US Hist 3.pdf

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 3

Lecture Three

The 18 th Century and the Wars for Empire (1689-1775)

Scope: This lecture will explore 18 th century developments in British North American colonies. The

key mark of this period was a dramatic growth of the colonial population. This process of

demographic growth was framed, on the one hand, by the maturing and diversification of the colonial

capitalist economy, and on the other—by the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening: two different

responses to the increasingly capitalist world of the 18 th century. As a result of these developments the

thirteen American colonies were becoming a nation. Looming over the 18 th century were the imperial

wars for world dominance between France and Britain. After Britain vanquished France in the French

and Indian War, British attempts to reorganize the colonies provoked protests. They led to the colonial

resistance that eventually erupted into a Revolution.

Outline

I. Throughout the 18 th century the population in the American colonies grew at a rate unprecedented

in human history: from 250,000 people in 1700, to more than 1 million by 1750, and about 2,5

million by 1775.

A. Much of this population growth was caused by immigration. Immigrants could be free or

unfree: indentured servants (British immigrants who had to negotiate terms of their indentures

or contracts in England), redemptioners (non-British immigrants who had to negotiate terms of

their indentures upon arrival in America), convicts (British citizens whose sentences were

commuted to a term of service in the colonies) and African slaves.

B. Among about 425,000 Europeans who migrated to the colonies in the 18 th century the largest

group, about 250,000, was Scotch-Irish. The second largest group, about 100,000, were the

Germans. Other immigrants came from Scandinavia, England, Wales, and Western Europe.

C. The population of African slaves, victims of the transatlantic slave trade, grew from less than

3000 in 1660 to more than 300,000 in 1775.

D. For all these new arrivals, most of the increase in the colonies’ population came not from

immigration or the slave trade but from natural increase. Women bore on average seven or

eight babies and the American population was exceptionally young. In 1790 the median age

was 16, compared to 35 in the year 2000.

II. The American colonial economy in the 18 th century was built and sustained by trade, and this trade

shaped the sort of societies the American colonies developed.

A. As the American colonies became capitalist societies, two economic revolutions followed:

1. a consumer revolution: a slow and steady increase in the demand for, and purchase of,

consumer goods.

2. an industrious revolution: a process in which people organized their households to produce

goods that could be sold, so that they would have money to pay for the items they wanted.

B. Both of these processes introduced a revolution of manners, as plantation products and

consumer goods once considered luxuries were becoming widely available. The result was the

creation of gentility.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 3

1. By 1700, with the appearance of the dressing table and the full-length mirror, people

became increasingly interested in how they appeared to others. Washing and fashioning

oneself became standard rituals for all who hoped to appear “genteel.”

2. Gentility was a new style of life, and had no precise meaning, but it represented all that

was polite, civilized, refined, and fashionable. Gentility meant not only certain sorts of

objects, such as a China teapot, but also the manners that were necessary to use such

objects properly.

3. Since the display of genteel manners was possible in a polite society, the revolution of

manners encouraged cultivating social life, made easier by the newest and most popular

consumer goods: forks and glasses.

4. The consumer revolution and the revolution of manners helped create an urban public

sphere. By 1775 the American colonies had dozens of cities, the largest being Philadelphia,

with 30,000 residents, and New York with 25,000.

C. The 18 th century also saw the beginning of diversification of the colonies’ economy. The

plantation regions of the South, made such large profits from selling tobacco, rice, and indigo

that they purchased more land and more slaves to work it. Northern farmers, whose profits

from agriculture were low, had to look for other opportunities to make money, and they found

them in trade. The South was more prosperous, but the North was more economically

diversified.

D. The strains of economic transformation produced many local crises, the most spectacular of

which was the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692 when Massachusetts executed 20 people

convicted of witchcraft. Although it was a relatively minor episode in American history, the

trails provide a window onto a society in crisis, one coping with the conflict between religious

and scientific ways of understanding the world.

III. American religious, intellectual, and cultural life in the 18 th century was shaped by two significant

movements: the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. Although these movements seemed

fundamentally opposed to each other, both criticized established authority, both valued the

experience of the individual, and both contributed to the humanitarianism that emerged at the end

of the century.

A. The Enlightenment was a transatlantic intellectual and philosophical movement that held that

the universe could be understood and improved by the human mind. Rejecting revelation as a

guide, the Enlightenment looked instead to reason. It was interested in knowledge not for its

own sake, but for the improvements it could make in human happiness.

1. Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke studied the connections among society,

politics, and the economy. Locke created the political theory of liberalism, and its

economic theory. Departing from mercantilism, Locke claimed that money has no intrinsic

value, and that human beings should be free to value the things that made them happy.

2. Using happiness as their standard for human life, later philosophers such as Adam Smith

argued that people should be free to produce. In his influential The Wealth of Nations

(1776) Smith criticized mercantilism and advocated free-market political economy.

3. The Enlightenment spurred the creation of not only new political and economic theories,

but also of a number of institutions that embodied its principles, such as hospitals and

public libraries.

B. The Great Awakening was a transatlantic religious and social movement that held that all

people were born sinners, that all could feel their own depravity without the assistance of

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 3

ministers, and that all were equal in the eyes of God. The Awakening was a series of religious

revivals that swept through the colonies between 1734 and 1745.

1. The Awakening was a response to the rational religion Enlightenment advocated. It was a

kind of religion that was emotionally fulfilling.

2. The primary figure of the American Great Awakening was a Methodist evangelist George

Whitefield who toured the colonies in the early 1740s.

3. Rather than restoring the unity of early 17 th century New England communities or the

hierarchical stability of the Anglican Chesapeake, the Awakening encouraged religious

individualism. It split most churches into evangelical and traditional factions, and created

space for new denominations to appear. The Awakening increased religious toleration in

the colonies, and strengthened religion itself, as a general force, making the colonies

simultaneously the most Protestant and the most religiously diverse culture in the world.

IV. In the years between 1689 and 1763, Britain and France were at war more than half of the time.

All of these wars had their roots in a struggle for world dominance between the two most powerful

nations, and all of them were also fought in North America.

A. The first four wars—King William’s War (1689-97), Queen Anne’s War (1702-13), the War

of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-44), and King George’s War (1744-48)—all followed a similar pattern

of European-inspired Indian raids along the frontiers, and all resulted in a stale-mate in both

Europe and North America.

C. At the beginning of the war, the advantage was with the French. With four times as many

troops as the British had stationed in North America, superior leadership, and the lack of

intercolonial rivalries, the French dominated the first phrase of the war, from 1754 through

1757. In 1757, after a seven-day siege, the French captured Fort William Henry. Following the

surrender, the Indians massacred the British, as they were evacuating the fort.

D. The greatest success of the French became their undoing. The outraged British sent more

troops to America and the second phase of war, begun in 1757 lasted until Britain’s victory in

1763.

E. In the Treaty of Paris (1763), which concluded the war, France surrendered to Britain all of

Canada except for two small fishing islands off the coast of Newfoundland.

V. Following the French and Indian War the British government attempted to draw their American

colonies more closely into the imperial system. In resisting the British imperial policy, the

American colonists developed new ideas about the purpose of government, ideas that propelled

them to revolution.

B. Even more vexing were the attempts of the British government to force the colonists to pay a

portion of the sum needed to support a large standing army now stationed in North America.

Toward this aim, Parliament passed four pieces of legislation: the Sugar Act, the Currency Act

(both 1764), the Stamp Act and the Quartering Act (both 1765).

B. The French and Indian War (1754-63) began from a quarrel between France and Virginia, both

of which had claimed the Ohio River valley.

A. The first immediate consequence of the French and Indian War was the issuing of the

Proclamation of 1763: an imaginary line running down the spine of the Alleghenies separating

the colonists east of the line, and Indians west of it.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 3

C. The Stamp Act, the first direct tax on the American people, angered the most powerful

colonists, in the most irritating way. Colonial resistance was forceful. By the day that the

Stamp Act was supposed to be put into effect every colony had taken steps to make certain that

the tax could not be collected. In the face of this opposition the British backed down and

repealed these Acts.

D. In the first phase of colonial opposition, 1763-75, the ideological bedrock of the colonists’

resistance to imperial legislation was constitutionalism. It was a set of ideas about the British

government that comprised two elements: the rule of law, and the principle of consent (that

one could not be subjected to laws or taxation except by duly elected representatives).

E. The second round of imperial legislation began in 1767 when Parliament passed The

Townshend Revenue Act. The Act levied duties on some imported goods. Again the colonists

resisted, boycotting imports, and forcing the British to repeal it by 1770.

F. In resisting the Townshend Duties the colonial radical thinkers used a body of thought known

as republicanism: a set of doctrines that held that power is always grasping, always dangerous.

According to a republican explanation, British actions were not acts of debatable

constitutionality, but a carefully orchestrated plot to deprive the colonists of their liberty. In

this way republicanism provided constitutionalism with a motive.

G. The resistance to the Townshend Duties established a pattern that would be repeated again and

again in the years before the Revolution. Each attempt to enforce the empire was met with an

organized colonial opposition, to which the British government responded with a punitive

measure. Ostensibly economic regulations, when rejected by the colonies, led to clearly

political responses from Britain. Two events especially became the milestones of growing

tension: the Boston “massacre” of 1770 and the Boston “tea party” of 1773.

1. The “massacre” was a scuffle between young men of Boston and British soldiers stationed

in town, in which the regulars fired on the crowd killing 5 and wounding 11.

2. In 1773 Parliament radically lowered the price of tea, allowing British East India Company

to sell it directly to Americans. Patriot radicals claimed that the Tea Act was a trick

intended to con the colonists into accepting the principle of taxation without

representation. Again, the most spirited resistance came in Boston: the crowd blocked the

wharf and colonists staged a “tea party,” unloading the cargo from the three tea-bearing

ships into Boston Harbor.

H. For the British government the Boston “tea party” was defiance of the law and wanton

destruction of property. In response, Parliament passed five bills in the spring of 1774 to

punish Boston and Massachusetts collectively for their misdeeds. Together, these acts were

known in Britain as the Coercion Acts and in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. The British

had thought that Massachusetts could be isolated.

VI. The threat to representative government presented by the Intolerable Acts was so clear that the

other colonies had rallied around Massachusetts and agreed to meet in Philadelphia. The meeting,

convened on September 5, 1774, became the First Continental Congress.

A. In the course of seven weeks, Congress achieved four objectives.

1. Firstly, after Massachusetts abandoned any discussion of offensive measures against the

British, Congress recommended passive resistance to the Intolerable Acts.

Prof. dr hab. Marek Oziewicz History of the United States

Lecture 3

2. Secondly, it issued a call for a boycott of all trade between the colonies and Britain.

3. Thirdly, Congress adopted a Declaration of Rights: a document, which for the first time

openly expressed the collective determination of every colony to stand by constitutional

arguments.

4. Finally, Congress agreed to reconvene in half a year, in 1775, unless the Intolerable Acts

were repealed.

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