Chapter 5: Colonial Society on the Eve of Revolution

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Today we're jumping back into a really crucial period,

the 75 years leading up to the American Revolution, basically 1700 to 1775, and our sources kick off with this fundamental question.

You know, Britain had 32 colonies in North America, but only 13 rebelled.

Why just those 13?

We kind of forget about places like Canada, Jamaica, the Floridas.

Right.

So our mission really is to dig into what was happening on that Atlantic seaboard socially, economically, politically, what created that halting gradual appearance of a recognizably American way of life, as the text puts it.

And gradual might even be leading in some ways.

The sheer speed of change, especially demographic change is, well, it's staggering.

You really have to grasp this to understand the era.

Think about it.

Fewer than 300 ,000 people in 1700.

Okay.

And by 1775, 2 .5 million.

That's an explosion.

Adding over 2 million people in just 75 years.

That's the foundation for everything that follows, including the revolution.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Starting with just how small these settlements actually were physically on the map.

We see these grand European claims, you know, Britain's got the East Coast, France, the Mississippi, Spain has the rest, California.

Yeah, but those were mostly lines on a map, weren't they?

Paper empires.

The reality on the ground was settlements clustered really tightly near the Atlantic coast or maybe up a few major rivers.

You mentioned Spain and California.

They claimed it all, sure, but hadn't really explored it properly since, what, 1603?

It was this vast, mostly unknown continent that was starting to fill up incredibly fast.

And that filling up, it wasn't mostly new arrivals from Europe, was it?

It was what historians call the conquest by the cradle.

Exactly.

Natural increase.

The colonial population was doubling roughly every 25 years.

Just think about that pace.

It means by 1775, the average age of a colonist was only about 16.

16.

Yeah.

And that has direct political implications, right?

In 1700, for every colonist, there were 20 people back in England.

20 to one.

By 1775, that ratio had plummeted to just three to one.

That's a massive psychological shift.

It gave the colonists a sense of, well, strength in numbers.

A growing confidence for the colonists, sure, but for the Native Americans already there.

It was often devastating.

Disease often arrived even before the settlers did.

Absolutely.

It just swept through, wiping out huge percentages of the population in some areas.

You see evidence later, like when George Vancouver explored the Pacific Northwest in the 1790s, he found abandoned villages, skeletal remains, just remnants of communities destroyed by epidemics that moved faster than the Europeans.

And for the Native groups that survived these initial waves,

European trade goods completely changed the game.

Things like horses and especially muskets.

Right.

Suddenly groups like the Caddo or the Osage, once they got access to these things, could dominate their neighbors.

It fueled these really complex and often brutal cycles of trade and warfare.

Like the Chickasaw raiding the Choctaw for captives to treat to the British for more muskets.

Exactly.

And then the Choctaw, desperate for their own weapons, allied with the French.

It created these intricate shifting alliances, all driven by access to European goods and weapons.

What's fascinating here is the Iroquois Confederacy.

They were positioned right between the English and the French empires.

And they played it incredibly smart.

In 1700, they managed to negotiate peace treaties with both sides.

This allowed them to act as this crucial neutral power for, well, about five decades, playing the French and English off against each other.

Very skillful diplomacy.

Okay, so we have the English settlers, this complex situation with Native Americans.

But the colonies weren't just English, were they?

This is where that polyglot stew idea comes in.

Oh, absolutely.

Gravacore wasn't exaggerating.

By the mid 18th century, colonial America was already becoming one of the most ethnically mixed places on earth.

It wasn't just English people anymore.

Like the Germans, for instance.

Yeah, big group.

About 6 % of the total population by 1775, maybe 150 ,000 people.

They were mostly fleeing religious persecution or war back in Germany.

They settled heavily in Pennsylvania,

Pennsylvania Dutch, which is really a corruption of Doish.

Mostly Lutheran, known for their solid stone barns, and importantly, they didn't feel any particular loyalty to the British crown.

Why would they?

They just left that kind of system behind.

Then you had the Scots -Irish, another significant group.

About 7%, so maybe 175 ,000.

These were Scottish lowlanders who had been moved to Northern Ireland by the English crown earlier.

But they faced economic hardship and discrimination there too.

They came to America seeking opportunity.

They ended up mostly on the frontier.

Pretty much.

They found the good coastal land already taken by the English and Germans, so they pushed west, often becoming frontiersmen, frequently squatting on land illegally, clearing it, farming it hard, and then moving on when it was exhausted.

They were restless.

This background kind of shaped their attitude towards authority.

What's fascinating here is, yeah, absolutely.

The Scots -Irish were already experienced colonizers and agitators, preparing them perfectly for the revolutionary mindset.

They weren't just settlers, they often led protests.

Like the Paxson Boys.

Exactly.

That armed march on Philadelphia in 1764, protesting what they saw as the government being too soft on Native Americans after frontier attacks.

And they were also central to the regulator movement in North Carolina, basically an uprising against the eastern coastal elite's control of politics.

They arrived ready to challenge authority.

It makes sense.

They felt overlooked by the powers that be, whether in Ireland or now in America.

Okay, so Germans, Scots -Irish.

Right.

But the largest non -English group was the African population.

By far.

Nearly 20 % of the total population by 1775, and heavily, heavily concentrated in the south, of course, due to the plantation system.

And life for enslaved people wasn't uniform across the south, was it?

There were differences.

Huge differences.

In the deep south, places like South Carolina with rice and indigo, the work was absolutely brutal.

Hot climate,

intense labor, high disease rates.

Mortality was so high that the enslaved population relied on continuous, fresh imports from Africa to sustain itself.

Whereas in the Chesapeake, Virginia, Maryland tobacco was the main crop.

Right.

Still incredibly hard work, but maybe less lethal than the rice swamps.

And critically, by around 1720 or so, the enslaved population in the Chesapeake started to have more women, enough to begin growing through natural reproduction.

So fewer forced importations were needed there over time compared to the deep south.

Exactly.

That's a really crucial demographic distinction between the two regions.

And despite the horrors of slavery, African -American culture managed to take root and develop.

Yes, remarkably so.

You see it, for example, in the unique Gullah dialect that emerged on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast.

It blended various African languages with English.

It's where we get American words like goober for peanut, gumbo, voodoo.

And musical contributions too.

Absolutely.

The banjo, the bongo drum, these have African roots that became integrated into American culture through the enslaved population.

But alongside culture, there was always resistance.

Always.

It took many forms from slowdowns to escape attempts, but sometimes it erupted into outright violence.

You had the New York slave revolt in 1712 where nine white people were killed and the Stono River rebellion in South Carolina in 1739.

Where enslaved people tried to march to Spanish Florida for freedom.

That's right.

Dozens were killed.

And the response was always Hartford laws, like the Virginia slave code of 1705.

It's systematically dehumanized enslaved people, legally defined them as property, banned interracial marriage, even said killing an enslaved person during punishment wasn't necessarily murder.

It's this legal framework of terror that you see powerfully condemned in narratives like a lot of equianos later on.

Okay.

Shifting gears a bit to the economy, you said 90 % were in agriculture.

What were they growing mainly?

Well, tobacco was still huge in Maryland and Virginia, though they were starting to shift towards wheat as well.

The middle colonies, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, those were the bread colonies.

Lots of grain.

New York was exporting something like 80 ,000 barrels of flour a year by the 1750s.

And despite the hard work, the general standard of living was pretty decent.

Comparatively, yes.

For free white colonists, standard of living was generally higher than for the average person in England or pretty much anywhere else in the world at that time.

Land was relatively cheap and abundant, at least initially.

And trade was obviously crucial.

Fishing in New England.

Cod was king.

It really spurred shipbuilding up there.

And think about this.

By 1770, about a third of the entire British merchant fleet was built in America.

Colonial ships, colonial crews.

Which ties into the triangular trade, doesn't it?

It does.

Though it's important to note that specific route New England rummed to Africa for slaves, slaves to the West Indies for molasses, molasses back to New England to make more rum while infamous and profitable for those involved was actually a pretty small part of total colonial commerce.

But it highlights the connection between New England industry and the slave economy.

Definitely.

And the West Indies trade, especially for molasses, was vital the New England economy.

Here's where it gets really interesting.

Because parliament tried to interfere with that trade, right?

The Molasses Act of 1733.

Yes.

This is a key moment showing that rising tension.

The powerful sugar planters in the British West Indies were getting undercut by cheaper French West Indian molasses.

So they lobbied parliament hard.

And parliament passed the Molasses Act to try and force the North American colonies to buy only the more expensive British molasses.

Right.

The goal was to cripple the trade with the French islands.

But the problem was the colonists needed that trade.

Selling their fish, lumber and food to the French West Indies was how they earned the hard currency, the gold and silver to buy manufactured goods from Britain.

So shutting down the French trade would hurt British exports in the long run.

Exactly.

So how did the American merchants react when parliament told them to

trade?

They just ignored it.

Pretty much.

They resorted to widespread bribery and smuggling.

Just sailed right around the law.

And this reaction, this organized defiance of a major act of parliament aimed at controlling their economy, it's a really clear foreshadowing of the resistance that would explode decades later.

That defiance comes partly from economic self interest.

But also you start seeing changes in colonial society itself.

Fears of Europeanization.

Yeah, the idea that America was becoming less egalitarian, more like old Europe with its rigid class structure.

The colonial wars, for example, generated huge profits for some creating these wealthy merchant princes in cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York.

And the gap between rich and poor was growing.

Definitely.

By the mid 1700s in those big port cities, the richest 10 % of the population owns something like two thirds of the taxable wealth.

That's a huge concentration.

And the other end, you had a growing number of poor widows, orphans, people displaced by war.

Cities like Philadelphia, New York actually had to build almshouses in the 1730s to cope with poverty.

And then there were the convicts, right?

The involuntary immigrants.

Britain literally dumped about 50 ,000

convicts, jailbirds, they call them robbers, murderers, debtors onto the colonies.

They were resented, but they were another part of this increasingly stratified society.

And below everyone, of course, the enslaved Africans.

The absolute bottom of the social ladder with no rights and treated as property.

And it's worth noting here, attempts by the colonies themselves to limit the slave trade were often blocked by London, right?

Yes.

South Carolina tried to restrict slave importation in 1760, for instance, but the British authorities vetoed it.

They wanted to protect the profits of British slave traders and also some New England merchants who were involved in the trade.

It's another source of friction.

So you have all this economic activity, this ethnic mixing, these social tensions,

but what started to tie these disparate colonies together?

What gave them a shared sense of identity?

Well, one of the first major forces was religious.

The great awakening in the 1730s and 40s.

This huge religious revival movement.

What sparked it?

It was partly a reaction against what some saw as dry, overly intellectual preaching in the established churches and also against newer, more liberal ideas like Arminianism, the belief that individuals could earn salvation through their own good works rather than relying solely on God's grace.

So it started locally.

It did, notably in Northampton, Massachusetts, with the preacher, Jonathan Edwards.

He was intense, brilliant and preached about the absolute sovereignty of God and the need for complete dependence on his grace.

His most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, really captured that feeling.

But the figure who really spread it across the colonies was George Whitefield.

Oh, absolutely.

Whitefield was an English preacher, an incredible orator.

He toured the colonies, drawing massive crowds outdoors, his voice, his emotional style.

It just ignited this conflagration of religious ardor, as the text says.

Even Ben Franklin was impressed, wasn't he?

He was.

Franklin, famously skeptical, went to hear Whitefield intending not donate, but he was so moved by the sermon, he ended up emptying his pockets into the collection plate.

It shows Whitefield's power.

What was the impact of the awakening?

Well, it caused splits.

You had the old lights, the traditional clergy who were wary of all the emotionalism and theatrics, and the new lights who defended the awakening and its methods.

It also led to new colleges.

Yes.

Several colleges like Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, Dartmouth were founded by new lights to train ministers in the new revivalist tradition,

but maybe the most significant impact.

It was the first really spontaneous mass movement that swept through all the colonies.

Regardless of region or denomination.

Pretty much.

It cut across those lines.

People from Georgia to New England shared this intense religious experience.

It gave them a sense of being part of something bigger, something uniquely American, perhaps for the first time.

That shared identity also started showing up in print, didn't it?

Even if high culture was still pretty derivative of Britain.

Right.

Colonial painters like Trumbull or Copley still felt they had to go to London to really make it.

Architecture followed British Georgian styles, but in popular print you had Benjamin Franklin again with poor Richard's Almanac.

Which was hugely popular.

Incredibly popular.

Published for over 25 years, full of witty sayings promoting thrift, hard work, common sense, you know, honesty is the best policy.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

It shaped a kind of practical American ethos.

And Franklin was also the colony's leading scientist.

Really the only one considered first rank by European standards at the time.

His experiments with electricity, the lightning rod, bifocals.

Pretty remarkable for someone largely self -taught.

But maybe even more important for future democracy was the development of press freedom, the Zenger trial.

Oh, absolutely crucial.

This was in New York 1734, 1735.

John Peter Zenger printed a newspaper that criticized the corrupt royal governor.

So he was arrested for seditious libel.

Under the existing law, just criticizing a public official to or not could be considered libel.

Exactly.

But Zenger's lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, made this brilliant bold argument.

He basically said, no, the jury should consider the truth of the statements.

He urged them to defy the judge's instructions and rule that printing the truth about official misconduct is not libel.

And the jury did it.

They did.

They found Zenger not guilty.

It didn't immediately change the law everywhere, but it was a landmark victory.

It established this principle, this idea that the press had a right, even a duty, to hold public officials accountable by printing the truth.

A huge step towards free speech and democracy.

Okay, so we have this growing sense of shared identity,

economic friction, developing press freedom.

What about actual politics?

How were the colonies governed day to day?

Well, there were different types, eight royal colonies with governors appointed by the king, three proprietary colonies under private owners, and two Connecticut and Rhode Island that were basically self -governing under charters.

But they shared a common structure.

Most did, typically a governor often appointed from England and a two -house legislature.

The upper house or council was usually appointed, but the lower house, the assembly, was elected by property -owning colonists.

And that elected assembly held the real power.

Increasingly, yes, because they controlled the money, the crucial power of the purse.

They voted on taxes and, critically, they controlled the governor's salary.

Ah, so they could basically hold the governor hostage financially.

Pretty much.

If the governor didn't approve the laws the assembly wanted or appointed officials they didn't like, the assembly could just refuse to vote for a salary.

We read about governors literally dying while owed years of back pay.

Like Lord Cornbury, that notoriously corrupt governor of New York and New Jersey.

A perfect example.

This constant battling over the governor's salary created endless friction with London, but it also gave the colonists decades of practice in using political leverage, obstruction,

and asserting their will against imperial authority.

They got really good at it.

And this self -government was just at the colony level, right?

It was local, too.

Very much so.

In the south, the main local unit was the county, usually run by justices of the peace appointed by the governor.

But in New England, you had the town meeting.

Which was much more democratic.

Oh yeah.

The town meeting was, as the source says, a cradle of self -government.

Eligible citizens would gather, debate local issues openly, and vote directly on measures like taxes, road building, electing officials.

It was direct democracy in action.

Now who was eligible to vote?

It wasn't everyone.

No, definitely not.

There were property qualifications, sometimes religious ones, too.

Generally, you had to own a certain amount of land or pay a certain amount of taxes.

This probably disenfranchised about half of all adult white men.

Still, compared to England.

Compared to England, where land ownership was much more concentrated, the threshold for voting in the colonies was relatively low and attainable for many, especially farmers.

So while not universal suffrage, by any means, colonial America was far more democratic in practice than Britain.

So what does this all mean?

Let's try and pull it together.

By 1775, you've got these 13 colonies.

They're incredibly diverse, ethnically, religiously.

There are growing economic tensions both internally and with Britain.

Social classes are becoming more defined.

Right.

But you also have these powerful, unifying forces.

That shared experience of great awakening, a growing resentment of British interference, like with the Molasses Act, a deep -seated belief honed through decades of practice in their assemblies and town meetings in the right to self -taxation and representative government.

They shared common origins in many ways, common beliefs in, well, at least some forms of tolerance, and crucially, this fierce devotion to self -rule.

All stitched together, but also crucially separated from Britain by, as the text puts it, a vast ocean moat some 3 ,000 miles wide.

Distance mattered.

So maybe the final thought for you to consider is this.

Was the revolution inevitable because Britain was being actively tyrannical?

Or was it more that Britain, through benign neglect and, frankly, administrative sloppiness, allowed the colonies to develop these powerful traditions of self -government?

Yeah, that failure, for instance, to ensure governors were paid directly by the Crown, independent of the colonial assemblies.

By letting the colonists wield the power of the purse for so long, did Britain essentially train them in the very political tactics they would use to break away?

Something to think about.

They learned how to obstruct, how to demand, how to leverage power against authority, skills they were about to put to revolutionary use.

Exactly.

They were well prepared, perhaps unintentionally, by the very empire they were about to challenge.