georgia, Whitefield furthered transatlantic and intercolonial integration by becoming the first celebrity seen and heard by a majority of the colonists.

From 1738 to 1741, the number of colonial imprints increased 85 percent, primarily owing to works by or about Whitefield.

Even radical evangelicals said little against slavery as a system. Otherworldly in their priorities, the radicals demanded the right to convert slaves but declined to challenge slavery as a temporal condition. The evangelicals prepared slaves for an afterlife where they would be, at last, free and equal—an eternity that seemed far more important than a lifetime endured in slavery.

Only the Quakers tried to fulfill the radical racial implications of the revivals by challenging the twin injustices most fundamental to colonial society: Indian war and African slavery.

In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting also barred Quaker slaveholders from church leadership, and in 1776 it disowned them from membership.

The Great Awakening also revived the long-dormant efforts by colonial Protestants to convert the Indians.

Despite their small numbers, the French claimed and affected more of the continent than did any other empire.

By adapting to that reality, the French developed a distinctive mode of empire that long held the vast interior against their more numerous rivals, the British.

Until 1663, Canada belonged to the fur-trading Company of New France, rather than to the French crown. The company saw little purpose and no profit in the costly business of transporting people to a colony dedicated to the fur trade. Because Indians did the work of the beaver hunt, the company needed only a few French employees, primarily soldiers to defend the post and clerks to handle the furs and the manufactured goods that purchased them.

By 1660 the English had 58,000 colonists in New England and the Chesapeake. Growing impatient with New France’s slow development and lingering insecurity, the crown took control of the colony in 1663.

From about 3,000 in 1663, the population grew to 15,000 in 1700: an impressive rate but from a very low base. This growth was too little too late to compete with the swelling number of English colonists, who numbered 234,000 whites plus 31,000 enslaved Africans by 1700.

On the contrary, if the push of hunger and poverty sufficed to generate emigration, France should have outdone England, for the French peasantry lived even closer to the bone than did the English poor.

Cultural values and institutional obstacles blocked the overseas emigration by the more numerous and desperate masses of France. In contrast to England, in France the peasantry remained rooted to their land.

In the mid-seventeenth century, 85 percent of French peasant families possessed fewer than thirteen acres—about the bare minimum for subsistence.

Potential emigrants found a cheaper, closer, and far warmer alternative by walking to Spain (especially Catalonia and Valencia), where there was considerable demand for French artisans and laborers. In 1669 about 200,000 French lived in Spain, compared with only about 5,000 in New France.

Finally, the swelling army of Louis XIV absorbed many of the poor and single men who might otherwise have emigrated as engagés to New France.

And although France had plenty of religious dissidents, who might have been eager to emigrate, French policy forbade their settlement in New France after 1632. That restrictive policy deprived Canada of an especially promising set of colonists, the Protestant minority known as Huguenots, who resembled the English Puritans in their Calvinist faith and middling status as artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants.

Because of the short growing season, Canadians could not produce the warm-climate staples in greatest European demand. Only a fool would attempt a sugar or tobacco plantation in Canada.

Ultimately, the Canadian economy depended on the gold and silver spent by the crown to pay soldiers, purchase their supplies, and build forts. In most years the military expenditures exceeded the value of the fur trade. In effect, French taxpayers sustained the Canadian economy.

Although greater than in the British colonies, the exactions of church and state in New France were much lighter than those endured by the captive peasantry of France.

Like Dutch law, French law treated wives as equal economic partners with their husbands—in contrast to English common law, which dissolved the wife’s identity into that of her spouse.

Compared with their British rivals, the French colonies reflected a more militaristic, paternalistic, and centralized form of authority.