The American Promise Value Edition Combined Volume 6th By James L. Roark - Test Bank

Natural Increase: Natural increase was a significant contributor to the dramatic population increase in the eighteenth century. It accounted for three-fourths of the population growth and both added to and was spurred on by the colonies’ economic growth.

Immigration: Although many ethnic groups immigrated to the colonies during this period, two of the largest were the Scots-Irish, who came by choice, and Africans, who came by force. Germans and Scots also came in significant numbers. Immigration shifted the ethnic balance among the colonists, so that by 1770, they were fewer English and fewer whites than ever before. In 1770, only about half the colonists were of English descent, and more than 20 percent descended from Africans.

New England Colonies: While the middle and southern colonies grew from both natural increase and immigration, the New England colonies grew primarily by natural increase, which kept them racially and ethnically homogeneous.

Middle and Southern Colonies: Immigrants often chose to settle in the middle and southern colonies because of New England’s relatively densely settled land. The Puritan orthodoxy found in the New England colonies was comparatively inhospitable to those of other faiths and those indifferent to religion, causing many immigrants to settle elsewhere.

Terms and Conditions of Agreements: In exchange for transportation to the colonies, redemptioners would agree to repay a ship’s captain with money they obtained, either by borrowing it from a friend or relative who was already living there or by selling themselves as servants. Redemptioners, unlike indentured servants, negotiated independently with their purchasers about their period of servitude, which was typically four years for healthy adults.

From Free to Enslaved: Africans were captured in war, kidnapped, or sold into slavery by other Africans. After their initial capture they were brought to the coast and sold to African traders, who assembled slaves for resale, and then sold again to European or colonial slave traders or ship captains.

Middle Passage to America: Hundreds of slaves were then packed aboard ships for the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The number of slaves who died of illness on the journey varied from 15 percent to 50 percent, depending on the ship. When slaves arrived in the southern colonies they were then sold again to slave merchants or planters.

Seasoning: New Africans had to adjust to the physical and cultural environment of the southern colonies. Arriving in a poorly nourished, weak, and sick state, slaves were extremely vulnerable to North American diseases and as many as 10 percent to 15 percent died within their first year in the colonies. Planters generally purchased small groups of newly arrived Africans, and those who survived illnesses were usually depressed, demoralized, and disoriented. Planters expected their experienced slaves to familiarize new slaves with the routines of bondage and plantation life. This system made it more likely that the new slaves would survive to become productive workers, and to reproduce to enlarge the slave workforce.

The Rebellion: The Stono Rebellion began as about twenty slaves attacked a store, killed two storekeepers, and confiscated the store’s guns, ammunition, and powder. After enticing other rebel slaves to join, the group plundered and burned some plantations and killed more than twenty white men, women, and children. A mounted force of whites quickly suppressed the rebellion.

Long-term Consequences: Whites’ response to this incident illustrated to eighteenth-century slaves that they had no chance of overturning slavery and very little chance of defending themselves in any bold strike for freedom.

Agriculture: Agriculture was one experience that unified colonists from the three different regions. All of these colonists grew distinctive crops that they could sell in markets in return for British goods such as mirrors, silver, spices, linens, clocks, and books. These goods built a certain material uniformity among colonists and gave them the idea that they, as individuals, could make decisions that influenced the quality of their lives.

Religion: The declining importance of religion was a second unifying experience. Most colonists focused less on religion and more on the affairs of the secular world than they had in the seventeenth century. The religious revivals of the Great Awakening spread across the colonies and briefly refreshed thousands of colonists’ spiritual energies. Revivals contributed to a set of common experiences that bridged colonial divides of faith, region, class, and status, although they did not substantially boost church membership

Identity with England: Third, white inhabitants throughout British North America—whether English, German, or Scots-Irish—became aware that they shared a distinctive identity as British colonists. Colonists from all ethnic origins expected that British power would defend them from foreign enemies, interact with their colonial assemblies, and trade with them. England’s policies gave the colonists a common framework of political expectations and experiences.

Religion: As commerce and trade became more central in American society in the eighteenth century, religion became less important. Most colonists were Christians in name only and went to church seldom or not at all. Many educated colonists—who were influenced by Enlightenment ideas that encouraged them to study the world around them, think for themselves, and look for natural order—became deists. For them, religion was a way to better understand nature and to think about ways to improve society.

Great Awakening: Deism and religious indifference led, in part, to the Great Awakening, which attempted to revive religion as a central aspect of American life by emphasizing the importance of salvation. Revivalist preachers did not substantially boost the total number of church members, but they did use religious ideas to express democratic and egalitarian ideas that brought diverse colonists together.

American Colonists as British Subjects: American colonists identified as loyal British subjects around issues of commerce. They acknowledged British authority to collect customs, inspect cargoes, and enforce trade regulations. They willingly sold their products to England and imported and consumed English goods in large quantities. In this sense, and in their expectation that England would defend the colonies against enemies, the colonists were contented British subjects.

American Colonists as Americans: The colonists also maintained an identity as American colonists who acted in their own best interests, especially when royal officials tried to wield their authority in the colonists’ internal affairs. When colonial governors tried to interfere with the actions or decisions of the colonial assemblies, colonists invoked the rhetoric of English representative government and took advantage of the difficulties in communication that came with geographic distance to defend their colonial interests.

Trading Relationships: By the eighteenth century, Native Americans depended on European goods such as guns, ammunition, clothing, and sewing implements. To obtain them, Indians trapped beaver, deer, and other furbearing animals to trade with the colonists. Colonial traders and their respective empires—British, French, and Dutch—competed to control the fur trade and monitored it to prevent their competitors from deflecting the flow of furs toward their own markets. Indians, trying to improve their prospects, played the traders and empires against one another. Indian tribes and confederacies also competed among themselves for favored trading rights with a colony—competition that colonists encouraged. Indian groups competed with one another, colonial empires competed with another, and Indians and colonists viewed one another as deadly enemies, profitable trading partners, and powerful potential allies. The Indians’ dilemma was to figure out how best to maximize their trade relationships while minimizing the possibility of violence.

Causes of Population Growth: New England’s population growth lagged behind that of the other North America regions because it did not attract many immigrants. Nevertheless, because most married women had many children and the region’s mortality rate was relatively low, natural increase caused the population to grow sixfold during the eighteenth century.

Effects of Population Growth: Because New England met the French colonies in the North and powerful Native Americans in the West, the region’s growing population pressed against a limited amount of land. By the eighteenth century, original land allotments had been subdivided into smaller and smaller plots, and the colonial governments began to sell land directly to individuals rather than granting it to communities. Colonists in western and northern New England settled on individual farms rather than in towns and villages; they regulated their behavior by their own individual choices and not so much by community and church dictates.

Commercial Economy: New England farms did not produce large cash crops, so people in that region participated in a diversified commercial economy that linked remote farms to markets throughout the Atlantic world. Therefore, the New England economy supported merchants of imported goods, farmers, livestock and timber dealers, skilled tradesmen, fishermen, and the shipping industry. This economic system included the slave economies of the West Indies, which absorbed two-thirds of all New England’s exports. The region had a significant concentration of wealth, with the richest 5 percent of Bostonians owning about half the city’s wealth in 1770, but only 5 percent of the population qualified for poor relief. Despite low poverty rates, New Englanders had only one-fourth as much wealth per capita as free colonists in the southern colonies.

Appeals of Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania was an attractive destination for many immigrants because it had religious toleration, civil liberties, readily available land, relatively little Indian violence, a thriving economy, and a relatively high standard of living.

German Immigrants: German immigrants were typically middling farmers and laborers who were generally prosperous enough to pay their own passage, although some did come as redemptioners. They were drawn to Pennsylvania by the positive reports of Germans who had previously settled there. Even those who came as servants, however, fared well once their term of servitude ended.

Scots-Irish Immigrants: Scots-Irish immigrants came in even greater numbers than Germans, and more of them came as indentured servants. This group also fared well: even those who endured a difficult period of servitude on their arrival had access to economic opportunities later on.

Quakers: Quakers were the earliest white settlers in Pennsylvania. Their long presence in the colony, combined with traits of industry, thrift, honesty, and sobriety, encouraged the accumulation of wealth, so Quakers dominated the commercial economy of cities such as Philadelphia and were the richest group in the colony.

Africans and African Americans: Slavery existed in Pennsylvania, but slaves were relatively few in the colony because they were expensive and because there were many available white servants. Furthermore, the agricultural economy of Pennsylvania was based on wheat, which was cultivated on family farms. Blacks in Pennsylvania were subject to whites’ convictions about black inferiority and tended to be made scapegoats for European Americans’ suspicions and anxieties. Racism and prejudice severely limited free blacks’ ability to achieve economic success in Pennsylvania.

Slavery and the Southern Economy: The number of slaves in the South grew from 20,000 in 1700 to over 400,000 in 1770, and slave labor provided the foundation for the flourishing cash crop economy there, which was based on tobacco in the upper South and rice and indigo in the lower South. These products, exported to England and the West Indies, made the southern colonies the richest in North America, with four times the per capita wealth of New England and three times that of the middle colonies.

Slavery and Southern Society: Slaves of African descent made up a significant proportion of the South’s population and managed, despite repressive circumstances, to shape their own culture, which was deeply influenced by African traditions, naming patterns, and music. Slave labor produced dramatic wealth for plantation-owning whites, which allowed them to dominate southern society. But although their wealth made some white southern yeoman envious, wealthy whites tried to acknowledge their lesser neighbors as equals, belonging to a superior white race. Poorer whites sensed the planters’ condescension and veiled contempt, but they also appreciated them for granting favors, upholding white supremacy, and keeping slaves in their place.

Slavery and Southern Politics: The slaveholding gentry dominated the politics of the southern colonies. Slave labor allowed members of the gentry to pursue both pleasures and responsibilities, and one of these responsibilities was political leadership. Voting whites nearly always elected members of the gentry to serve in the colonial legislature, and the gentry passed elected political offices from one generation to the next as if they were hereditary.

The Middle Passage: By 1770, 40 percent of southerners were of African ancestry. Africans from a wide diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures were captured by other Africans and taken to the coast for resale. From there, they were packed into European slave ships and carried on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Slaves experienced horrible conditions, including suffocating heat, filth, and disease. On average, 15 percent of the slaves died on the voyage.

New Negroes: The newly arrived Africans were often profoundly depressed, demoralized, and disoriented. Other slaves were expected to help new slaves to acclimate to their new lives. Ten to fifteen percent of new Negroes died within the first year.

Labor and Culture: Slaves were expected to work from sunup to sundown, and the threat of physical punishment was a constant. Slaves resisted in small and large ways, from refusing to learn a task to outright revolt, such as the Stono Rebellion. Regardless, whites remained firmly in control. The slave population grew quickly, and natural reproduction played a large role. By the 1740s, the majority of southern slaves were country-born. Family and kinship ties were significant, as were cultural ties to Africa. Slaves drew on their heritages for many areas in their lives, including naming rituals, food, musical instruments, funeral rites, and even dolls.

Enlightenment: The Enlightenment, a rationalist intellectual movement that suggested that science and reason could reveal truths about the natural order, encouraged people to study the world around them, to question tradition, and to think for themselves. This philosophy influenced many educated colonists and encouraged prominent people, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to think and talk about these issues with one another, to seek to understand nature, and to find ways to improve society.

Great Awakening: The Great Awakening was a wave of religious revivals that aimed to reinvigorate spiritual energies by reminding people about their sins and the need for salvation. In doing so, revivalist preachers communicated the message that every soul mattered, that men and women could choose to be saved, and that individuals had the power to make a decision for everlasting life or death. Many American colonists internalized this religious message and also translated it into other areas of their lives.