SOCIAL STUDIES NOTES: GRADE 8
UNIT 3 LIFE IN THE COLONIES: 1650-1750
Section 1: Governing the Colonies
I. The English Parliamentary Tradition
-The English colonists brought with them the idea that they had political rights. This idea was rooted in English tradition.
-In 1215, English nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta or Great Charter. The Magna Carta was the first document to place restrictions on an English ruler’s power. It limited the monarch’s right to levy taxes without consulting nobles. It also protected the right to own private property and guaranteed the right to trial by jury.
-The rights listed in the Magna Carta were at first limited to nobles, but over time the rights were extended to all English citizens.
-Under the Magna Carta, nobles formed a Great Council to advise the king. This body developed into the English Parliament.
-Parliament was a two-house legislature. The House of Lords was made up of nobles, most of whom inherited their titles. Members of the House of Commons were elected. Only a few rich men and landowners had the right to vote for the House of Commons.
-Parliament’s greatest power was the right to approve new taxes. No monarch could raise taxes without the consent of Parliament.
-In the 1640s, power struggles between King Charles I and Parliament led to the English Civil War. Parliamentary forces eventually won the war, executed the king, and briefly ruled England by itself.
-In 1660, the monarchy was restored, but Parliament retained its traditional rights.
-An event in 1688 further boosted parliamentary power. Parliament removed King James II from the throne and invited his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange to rule. This was called the Glorious Revolution.
-In 1689, King William and Queen Mary signed the English Bill of Rights which restated many of the rights granted by the Magna Carta. These included the right to trial by jury. It upheld habeas corpus, the principle that a person cannot be held in prison without being charged with a specific crime.
-The Bill of Rights also required that Parliament meet regularly and declared that no monarch could levy taxes or raise an army without the consent of Parliament.
II. Colonial Self-Government
-The legal rights that Englishmen had won over the centuries led colonists to expect a voice in their government. The ideas of limited monarchy and representative government were important to them. In their new land, colonists wanted to take part in governing themselves.
-By 1760, every British colony in North America had a legislature of some kind. In Virginia, the House of Burgesses became the first legislature in British North America. Massachusetts colonists set up a legislature called the General Court in 1629.
-In many ways, the colonies offered settlers greater political rights than they would have had in England. Still the right to vote did not extend to everyone. English women, even those who owned property, could not vote in any colony. Neither could the Native Americans who still lived on the land claimed by the colonists. Finally, no Africans, whether free or enslaved, could vote.
III. Freedom of the Press
-The colonists expected to enjoy the traditional rights of English subjects. A notable court case in 1735 helped establish another important right. This was freedom of the press.
-John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, was arrested for printing a series of articles that criticized the governor. Zenger was charged with libel, or the publishing of statements that damage a person’s reputation.
-Under modern American law, statements must be untrue in order to be considered libel. However, English law at the time punished writings that criticized the government-even if those statements were true.
-Andrew Hamilton, Zenger’s attorney, argued that the articles Zenger published were based on fact and, therefore, should not be considered libel. The jurors agreed.
-The Zenger case later helped establish the fundamental principle that democracy depends on well-informed citizens. The press has a right and responsibility to keep the public informed of the truth.
IV. Regulating Trade
-Under the theory of mercantilism, colonies existed in order to serve the economic needs of their parent country. They were a source of raw material and a place to sell the home country’s goods.
-In 1651, Parliament passed the first of several Navigation Acts to support mercantilism. By these laws, (1) Shipments from Europe to the colonies had to go through England first. (2) Any imports to England from the colonies had to come in ships built and owned by British subjects. (3) The colonies could sell key products such as tobacco and sugar, only to England. This helped create jobs for English workers.
-In many ways, the Navigation Acts benefited the colonies. They had a sure market for their goods in England, and the law contributed to a booming shipbuilding industry in New England.
-Still, as colonial trade expanded, many colonists came to resent the Navigation Acts. They believed that the laws favored English merchants, and that they could make more money if they were free to sell to foreign markets themselves.
-Some colonists got around the Navigation Acts by importing and exporting goods illegally.
Section 2: Colonial Society
- I. The Family in Colonial Times
-The family played an important role in colonial America. Many people lived with their extended family.
-Most colonists lived on farms where a large family was considered an advantage.
-By today’s standards, farmhouses were not very comfortable. Most were made of wood and had few rooms. People sat on stools and benches and slept on planks.
-In Puritan New England, single men and women were expected to live with a family as a servant or a boarder.
- II. Men, Women, and Children
-The lives of men and women differed. Even on the frontier, where families had to labor together to survive, men and women generally took on different roles.
-Men were generally carpenters, joiners, wheelwrights, coopers, butchers, tanners, shoemakers, tallow-chandlers, and watermen.
-A husband and father controlled a family’s income and property. Men also represented their families in public life as voters and, sometimes, as officeholders.
-In colonial America, most women were expected to marry men chosen by their parents.
-Besides childcare, a woman had many domestic responsibilities. She cooked, did the laundry, and spun yarn into cloth that she made into family clothing.
-Outside, she took care of the garden, milked the cows, tended the chickens, churned butter, and preserved food.
-Women had little or no role in public life. They could not hold office or vote.
-If they survived infancy, colonial children had about seven years before they were required to work. In these years, they could pass the time playing.
-By the age of seven, most children had work to do. They might do household or farm chores, or, if they were poor, they might become servants in other families.
-On farms, children were expected to fetch water and wood and to help in the kitchen and in the fields.
-Older children had greater responsibilities. Boys were expected to work the fields with their fathers, while girls labored beside their mothers learning how to run a house.
-Boys who were learning trades began as apprentices. The apprentice would live in the home of a master artisan. At the end of his apprenticeship, the young man was prepared to work independently.
- III. Social Classes
-Many European colonists came to America hoping to build a better life. In England and other European countries, land was the main measure of wealth.
-Land in Europe, however, was in the hands of a relative few. America appeared to have land in abundance, offering immigrants the chance to own land.
-In Europe, a person’s prospects were determined by birth. Those who were born wealthy generally stayed wealthy. Those who were born poor had little opportunity to improve their station in life.
-By contrast, in colonial America there was more social equality among settlers.
-A group known as the gentry was the upper class of colonial society. The gentry included wealthy planters, merchants, ministers, royal officials, and successful lawyers.
-The gentry were few in number, but they were the most powerful people.
-Because many official jobs paid no salary, few but the gentry could afford to hold office.
-The great majority of colonists from Europe were what colonists called “the middling sort.” Neither rich nor extremely poor, this middle class was made up of small planters, independent farmers, and artisans.
-Middle class men could vote and a few held office.
-The growth of the middle class gave the poor something to hope for and work for. The poor who were free might never be rich, but they could always maintain the hope that some day they would be middle class.
-In this way, the colonies differed from England and the rest of Europe. Not only could people move around the land, they could acquire property and move up the social scale.
-Lower on colonial America’s social scale, and just above enslaved Africans, were farmhands and indentured servants.
-An indentured servant signed a contract to work from 4 to 10 years in the colonies for anyone who would pay for his or her ocean passage to the Americas.
-During the time of service, indentured servants had few, if any, rights. They were bound to obey their masters who could work them almost to death.
-At the end of a term, an indentured servant received a set of clothes, tools, and 50 acres of land.
-Free people of African ancestry were never a large portion of the colonial population. Free African Americans were allowed to own property, even in the South.
-The lives of free African Americans were restricted. Most African property owners were not allowed to vote or sit on a jury.
Section 3: Slavery in the Colonies
- I. The Atlantic Slave Trade
-Some scholars estimate that more than 10 million enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas between the 1500s and the 1800s.
-The Spanish and the Portuguese brought the first Africans to the Americas. The British, Dutch, and French also entered the slave trade.
-Slave traders set up posts along the West African coast. Africans who lived along the coast made raids into the interior, seeking captives to sell to the Europeans.
-Once they arrived at the coast, captives were traded for guns and other goods. They were then loaded into slave ships and transported across the Atlantic on a brutal voyage that became known as the Middle Passage.
-To increase their profits, some slave-ship captains crammed the maximum number of captives on board.
-As a result of such conditions, from 15 to 20 percent of enslaved Africans died or committed suicide during the Middle Passage.
-Once slave ships reached the Americas, healthy men, women, and children were put on the auction block. The vast majority of those sold ended up on plantations in the Spanish colonies, Brazil, or the Caribbean. But for some 50,000 enslaved Africans, their final destination was British North America.
-By about 1700, slave traders in the British colonies had developed a regular routine, known as the triangular trade. The triangular trade was a three-way trade between the colonies, the islands of the Caribbean and Africa.
-On the first leg of the three-leg voyage, ships from New England carried fish, lumber, and other goods to the Caribbean islands or West Indies. There, Yankee traders bought sugar and molasses. The ships then sailed back to New England where colonists used the molasses and sugar to make rum.
-On the second leg, ships carried rum, guns, and other goods from New England to West Africa. There, merchants traded the goods for enslaved Africans. On the final leg, ships carried their human cargo to the West Indies for sale. With the profits from selling enslaved Africans, traders bought more molasses.
-Many New England traders grew wealthy from triangular trade. In doing so, they often violated the Navigation Acts which required them to buy only from English colonies.
II. Slavery in the Colonies
-The first Africans who reached Jamestown may have been treated as servants. But by the late 1600s, ships were bringing growing numbers of enslaved Africans.
-One reason slavery took root was the plantation system. The profits that could be made from tobacco and rice led planters to import thousands of enslaved Africans to work the fields. The southern economy came to depend on slavery.
-For planters, slaves were preferable to servants. Indentured servants were temporary. Once their terms were over, they could go. Also, as conditions improved in England, fewer servants came to America.
-As the need for cheap labor grew, colonies made slavery permanent.
-Early on, there were attempts to stop slavery. In 1652, Rhode Island passed the first anti-slavery law. However, it did not survive because Rhode Island shippers made high profits from the slave trade.
-Slavery became legal in all the colonies.
-Not every African in America was a slave, but slavery came to be restricted to people of African descent. Thus slavery was linked to racism.
-As the number of slaves grew, whites began to worry that they would revolt. The first serious slave revolt took place in 1663, in Gloucester, Virginia.
-Soon other revolts occurred in Connecticut and Virginia.
-Fearing more trouble, colonial authorities wrote slave codes, or strict laws that restricted the rights and activities of slaves.
-Under the codes, enslaved people could not meet in large numbers, own weapons, or leave a plantation without permission. It also became illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write.
-Masters who killed enslaved people could not be tried for murder.
-The new laws did not stop resistance. In 1739, an enslaved Angolan named Jemmy led a revolt in South Carolina. He and his followers killed more than 20 whites before they were defeated. Revolts continued to flare up until slavery itself ended in 1865.
III. African Cultural Influences
-The lives of enslaved Africans differed greatly from colony to colony. Only about 10 percent of the enslaved population lived north of Maryland.
-In cities of the North, they were often hired out to work as blacksmiths or house servants. On small farms, they might work alongside the owner. Over time, they might buy their freedom.
-Even in the South, the lives of enslaved Africans varied. On rice plantations in South Carolina, Africans saw few white colonists. As a result, more than any enslaved Africans, these workers kept the customs of West Africa.
-Enslaved Africans in colonies such as Virginia and Maryland were less isolated from white society. Still, many African customs survived.
Section 4: The Spread of New Ideas
I. The Importance of Education
-The Puritans set up a government based on religion, but to them, education went hand in hand with religion. In early New England, everyone was expected to read the Bible.
-The Puritans passed laws to promote education. They required parents to teach their children and servants to read. Another law required every town with at least 50 families to start an elementary school. Every town with 100 families had to have a grammar school for older students.
-These Massachusetts laws were the beginning of public schools in America.
-Puritan schools were very different from the public schools of today. Puritan schools were run with both private and public money. In addition, Puritan education laws were not completely compulsory.
-Laws that required all children to attend school did not begin until the late 1800s.
-Colonial schools also required instruction in religion. Most schools in the 1600s were under religious sponsorship.
-In addition, colonial elementary schools taught basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.
-In the South, people were separated by great distances so there were few schools. Members of the gentry often hired private tutors to instruct their children. Children from poorer families often received no formal education at all.
-Some colonial elementary schools admitted girls. Others taught them only in summer when boys were not in school. Girls might also attend dame schools, schools that women opened in their homes to teach boys and girls to read and write.
-Most colonial schools were restricted to white children. However, in New York, an Anglican church group ran a school for free African Americans, as well as for Native Americans and poor whites.
-After elementary school, some boys went on to grammar school. These schools prepared boys for college. Student learned Greek and Latin, as well as geography, mathematics, and English composition.
-The first American colleges were founded largely to educate men for the ministry. Opening in 1638, Harvard was the first college in the English colonies. In 1693, colonists in Virginia founded the College of William and Mary, the first college in the South.
II. Roots of American Literature
-The earliest forms of colonial literature were sermons and histories.
-The first colonial poet was Anne Bradstreet. Her book The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, was first published in 1650 in England. Her poetry expressed the joys and hardships of life in Puritan New England.
-A later poet, Phillis Wheatly, was an enslaved African in Boston. Her first poem was published in the 1760s when she was about 14 years old. Her works were in a scholarly style then popular in Europe.
-Perhaps the best-loved colonial writer was Benjamin Franklin. His newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, became the most widely read newspaper in the colonies.
-Franklin’s most popular work was Poor Richard’s Almanack which was published every year from 1733 to 1753. It was full of pithy sayings that usually had a moral.
-Franklin was also a businessman, community leader, scientist, inventor, and diplomat.
III. The Great Awakening
-From the start, religion played a key role in the 13 English colonies. In Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, religious leaders set extensive rules on moral and religious matters.
-Early laws also required colonists to attend church regularly.
-By the 1700s, the Puritan tradition had gradually declined in New England.
-An emotion-packed movement swept through the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. This period of religious revival is called the Great Awakening.
-The Great Awakening began as a reaction against what some Christians saw as a decline in religious zeal. Leaders such as Massachusetts’ preacher Jonathan Edwards called on people to examine their lives and commit themselves to God.
-Forceful preachers quickly spread the Great Awakening throughout the colonies.
-The Great Awakening led to the rise of many new churches. Methodists and Baptists, which had been small sects or groups, grew quickly. The Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and Congregationalist churches split between those who followed the new movement and those who did not. In time, the growth of new churches led to more tolerance of religious differences in the colonies.
-The Great Awakening was one of the first national movements in the colonies. It reinforced democratic ideas. People thought that if they could decide on their own how to worship God, they could decide how to govern themselves.
IV. The Enlightenment
-Starting in the late 1600s, a group of European thinkers came to believe that all problems could be solved by human reason. They ushered in a new intellectual movement that became known as the Enlightenment.
-Enlightenment thinkers looked for “natural laws” that governed politics, society, and economics. The Enlightenment reached its height in France in the mid-1700s.
-In 1690, John Locke published Two Treatises on Government. In this influential work, Locke argued that people have certain natural rights, that is, rights that belong to every human being from birth.
-These rights include life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, these rights are inalienable.
-Locke challenged the idea of Divine Right. Divine Right is the belief that monarchs get their authority to rule directly from God. According to this belief, any rights people have come to them from the monarch.
-By contrast, Locke stated that natural rights came from God. He argued that people formed governments in order to protect their rights. They give up some individual freedoms but only to safeguard the rights of the community.
-Locke’s reasoning led to a startling conclusion. Because government exists to protect the rights of the people, if a monarch violates those rights, the people have a right to overthrow the monarch. This idea would later shape the founding of the United States.
-A French thinker, the Baron de Montesquieu, also influenced American ideas. In his 1748 book, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that the powers of government should be clearly defined and limited. Furthermore, he favored separation of powers, or division of powers into separate branches.
-Separation of powers, he said, protects the rights of the people because it keeps any individual or group from gaining too much power.
- Montesquieu suggested that government should be divided into three branches: a legislative branch to make laws, an executive branch to enforce laws, and a judicial branch to make judgments on the law.
-This division of power would become the basis of government in the United States.