Aspects of American History

Simon Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134098736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Aspects of American History examines major themes, personalities and issues across American history, using topic focused essays. Each chapter focuses on key events and time periods within a broad framework looking at liberty and equality, the role of government and national identity. The volume engages with its central themes through a broad ranging examination of aspects of the American past, including discussions of political history, foreign policy, presidential leadership and the construction of national memory. In each essay, Simon Henderson:

• introduces fresh angles to traditional topics
• consolidates recent research in themed essays
• analyzes views of different historians
• offers an interpretive rather than narrative approach
• gives concise treatment to complex issues.

Including an introduction which places key themes in context, this book enables readers to make comparisons and trace major thematic developments across American history.

1
NATION IN EMBRYO

The development of colonial America

The North American colonies were home to men and women from a myriad of different cultures and backgrounds that faced considerable environmental challenges to their continued existence. Looking back from the twenty-first century, amidst the rampant advance of globalisation, it is difficult to comprehend the unique situation of cultural exchange that was experienced by the colonists. Stirring a cocktail of different races, language, custom and religions, ‘the New World produced a kaleidoscope of human encounters’.¹ The rich human tapestry of the colonists’ ambitions and motivations provided for significant diversity in the British colonies which would eventually become the United States of America. This chapter provides a survey of these colonies, their racially varied inhabitants, and the patterns of development they followed – patterns which had profound consequences for the future of America. Despite the obvious differences between the societies of the eastern seaboard, there was a tentative sense of collective separateness from Britain which eventually led to independence from the mother country. Pointers towards how this impulse emerged from the great diversity of the colonial experience will also be considered.

It is important to recognise that study of the colonies has wrestled with the issue of regionalism. How to divide up the thirteen colonies into distinct geographical areas has provoked debate. As Michael Zuckerman has argued, ‘if men of the eighteenth century could not concur on the regional alignments that characterised the country, historians and geographers who have the help of hindsight have done no better’.² Scholarly quarrels over how many regions to subdivide the colonies into have abounded with some choosing four, some preferring five and some settling for a simple division of North and South. By focussing on the regional centres of New England, the mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake Bay and the lower South my intention is to show important differences in the shape of colonial society which had an impact on the development of an embryonic nation.

Perhaps no colonial region has been studied more closely than New England. Historians for some time focussed their attention on the Puritan town believing it to be the prototypical American community; however, it would appear that in many ways it was in fact atypical of the American experience.³ The Puritan leaders who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed their society was to be a ‘city upon a hill’, looked to as an example by the rest of the world. As Daniel Boorstin explains, ‘the Puritan beacon for misguided mankind was to be neither a book nor a theory. It was to be the community itself’.⁴ The society built in New England was closer to the pattern of rural England than any other of the colonies. The homogeneity of the region led Crevecoeur to describe New Englanders as ‘the unmixed descendants of Englishmen’.⁵

Unfavourable physical environment and the cultural heritage of Puritanism meant that the New England colonies did not develop a market economy in the way that other areas of British North America did. Social development remained closer to the founding patterns in New England than in any other of the colonies.⁶ The relatively homogeneous society of New England led to the development of the most egalitarian community in the colonies. There was not an extreme distinction between different social classes or between the propertied and the landless. Compact settlement and the propensity of small landholding enterprises meant that, even in the eastern Massachusetts counties, the number of landless men did not usually exceed 20 per cent. There was not, of course, absolute equality – an absence of social or economic distinctions – but there was a common minimum standard of living and there was less inequality than in rural Scotland or Ireland, for example. In eighteenth-century New England the vast majority of work was performed by native-born whites and there was little receptiveness to slave or indentured labour.⁷

It is important, however, not to overemphasise the homogeneous and static nature of New England society. Firstly, New England is a regional term that covers separate colonies which did have distinct differences. Secondly, there were subtle changes occurring in the eighteenth century which affected the colonies of the north-east. Crevecoeur may have suggested that the population was made up of Englishmen and their descendants, but, by 1760, three in ten New Englanders originated outside of England. New England was more homogeneous than the rest of North America but there were 5,000 Africans and 4,000 Scots, Scots-Irish and Irish who constituted a significant minority.⁸ Rapid population increase from the early eighteenth century to the eve of the Revolution put pressure on land supplies and led to a rise in land speculation. The impulse towards greater geographical mobility was felt in New England as in other areas of America. As Richard Hofstadter argued, ‘the urge to exploit the land was changing the old order, the Yankee entrepreneur was replacing the Puritan villager’.⁹ We must be careful, however, not to overemphasise the significance of this change. More recent scholarship has challenged the traditional declension approach of those like Hofstadter and shown continuity in the internal economic development of the Massachusetts Bay region. Market forces were at work from the early seventeenth century and did not emerge suddenly to smash Puritan idealism in the eighteenth century.¹⁰

In the cities of New England, most notably Boston, there was a growing poverty problem and the development of a depressed labouring poor in the years after 1700.¹¹ In fact studies of the region have uncovered evidence to show that eighteenth-century New England had a greater distribution of poverty than areas of the South.¹² It is clear that the idealised image of an egalitarian society fails to recognise the complex realities of significant socio-economic stratification in New England. Nevertheless, it remained different in relative terms to the other colonies. Its sense of mission, essentially slave-free society and strong commitment to common laws and rights, was profoundly important for the development of America.

In the mid-Atlantic colonies there was much greater diversity than in New England. Indentured servitude, slave and wage labour were all used in colonies that had a more developed ethos of self-interest than anywhere else in colonial America.¹³ Landholding in the middle colonies was much more diverse than in New England. In New York landlords favoured renting over selling and tried to hold up land prices. In this environment hired labourers, indentured servants and slaves formed a substantial and relatively poor population. South of New York, in the agrarian heartland of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, land was not so expensive and property was more equitably distributed. In 1742 the governor of New Jersey described the people of his province as ‘the most easy and happy people of any colony in North America’.¹⁴ In urban areas of the middle colonies such as Philadelphia, however, there was a growing restlessness among working people from the 1740s onwards. The lower classes of the city began to voice frustration, just as they did in Boston. The political mobilisation of the working classes was crucial in the changing political culture of the colonies in the eighteenth century.¹⁵

Between 1710 and 1770 approximately 85,000 Germans arrived in the North American colonies with almost three-quarters settling in Pennsylvania. Like the English who arrived in New England, the majority of Germans came in family groups and sometimes in large neighbourhood or community groups. Many of them made use of the redemption system through which they borrowed money from shippers to gain passage to the New World and then entered into a labour contract with employers who redeemed their loans from the shippers. The Germans brought with them a wide variety of religious groupings and formed a strong community identity. Unlike the Scots or French Huguenots of the middle colonies they did suffer from discrimination and experienced a xenophobia directed towards them from Anglo-Americans.¹⁶

In Pennsylvania, as in New England, religion was an important factor in the development of social and political institutions. The Quakers of Pennsylvania shared a sense of mission and search for utopia with their Puritan counterparts.¹⁷ By 1756 Quaker involvement in the government of Pennsylvania had come to an end as their representatives in the colonial Assembly withdrew. Whereas the Puritans of New England had tempered their utopian vision in the face of the practical realities of the situation in America, the Quakers clung to their principles with an impressive rigidity. Their failure to make accommodations to the changing colonial situation, however, rendered their continued rule in Pennsylvania untenable. Strict adherence to their principles caused them to become more inward looking and left the Quakers unequipped to take any part in the social forces stirring revolution in the years preceding 1776.¹⁸

The colonies of the Chesapeake Bay region, Virginia and Maryland, were not influenced by the sort of religious utopianism which impacted on Pennsylvania and New England. Indeed, the Chesapeake and the colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia developed in such contrast to New England and the mid-Atlantic that, as one historian has argued, ‘they may be designated hinterlands of exploitation rather than settlement’.¹⁹ Those who had to suffer this exploitation were increasingly black. Even in the late seventeenth century there were few Africans in the North American colonies and there were only a small number of slaves in the Chesapeake region. Indeed, slavery as an economic system took many decades to emerge in the Chesapeake. By 1760, however, there were 284,000 blacks in the southern colonies and 60 per cent of them lived in Virginia and Maryland.²⁰ Why this increase and why the emergence of large-scale slavery? Part of the reason lies in the social and economic makeup of the southern colonies. Here, unlike the mid-Atlantic and New England, the majority of the population were males who came to the New World without a family. Many of these young men were indentured servants who laboured on the land. At the turn of the eighteenth century, when demands for labour were increasing, there was a slowdown in supply from Britain and Europe as men were less willing to make the journey across the Atlantic. Black labourers, and specifically slave labourers, offered an opportunity to fill the labour shortfall. Slavery offered lifetime service whereas indentured labour had a finite life span. Furthermore, perceptions of African culture made Europeans less likely to ask moral and legal questions about human bondage.²¹

In his seminal study of Virginia, Edmund Morgan argued that the story of American freedom and American slavery were intimately connected. Virginia was dominated by rich and powerful landed gentry who dominated the politics of the colony. They reaped the financial rewards of the labours of thousands of indentured servants. When these men had served their contracts, however, they were free to make their own way. Without the capital to buy land they increasingly formed a restless poor who posed a threat to Virginia’s elite – a threat which became real in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Black slavery allowed Virginia’s planters to purchase labourers for life who would not be set free to roam the countryside. Slavery also allowed the white poor to join with their betters in a racial compact wherein whiteness guaranteed freedom.²² Morgan argued that the self-confidence the Virginia planters gained from the static society they presided over made them less fearful of the mob than those in other colonial regions and so more forceful in leading the push for independence. His arguments remain attractive although critics are right to probe why a similar situation did not emerge in other slaveholding colonies.²³ It should also be noted that planters who wished to increase the profits to be made from tobacco had shown a desire for slave labour long before the turn of the eighteenth century. The problem was that the supplies from Africa were not readily available.

Of these other colonies it was South Carolina, heavily influenced by the Caribbean experience of slavery, which had the largest concentration of slaves. In Virginia and Maryland slaves were able to lay the foundations for a secure African-American society and were involved in a more paternalistic day-to-day contact with masters. In the Carolinas and Georgia they worked on large plantations in brutal and isolated conditions.²⁴ ‘South Carolina, as it fattened on its slaves and staples, developed the most lordly and most leisured ruling class in America.’²⁵ We see in South Carolina a key shift from a slave-owning society to a slave society with a closed system of race relations.²⁶

North Carolina, however, followed a different pattern and relied less on slave labour as it eventually came to be characterised by a large rural middle class. The colony was originally inhabited by colonists pushing south from Virginia and north from South Carolina. The North Carolina piedmont was not occupied until the 1750s, at which time it was a frontier region. It slowly became dominated by corn, wheat and livestock agriculture worked by English, Scots-Irish and German farmers.²⁷ These distinct differences inherent in the southern colonies laid the foundations for an internal tension in what would become the South, a tension which contradicted those who championed southern nationalism in the immediate antebellum years.

The colony of Georgia was founded by philanthropists in the early eighteenth century as a buffer between South Carolina and the Floridas and as a place for the working class, petty criminals and vagabonds of London and other English cities to prove their worth. The project prohibited slavery and rum in a society of small and earnest landholders. A different type of utopia than that envisioned by the Puritans of New England or the Quakers of Pennsylvania, Georgia nevertheless was confronted by American realities just as they were. At the root of the problem was the unrealistic vision of the London philanthropists who founded the colony. They ‘were trying to make Georgia fulfil a European dream. They were less interested in what was possible in America than what had been impossible in Europe.’²⁸ Increasingly frustrated colonists toiled on unfertile land which they were not permitted to sell. Furthermore, the silkworms in Savannah died, proving that the climate was unsuited to the Georgia trustees’ preferred crop. These trustees finally admitted defeat in 1752 and handed their charter back to the Crown. After this point the colony increasingly imported slave labour and rapidly became a planter society closer to the model of South Carolina. By the eve of the Revolution, Georgia was sparsely populated and the poor relation of the other American colonies.²⁹

What has been sketched above is a picture of the main regions of the colonial period and how they differed from one another. Michael Zuckerman, though, has decried the focus on the regional dissimilarity in the colonial experience, arguing that differences have been over-emphasised at the expense of commonality. He asserts, ‘historians of the colonies have turned to regional orderings of provincial experience because they cannot find any overarching meanings in that experience and will not impose any overarching meanings on it’.³⁰ On the contrary, regional diversity enriches the story of colonial America. Recognising the different shape of the regions that made up the early America makes the process by which people formed a country all the more dynamic and historically appealing. Attempts to reach for commonality of experience that was not present overstate the extent of an American identity in the colonies. Something new was developing, but to speak of a common sense of Americanness in the colonial period is an exaggeration.

Within the different regions of colonial America there existed a diverse array of racial identities. These identities were not static and were not clearly formed in the way a modern conception of racial identity would suggest. The colonial period provided only the beginning of a process by which these identities were developed. Almost all people in the colonies encountered Native Americans at some time. The arrival of the Europeans on the North American continent brought diseases which wiped out thousands of Indians. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Nation in embryo: the development of colonial America
• 2 Reasons for revolt: the birth of the United States
• 3 The Constitution: makings and meanings
• 4 Flawed heroes: Washington, Jefferson and slavery
• 5 Ignoring Washington’s warning: antebellum party systems
• 6 Slavery and the causes of the American Civil War
• 7 Southern and Confederate nationalism
• 8 Lincoln and liberty
• 9 Reconstruction: the unfulfilled promise
• 10 Civil War memory and American national identity
• 11 Introducing Jim Crow: the codification of segregation in the South
• 12 Prejudice and paternalism: assimilation and Native American identity
• 13 American identity and the American West
• 14 Immigration and assimilation: melting pot or salad bowl?
• 15 Gender, race and the vote, 1865–1920
• 16 Origins of the civil rights movement: southern black protest, 1900–1945
• 17 Kennedy, Johnson and civil rights
• 18 Martin, Malcolm and black America
• 19 American national mission and global conflict in the twentieth century
• 20 American identity and the ‘war on terror’
• Notes
• Select bibliography