Chapter 3: Creating Anglo-America, 1660–1750

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Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we sift through the sources to bring you the most potent nuggets of knowledge.

Today, we're plunging into a really pivotal period of North American history, the creation of Anglo -America, roughly between 1660 and 1750.

This era wasn't just about English expansion.

It was a complex collision, global competition, the brutal rise of slavery,

profound internal crises, dramatic demographic shifts.

Our mission today is to try and untangle these threads, revealing how the very idea of freedom was being aggressively redefined, often, frankly, at someone else's expense.

We'll be using chapter three of Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty as our essential guide for this.

That's right.

And this chapter really acts as a crucial bridge.

It takes us from those early kind of struggling colonial outposts to a more distinct yet deeply conflicted Anglo -American society.

What becomes really clear is this constant interplay between European imperial ambitions, often fierce need of resistance, and the tragic, increasingly systematic development of a racialized slave system.

It's truly a foundational period, if you want to understand America's complex origins.

Okay, let's unpack this then.

We're talking about a time when new societies were forming, you know, layer by layer, driven by these powerful forces, and the question of who truly deserved liberty was constantly being answered, often in pretty stark ways.

So England, much like other European powers, started to view its American colonies as, well, far more than just distant outposts.

They were seen as vital components of national wealth and power.

Which brings us to the core economic philosophy of the era, mercantilism.

How did this idea fundamentally shape England's approach?

Right, mercantilism.

In a nutshell, it was the belief that a nation's power was directly tied to its wealth, especially gold and silver, and that governments should regulate all economic activity to achieve this.

For the colonies, the core insight here is that England was meticulously designing a system where all roads, and essentially all wealth, led directly back to London.

This was put into practice through the Navigation Acts, passed from 1651 onwards.

These laws mandated that valuable colonial products, the enumerated goods like tobacco and sugar, had to be shipped on English vessels and sold in English ports first.

And on top of that, most European goods going to the colonies had to pass through England first, paying customs duties there.

Now this system undeniably enriched English merchants, manufacturers.

Sure, and it stimulated their shipbuilding too, right?

Absolutely, and even stimulated New England's own shipbuilding industry to some extent.

But the primary goal, benefiting the mother country, that was paramount.

And this economic drive also fueled England's physical expansion.

A prime example is the conquest of New Netherland in 1664.

This turned a Dutch trading post into New York, named after James, the Duke of York, who was granted pretty sweeping powers.

It quickly became a vital imperial outpost.

Yeah, and the key takeaway from New York's transformation, I think, is that English freedom was a highly selective commodity.

It wasn't universal.

On one hand, it actually reduced freedoms for some people.

English law ended the Dutch practice, where married women could conduct business independently.

Free blacks lost many skilled jobs they'd held under the Dutch.

Huh, so winners and losers right away.

Exactly.

But on the other hand, it expanded freedoms for a slick few.

The Duke of York handed out these immense land grants, creating a really powerful landed elite.

Get this, by 1700, just five families owned nearly two million acres of land in New York.

So this was an English freedom based very much on hierarchy and property.

That selective application of freedom seems like a recurring theme, we'll see.

And while they're solidifying control over people within New York, they're also forging these complex, sometimes fraught, alliances with powers outside, like the Iroquois Confederacy.

Precisely.

This alliance, known as the Covenant Chain, was basically a series of agreements.

The Iroquois acted as this crucial buffer against other native tribes, and, importantly, the French.

In exchange, they got English support and influence over vast territories.

For a while, this gave the Iroquois significant authority, though by the end of the century, they strategically shifted towards neutrality, playing empires off each other.

Interesting.

And meanwhile, inside New York.

Well, the colonists themselves were always demanding the liberties of Englishmen.

They pushed for, and eventually secured, the Charter of Liberties in 1683.

This established an elected assembly, though only for male property owners and city freemen, and it affirmed rights like trial by jury, security of property, and, significantly,

religious toleration for Protestants.

Okay, so from the Mid -Atlantic, as England's tightening its grip up north, its ambitions are also pushing south, pretty aggressively.

The founding of Carolina in 1663 seems like a particularly grim case study.

What made Carolina's early economy so distinct and, frankly, troubling?

Carolina, yeah.

It was initially set up as a barrier against Spanish Florida, but it quickly became what Foner calls an offshoot of Barbados.

Importing that island's brutal plantation model almost wholesale.

And what's truly shocking is its early economy.

It involved arming friendly Indian tribes to raid and enslave other Indians.

Between 1670 and 1720, they actually exported more Native Americans into slavery than they imported Africans.

Wow.

That's staggering.

It is.

And this brutal trade ultimately sparked the Yamasee Uprising in 1715, a major conflict.

Now Carolina's fundamental constitutions did offer an assembly and religious toleration, but they also explicitly granted slave owners absolute power and authority over their human property.

This laid the groundwork for a wealthy elite based on rice cultivation using enslaved labor.

And then, kind of contrasting with that vision, we get William Penn's holy experiment in Pennsylvania, founded in 1681.

Right.

Penn was a devout Quaker,

and he envisioned Pennsylvania very differently.

As a refuge for the persecuted, yes, but also as for peaceful coexistence with the Indians.

Quaker principles emphasized equality before God and a kind of universal liberty.

This led them to become the first white group to explicitly repudiate slavery as an institution.

Penn's Charter of Liberty offered Christian liberty, meaning religious freedom to all who believed in God.

It established no official church and supported broad suffrage for male taxpayers and freemen, although Jews were barred from holding office.

And this aggressive promotion of religious toleration, combined with a healthy climate and cheap land, well, it attracted a really diverse mix of European immigrants.

But here's where the irony kicks in, isn't it?

Pennsylvania's success in offering these freedoms to European immigrants ultimately put immense pressure on its own benevolent Indian policy.

More settlers meant more demand for land.

Exactly.

The sheer numbers created conflict.

And, white indentured servants from places like Virginia and Maryland.

Which in turn contributed to accelerating the shift towards slave labor in those colonies because that pool of white labor was shrinking.

Precisely.

It's a complex web of cause and effect.

So it wasn't just about labor needs, but perceived advantages of enslaving Africans specifically.

Right.

And while our modern concepts of race and racism were still forming,

there were rampant anti -black stereotypes already circulating, portraying Africans as fundamentally different as other and therefore, in their view, enslaveable.

It's really important, I think, for us to understand the unique nature of this system that developed in the New World.

Because slavery existed elsewhere, but this was different.

Absolute different.

If you connect this to the bigger picture, New World slavery became something far more rigid, far more brutal than what had come before in most other parts of the world.

It became overwhelmingly plantation -based.

This meant vast numbers of enslaved people working under single owners, often under horrific conditions leading to high death rates requiring constant brutal policing.

And crucially, New World slavery became inextricably linked to race.

It drew this permanent, seemingly unbridgeable line between whites and blacks in law and custom.

We see this really vividly in the West Indies, right?

Like, Barbados.

Oh, absolutely.

Barbados is a prime example.

Sugar plantations drove that economy.

Disease had wiped out the native populations, and white indentured servants were largely unwilling or unable to do the incredibly harsh work.

So this led to massive imports of African slaves.

Sugar became the first truly mass -marketed crop to European consumers, making those islands immensely profitable, but at a terrible human cost.

But interestingly, slavery developed more slowly in mainland North America initially.

You mentioned slaves were more expensive than indentured servants.

They were initially.

And the high death rates, especially among tobacco workers in the early Chesapeake, made investing in lifetime labor seem less economical at first.

So as late as 1680, enslaved Africans made up only about 5 % of the Chesapeake population.

So what was the status of black people in that early period?

Was it ambiguous?

For much of the 17th century, yes, it was quite ambiguous, legally speaking.

The very first Africans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 were likely treated as slaves, but the records show some later did achieve freedom.

But racial distinctions were being codified pretty quickly.

Blacks were barred from serving in the militia by the 1620s.

A poll tax was imposed on African women in 1643, but not on white women, marking them as different as laborers.

But despite that, some free blacks could still operate in society.

Paradoxically, yes.

In that earlier period, free blacks could still sue in court, testify, acquire land, and sometimes even own servants or slaves themselves.

Importantly, black and white laborers often worked together, ran away together, even formed relationships.

The lines weren't yet absolute.

But then came that chilling turning point you mentioned earlier.

In the 1660s, Virginia and Maryland laws started explicitly referring to slavery.

This marked a really sharp divergence.

A critical legal shift.

A 1662 Virginia law was particularly insidious.

It dictated that a child's status slave or free followed that of the mother.

This reversed European practice and grimly made the sexual abuse of enslaved women profitable for slaveholders, as any children born would also be their property.

That's horrifying.

It is.

Then in 1667, another law decreed that religious conversion baptism did not grant freedom to an enslaved person.

This closed a potential loophole.

By 1680, laws were passed declaring all offspring of interracial relationships illegitimate, legally cementing racial difference.

And unlike the Spanish Empire, which recognized various categories of mixed -race people in British North America, the rule became effectively.

Any known African ancestry meant you were considered black, period.

And this whole process, this rigidification of slavery, was significantly accelerated by a pivotal event in 1676, Bacon's Rebellion.

Yes, Bacon's Rebellion was absolutely pivotal.

It grew out of deep frustration with Governor William Berkeley's corrupt regime in Virginia.

He and his cronies monopolized the best lands, leaving many poorer white farmers disenfranchised and land hungry.

When Berkeley refused to authorize attacks on Native Americans to open up more land for a white settlement, a series of brutal Indian massacres erupted.

This escalated into a full -fledged rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon, himself a wealthy planter but disgruntled with Berkeley.

Bacon rallied these discontented farmers, landless men, indentured servants, even some Africans, promising them freedom, which largely meant access to Indian lands.

They marched on Jamestown, the capital, and burned it to the ground.

Wow.

So what was the fallout from that?

The elite must have been terrified.

Terrified is the right word.

The specter of civil war among white Virginians rich against poor,

laborers rising up absolutely horrified the ruling planter class.

So in the aftermath, they did a few things.

They restored property qualifications for voting to consolidate their power.

They reduced taxes slightly to appease the poor whites.

And they adopted a much more aggressive anti -Indian policy, opening up those lands Bacon's followers wanted.

But the crucial move regarding labor?

The crucial move was to prevent future rebellions like Bacon's, which had united poor whites and some blacks.

They saw the growing population of landless, potentially rebellious white former indentured servants as a major threat.

So they decisively accelerated the shift to African slaves.

Slaves, unlike indentured servants, would never become free, would never demand land, could be controlled more brutally, and wouldn't compete with poor whites.

They were seen as a more stable, controllable labor force.

And this shift happened relatively quickly, then?

Pretty quickly, yes.

Between roughly 1680 and 1700,

slave labor largely supplanted indentured servitude in the Chesapeake.

This was helped by a couple of other factors, too.

The death rate started falling, making lifetime slave labor more economically viable.

And the Royal African Company lost its monopoly on the English slave trade, which actually reduced the price of slaves, making them more accessible to planters.

This transformation really culminated in Virginia becoming what historians call a slave society by 1705.

Can you explain that distinction?

It wasn't just a society with slaves anymore.

Right.

That's a critical distinction historians make.

A society with slaves is one where slavery exists.

But it's just one form of labor, among others, perhaps peripheral to the main economy.

A slave society, which Virginia became, is one where slavery is the central economic engine.

It shapes the entire society, the laws, the social structure, the politics, the culture.

Everything revolves around maintaining the institution of slavery.

And the 1705 slave code reflected this.

Absolutely.

Virginia's comprehensive slave code of 1705 made slaves unequivocally property chattels subject entirely to their master's will.

It established separate courts for blacks and whites, barred blacks from owning arms, from striking any white person under any circumstance.

Yet even with these incredibly brutal controls, the desire for freedom persisted.

We know this from the constant problem of runaway slaves.

Governor Alexander Spotswood himself warned in 1709 about enslaved people having great notions of freedom, which terrified the authorities.

Okay, broadening our view now beyond the King Philip's War in New England and Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia.

These weren't isolated incidents, were they?

They were part of a wider pattern of colonial unrest in the late 17th century.

That's exactly right.

You had uprisings and turmoil in other places, too, like a Protestant uprising in Maryland against the Catholic proprietor.

And this internal colonial turmoil was often intensified by events happening back in England, specifically the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Right, the Glorious Revolution.

How did that play out?

Well, James II, the king, was Catholic and a strong believer in the divine right of kings.

He alarmed the English political establishment by decreeing religious toleration, which they saw as a move to favor Catholics, and crucially, by having a Catholic son, raising the prospect of a permanent Catholic dynasty.

This led powerful English aristocrats to invite William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant prince married to James's Protestant daughter Mary, to invade.

William landed, James II fled France, and Parliament essentially offered the throne jointly to William and Mary.

And this had big implications for liberty.

Huge implications.

It established, once and for all, parliamentary supremacy over the Crown.

The English Bill of Rights in 1689 cemented this, listing parliamentary powers and guaranteeing individual rights like trial by jury.

The Toleration Act, also in 1689, allowed Protestant dissenters, non -Anglicans, to worship freely, though only Anglicans could hold public office.

For colonists, this reinforced a powerful sense of shared English liberties and a shared Protestant identity against Catholic France and Spain.

So how did this ripple across the Atlantic?

Before the 1670s, the colonies had enjoyed a fair bit of autonomy, right?

What happened when news of the Glorious Revolution reached American shores?

Well, even before the Glorious Revolution, England had started trying to tighten control.

In 1675, the Lords of Trade were established to oversee colonial affairs, and they challenged Massachusetts' autonomy over things like the Navigation Acts.

Then James II took a much more drastic step.

He created the Dominion of New England between 1686 and 1689.

This abolished existing colonial charters and combined Connecticut, Plymouth, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and East and West Jersey into one huge super colony.

And it was ruled by a governor, Sir Edmund Andros, without an elected assembly.

Colonists saw this as a direct, tyrannical attack on their freedom.

So when news arrived that James II had been overthrown?

It triggered immediate rebellions across America in 1689.

In Boston, the militia rose up, arrested Andros and other officials, and the old colonial governments were quickly restored.

In New York, you had Leisler's Rebellion.

Captain Jacob Leisler, a German merchant and militia captain, led a rebel militia that seized control of Lower New York.

This uprising sharply divided the colony along ethnic and economic lines, with the Dutch majority briefly reclaiming power from the English elite.

Leisler was eventually arrested and executed, which polarized New York politics for decades.

And in Maryland, a group called the Protestant Association overthrew the government of the Catholic proprietor, Lord Baltimore.

This led to Maryland becoming a royal colony with a Protestant -dominated government, effectively ending its original policy of broad religious toleration, at least until 1715, when the Kelvert family got the proprietorship back after converting to Protestantism.

What was the long -term outcome, particularly for Massachusetts?

Did everyone just go back to how things were before the Dominion?

Not quite.

While most colonies regained their original charters, Massachusetts did not.

Plymouth Colony was absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691 under a new charter, and this new charter brought significant changes.

Crucially, the right to vote was now based on property ownership, not church membership, ending the old Puritan model.

The governor would now be appointed by London, not elected locally.

Massachusetts effectively became a royal colony and had to abide by the English Toleration Act, meaning all Protestants had to be allowed to worship freely.

That must have been a huge blow to the old Puritan establishment.

It was.

This loss of autonomy, the imposition of religious toleration for other Protestants whom many Puritan clergy viewed as heresy, combined with ongoing fears about French and Indian raids on the frontier,

created this atmosphere of intense anxiety.

Many people, especially at the clergy, felt their society was under attack, perhaps even supernaturally.

They started to see the hand of Satan at work in their misfortunes.

And this intense anxiety of the search for scapegoats brings us to one of the most chilling episodes in American history, The Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Exactly.

Belief in witchcraft was common across 17th century Europe and America.

People genuinely believed witches existed and could use supernatural powers, often provided by the devil, to harm others or cause misfortunes like crop failures or sickness.

In Salem Village, Massachusetts, things spiraled out of control.

A group of young women started suffering fits convulsions, and they began accusing local women of witchcraft.

The first three accused were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indian slave originally from Barbados who eventually confessed under pressure and implicated others.

The legal proceedings created a snowball effect.

The accused were pressured to confess and to name other witches to save themselves.

This led to hundreds of people being accused across Essex County.

Before the hysteria subsided, 19 men and women had been hanged, and several others died in prison.

How did it finally end?

Eventually, the governor stepped in, partly because the accusations were reaching higher and higher into society, even implicating his own wife.

The court procedures were discredited.

This crisis really marked a turning point.

It largely ended the prosecution of witches in colonial America and encouraged more educated colonists to look towards scientific explanations for natural events rather than supernatural ones.

Okay, so after all those crises of the late 17th century, the wars, the rebellions, the witch trials, the 18th century brought a period of just remarkable growth and transformation.

The population numbers are staggering.

They really are.

The colonial population exploded roughly tenfold, from about 265 ,000 in 1700 to over 2 .3 million by 1770.

This is even as the native population continued its tragic decline since European arrival.

And a key feature of this 18th century society was its incredible diversity, right?

It wasn't just English people coming over anymore.

Not at all.

That's one of the most striking characteristics.

English immigration actually declined because England itself was becoming more prosperous.

Instead, you see this huge influx of non -English Europeans and tragically enslaved Africans.

London actively encouraged Protestant immigration from other parts of the British Isles, like Scotland and Northern Ireland and from mainland Europe, promising land and religious freedom.

It was a strategic move to populate the colonies.

Were these immigrants all coming over free?

Not necessarily.

A significant portion, maybe 40 % of European immigrants still arrived as bound laborers.

This included indentured servants, but also a group called redemptioners.

Redemptioners?

What were they?

Redemptioners were common among German families.

They'd agree with a shift captain to pay for their passage upon arrival in America.

If they couldn't pay immediately, they'd essentially sell their own labor or their family member's labor for a set number of years to whoever paid the captain.

It was another form of unfree labor, though temporary.

And you mentioned the Germans specifically.

They were a huge group, weren't they?

They were the largest group of non -British European newcomers.

About 85 ,000 arrived in the 18th century.

Many were fleeing religious persecution or agricultural crises in Germany.

They tended to settle in tightly knit German -speaking communities, often on the frontier, rural New York, western Pennsylvania, the southern backcountry.

They really transformed the cultural landscape in those areas.

Did this create tensions?

Sometimes, yes.

We have historical documents showing this.

There's a petition from English settlers in Pennsylvania in 1727 expressing concern about these Germans arriving armed, calling them papists, though most were Protestant, and complaining they weren't naturalizing or learning English.

But then you have letters like one from Johannes Henner, a Swiss -German immigrant, written 1769, just praising America.

He calls it a free country, with abundant land, food, and opportunity.

So you see both perspectives.

If you picture a map of the Atlantic coast around 1760, it would show this incredible mosaic patches of English settlement, but also significant areas dominated by French Huguenots, Germans, Dutch, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, alongside the growing African populations, especially in This increasing ethnic diversity must have led to greater religious diversity, too.

Absolutely.

Outside of Puritan New England, colonial America became far more religiously diverse than Britain itself.

Most colonies still had an official established church, usually Anglican or Congregationalist, and most barred Catholics and Jews from holding public office.

But in practice, de facto toleration among the various Protestant denominations really flourished.

That visitor to Pennsylvania in 1750 you mentioned in the outline, he listed Lutherans, Reformed, Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkers, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews.

It was an astonishing mix for the time.

But all this growth, all these newcomers, what did it mean for the Native American populations who were still there?

It was largely disastrous.

This flood of newcomers equated liberty with owning land, and they relentlessly pushed westward, encroaching on remaining Indian territories.

Many smaller Indian societies simply disappeared due disease and warfare.

Those communities that survived often became integrated into the British imperial system in ways that undermined their independence.

They grew dependent on European goods, knives, axes, firearms, textiles, and unfortunately alcohol.

A Cherokee leader lamented in 1753, every necessary thing we must have from the white people, their traditional ways of life are profoundly disrupted.

And the relationship wasn't always based on treaties or negotiation, was it?

The walking purchase of 1737 in Pennsylvania is a pretty stark example of bad faith.

Oh, the walking purchase is infamous.

It was outright fraud.

The Pennsylvania authorities, under James Logan, claimed an old, possibly forged deed allowed them to acquire land from the Lenape Indians, equivalent to the distance a man could walk in a day and a half.

36 hours.

The Lenape likely expected a casual pace along a river or path.

Instead, Logan hired the fastest runners he could find, who raced along a prepared trail, marking out a massive tract of land far larger than the Indians ever anticipated seeding.

So it completely poisoned relations there.

Completely.

By 1760, Pennsylvania's population had exploded and the peaceful coexistence envisioned by William Penn was basically gone, replaced by hostility and suspicion between settlers and Indians on the frontier.

You could imagine a famous painting like Benjamin West's William Penn's Treaty with the Indians, painted much later, in 1771.

It shows this peaceful harmonious meaning, but it's a highly romanticized image, commissioned long after the reality it depicted had vanished.

So by the mid -18th century, you have these distinct regional characters emerging.

Definitely.

New England and the back country that stretched from central Pennsylvania down through the upland south were mostly characterized by small family farms, growing food mainly for their own use for local markets.

The middle colonies, though Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, were much more commercially oriented.

They grew grain for export to the West Indies in Europe.

Pennsylvania, with its fertile soil, good climate, and initially welcoming policies, really earned its nickname as the best poor man's country, offering opportunities for small farmers and artisans.

And this is all happening alongside something called the Consumer Revolution.

Yes.

Britain, by this time, had surpassed the Dutch as the leading producer of affordable consumer goods, things like cloth, ceramics, glassware, metal goods, and it started exporting these in huge quantities.

This trade really integrated the British Empire.

The American colonies became major markets for these British goods.

You see shops proliferating in towns and even villages, newspaper ads, hawking imported wares.

It meant that even families of relatively modest means started owning items like ceramic plates, metal cutlery, tea sets, manufactured cloth things that would have been luxuries a century earlier.

Imagine finding a fragment of decorated English China from the 1690s, maybe depicting King William and Queen Mary.

That's a tangible piece of this growing colonial demand and Atlantic trade.

And the colonial cities played a key role in this trade.

They were crucial hubs, cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charleston.

They were still small compared to London or Paris or even Mexico City or Lima in Spanish America.

But they were vital centers for collecting agricultural goods from the surrounding countryside and distributing these imported manufactured goods back out.

Philadelphia especially boomed.

By 1770, it had around 30 ,000 people, making it arguably the capital of the New World, at least its British part, and the British Empire's third busiest port after London and Liverpool.

So it sounds incredibly interconnected.

Utterly.

The Atlantic world was this dynamic space.

People, ideas, and goods flowed constantly back and forth across the ocean, knitting together these diverse populations in America with Britain and other parts of the empire.

The colonies weren't isolated backwaters.

They were vital overseas markets and sources of raw materials, locked into this complex web of imperial interdependence.

So this economic growth, this Atlantic trade, how did it shape colonial society internally?

Did it lead to clearer social classes?

Yes, it definitely did.

We see the clear emergence of a colonial elite.

Now, they weren't as powerful or wealthy as the aristocracy back in England, but within the colonies, they became increasingly dominant.

In New England and the middle colonies, this elite consisted mainly of wealthy merchants involved in the Atlantic trade.

In the Chesapeake and the Lower South, especially South Carolina, it was the great planters, the owners of those large tobacco and rice plantations worked by enslaved people.

South Carolina's rice planters, in fact, became the richest group on the mainland, known for their lavish lifestyles, often centered in Charleston.

Virginia famously was dominated by a planter class so interconnected by marriage and business that it's sometimes called the cousinocracy.

Think of the ancestors of figures like Jefferson and Washington.

They came from this landed gentry.

And you can sort of see this visually sometimes, right?

Like in portraits.

Exactly.

There's a portrait mentioned in Foner of the Oliver Brothers from 1732.

They're shown well -dressed with delicate hands, a clear visual signal that they were gentlemen, free from the need to perform manual labor.

That itself is a mark of elite status.

And this elite class, they started trying to act more, well, more English.

That's right.

Historians call this process anglicization.

As wealthy Americans accumulated fortunes, they increasingly sought to demonstrate their status by emulating British models of behavior, fashion, architecture, and education.

They sent their sons to Britain for schooling, built grand Georgian -style mansions, imported luxury goods.

They were consciously trying to overcome what they felt was their provincial isolation and prove they were the equals of the English gentry.

And how did they view liberty?

Do they see it the same way as, say, a small farmer?

Not really.

For this elite, liberty was closely linked to their power to rule.

They generally believed society was naturally hierarchical and that men of wealth, education, and social standing like themselves were best equipped and indeed destined to govern.

Freedom for a gentleman also meant freedom from labor.

Okay.

So that's the elite.

But what about the other end of the spectrum?

Was there growing poverty alongside this growing wealth?

Yes, there was.

While poverty was generally less widespread and less severe than in Britain at the time, it was definitely increasing, especially in the 18th century.

As the population grew, access to land became more difficult, particularly in older settled areas.

You had a growing number of propertyless men, former indentured servants, sons who couldn't inherit farms, recent immigrants, many of whom drifted to the cities looking for work as laborers or sailors.

By the mid -18th century, estimates suggest that the richest 10 % of the population might have owned as much as half the wealth in the colonies.

How were the poor viewed?

Prevailing attitudes often mirrored those in England.

The poor were frequently seen as lazy, lacking in moral fiber, and responsible for their own plight.

Public assistance was limited, and sometimes the poor were placed in workhouses to instill habits of industry, though this was less common than in England.

But the vast majority of Americans weren't necessarily elite or destitute, right?

There was this large group in the middle.

Absolutely.

The middle ranks, as Foner calls them.

This was the large majority of free Americans.

Perhaps two -thirds of the free male population owned their own land.

For these small farmers and artisans, owning property, especially land, was seen as fundamental.

It was the bedrock of independence and liberty.

It allowed them to control their own labor and not be dependent on others for a livelihood.

This fostered a strong dislike of personal dependence and deference, which would become really important later on.

And the family was central to this?

Totally central.

The household was the main unit of economic life.

The independence of these farmers relied heavily on the combined labor of the entire family, husband, wife, and children.

The remarkably high birthrate in the colonies wasn't just accidental.

It reflected the need for many hands to work the farm or the shop.

What about women's roles specifically?

Did they change much during this period?

They did.

But perhaps not in the way we might expect.

In the very early colonial period, women sometimes had slightly more economic autonomy, especially widows.

But as colonial society became more stable and structured in the 18th century, women's opportunities often actually receded.

Foner gives the example of Connecticut courts, where women who might have represented themselves earlier increasingly needed male lawyers.

The division of labor along gender lines became more rigid.

Women's work was clearly defined as domestic cooking, cleaning, sewing, assisting in the fields or shop, but especially bearing and raising children.

Even as the consumer revolution brought more store -bought goods into the home, women's lives remained largely centered on the household and family maintenance.

Think of those family portraits from the late 18th century.

Like the Cheney family portrait mentioned, they often depict numerous children, visually representing the many years women spent primarily engaged in childbearing and childrearing.

So by the middle of the 18th century, North America is this incredibly diverse place.

You've got Pueblo villages in the southwest, huge tobacco plantations in Virginia, small farms in New England, bustling port cities, fur trading outposts in the interior.

It's an astonishing patchwork, and it presents this profound paradox that runs through the whole period.

On one hand, many colonists, particularly white men, undoubtedly enjoyed greater opportunities for freedom, the chance to vote, to own land, to worship as they chose, to improve their economic standing than they would have had in Europe.

But at the very same time, this expansion of freedom for some was built upon and inseparable from the partial freedom of indentured servitude, and increasingly, the complete absence of freedom inherent in racialized chattel slavery for hundreds of thousands of Africans and their descendants.

Both these timeless longings for and these historically specific unprecedented forms of unfreedom were absolutely essential components in the development of these North American colonies.

You really can't understand one without the other.

Okay, so let's try to wrap up the core takeaways from our deep dive today into the creation of Anglo -America, roughly 1660 to 1750.

We've seen the relentless expansion of the English Empire really driven by that economic theory of mercantilism.

Right, and the practical tools like the Navigation Acts designed to funnel wealth back to England.

We've traced the tragic and systematic establishment of racialized slavery, moving from ambiguity to a rigid system, especially after Bacon's Rebellion.

A shift from a society with slaves to a slave society in places like Virginia, which is a crucial difference.

We touched on that series of profound crises in the late 17th century King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, Leisler's Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution's impact, and the Salem witch trials.

Real moments of instability.

Which led to anxieties, but also significant political changes, like Massachusetts becoming a royal colony and the basis of voting shifting from religion to property.

And then out of that, the 18th century saw this explosion of population and diversity, not just English, but Germans, Scotch -Irish, Africans,

alongside the growth of a real Atlantic economy and internally widening classes from a wealthy elite to growing numbers of poor.

Exactly.

It's this period that really laid the crucial foundations for what America would become, shaping not just its economy and demographics, but its fundamental and often contradictory ideas about liberty and who was actually entitled to it.

So what this deep dive really reveals, I think, is how the very definition of freedom in early America wasn't fixed.

It was constantly being contested, constantly evolving.

And often with these stark contradictions built right in, who got freedom often depended on denying it to someone else.

And those contradictions, those tensions, they echo right through American history, don't they?

They certainly do.

It's a powerful thought, maybe something for you listeners to consider,

how that pursuit of economic opportunity and liberty for some groups seemed almost inevitably tied to the dispossession and the unfreedom of others, Native Americans, enslaved Africans.

It created this incredibly complex legacy that we're still grappling with today.

Absolutely.

We hope this exploration is giving you a clearer understanding of these really formative historical forces and encourages you to keep thinking critically about how this past continues to shape our present.

Thank you so much for joining us on the deep dive into the making of Anglo -America.

We hope you feel a little more well -informed and perhaps a lot more curious after this.