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Masterfully employing that seed capital, Penn organized the fastest and most efficient colonization in the seventeenth-century English empire.
Penn established a city and capital named Philadelphia—“City of Brotherly Love.” He designed a systematic grid of broad streets with spacious parks, an arrangement that distinguished Philadelphia from older colonial towns, like Boston or Bridgetown, with their rambling and narrow streets, crowded buildings, and frequent fires.
As in New England, family farms worked primarily by free labor prevailed in Pennsylvania, which meant a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth.
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many native peoples fled from mistreatment in other colonies to settle in Pennsylvania.
During the early eighteenth century, economic growth endowed Pennsylvanians with a standard of living superior to New England’s.
Lower Counties resented political domination by the Quaker newcomers, and they feared the economic decline of their downriver ports as Philadelphia became the regional entrepôt. More vulnerable to French and pirate attacks by sea, the Lower Counties also demanded defense appropriations to arm their militia and strengthen their coastal fortifications. But the Quaker assemblymen balked, for their constituents were more securely located upriver, committed to pacifism, and determined to minimize their taxes. Unable to reconcile the two regions, Penn consented to their division in 1704 into the
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Living beyond his means and donating generously to support Quaker meetings and Public Friends, Penn accumulated the debts that would consign him to an English debtors’ prison in 1707.
That very diversity became the defining characteristic of the middle colonies, the collective name for New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania because they lay between the Chesapeake and New England.
Neither any single ethnic group nor any particular religious denomination enjoyed a majority in any middle colony.
In the mid-eighteenth century, a German immigrant reported, “They have a saying here: Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”
The middle colonies defined a distinctive culture and social order that precociously anticipated the American future.
James II regarded the American colonies as cash cows meant to fund a more authoritarian crown.
Like Lord Cornbury, most royal governors were born and bred in England, ordinarily among the gentry or aristocracy, where they learned to live lavishly, accumulating mounting debts. They sought a colonial governorship as an opportunity to recoup their fortunes by reaping every possible salary and fee. Sojourners, they expected to return to London within a few years enriched to enjoy a more fashionable society and to reenter the higher-stakes politics of the mother country.
Ultimately, most colonial fortunes depended upon the increased real estate value produced by expansion and farm-building on the frontier.
In 1767 a Pennsylvanian noted, “It is almost a proverb, that Every great fortune made here with in these 50 years has been by land [speculation].”
after 1707, the Scots outnumbered the English as emigrants to the colonies.
In a colonial world divided between masters and servants, the pirates defined freedom as their own opportunity to prey upon others.
Between 1716 and 1726 the British convicted and executed between four hundred and six hundred pirates; at least twice as many more died resisting capture. By 1730 the campaign virtually exterminated the pirates in the Bahamas, the Carolinas, and the West Indies, bringing a new security to colonial shipping.
As commerce became fundamental to British power, the American colonies became more important to the empire, attracting increasing attention from the press, Parliament, and the imperial bureaucracy.
Shared commercial and military interests also tied the colonies to the mother country as never before.
Except for the high-value “enumerated” commodities (principally sugar and tobacco), the colonists were free, indeed encouraged, to carry their produce to other lands, provided that they did so in ships owned and operated by British subjects
Despite their many internal disputes over religion, the Scots, the English, and their colonists could see themselves as united Protestants when they focused outward upon Catholic France.
William Penn explained that it had become “the interest of England to improve and thicken her colonys with people not her own.”
The new recruitment invented America as an asylum from religious persecution and political oppression in Europe—with the important proviso that the immigrants had to be Protestants. Colonial laws and prejudices continued to discourage the emigration of Catholics and Jews to British America, from a fear that they would subvert Protestantism and betray the empire to French or Spanish attack. As a land of freedom and opportunity, British America had powerful limits.
The growing numbers of African slaves alarmed leading colonists as a grave internal security threat. Addicted to slave labor, most colonies dared not block further African imports. Instead, led by South Carolina, several colonies actively recruited and subsidized free white emigrants from Europe to help counterbalance the slave numbers and guard against a slave uprising.
Indeed, the colonies grew more rapidly than any other economy in the eighteenth century, including the mother country.
In 1700 the colonial gross domestic product was only 4 percent of England’s; by 1770 it had blossomed to 40 percent, as the colonies assumed a much larger place within the imperial economy.
Stature depends upon nutrition, and especially protein, so the superior height of free colonists attested to their better diet, especially rich in meat and milk. On average, the tallest colonists were southern planters—those who profited most from African slavery and Indian land.
Richer in land than in people and capital, British America was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural.
Crèvecoeur estimated that only about half of the frontier families paid for their farms and escaped from debt before death passed the burden to the next generation.
In 1700 the American colonies consumed about 10 percent of British exports; that figure rose to 37 percent by 1772. In sum, the growing American market became critical to the profits and growth of British manufacturing.
Between 1718 and 1775, the empire transported about fifty thousand felons, more than half of all English emigrants to America during that period.
About 80 percent of the convicts went to Virginia and Maryland, riding in the English ships of the tobacco trade.
Scots emigration soared to 145,000 between 1707 and 1775.
The Lowland Scots were especially conspicuous as colonial doctors, for more than 150 emigrated between 1707 and 1775. By the American Revolution, Scots doctors and their American apprentices dominated formal medical practice in the colonies.
the 100,000 Germans were second only to the Scots as eighteenth-century immigrants to British America.
About three-quarters of the Germans landed in Philadelphia, the great magnet for colonial migration.
In 1682, William Penn recruited a few Germans to settle in Pennsylvania, where they prospered. Word of their material success in a tolerant colony intrigued growing numbers in their old homeland.
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.
During the eighteenth century at least one-third of the slaves died within three years of their arrival on the island of Barbados.
Most slaves were taken to a plantation and put to work in a strange new setting, obliged to respond to the orders and whims of a new master and overseer. Many did not survive the shock of the change. In the Chesapeake colonies during the early eighteenth century, one quarter of the new slaves died within their first year of arrival.
By the mid-eighteenth century in the mainland colonies (but not in the West Indies), American-born slaves came to outnumber the African-born. At that point, resistance became more subtle. The second-generation “creole” slaves usually recognized that overt rebellion and maroon settlements were suicidal, given the superior numbers, arms, and organization of their oppressors. Shifting tactics, creole slaves ran away as individuals or pairs to try to disappear into the free black population of a seaport in another colony. Many more slaves stayed on their plantation but resisted covertly, by
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Dwelling in large concentrations on rural plantations, the Carolina and Georgia slaves could preserve (by adaptation) much of their African culture, including traditional African names. They developed a new, composite language, Gullah, based on several African languages and distinct in grammar and structure from English.
As an established church dependent upon taxation, the church needed to be inclusive to justify town support and to provide universal moral instruction and supervision.
As an established church in the world, Congregationalism also accepted and reflected social inequalities, arranging the pews in the meetinghouse to reflect the local hierarchy of family wealth and status.
Not until 1693 did Anglicans found the College of William and Mary in Virginia,
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.
Despite the difficult conditions, every colonial region developed an extensive and conspicuous array of churches.
In 1750 the mainland colonies sustained approximately 1,500 local congregations, each averaging about ninety families attending, which suggests that at least two-thirds of colonial adults were “churched” in the broad sense of affiliation.
Although overwhelmingly a Protestant society, the colonies also hosted a few Catholic churches (especially in Maryland) as well as Jewish synagogues in Newport, New York City, and Charles Town.
