A History of the American People Part 2

This was only the beginning of the Ulster-Scotch migration. From 1720, for the next half-century, about 500,000 men, women, and children from northern Ireland and lowland Scotland went into Pennsylvania. A similar wave of Germans and Swiss, also Protestants, from the Palatinate, Wurttemberg, Baden, and the north Swiss cantons, began to wash into America from 1682 and went on to the middle of the 18th century, most of them being deposited in New York, though 100,000 went to Pennsylvania. For a time indeed, the population of Pennsylvania was one-third Ulster, one-third German. Land in Pennsylvania cost only 10 a hundred acres, raised to 15 in 1732 (plus annual quitrents of about a halfpenny an acre). But there was plenty of land, and the rush of settlers, and their anxiety to start farming, led many to sidestep the surveying formalities and simply squat. The overwhelmed chief agent of the Penn family, James Logan, complained that the Ulstermen took over 'in an audacious and disorderly manner,' telling him and other officials that 'it was against the laws of G.o.d and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread.' How could he answer such a heartfelt point, except by speeding up the process of lawful conveyance?

The further south you went, the cheaper the land got. Indeed it was often to be had for nothing. From the I720s onwards, Germans, Swiss, Irish, Scotch, and others, moved down from the northeast along the rich inland valleys of the mountain area-the c.u.mberland, Shenandoah, and Hagerstown valleys, then through the pa.s.ses east into what is now North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Shortly after the mid-century they were getting into Georgia this way. As F. J. Turner was later to note, in The Frontier in American History, this moving ma.s.s of people contained children with names like Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and James Robertson, and the forebears of Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, John C. Calhoun, James K. Polk, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Stonewall Jackson. This was when Andrew Jackson's father set up in Carolina piedmont and Thomas Jefferson's built his home on the frontier at Blue Ridge.

South of the Chesapeake, the framework of government became weaker. In the Carolinas there was constant bickering between north and south, as well as between Tidewater grandees and inland settlers in the piedmont. In 1691 the Carolina proprietors recognized the fait accompli of a northern region by dividing the colony into two provinces, with a deputy governor living in the town of Albemarle, capital of what was already being called North Carolina. On May 12, 1712 the separation was completed and North Carolina became a colony on its own. It had already run its own legislature, be it noted, for forty-seven years-five years longer than South Carolina's in Charleston. This did not solve the problem in either half, for the proprietors were absentee landlords-the absentee grandee was the curse of the early South, as it always was in Ireland-and that meant there was a lack of control and purpose in the governor's mansion, leading to tardy and inadequate response to Indian raids, a poorly led and equipped militia, and other evils. The settlers pet.i.tioned London for help-it is significant that, even in the 1720s, colonists still had the 'look homeward' reflex and saw the crown as their father and savior. The crown responded: South Carolina became a royal colony on May 29, 1721 and North Carolina followed eight years later on July 25, 1729. But that did not mean the arrival of royal soldiers or a.s.sured protection from London.

Nor were the Indians the only threat. In 1720, for instance, South Carolina had only 7,800 whites, as opposed to 11,800 black slaves-the largest ratio of blacks to whites, about 6o percent, in any colony. And it was bringing in more slaves fast; another 2,000 in the years 1721-5 alone. Many slaves escaped, and these maroons, as they were called, tended to organize themselves into gangs to break out of British territory into Spanish Florida, which issued a decree in 1733 stating that slaves who defied the British and managed to reach land under the Spanish flag would be considered free. The result, in 1739, was a series of slave revolts. A band of Charleston slaves set out for Spanish St Augustine and freedom, killing all whites they met on the way, a total of twenty-one; forty-four of these maroons were rounded up and executed on the spot. On the Stono River, a black firebrand called Cato led an even bloodier uprising-thirty whites and about fifty blacks were killed before order was restored. There was a third revolt in St John's Parish, in Berkeley County.

Violence between blacks and whites was by no means confined to Carolina, of course, as the number of blacks imported from Africa and the West Indies steadily increased. In 1741 a series of mysterious fires in New York City, where blacks were a fifth of the population, led to rumors that a negro conspiracy was to blame and that the slaves were planning to take over the city. Many blacks were arrested, eighteen were hanged, and eleven burned at the stake, though a public prosecutor, Daniel Horsemanden, later admitted that there was no evidence such a conspiracy ever existed. But in the Carolinas, especially towards the south and in the back-country, security was much more fragile. Stability was not established until a first-cla.s.s royal governor, James Glen, took over in 1740. He was even able to get some action from the crown: early in 1743 General James Oglethorpe, with a fierce body of Scottish Highlanders, as well as local militia, thrashed a Spanish force four times its size at the Battle of b.l.o.o.d.y Marsh.

James Oglethorpe (1696-1785) was a fascinating example of the bewildering cross-currents and antagonisms which make early American history so confusing at first glance. He was a rich English philanthropist and member of parliament, who came to America as a result of his pa.s.sionate interest in prison reform. He was particularly interested in helpless men imprisoned for debt and believed they ought to be freed and allowed to work their way to solvency on American land. In 1732, George II gave him a charter to found such a colony between the Savannah and the Altama rivers, to be named Georgia after himself. Oglethorpe himself went out with the first band of settlers in January 1733. This was another utopian venture, though with humanitarian rather than strict religious objectives-an 18th-century rationalist as opposed to a 17th-century doctrinaire experiment. Oglethorpe and his supporters wanted to avoid extremes of wealth, as in South Carolina, to attract victims of religious persecution and the penal system, and to create a colony of small landowners, with total landholdings limited by law, and slavery prohibited. He was also a military man and he intended, with British government backing, to set up Georgia as a defended cordon sanitaire against Spanish troublemaking in the South. He built forts, recruited a militia, and attracted fighting Highlanders for a defensive colony on the Altamaha frontier, which they called New Inverness. His victory at b.l.o.o.d.y Marsh not only put an end to the Spanish threat but was a warning to the Indians too-though he made it clear his approach to them was essentially friendly by setting up Augusta as an advance post for the Indian trade. In every respect, Georgia was intended to be a model colony of the Age of Enlightenment. Oglethorpe planned to introduce silk-production, and in Savannah, his new capital, he even set up what was called the Trustees Garden, an experimental center for plants.

The colony itself prospered; but the experiment in reason, justice, and science failed. Just as in North Carolina, attempts to ban slavery came up against the ugly facts of economic interest and personal greed. Georgia was too near to the rambunctious but undoubtedly flouris.h.i.+ng planter economy of South Carolina to remain uncorrupted. Oglethorpe's regulations were defied. Slaves were smuggled in. So was rum-another banned item. Then the Savannah a.s.sembly legitimized widespread disobedience by changing the law. Rum was officially admitted from 1742. Five years later the laws against slavery were suspended and in 1750 formally repealed. These changes brought a flood of newcomers from north of the Savannah, including experienced planters and their slaves, taking up Georgia's cheap land. The utopian colony was Carolined. Oglethorpe was already in trouble with the English authorities for muddling the military finances. So the man who, in the words of Alexander Pope, went to America 'driven by strong benevolence of soul,' returned to England disillusioned and disgusted, surrendering his charter in 1752.

By mid-century all the original Thirteen Colonies were in actual, though not always legal, existence, and all were being rapidly transformed by unequal, sometimes patchy, but on the whole overwhelming prosperity. It was already a region accustomed to dealing in millions-the land of the endless noughts.' In 1746 a New Hamps.h.i.+re gentleman, John Mason, sold a tract of land totaling 2 million acres, which had been in his family for generations, to a group of Portsmouth businessmen for a planned settlement of new towns. This was merely the largest single item in a continuing process of buying and selling farms, estates, and virgin soil, which had already made British America the biggest theater in land-speculation in human history. Everyone engaged in it if they could-a foreshadowing of the eagerness with which Americans would take to stock-market speculation in the next century.

Four years later in 1750, the population of the mainland colonies pa.s.sed the million mark too. The British authorities of course saw North America as a whole, and missed the significance of this figure. But whereas at mid-century Barbados had a population of 75,000 and Bermuda-Bahamas 12,000 and Canada, Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Nova Scotia, plus Newfoundland, had a further 73,000, Ma.s.sachusetts and Maine together were approaching a quarter-million, Connecticut had 100,000, Rhode Island and New Hamps.h.i.+re had 35,000 each, there were 34,000 in East Jersey, 36,000 in West Jersey, 75,000 in New York, 1165,000 in Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties, 130,000 in Maryland, 135,000 in the Carolinas-plus 4,000 in infant Georgia-and a ma.s.sive 260,000 in Virginia. Greater New England had 400,000, Greater Virginia 390,000, Greater Pennsylvania 230,000, and Greater Carolina nearly 100,000. These four major self-sustaining growth-centres were the main engines of demographic increase, attracting thousands of immigrants every year but also ensuring high domestic birth-rates with a large proportion of children born reaching adulthood, in a healthy, well-fed, well-housed family system.

Noting all these facts, Benjamin Franklin, writing his Observations Concerning the Increase of Making, Peopling of Countries etc (1755), felt that the country had doubled in population since his childhood and calculated it would double again in the next twenty years, which it did-and more. In attracting yet more people, to keep up the impetus of growth, local authorities did not worry too much about boundaries, an early indication of how the whole territory was beginning to meld together. Thus in 1732 Maryland invited Pennsylvanian Germans to take up cheap 200-acre plots in the difficult country between the Susquehanna and Patapsco, which became an inland district for the new and soon flouris.h.i.+ng town of Baltimore. Equally, in the 1750s there was a large movement from Pennsylvania at the invitation of the Virginia government into the western region of the colony, where large blocks in the Shenandoah Valley were offered at low prices. This created, from an old Indian tract, the famous Great Philadelphia Waggon Trail, which became a major commercial route too. Thus Greater Pennsylvania merged into Greater Virginia, creating yet more movement and dynamism. As settlement expanded inland from the tidewaters, colonies lost their original distinctive characteristics and became simply American.

The historian gets the impression, surveying developments in the first half of the century, that so many things were happening in America, at such speed, that the authorities simply lost touch. Their information, such as it was, quickly got out of date and they could not keep up. Strictly speaking, in an economic sense, the colonies were supposed to exist entirely for the home country's benefit. A report to the Board of Trade sent by Lord Cornbury, governor of New York 1702-8, reveals that all governors were instructed 'To discourage all Manufactures, and to give accurate accounts of any Indications of the Same,' with a view to their suppression. One member of the Board of Trade stated flatly in 1726, that certain developments in a colony were eo ipso unlawful whether or not there was a specific statute forbidding them:

Every act of a dependent provincial government ought to terminate to the advantage of the Mother State unto whom it owes its being and protection in all valuable privileges. Hence it follows that all advantageous projects or commercial gains in any colony which are truly prejudicial to and inconsistent with the interests of the Mother State must be understood be illegal and the practice of them unwarrantable, because they contradict the end to which the colony has a being and are incompatible with the terms on which the people claim both privileges and protection ... for such is the end of colonies, and if this use cannot be made of them it is much better for the state to do without them.

This was hard doctrine, manifestly unjust and equally clearly unenforceable. There were of course many legislative efforts to turn it into reality. An Act of 1699 forbade the colonies to s.h.i.+p wool, woolen yarn, or cloth. Another in 1732 vetoed hats. An Act of 1750 admitted entry of bar-iron into England but banned slitting or rolling mills, plat-force, or steel furnaces. But iron casting was not specifically forbidden and so the colonies produced such things as kettles, salt-pans, and kitchen utensils, as well as cannon. According to Board of Trade economic doctrine these must be inherently unlawful. But they continued to be made. And what about s.h.i.+pbuilding? The sea was Britain's lifeblood and s.h.i.+ps were made, compet.i.tively, in yards all over England and Scotland. But with wood so cheap and accessible, America had a huge compet.i.tive advantage in s.h.i.+pbuilding before the age of iron and steam. By mid-century New England yards were turning out s.h.i.+ps at an average cost of $34 a ton, 20 to 50 percent cheaper than in Europe. They had vigorously promoted s.h.i.+pbuilding from the 1640s and as early as 1676 were turning out thirty a year for the English market alone; this rose to 300 to 400 a year by 1760. By this time fully a third of the British merchant fleet of 398,000 tons was American-built, and the colonies were turning out a further 15,000 tons a year. The reason for permitting this obvious anomaly was the British need for cheap timber. A British merchant could sail his s.h.i.+p to Boston, sell his cargo, then with the proceeds build an additional s.h.i.+p, and load both with timber. The British authorities unwittingly encouraged this procedure, paying substantial bounties on timber-related products such as pitch, tar, rosin, turps and water-rotted hemp, to reduce its dependence on supplies from the Continent.

This cheapness of wood, and so of s.h.i.+ps, also encouraged the development of an enormous fis.h.i.+ng fleet which again, strictly speaking, was a challenge to British interests. As early as 1641 figures show that New England was exporting 300,000 cod a year plus halibut, mackerel, and herring. By 1675, 4,000 men and 600 s.h.i.+ps were involved in the industry. By 1770 its exports were worth $225,000 a year. The largest and most difficult-to-cure fish were eaten locally; small, damaged, or tainted fish were sent to the West Indies to be eaten by slaves; the best smaller fish were cured and sent to Britain. All this stimulated a large cooperage industry, again encouraged by cheap wood-New England farmers often increased their incomes by turning out barrels on the side. As New England made bigger and better s.h.i.+ps, it went into worldwide deep-sea whaling, already important by 1700 and growing rapidly. For its own mysterious reasons the home government again favored this activity, paying a pound bounty per ton (1732) on whalers of 200 tons of more, and raising it (1747) to 2 pounds a ton. By midcentury America had the most skillful whalers in the world, 4,000 of them from New Bedford and Provincetown, Nantucket and Marblehead, operating over 300 s.h.i.+ps.

The fact is, though America's was largely an agricultural economy, far more so than Britain's, it was stealthily catching up in manufactures of all sorts. When the Board of Trade wrote to colonial governors, asking for figures of goods produced locally, the governors, with their eye on local opinion, deliberately underestimated output. A lot of phony statistics pa.s.sed across the Atlantic in the 18th century-not for the last time, either. Comptroller Weare wrote anxiously to the Board of Trade c.1750: 'The Planters throughout all New England, New York, the Jersies, Pennsylvania and Maryland (for south of that province no knowledge is here pretended) almost entirely clothe themselves in their own woollens, and generally the people are sliding into the manufactures proper to the Mother Country, and this not through any spirit of industry or economy, but plainly for want of some returns to make to the shops.' Another report at the same time suggested that American producers were competing successfully with English ones, even in exports, in cotton yarn and cotton goods, hats, soap and candles, woodwork, coaches, chariots, chairs, harness and other leather, shoes, linens, cordage, foundry ware, axes, and iron tools.

American spokesmen, like Benjamin Franklin, were anxious to play down how well the colonies were doing in this respect, for fear of arousing the wrath of the jealous Mother Country. As Agent of Pennsylvania, he informed a House of Commons committee in 1766 that his colony imported half a million pounds' worth of goods from Great Britain but exported only 40,000 in return. Asked how the difference was made up he replied: 'The balance is paid in our produce to the West Indies, or sold in our own island, or to the French, Spaniards, Danes or Dutch; by the same carried to other colonies in North America, or to New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Carolina and Georgia; by the same carried to different parts of Europe, as Spain, Portugal and Italy: in all which places we receive either money, bills of exchange or commodities that suit our remittance to Britain; which together with all the profits on the industry of our merchants and mariners, arising in those circuitous voyages, and the freights made by their s.h.i.+ps, center finally in Britain, to discharge the balance and pay for British manufactures . . . ' Separating 'visibles' from 'invisibles,' distinguis.h.i.+ng between all the different elements in triangular or quadrilateral trading patterns-it was all too difficult for an amateur group of parliamentary gentlemen, and all too easy for Franklin to bamboozle them, though it is very likely that his own figures were inaccurate and many of his a.s.sumptions misleading. The truth is, by the mid-18th century, mercantilism was on its last legs, overwhelmed by the complexity of global trade and the inability to distinguish what was in the true long-term interests of a country with burgeoning self-sustaining dominions. Entrepreneurial capitalism, spanning the Atlantic, was already too subtle and resourceful for the state to manage efficiently.

In any case, the British economic strategists-if that is not too fancy a name for cla.s.sically educated Whig country gentlemen advised by a handful of officials who had never been to America (or, in most cases, to the Continent even)-were slow to grasp the speed with which the American mainland colonies were maturing. The conventional wisdom in London was to treat them as poor and marginal. They had played little part in the great wars of King William and Queen Anne's day. Tobacco was the only thing they produced of consequence. In the early 18th century they accounted for only 6 percent of Britain's commerce, less than one-sixth of the trade with northern Europe, two-thirds or less of that with the West Indies, even less than the East Indies produced. Almost imperceptibly at first this situation changed. By 1750 the mainland American colonies had become the fastest-growing element in the empire, with a 500 percent expansion in half a century. Britain, with the most modern economy in Europe, advanced by 25 percent in the same period. In 1700 the American mainland's output was only 5 percent of Britain's; by 1775 it was two-fifths. This was one of the highest growth-rates the world has ever witnessed.

It seems as though everything was working in America's favor. The rate of expansion was about 40 percent or even more each decade. The availability of land meant large family units, rarely less than 60 acres, often well over 100, huge by European standards. Couples could marry earlier; a wife who survived to forty gave birth on average to six or seven children, four or five of whom reached maturity. Living standards were high, especially in food consumption. Males ate over 200 pounds of meat a year, and this high-protein diet meant they grew to be over two inches taller than their British counterparts. They ate good dairy food too. By 1750 a typical Connecticut farm owned ten head of cattle, sixteen sheep, six pigs, two horses, a team of oxen. In addition the farm grew maize, wheat, and rye, and two-fifths of the produce went on earning a cash income, spent on British imports or, increasingly, locally produced goods. It is true that widows might fall into poverty. But only 3 to 5 percent of middle-aged white males were poor. One-third of adult white males held no appreciable property, but these were under thirty. It was easy to acquire land. Over the course of a lifecycle, any male who survived to be forty could expect to live in a household of median income and capital wealth. In short by the third quarter of the 18th century America already had a society which was predominantly middle cla.s.s. The shortage of labor meant artisans did not need to form guilds to protect jobs. It was rare to find restriction on entry to any trade. Few skilled men remained hired employees beyond the age of twenty-five. If they did not acquire their own farm they ran their own business. In practice there were no real cla.s.s barriers. A middle-aged artisan usually had the vote and many were elected to office at town and county level. These successful middle-aged men were drawn not just from the descendants of earlier settlers or from the ranks of the free immigrants but from the 500,000 white Europeans who, during the colonial period, came to America on non-free service contracts running from four to seven years. White servitude, unlike black slavery, was an almost unqualified success in America.

The policy, begun in 1717, of transporting convicts to the American mainland, for seven years as a rule, worked less well-far less well than it later did in Australia. This was subsidized by the British state, which wanted to get rid of the rogues, but was also a private business tied to the s.h.i.+pping trade. The convicts left Britain in the spring, were landed in Philadelphia or the Chesapeake in the summer, and the s.h.i.+ps which transported them returned in the autumn loaded with tobacco, corn, and wheat. In half a century, 1717-67, 10,000 serious criminals were dumped on Maryland alone. They arrived chained in groups of ninety or more, looking and smelling like nothing on earth. Marginal planters regarded them as a good buy, especially if they had skills. They went into heavy labor-farming, digging, s.h.i.+pbuilding, the main Baltimore ironworks, for instance. In 1755 in Baltimore, one adult male worker in ten was a convict from Britain. They were much more troublesome than non-criminal indentured labor, always complaining of abuses and demanding 'rights.' People hated and feared them. Many were alcoholics or suicidal. Others had missing ears and fingers or gruesome scars. Some did well-one ex-thief qualified as a doctor and practiced successfully in Baltimore, attracting what he called 'bisness a nuf for 2.' But there were much talked-about horror-stories-one convict went mad in 1751 and attacked his master's children with an axe; another cut off his hand rather than work. From Virginia, William Byrd II wrote loftily to an English friend: 'I wish you would be so kind as to hang all your felons at home. There were public demands that a head-tax be imposed on each convict landed or that purchasers be forced to post bonds for their good behavior. But the British authorities would never have allowed this. As a result of the convict influx we hear for the first time in America widespread complaints that crime was increasing and that standards of behavior had deteriorated. All this was blamed on Britain.

Indeed the historian notes with a certain wry amus.e.m.e.nt, as the century progressed, an American tendency to attribute everything good in their lives to their country and their own efforts, and to attribute anything which went wrong to Britain. Certainly, America showered blessings on its people, as English newcomers noticed. One visitor said that 'Hoggs in America feed better than Hyde Park d.u.c.h.esses in England.' Another called the country 'a place of Full Tables and Open Doors.' Miss Eliza Lucas, much traveled daughter of an English army officer, discoursed eloquently in a letter home of 'peaches, nectarines and mellons of all sorts extremely fine and in profusion, and their oranges exceed any I ever tasted from the West Indies or from Spain or Portugal.' There were many more, and better, vegetables than were available in England. German immigrants were particularly good at producing in quant.i.ty and for market, at low prices, apples, pears, quinces, chestnuts, and a wide range of strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, and cherries for preserves. Ordinary people filled their stomachs with beef, pork, and mutton, as well as 'jonny cake' and 'hoe cake.' A contributor to the London Magazine in 1746 thought the American country people 'enjoy a Life much to be envied by Courts and Cities.' And there were always new evidences of nature's bounty to those who looked hard enough for it. Clever Miss Lucas, left in charge of a South Carolina plantation, took advantage of a parliamentary bounty on indigo, raised to sixpence a pound in 1748, to experiment successfully with a crop. Thanks to her, the Carolinas were exporting 1,150,662 pounds of it in 1775, and it became the leading staple until displaced by cotton after the Revolution.

While the pioneers pushed inland, opening up new sources of wealth, and gradually creating the demographic base from which America could take off into an advanced industrial economy, the cities of the coast were coining money and spending it. The queen of the cities was Philadelphia, which by mid-century had become the largest in the entire British Empire, after London. Its Philosophical Society (1743) was already famous and its Academy (1751) burgeoned into the great University of Pennsylvania. New York City was also growing fast and was already the melting-pot in embryo. By 1700 the English and the Huguenots outnumbered the original Dutch inhabitants: half a century later, many of the Dutch had become Anglicans and all were bilingual or English-speaking. They had been joined by mult.i.tudes of Walloons and Flemings, Swedes, Rhineland Protestants, Norwegians, and North Germans, as well as Scotch and English Calvinists and Quakers, freed slaves, Irish, and more Dutch. By mid-century the Lower Hudson, including East and West Jersey, joined as the royal colony of New Jersey in 1702, was a collection of communities-Dutch in Harlem and Flatbush, lowland Scots in Perth Amboy, Baptist settlers from New Hamps.h.i.+re in Piscataway, New England Quakers in Shrewsbury, Huguenots in New Roch.e.l.le, Flemings in Bergen, New Haven Puritans in Newark and Elizabeth, and pockets of Scotch, Irish, and Germans upriver, as well as many Dutch-Albany was a Dutch town then, though English-speaking. It was already competing with French Montreal for the Indian and wilderness trade in furs, with an offshoot at Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario.

The economic and political freedom enjoyed in English America, with its largely unrestricted enterprise, self-government, and buccaneering ways, was already reflected in growth-rates which made Canada, in which the French state had invested a huge effort but also a narrow system of controls, seem almost static. By 1750 there were well over 100,000 in the Hudson Valley alone, compared to only 60,000 in the vast St Lawrence basin, and New York City was four times the size of Quebec. And unlike inward-looking and deadly quiet Quebec, New York and its politics were already noisy, acrimonious, horribly factionridden, and undoubtedly democratic.

The venom of New York politics led to America's first trial for seditious libel in 1735, when John Peter Zenger, who had founded New York's Weekly Journal two years earlier, was locked up for criticizing the governor, William Cosby, and finally brought to trial after ten months behind bars. Zenger was by no means America's first newspaper publisher. That honor goes to the postmaster of Boston, William Campbell, who set up the News-Letter in 1704 to keep friends scattered around the Bay Colony informed of what was going on in the great world. By mid-century more than a score of newspapers had been started, including the Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury (1719), the Boston New England Courant (1721), started by Benjamin Franklin's elder brother James, and Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, which he acquired in 1729. There was also an Annapolis paper, the Maryland Gazette (1727), and the Charlestown South Carolina Gazette (1732). It is significant that Zenger, or rather his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, put forward truth as his defense. That would not have been admitted in an English court where anything was criminally libelous, whether it was true or not, which fostered 'an ill opinion of the government.' Indeed, it was an axiom of English law, in seditious libel, that 'the greater the truth, the greater the libel.' In Zenger's case the judge tried to overrule his defense, but the jury acquitted him all the same-and that was the last of such prosecutions. This in itself was an indication of what critics of society could get away with in the heady air of colonial America-prosecutions for criminal libel continued in England until the 1820s and even beyond.

Not all these cities were booming or bustling. Charleston, the only city in the South for more than a century, had little over 8,000 people in 1750, but it was s.p.a.cious, tree-shaded, elegant, and free-spending, with a recognizable gentry living in town mansions and parading in their carriages. Annapolis was another gentry town, though even by 1750 it had only 150 households. It was brick-built with paved streets, as good as any in Boston, and had fine shops selling silverware, gold, well-made furniture, and paintings. Not only did it have its own newspaper, it also sported a bookstore-publisher from 1758. By the 1740s it was holding regular concerts and claimed its own gifted composer, the Rev. Thomas Bacon (1700-68 ), who also compiled The Laws of Maryland. In June July 1752 it had a theatrical season in which visiting professional players performed Gay's Beggar's Opera, the great London hit, and a piece by Garrick. A permanent theater was opened in 1771, the first in all the colonies to be brick-built. Its opening night was attended by a tall young colonel called George Was.h.i.+ngton. Its Tuesday Club, attended chiefly by clerics and professional men, was the center of scientific inquiry. Williamsburg, which became the capital of Virginia Colony in 1699, developed into a similar place, small, elegant, select, with a conscious air of cultural superiority, generated from its William and Mary College, the second oldest in the colonies (1693). Its main building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

These miniature red-brick cities were adorned by the rich of the Chesapeake with fine town houses. Many of them were modeled on one built in Annapolis by the secretary of Maryland Colony, Edmund Jennings, a magnificent building set in 4 acres of gardens at the foot of East Street. Another with splendid gardens-and no fewer than thirty-seven rooms-was built by William Pace. The chimneys of James Brice's mansion towered 70 feet above street-level. Many of the finest houses were the work of the local architect-craftsman William Buckland, credited with turning the place into the 'Athens of America.' Annapolis had an English-style Jockey Club from 1743, which supervised the regular race-meetings and was the meeting-place of local breeders. By the third quarter of the century over 100 English-bred horses of Arab strains had reached the Chesapeake and the gentry could attend races held near both these elegant cities-they were within commuting range. City artisans had c.o.c.kfighting. But, as in England, the artisans went to the races if they could afford it, and the gentry certainly attended c.o.c.kfights.

For boom you went to Baltimore, then the fastest-growing city in America, probably in the world. In 1752, it was nothing much-twenty-five houses, 200 people. Less than twenty years later it was the fourth-largest city in America. Its jewel was its magnificent harbor, which made it the center for Virginia-Maryland tobacco exports to Glasgow (European end of the trade), all-purpose trade with the West Indies, and s.h.i.+ps loaded with imports from all over Europe. On top of the hill overlooking the harbor, enormous flags, each from a different s.h.i.+pping company, announced major arrivals from the ocean. Fells Point was one of the most crowded s.h.i.+pping wharves on earth, backed by 3,000 houses, most of brick, two or three stories high. Later, the haughty French aristocrat Francois Alexis de Chateaubriand conceded that entering Baltimore harbor was like 'sailing into a park.' There was a downside to all this bustle, needless to say. Land values shot up astronomically and people complained the cost of living was higher than London's and much higher than in Paris. There was a terrific stench from the harbor at low tide and the streets near it were crowded with Indian, black, and white wh.o.r.es-also said to be high-priced and insolent. On the other hand there were not one but two theaters, and the Indian Queen Hotel on the corner of Market and Hanover streets was one of the best in the western hemisphere by the 1790s: excellent food, boots and shoes polished by a.s.siduous blacks if left outside the rooms, and slippers provided free for guests.

There also grew up in colonial America, beginning in the last decades of the 17th century and progressing in stately fas.h.i.+on and growing confidence in the 18th century, a country-house culture, modeled on England's but with marked characteristics of its own. To begin with, these baroque-Georgian-Palladian houses were almost invariably at this date built on navigable rivers and creeks, to serve the plantation export economy. The wharf was as important as the drawing-roomindeed, without the wharf the elaborate furniture, imported from London or Paris or made in New England, could not be afforded. These grand houses arose naturally from the economic activities which sustained them and were not plonked artificially in the midst of a capdoffing countryside like Blenheim or Chatsworth or Althorp in England. Nor, until the arrival of the plutocracy after the Civil War, were American country houses on anything like the same scale as the English aristocracy's. Except when the Dutch patroons built them, they were rarely of stone. But in the deployment of brick the American house-builders, amateur and professional, have rarely been excelled.

The greatest early 18th-century house in America was Rosewell, erected by Mann Page (1691-1730) in 1726 on the York River. Page married a Carter, of the family of 'King' Carter (1663-1732), the famous and rapacious agent of Lord Fairfax, proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia. Carter ama.s.sed 300,000 acres of prime land, and he gave his fancy son-in-law, Page, 70,000 of them. Page had this superb house built using the designs in Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus-published in London 1715-25 and quickly s.h.i.+pped across the Atlantic-as models. Page overspent, his grand house was unfinished when he died in 1730, and his debts exceeded the value of all his property, slaves included. Moreover, Rosewell, having triumphantly survived the horrors of the Civil War, was burned down in 1916. But its ruins compel one to believe that, in its day, 'there [was] nothing like it in England.'

Almost as grand, and still in excellent condition (and open to the public) is Hampton, near Baltimore. This was built (from 1783) by Charles Ridgeley (1733-90) and testifies to the failure of the British authorities to carry out their intention of preventing the American colonies from becoming a major iron-producer. Ridgeley was not only a planter with 24,000 slave-worked acres, but the owner of a large ironworks. That was where most of his money came from. Maryland not only had rich iron-ore deposits but plentiful hardwoods for making charcoal and fast streams for power. As early as 1734-7 it s.h.i.+pped 1,977 tons of pig-iron to England; by the 1740s it had a huge forge and made bar-iron as well as pigs; by the 1750s it had multiple furnaces and forges: in 1756 there were six ironworks in Baltimore County alone. Then it began to push inland, with rich members of the local elite, like Daniel Dulany, Benjamin Tasker, and Ridgeley, buying up gigantic blocks of iron-bearing land by patent, then moving in Swiss-German and Scots-Irish workmen, as well as slaves for the heavy work. This glorious iron-master's house was held by six generations of Ridgeleys until, in 1948, it was bought by the National Park Service and made available to visitors.

There were equally fine, and many more, country houses built in the 18th century in Virginia, by members of the l00 leading families-Byrds, Carters, Lees, Randolphs, Fitzhughes, and so on-of which many, such as Westover, Stratford, and s.h.i.+rley, survive. Drayton Hall, built 1738-42, on the Ashley River, a good example of the way local American architects used cla.s.sical models, is based on Palladio's Villa Pisani, happily survived the Revolutionary and Civil wars and is now part of the American Trust for Historical Preservation. Another, rather later masterpiece, now part of Johns Hopkins University, is Hoewood, a Baltimore cla.s.sical villa erected by the famous Charles Carroll of Carrolltown (1737-1832), grandest of the Revolutionary politicians. These houses and mansions sometimes contained fine libraries of ancient and modern works. A visitor described William Byrd II's library at Westover as 'consisting of nearly 4,000 volumes, in all Languages and Faculties, contained in 23 double-presses in black walnut ... the Whole in excellent Order.' He added, admiringly: 'Great Part of the books in elegant Bindings and of the best Editions and a considerable Number of them very scarce.' This opulent pile also still exists, though the interiors have been remodeled.

The men who owned these country houses, and others like them along the James, the Connecticut, and the Hudson, and the neat and in some cases s.p.a.cious city houses in Boston and New Haven, Albany and New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Baltimore, would in England have sat in the House of Commons, 'to keep up the consequence of their families,' as Dr Samuel Johnson put it. In some cases they would have sat in the House of Lords, with a writ of individual summons to parliament. In the American colonies they played a similar role, the main difference being that they were usually forced to consort with a host of lesser folk, many of whom could barely write their names, in helping to run the country. American colonies had their elites everywhere. There were immense differences in wealth and social customs, especially in the South and notably between the Tidewater grandees and the farmers of the piedmont and the inland valleys. Sometimes these grandees behaved as if they owned the place. Thus, in early South Carolina, the Tidewater elite did not even have a House of a.s.sembly but met in one another's houses, just as if they were Whig dukes holding Cabinet dinners in London. But that kind of thing did not last. Rich Americans who got too uppity or tried to pull a rank they did not in law possess were soon reminded that America was a society where all freemen were equal, or liked to think they were anyway. One of the effects of slavery was to make even poor whites a.s.sertive about their rights. They felt they were of consequence because they were complacently aware of a huge servile cla.s.s below them.

To 18th-century Frenchmen or Spaniards, who were familiar with the uniform manner in which their own colonies were directed, with an omnipresent state, a professional bureaucracy, and only the most nominal element of local representation, the British colonies in America must have seemed bewildering, chaotic, and inconsistent in the way they were run. The system was empirical and practical rather than coherent. It evolved almost organically, in the way English inst.i.tutions had always evolved. No two colonies were quite the same. The system is worth examining in a little detail both because of its bearing on the events leading up to the American Revolution, and because of its influence on the way the American Republic developed thereafter.

Originally all the colonies had been divided into two categories: trading or commercial companies, run like primitive joint-stock corporations, or proprietary companies run by one or more great landed estate-owners. All had charters issued directly by the crown. Without these two forms of owners.h.i.+p, which involved a high degree of self-government, the colonies would never have got going at all, because the English crown, unlike the crowns of France and Spain, was simply not prepared to pour out the prodigious amounts of cash needed. So the English state got its colonies largely for nothing and this successful stinginess continued to condition the thinking of British governments throughout the 18th century. They did not expect to have to pay for the empire or, if they did, they expected those who lived in the empire to refund the money through taxes. However, having set up these quasi-independent and self-supporting colonies in the early and mid-17th century, the crown began to wrest back some degree of control before the end of it. From Charles II to William III, they revoked or refused to renew charters-there was always a perfectly good excuse-and turned both commercial and proprietary colonies into crown ones. By 1776 only two commercial colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island) and two proprietary colonies (Maryland and Pennsylvania) were left. It is true that Ma.s.sachusetts was also still operating under a royal charter, but it was governed as a royal province.

This ought to have given the crown a great deal of power, at any rate in the nine colonies it controlled directly. In practice, English meanness in colonial matters again frustrated London's ability to control what happened. In each colony, the governor const.i.tuted the apex of the pyramid of power-and it is characteristic of the profound const.i.tutional conservatism America has inherited from England that the fifty members of the United States are still run by governors. But the actual power of the colonial governors was less than it looked in theory, just as today the state governors of the federal republic are severely limited in what they can do. In the crown colonies the governors were appointed by the King on the advice of his ministers. In the proprietary colonies they were chosen by the proprietors, though the King had to approve. In the charter colonies they were elected, though again royal approval was needed. All were treated in some ways with deference, as viceroys. But whereas in the Spanish and French colonies they had not only enormous legal powers but the means to enforce them, in America they were not even paid by the crown. In every case except Virginia, their salaries were determined and paid by the colonial a.s.semblies, who, true to the tradition of British meanness, kept these stipends small. They were often grudgingly and tardily paid too. Nor did they have many valuable perks and privileges. Most of them seem to have been able and-amazingly for the 18th century-honest. But they were not, on the whole, great, forceful, self-confident, or masterful men. That in itself made a difference to the degree of authority exercised over the people of the colonies.

The governors were caught between two quite different and often opposed forces. On top of them, but exercising power from distant London, was the crown. Colonies were supervised by the Privy Council, which operated through a Commission, variously called for trade or plantations and, from the days of William III, the Board of Trade and Plantations (1696-1782), which continued to be in charge of American policy until the end of the Revolutionary War. It was handicapped by the fact that it did not actually pay the governors (or in many cases appoint them) and it was very rare indeed for any of its members, or officials, to have set foot in America. The instructions it issued to governors were not always clear, or sensible, or consistent, and were often beyond their power to carry out. On the other hand, the crown tended to see governors as weak, ineffectual, demanding, and 'expensive servants,' always quarreling with the planters, provoking rebellions, or getting themselves involved in Indian wars through needless brutality and insensitive actions. The Crown usually sided with the Indians in cases of dispute and sometimes even with white rebels. When Governor Berkeley, who had run away from Nathaniel Bacon and his followers, turned on them savagely after Bacon died, Charles II exclaimed in exasperation: 'That old fool has taken away more lives in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.'

The governors, of course, did not rule alone. Each had some kind of council, which formed the executive or administrative body of the colony and const.i.tuted the upper chamber (like the House of Lords) of its a.s.sembly. They were appointed by the crown (in royal colonies) or by the proprietors, and their numbers varied-ten in Rhode Island, twenty-eight in Ma.s.sachusetts. They also had judicial functions and (with the governor) served as courts of appeal, though certain important cases could be appealed again to the Privy Council in London. A good, firm-minded governor could usually get his council solidly behind him.

It was a different matter with the Houses of Burgesses (or whatever they were called), the lower chambers of the a.s.semblies. The first one dated from as far back as 1619. All the colonies had them. Most of them were older than any working parliaments in Europe, apart from Britain's. They aped the House of Commons and studied its history a.s.siduously, especially in its more aggressive phases. Most of these a.s.semblies kept copies of one or more volumes, for instance, of John Rushworth's Historical Collections, which doc.u.ments the struggles of the Commons against James I and Charles I and was regarded by royalists as a subversive book. Whenever the Commons set a precedent in power-grabbing or audacity, one or other a.s.sembly was sure to cite it.

However, there was an important different between the English parliament and the colonial a.s.semblies. England had never had a written const.i.tution. All its written const.i.tutional doc.u.ments, like Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, were specific ad hoc remedies for crises as they arose. They were never intended, nor were they used, as guides for the present and future. All the English had were precedents: their const.i.tutional law operated exactly like their common law, organically The Americans inherited this common law. But they also had const.i.tutions. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) was the firs written const.i.tution not only in America but in the world. Written const.i.tutions were subsequently adopted by all the colonies. It is vital to grasp this point. It was the const.i.tutions as much as the a.s.semblies themselves which made the colonies unique. In this respect they could be seen as more 'modern' than England, certainly more innovatory. Its const.i.tution was what made Connecticut, for instance, separate from and independent of Ma.s.sachusetts, its original 'Mother.' Having a const.i.tution made a colony feel self-contained, mature, almost sovereign Having a const.i.tution inevitably led you to think in terms of rights, natural law, and absolutes, things the English were conditioned, by their empiricism and their organic approach to change, not to trouble their heads about. That was 'abstract stuff.' But it was not abstract for Americans. And any body which has a const.i.tution inevitably begins to consider amending and enlarging it-a written const.i.tution is a sign post pointing to independence.

The early establishment of a.s.semblies and written const.i.tutions-self-rule in fact-arose from the crown's physical inability, in the first half of the 17th century, to exercise direct control. The crown was never able to recover this surrender of power. Nor could the English deny the Americans the fruits of their own past. Their parliament had waged a successful struggle against the crown in the 1640s and acquired powers which could never subsequently be taken away. The colonial a.s.semblies benefited from this. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution turned a divine-right monarchy into a limited, parliamentary one. The colonies partic.i.p.ated in this victory, especially in New York, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Maryland, which overthrew the royal government of James ii and replaced it by popular rule. When William III, the beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution, sought to reorganize the English colonies on Continental lines, he found it impossible and was forced to concede their rights to a.s.semblies. These were all further milestones along a road which led only in one direction, to ultimate independence.

In const.i.tutional terms, the story of the first half of the 18th century in the American mainland colonies is the story of how the lower, elected houses of each a.s.sembly took control. The governor had the power of veto over legislation and he was expected. using his council members sitting in the upper chamber, to take the lead, with the elected a.s.semblies deferentially subordinate. The reverse happened. In 1701 the Pennsylvania elite extracted from William Penn a charter of privileges which made it the most advanced representative body in America. When South Carolina ceased being a proprietary colony and became a crown one in the 1720s, which might in theory have led to a diminution of popular power, the House of Burgesses exploited the handover to increase its influence. In the first three decades of the 18th century, lower houses not only in Pennsylvania and South Carolina but in New York and Ma.s.sachusetts also waged const.i.tutional battles with governors, councils, and the crown, blocked orders, and, on the whole, determined the political agenda. In every colony, the lower houses increased their power during the first fifty years of the 18th century, sometimes very substantially. They ordered their own business, held elections, directed their London agents, and controlled the release of news to the press. They claimed and got the sole right to frame and amend money Bills, and so to raise or lower taxes. They controlled expenditure by specific allocations-something the British parliament could not do because of the huge power of the Treasury-and this meant they appointed and paid money commissioners and tax-collectors, regulated the fees of the administration, and subjected all officials, including the governor, to annual salary regulations. In fact, unlike the House of Commons, they gradually acquired all kinds of executive responsibilities and began to think of themselves as government.

It was not a one-way struggle by any means. Governors, on behalf of the crown, tried to cling on to their prerogative powers-to appoint judges and regulate the courts, to summon, dissolve, or extend a.s.semblies. They made efforts to build up 'court parties' or b.u.t.tress conservative factions among the burgesses, especially in New Hamps.h.i.+re, Maryland, and Ma.s.sachusetts. In Virginia and New York, governing councils managed to retain power over land policy, an important source of patronage. As elsewhere in the British Empire, they tried divide and rule. Squabbles between coastal elites and up-country men were perennial. Franchises were heavily weighted in favor of property owners. So were const.i.tuency boundaries. For instance, in Pennsylvania, the three 'old' counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia elected twenty-six deputies to the legislature, the five frontier ones only ten. The young Thomas Jefferson, himself frontier-born, complained that 19,000 men 'below the falls' legislated for more than 30,000 elsewhere. But in most cases the majority of adult males had votes. The further from the coast, the more recent the settlement, the more the franchise became democratic. In practice, it was impossible to enforce any regulation which most people did not like. In the towns mobs could form easily. There were no police to control them. There was the militia, to be sure. And most members of the mob belonged to it!

But there was no real need for mobs. People were too busy, making money, pus.h.i.+ng themselves upwards. A growing number got experience of local government, being elected to one office or another, sometimes several. If Americans, in an economic sense, were already predominantly middle cla.s.s by 1760, the colonies were also in many respects a middle- cla.s.s democracy too."' But this applied more to New England, especially Ma.s.sachusetts, than to, say, Virginia, where a good deal of deference remained. It is a fact that most people elected to the a.s.semblies, especially in the South, and certainly most of the men who set the tone in them and took a leading legislative and executive part, were vaguely gentry. They were fluent orators, by virtue of their education, and spoke the language of political discourse-very significant in the 18th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesser men, even those proud to call themselves 'free-born Americans,' looked up to them. This was important, because it gave such members of the political elite self-confidence, made them feel they 'spoke for the people' without in any way being demagogs.'

Bearing all these factors in mind, it was inevitable that the lower houses would eventually get the upper hand in all the colonial a.s.semblies. And so they did, but at different speeds. The chronological scorecard reads as follows. The Rhode Island and Connecticut Houses of Representatives were all-powerful from well before the beginning of the 18th century. Next came the Pennsylvania House, building on its 1701 Charter of Privileges, and so securing complete dominance in the 1730s, despite the opposition of governors. The Ma.s.sachusetts House of Representatives actually shared in the selection of the council under its new charter of 1691 that was unique-and in the 1720s it became paramount in finance. By the 1740s it was dominant in all things. The South Carolina Commons and the New York House of a.s.sembly came along more slowly, and trailing behind them were the lower houses in North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia-in fact Virginia's burgesses did not get on top until about the mid-1750s. In Maryland and New Hamps.h.i.+re the victory of the lower house had still not been achieved by 1763. But every one had got there by 1770 except remote and under-populated Nova Scotia. The movement was all in one direction-towards representative democracy and rule by the many.

This triumph of the popular system had one very significant consequence for everyday life. It meant that the American mainland colonies were the least taxed territories on earth. Indeed, it is probably true to say that colonial America was the least taxed country in recorded history. Government was extremely small, limited in its powers, and cheap. Often it could be paid for by court fines, revenue from loan offices, or sale of lands. New Jersey and Pennsylvania governments collected no statutory taxes at all for several decades. One reason why American living standards were so high was that people could dispose of virtually all their income. Money was raised by fees, in some cases by primitive forms of poll-tax, by export duties, paid by merchants, or import duties, reflected in the comparatively high price of some imported goods. But these were fleabites. Even so, there was resentment. The men of the frontier claimed they should pay no tax at all, since they bore the burden of defense on behalf of everyone. But this argument was a self-righteous justification of the fact that it was hard if not impossible to get them to pay any tax at all. Until the 1760s at any rate, most mainland colonists were rarely, if ever, conscious of a tax-burden. It is the closest the world has ever come to a no-tax society. That was a tremendous benefit which America carried with it into Independence and helps to explain why the United States remained a low-tax society until the second half of the twentieth century.

By the mid-18th century, America appeared to be progressing rapidly. It was unquestionably a success story. It was to a large extent self-governing. It was doubling its population every generation. It was already a rich country and growing richer. Most men and women who lived there enjoyed, by European standards, middle-cla.s.s incomes once the frugality and struggles of their youth were over. The opportunities for the skilled, the enterprising, the energetic, and the commercially imaginative were limitless. Was, then, America ceasing to be 'the City on the Hill' and becoming merely a materialistic, earthly paradise? Had Cotton Mather's Daughter Prosperity destroyed her Mother Religion? A visitor might have thought so. In Boston itself, with its '42 streets, 36 lanes and 22 alleys' (in 1722), its 'houses near 3,000, 1,000 brick the rest timber,' its ma.s.sive, busy 'Long Wharf' which ran out to sea for half a mile and where the world's biggest s.h.i.+ps could safely berth in any tide, the acc.u.mulation of wealth was everywhere visible. True, the skyline was dotted with eleven church spires. But not all those slender fingers pointing to G.o.d betokened the old Puritan spirit. In 1699 the Brattle Street Church had been founded by rich merchants, who observed a form of religion which was increasingly non-doctrinaire, was comfortably moral rather than pious, and struck the old-guard Puritans as disgustingly secular. A place like Philadelphia was even more attached to the things of this world. It had been founded and shaped by Quakers. But the Quakers themselves had become rich. A tax-list of 1769 shows that they were only one in seven of the town's inhabitants but they made up half of those who paid over 100 in taxes. Of the town's seventeen richest men, twelve were Quakers. The truth is, wherever the hard-working, intelligent Quakers went, they bred material prosperity which raised up others as well as themselves. The German immigrants, hard-working themselves but from a poor country still only slowly recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years War, were amazed at the opportunities the Quaker colony presented to them. One German observer, Gottlieb Mittelberger, summed it up neatly in 1754: 'Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and h.e.l.l for officials and preachers. Philadelphia may have already acquired twelve churches by 1752. But it had fourteen rum distilleries.

However, though Puritanism was in decline in 18th-century America, and the power of the old Calvinist dogmas-and the controversies they bred-were declining, religion as a whole was not a spent force in the America of the Enlightenment. Quite the contrary. In fact American religious characteristics were just beginning to mature and define themselves. It could be argued that it was in the 18th century that the specifically American form of Christianity-undogmatic, moralistic rather than credal, tolerant but strong, and all-pervasive of society-was born, and that the Great Awakening was its midwife. What was the Great Awakening? It was, is, hard to define, being one of those popular movements which have no obvious beginning or end, no pitched battles or legal victories with specific dates, no const.i.tutions or formal leaders, no easily quantifiable statistics and no formal set of beliefs. While it was taking place it had no name. Oddly enough, in the first major history of America, produced in the middle decades of the 19th century, George Bancroft's History o f the United States (1834-74), the term Great Awakening is never used at all. One or two modern historians argued that the phrase, and to some extent the concept behind it, was actually invented as late as 1842, by Joseph Tracey's bestselling book, The Great Awakening: a History of the Revival of Religion in the Times of Edwards and White field.

Whatever we call it, however, there was a spiritual event in the first half of the 18th century in America, and it proved to be of vast significance, both in religion and in politics. It was indeed one of the key events in American history. It seems to have begun among the German immigrants, reflecting a spirit of thankfulness for their delivery from European poverty and their happy coming into the Promised Land. In 1719, the German pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, Theodore Frelinghuysen, led a series of revival meetings in the Raritan Valley. 'Pietism,' the emphasis on leading a holy life without troubling too much about the doctrinal disputes which racked the 17th century, was a German concept, and this is the first time we find non-English-speaking immigrants bringing with them ideas which influenced American intellectual life. It is also important to note that this Protestant revival, unlike any of the previous incarnations of the Reformed Religion, began not in city centers, but in the countryside. Boston and Philadelphia had nothing to do with it. Indeed to some extent it was a protest against the religious leaders.h.i.+p of the well-fed, self-righteous congregations of the long-established towns. It was started by preachers moving among the rural fastnesses, close to the frontier, among humble people, some of whom rarely had the chance to enjoy a sermon, many of whom had little contact with structured religion at all. It was simple but it was not simplistic. These preachers were anxious not just to deliver a message but to get their hearers to learn it themselves by studying the Bible; and to do that they needed to read. So an important element in the early Great Awakening was the provision of some kind of basic education in the frontier districts and among rural communities which as yet had no regular schools.

A key figure was William Tennent (1673-1745), a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian who settled at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, in the 1720s, where he built what he called his Log College, a primitive rural academy teaching basic education as well as G.o.dliness. This was 'Frontier Religion' in its pristine form, conducted with rhetorical fireworks and riproaring hymn-singing by Tennent and his equally gifted son Gilbert, but also in a spirit of high seriousness, which linked knowledge of G.o.d with the spirit of knowledge itself and insisted that education was the high road to heaven. Many of Tennent's pupils, or disciples, became prominent preachers themselves, all over the colonies, and his Log College became the prototype for the famous College of New Jersey, founded in 1746, which eventually settled at Princeton.

As with most seminal religious movements in history, news of these doings spread by word of mouth and by ministers-some of them unqualified and without a benefice-traveling from one small congregation to another, rather than through the official religious channels. The minister at the Congregationalist church in Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), was intrigued by what he heard. Edwa