Family Labor and the Growth of the Northern Colonies, 1640-1760

From the start of European migration to the northern colonies, most settlers found themselves in a healthier, less economically exploitative environment than their counterparts in the South. Early migrants to the Chesapeake faced high mortality from disease (see Chapter 2) and harsh treatment, but those reaching New England soon established stable, flourishing societies. The availability of land and food enabled the first generation of Massachusetts settlers to enjoy life expectancies longer than any in Europe. Even as Native people died from Europeans’ diseases, white northern settlers began to build large families, and doubled their populations every twenty years or so.

The goals held by their organizers also explain why the northern colonies became quickly established. While Virginia’s founders had come to the New World intending to get rich and get out, the founders of New England—and later, Pennsylvania—intended to build stable communities for which families were essential. Seven out of eight migrants to Massachusetts in the 1630s traveled with at least one relative, and three out of four came in a family group.

Women were present in significant numbers from the start. Whereas in the Chesapeake, men outnumbered women by three to two even in 1700, in New England the ratio was almost balanced half a century earlier. This was another reason for rapid population growth. Most men and women found marriage partners, women bore an unprecedented number of children, and children survived infancy at an unprecedented rate. Husbands, wives, and children supplied most basic requirements for labor. Men and women divided tasks between them, and children worked for the family, too. If a family obtained other assistance, as often happened, it was usually to supply a need that for the time being it could not meet itself. Even though the flow of emigrants to New England ceased in the early 1640s, as England became embroiled in civil war, childbirth and low mortality enabled the settlements there to survive and thrive. In these stable, growing colonies, the majority of white men owned land, and the colonies’ Puritan leaders enforced strict social and religious boundaries. Yet the colonists’ attitudes about the meaning of land ownership, and their desire for ever more land, led to increasing conflict with local Native nations.

One key to New England’s survival was the widespread availability of land that was not just monopolized by the wealthy or by those with the right connections.Landownership in New England usually conferred outright title, or “freehold,” to a property. In England, most land had been held by large landholders, who might lease it in portions to tenant-farmers in return for rent, or who even retained feudal or manorial rights to payments, labor services, and other obligations from the people who occupied and worked it. New Englanders took pride in their absolute property rights, and in the freedom this conferred to pass on their land as they wished, without owing tribute to landlords. They came to see freeholding as an essential part of their “English liberties.”

Yet largely rejecting competitive individualism, and aiming to shape their lives to achieve spiritual grace and social harmony, most early new Englanders avoided the kind of free-for-all that had marked planters’ acquisition of land in Virginia. In Massachusetts the government usually made grants of land not to individuals, but to whole communities, known as “towns.” Sometimes at meetings of all freemen in the town, sometimes through special committees, townsmen themselves decided how to allocate the grant. Dedham, Massachusetts, and other early towns divided land into large open fields rather than separate enclosed farms, a pattern familiar especially to those who had come from eastern England. People lived together in central villages, offering one another mutual support and defense.  Each landowner had individual strips in the different fields, but townspeople collaborated at work, from the first plowing to the harvest.

Requests for town grants met with generous response from the colonial government. Andover’s founders received more than 38,000 acres of land for a population that, as late as 1662, numbered only forty families. Towns often held most of their land in reserve. When the town of Sudbury made its first division, it handed out only 751 acres, in grants ranging from four acres to 76 acres. Individuals—almost always male household heads—received their land on the basis of the town’s judgment about how much each needed. A man’s prestige (being the minister or having a good name from England), community need (for a miller or a blacksmith), and individual necessity (the number of children in a family) all influenced the allocation. Towns held back undivided land, for distribution to newcomers and, especially, for the next generation of townspeople. The towns’ distribution of land helped secure the authority and economic position of male property owners.

But towns were much more than devices for managing land. Town meetings of all freemen were the basic unit of local government, while to Puritan leaders towns were also the means for gathering communities of believers. Each town had an independent Congregational church with power to appoint its own minister. Although town membership and church membership were never identical, Puritans saw their churches as central to the creation of an ordered commonwealth.

Puritan society had both egalitarian and hierarchical aspects. It avoided extremes of wealth and poverty, and rejected ostentation or formal hereditary distinction. Yet it also stressed authority and hierarchy as instruments of social order. Even in New England, wrote Governor John Winthrop, “some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” At public worship, people were seated according to their rank in town. Respect was to be accorded to age, gender, piety, and social standing. Clergy and magistrates were cast as “fathers” to the community.

Only men with property exercised influence in towns and churches, and they curbed the voices of women and youths. Though Puritans regarded men and women as spiritual equals, and women were economically vital, this did not mean that women were socially equal. Puritans shared the patriarchal assumptions of all early settlers, that men were superior to women and that property-owning men should exercise authority over the members of their families, which included their wives, children, and any servants or other dependents living with them. Parents or employers could lawfully administer whippings or beatings for wrongdoing, and although the courts punished excessive cruelty, they also admonished parents or masters for showing too much laxity.

Puritans saw orderly households as the germ of social order. Personal freedom and individuality were suspect. To ensure that everyone resided under the discipline of family life, young single men and women were obliged to live with families as servants. They formed up to one-third of New England’s workforce before 1650, although their relative importance declined after that. Servants were obliged to remain with uncongenial employers and could be returned to them if they ran away, and the law looked with similar disfavor on wives who sought to escape cruel husbands or neglected the household duties expected of them.

Women who spoke up or stood out posed a threat to social order. In 1637, Anne Hutchinson, a prominent Boston woman, was tried and banished from Massachusetts after attracting a religious following and “casting reproach upon the faithful Ministers of this Country.” Governor John Winthrop claimed that she had “a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man,” and feared her opinions would “spread like a Leprosie, and infect farr and near.” When a few Quaker preachers, including women, entered Massachusetts in the late 1650s, they were jailed, whipped, and banished. Four of them were executed, including Mary Dyer, who was hanged in 1660 after she defied the courts and returned to Boston from exile in Rhode Island to preach.

Women seen as too independent or assertive also faced suspicion of witchcraft or complicity with the devil, a crime punishable by death. Eighty percent of accused witches in seventeenth-century New England were women, many of them widowed or in some sense independent. . The fear of disorder such women instilled helped bring about the notorious Salem Village trials of 1692, when magistrates put credence in rampant accusations of witchcraft in a local community. Of nineteen alleged witches eventually hanged at Salem, fourteen were women. The first three to be accused—an enslaved West Indian, a poor widow, and an old semi-invalid woman who lived on the edge of town—were at the margins of Salem society, but among the others were women of means who had exercised some discretion over their own affairs.

There were also substantial inequalities among men, however. Not all towns developed in the manner of Dedham, Sudbury, or Andover. The ports and fishing camps northeast of Boston were dominated by traders and shipowners, for whom poorer men worked as crews on fishing boats and as seamen. Such places were never as egalitarian as some of the inland towns. In mid-seventeenth century Ipswich, 75 percent of families owned less than 90 acres of land each, almost 25 percent owned more than 100 acres, and five men owned over 1,000 acres. Yet most New Englanders upheld the ideal of a society based on widespread freehold landownership by independent households. This ideal helped seal the fate of Native peoples in the New England region, and it also shaped colonists’ attitudes to English rule in the later seventeenth century.

The defeat of Pequots in the late 1630s (see Chapter 1) did not end the friction between growing populations of settlers and Native polities. Most settlers wanted to clear the forest; fence in their fields; build houses and barns, meetinghouses and stores; plant English crops; and raise livestock. Native Americans and Europeans had very different understandings of what it meant to live on the land. For most Native Americans the land was a living relative, and provided life and therefore, needed to be protected. Nations tended the land, and all members shared its fruits. This was a shared responsibility among all living from the land; a reciprocal relationship between Native peoples and the land they lived on. But for New England’s freeholders, ownership was individualistic and absolute. Colonists asserted that Native peoples did not, according to English law, actually own their land, but merely occupied it, because they built no permanent buildings and used no draft animals. No fences and hedges marked where one person’s property ended and another’s began. while Native women tended crops,Native men, settlers claimed, were idle,  and exerted themselves only to hunt or fish, activities suitable for aristocrats or poachers but unworthy of sturdy independent yeomen.

Differing assumptions had tragic consequences. To Europeans, land that Native peoples had not actually cleared was not really theirs. To Native people, “selling” the land to Europeans merely meant allowing them to use it. Even the settlers’ introduction of livestock had huge effects. Following English custom, colonists let their animals roam free in the woods, to be rounded up when needed, and they built fences to keep them out of their own crops. But their pigs and cattle invaded Native peoples’ unfenced fields and destroyed their crops. Roger Williams, a founder of Rhode Island, was one of the few early colonists to acknowledge the violation of Native peoples’ rights: “Swine,” he noted, “are most hateful to all Natives, and they call them filthy cutthroats.” But many settlers convinced themselves that Native peoples would have to move out of their way, or be removed.

Their defeat of the Pequots helped colonists expand across southern New England. They established Connecticut and the small colony of New Haven, and soon began to settle Long Island. Making alliances with some Native nations against others, they were able to hold off any united resistance to their expansion. They made deals, often with minor sachems or chiefs, by which Native polities agreed to cede land or pay tribute in return for protection.

The responses of Native people to this intrusion varied. Some ceded land simply because they were outnumbered. At New Haven, five dozen or so Quinnipiacs and others, their population depleted by disease and displacement, faced 2,500 arriving colonists. In eastern Connecticut, however, the Mohegans made an alliance with the English so as to strengthen their own hold over smaller Native polities, and in hope of protecting themselves against encroachment. Inhabitants of the fourteen “praying Indian” towns in Massachusetts accepted greater association with colonists, until King Philip’s War (see chapter 1) breached the bonds of trust between them and caused many Native people to be banished. Defensive alliances to stem the settlers’ invasion, such as that attempted by the Narragansetts in the 1640s, could be outmaneuvered by the English in conjunction with other Native polities, like the Mohegans. King Philip’s War itself marked the high tide and then collapse of Native resistance in southern New England. Subsequently, Native peoples were dispersed across this region, obliged to live on marginal lands, hunting and fishing where they could, or supporting themselves by laboring for white communities, their children often put into white families as servants. By the eighteenth century many Native peoples lived like the parents of the Mohegan Samson Occom, who “Chiefly Depended upon Hunting, Fishing and Fowling for their Living and had no connection with the English except to Traffic with them in their small Trifles.” They preserved a degree of independence, but had largely lost control of their lands.

Overcoming Native resistance did not, however, assure New Englanders that they would be secure on their freehold lands. The ending of the English civil war by the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 (see Chapter 1) brought renewed aristocratic visions of great landed estates in the New World, threatening the freehold ideal. New Englanders’ ambition to build a Puritan commonwealth, and their sympathy with English Puritans, brought them under scrutiny by the restored monarchy of Charles II. English Puritans now faced a hostile political climate, and the Crown seemed likely to undermine New England’s distinctiveness and relative independence, including its freehold land titles.

Developments in the territory south of New England and north of the Chesapeake soon demonstrated the fragility of the freehold ideal, as huge areas became the subject of royal grants to favored landed proprietors. The creation of great proprietorships in the Middle Colonies suggested that English North America might become a society of great estates on the English pattern, in which aristocrats would, for their own benefit and profit, employ tenant farmers and other dependents to cultivate the land. While English colonists controlled ever greater amounts of land in coastal areas, the strength and diplomacy of some Native nations in the interior, such as the Haudenosaunees, meant that settlers and Native peoples negotiated various forms of cooperation and exchange.

The small population of New Netherland could do little to discourage the land-hungry English from invading Dutch claims. When Charles II granted land including the Dutch colony to his brother James, Duke of York, James moved quickly to take power from the governor, Peter Syuyvesant. After three English attacks, the Dutch relinquished control of New Netherland in 1664, and it became the English colonies of New York and later New Jersey. The Dutch had already created large landholdings, known as patroonships, in New Netherland. The English did the same, granting large tracts of land on feudal terms to manor lords who gained the right to hold court and sit in judgment over their tenants. No landowner actually exercised that right, but three manorial families would control what amounted to private seats in the New York colonial assembly.

The development of great estates in the Hudson and Mohawk river valleys was a notable feature of New York society over the next several decades. Families like the Van Rensselaers, the Johnsons, the Livingstons, the Schuylers, the Philipses, and the Morrises acquired large manors derived from Dutch or English land-grants. Livingston Manor, some forty miles south of Albany, grew to occupy 160,000 acres of prime farmland. Landlords rented farms to tenants over whom they acquired considerable power. The result was class division and landlords’ expectation of deference from their tenants. Sir William Johnson, the eighteenth-century “Mohawk Baronet,” owned the local courthouse, jail, and Anglican church on his estate. A tenant could sell his leasehold only with the landlord’s consent. When one landlord’s daughter was married, “tenants gathered before the manor hall” in deferential attendance, “as on rent day.”

The Duke of York had meanwhile given New Jersey to his close associates, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. In 1676, William Penn and three other Quaker gentlemen acquired Carteret’s share. By the early 1680s, the well-connected Penn had negotiated control of even more territory, accepting a large mass of land, which he named “Pennsylvania,” in return for forgiving a large debt owed him by the king. The Penns became hereditary proprietors of their new province, and its governorship descended in their family until the American Revolution. Having created an American proprietorship on a grand scale, William Penn drew up an ambitious scheme of settlement, advertising for colonists in 1681. A year later his first party of emigrants reached the Delaware River, founding the city of Philadelphia and settling the land nearby.

Pennsylvania, however, did not follow the Hudson Valley pattern. William Penn was primarily concerned with creating a prosperous haven for oppressed Quakers and an experiment in religious toleration, and so he never set up the lesser lordships permitted by his charter. Instead the Penns encouraged migrants by selling them land directly, fixing only modest sums for the annual “quitrents” to which their grant entitled them, and setting aside fifty-acre allotments of land for male servants completing their terms. In practice, Pennsylvania’s land system worked little differently from the freehold tenure of New England. Purchasers who did become landlords in their own right never enjoyed the power of a New York manor patroon.

After 1660 New Englanders were apprehensive that the crown would seek greater control of their colonies, and impose upon them some form of aristocracy, or enforce the practices of the Anglican church. Royal officials began to scrutinize colonists’ conformity to trade regulations, including the new Navigation Acts (see chapter 2), and the close connections—except in Rhode Island—between Puritan churches and colonial governments. Complaints reached England from people denied political rights because they were not members of a Puritan church, or who had been punished for infractions of tight Puritan laws. Massachusetts in particular feared that the crown would overturn the colony’s original charter and bring the Puritan experiment in godly government to an end.

The crown suspended the Massachusetts charter in 1684, and the next year placed the colony with Plymouth, Maine, and New Hampshire in a united “Dominion of New England.” Connecticut and Rhode Island were also pressed to join, under the royal governor of New York, Sir Edmund Andros. Massachusetts lost its elected General Court  and was ruled by a council appointed by Andros.  The Dominion’s creation followed the Duke of York’s accession to the English throne as James II in 1685; that James was suspected of autocratic designs and Catholic sympathies underscored colonists’ fears for the future of their religious and political autonomy, and of their freehold land titles.

Events in England helped the colonies to evade disaster. Protestant, Whig opposition to James mounted, and in what its supporters came to call the “Glorious Revolution,” he was deposed and forced to flee to France in 1688. Parliament confirmed James’s son-in-law, the Protestant Dutch ruler William III, as the new king, and passed laws to secure its own powers and exclude Catholics from the English throne. News of James’s flight touched off rebellions in Maryland and New York, while Massachusetts leaders ousted Governor Andros, reinstituted their own government, and petitioned London for a new charter. By 1689 the Dominion of New England was shattered. All awaited a new political settlement.

Two years later, Massachusetts received its new charter, which ended the Puritans’ autonomy, reduced the churches’ influence in government, and created a royal governorship, like those in New York and Virginia. But the charter also restored Massachusetts’ elected assembly, the General Court, and confirmed the colony’s freehold land titles. After decades of uncertainty, New Englanders could celebrate their escape from the “reduction to lordships” that the English Restoration had threatened.

By the early eighteenth century many Native peoples along the East Coast acknowledged the king of England’s sovereignty over his colonies, but they also insisted that this sovereignty did not confer control over Native peoples or how they used their lands. In most seaboard regions, unfortunately, such insistence did little to prevent the conquest and near-destruction of Native peoples' cultures.

In the interior, however, more powerful groups such as Haudenosaunees held off European settlement remarkably well. In the 150 years before the American Revolution, the boundary of white settlement moved inland by at most a few hundred miles. Beyond it, Native Americans imposed limits on the seizure and occupation of their land, and exploited alliances with both the English and the French as they fought colonial wars with one another In northern New England Native nations harassed colonial villages and held back the spread of settlement until the 1720s and 1730s. Raids, like that of Native peoples and French fighters on Deerfield in western Massachusetts in 1704, resulted in the death or capture of dozens of white settlers and discouraged frontier expansion. Of some three hundred people captured between 1690 and 1730, over one in ten of males and one in four of females chose to adopt their captors’ way of life. Neither Native peoples' nor settlers’ culture could simply dominate the other.

The Iroquois-speaking Kanien'kehá:kas (Mohawks), Onöndowa’ga:s (Senecas), Onoñda’gegas (Onondagas), Onyota'á:kas (Oneidas), and Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼs (Cayugas) played a key part in containing white settlement. Their territory stretched from Canada to New York’s Finger Lakes, and in the seventeenth century, Haudenosaunees used their power mainly to expel other Native polities from the region. Controlling the fur-rich Adirondack Mountains and key routes toward the west, they could induce both the French in Montreal and the Dutch and English at Albany to pay court to them. Meanwhile they continued to absorb other groups. In 1716, they adopted a sixth Iroquois-speaking nation, the Skarù∙ręʔs (Tuscaroras), who had been driven out of North Carolina by white settlement. By the 1740s and 1750s, after a deal with the Pennsylvania government, Haudenosaunees were taking Lenapes (Delawares) under their supervision in the upper Susquehanna valley.

Haudenosaunees learned much from observing the subjugation or destruction of other Native nations. Because French Jesuit missionaries respected Haudenosaunee culture, they had some success converting them to Christianity.  The grave of Kateri Tekakwitha, a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman noted for her penitent life, became an object of  Catholic pilgrimage after her death in Canada in 1680. But knowing how the “praying Indians” of Massachusetts had been crushed by Puritans who had converted them and then changed their way of life, Haudenosaunees remained wary of Protestant missionaries well into the eighteenth century.

Haudenosaunees could fight fiercely, and might severely torture men they captured in war, but they also adopted captives into their nation. Such people might rise to high rank. Hendrick Peters, born around 1680, adopted by the Kanien'kehá:kas (Mohawks) as Tee Yee Neen No Ga Row, became a prominent leader at Canajoharie, west of Albany. Women elders usually determined the fate of captives. Those who accepted adoption sometimes became honored matriarchs in a society in which women wielded considerable power. Both Eunice Williams, taken from Deerfield as a child by the Kanien'kehá:kas, and Mary Jemison, captured by the Onöndowa’ga:’s (Senecas) in 1758, refused to return to their white families and lived out long lives in their new Native American communities.

Using the advantages of their position, Haudenosaunees became as adept at diplomacy as any European nation, playing off the rival contenders for their lands against each other. For well over a century, they balanced the Dutch against the French, then the French against the English, and finally the English against their own colonists. Haudenosaunee fighters played an important part in the succession of wars between English and French colonies that took place from the 1680s to the 1760s. Haudenosaunees held together and managed to curb colonial expansion. Only later, when the American Revolution decisively altered the balance of power against them, would the Haudenosaunees’ diplomacy finally fail.

By the eighteenth century the rural population of the northern colonies was growing, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total. The rural North was divided between the relatively small areas of New York and New Jersey, where tenancy and large estates were common, and the bulk of New England and Pennsylvania, where most land was controlled by independent farmers. Though landownership patterns varied, the majority of farms in all these regions were maintained by the families who lived on them, and  that shaped the opportunities and constraints they faced.

Though geographically close to one another, the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania developed very differently. At first, when their land was still unsettled by white peoples, New York’s proprietary landlords made tenancy attractive so as to secure scarce labor. They provided mills, roads, help with livestock, and rent-free periods in order to lure new settlers onto uncultivated land grants. But such benefits came at a price. Some manors obliged tenants to work a certain number of days for the landlord, give the landlord first option to buy their crops, and grind their grain at his mill. Landlords could require tenants to plant certain kinds of trees or build certain kinds of houses. Tenants could not buy the land they farmed. They could expect payment from the landlord for any improvements they made, but if they wanted farms of their own, they were obliged to sell their leases and move to freehold land elsewhere. When a lease was sold, the landlord could demand up to one-third of the purchase price. For some landlords the manorial system created immense wealth.

Landlords’ relations with tenants varied. Some, including Frederick Philipse at Philipse Manor and Sir William Johnson in the Mohawk Valley, tried to create stable, paternalistic communities. Although Philipse raised rents when he inherited his manor in 1760, he promised never to do so again and kept his word. But others were out to gain all they could. While Philipse held rents steady, his brother-in-law Colonel Beverly Robinson raised his rents three times.  Tenants resented the shaky legal basis of some estate grants. Only 6,000 of Livingston Manor’s 160,000 acres had been included in the original grant to the first manor lord. Poorly drawn surveys and outright fraud had contributed the rest, and the tenants knew it.

Poor conditions for many tenants served to limit New York colony’s growth. In 1770, its population stood at approximately 162,000. By contrast, Pennsylvania, founded decades later, had by then already surpassed 240,000. By making land relatively attractive and affordable, William Penn had sown the seeds of rapid growth. Most settlers created small or moderately sized family farms. At first they raised cattle and other livestock, but soon switched to grain farming, which on modest farms could better provide livelihoods for their children. To a significant degree, settlers realized William Penn’s founding vision of a middling rural society in which family and neighborhood cooperation would be complemented by the commerce generated by grain exports.

Pennsylvania’s people were especially diverse, including English Quakers of the “middling sort,” many of them skilled artisans; Germans of peasant origin who came to found religious communities on Pennsylvania’s rich farmland; and tens of thousands of Protestant Scots-Irish migrants from the northern part of Ireland, many of whom—like the Germans—came as indentured servants. As they migrated to the colonial frontier, friction with Native peoples and other settlers often led to trouble. Pennsylvanians had a reputation for sturdy independence. When the gentleman-pamphleteer John Dickinson wanted to emphasize Americans’ independence of spirit during one of the 1760s disputes with Britain, he could find no better way than to style himself “a farmer in Pennsylvania.”

Wherever they lived, and whether they were tenants or freeholders, northern farm families shared many common circumstances. In most places the open-field villages of the earliest New England settlements had given way to dispersed settlements and scattered farmsteads, though ideals of social harmony persisted. Church membership, town government, family ties, and the mutual exchange of goods and labor sustained a sense of “neighborhood” in much of New England. In the Middle Colonies, too, tenants and farmers maintained ties to their neighborhoods and to the wider commercial world. For all farm families, a central concern was how to pass on land and livelihoods to their children.

In a pre-contraceptive age, almost every married woman spent a good part of her life pregnant and caring for children. The women of Andover, Massachusetts, had more than five births per marriage in every decade between 1650 and 1720, and between 1690 and 1710 the rate was higher than seven. Yet, though childbirth risked women’s lives in some cases, the life expectancy of women in New England was better than in England or the southern colonies, and almost as good as that of men. In four out of every five early New England marriages, both partners survived to at least the end of normal childbearing years.  In legal terms, a colonial woman ceased to exist as an independent being when she married. Unless there were special pre-nuptial arrangements, a wife could not control her own property or make a binding contract. Her husband controlled the family’s property, whether he had purchased it himself, inherited it, or acquired it through her. In day-to-day life, however, a wife was her husband’s partner. The operation of a household depended heavily on women’s work--not just the raising of children, but a host of other tasks. Women made cheese and butter, which were vital sources of cash income; they also made the beer or cider and much of the food that sustained the family’s members. Women made and repaired clothing, produced the soap that kept the family clean, and made the tallow candles that provided lighting. During harvest, farmwomen joined in gathering crops. An artisan’s wife was likely to acquire some of her husband’s craft skills and take a hand in production.

In a rural community, unmarried women faced great hardships. Some did venture outside the conventional expectations of their roles, daring (as one put it) to be “as independent as circumstances will admit [i.e., permit].” But often the best they could hope for was to have a room in a relative’s house in exchange for performing household chores. Widows also encountered  difficulties. The law guaranteed the “widow’s portion,” usually one-third, of a husband’s real estate, but her right was not to the freehold, only to the use of it during her lifetime;  in some colonies, even this right eroded over time. Many widows were as dependent on their sons or sons-in-law as they had once been on their fathers and husbands.

Children were expected to submit to parental authority. As they grew older, children became important to the work of most rural households, first performing simple tasks, then assuming the roles that, according to their sex, would fall to them as adults. Unmarried daughters usually assisted with household and garden tasks and undertook dairy work or home manufacturing. Boys and young men, as well as helping with farm work, often provided crucial labor for felling trees, clearing land, and other tasks involved in creating and maintaining new settlements. Fathers could use the promise of land to keep their sons at home and working for the household until well into the sons’ adulthood. It was a form of labor control that shaped and fitted the family life cycle and the transmission of economic power from one generation to another in families with property. Poor or orphaned children were often sent to live with and work for other families, where their labor earned them no future security.

Some farm neighborhoods were largely self-sufficient, with families growing or making much of what they needed, and swapping labor, or “’changing works,” among households.  Farmers grew mixed crops and built local networks of exchange, in which a tradesman might accept “wheat, rye, Indian corn, as well as cash, or anything that is good to eat,” in return for his services. Farm wives traded cloth, butter, and beer, as well as nursing, midwifery, and child-care. Many farmers also bought and sold land to build holdings large enough to provide for their children, and to set them up for similar lives of modest prosperity and independence, which contemporaries often referred to as a “competency.”

For most country people, competency also involved producing surpluses to be marketed. The role of this surplus produce in broader patterns of commerce, and in farm families’ own strategies, varied according to circumstances. In much of eastern and southern New England by the mid-eighteenth century, settlements were becoming crowded and families were dividing up landholdings. Of farms in Andover, Massachusetts, only one in three exceeded 200 acres in size. The land in many parts of New England was relatively infertile, and crop surpluses there were low. Families seeking land on which to settle their offspring might well look to frontier regions. From the 1730s onward, their demand for land led to a powerful outward migration from old to new areas of North America.

In the Middle Colonies, many landholdings were larger, and more fertile land was available. In the mid-eighteenth-century Delaware Valley, two-thirds of farms exceeded 500 acres in size. By concentrating their efforts on grain production, farmers here were able to raise market income from the sale of wheat and other crops, and they used these resources to provide for their children. Eighty percent of Pennsylvania farms had crop surpluses, and forty percent of the total crop was sent to market for export. By the 1760s wheat from New York, Pennsylvania, and the northern Chesapeake fed people all around the Atlantic basin. Farmwomen, too, contributed to marketable surpluses through dairying and raising poultry.

But the demands of wheat farming also altered patterns of labor, especially on the larger farms in Pennsylvania’s English-speaking areas. An increasing number of servants, some of them indentured to work off the cost of transatlantic passages, were employed to assist with crop-raising. Many were German or Scots-Irish and were unrelated to their employers. Conflicts arose over harsh treatment or monotonous work. Servants—like George Owens of Chester County, Pennsylvania, who was driven to despair because his only work was chopping wood—often ran away. Married servants known as “inmates” occupied cottages on farm lands. Others worked as day laborers. In Chester County in 1750 there was one inmate or free laborer for roughly every four householders, but a decade later the proportion had risen to nearly one for every two. Wage labor was a growing part of the grain-exporting rural economy.

Although independent farm families dominated northern agriculture, slavery also became important in a few localities: along Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay:, and in parts of southern Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. Around 1700 13 percent of Long Island’s inhabitants were enslaved, while enslaved and free Black people accounted for one-fifth of the population of Bergen County, New Jersey. In contrast to southern plantations, however, most northern enslavers owned only one enslaved person. As a result, northern enslaved persons often lived separate lives, without their own families or distinctive culture.

Social stratification among rural white populations also grew in the eighteenth century. The Connecticut River Valley in western Massachusetts became dominated politically by wealthy families, whose influence earned them the title of “River Gods.” Members of these families intermarried, filled town delegations to the General Court in Boston, secured provincial appointments as colonels of militia or county-court judges, and became pastors of some of the region’s churches. Although the New England freeholding ethos sometimes bred resentment against the powerful and well-to-do, deference toward age, wealth, and family remained common. Only during times of political crisis was it sometimes disrupted.

By 1770, about ninety-three percent of all colonists lived in places with populations under 2,500. However, one way in which the northern colonies differed from most parts of the South was in the relative significance of the port towns that grew up along their coasts and river estuaries.

In 1700, even the largest of these towns—Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia—had been little more than overgrown villages, with a few thousand inhabitants each. But by 1760, they were substantial places whose people  lived differently from their rural counterparts. In these port towns merchants and shipowners rubbed shoulders with professional men, with master artisans and their apprentices, with the day laborers who worked on the wharves, and with seamen from many places who crewed cargo ships and fishing vessels. Public emblems still commemorate the work of these early colonists. In Boston’s State House hangs the gilded image of a codfish, symbol of New England’s early wealth from fishing and the sea. New York City’s official seal bears the sails of a windmill, two barrels, a beaver, and the figures of a Native American and a white man. It recalls the port’s initial prosperity from the trade in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia furs trapped by Native people, and from grain grown by farmers, ground by millers, and shipped in barrels made by coopers. In towns, as in the country, many economic activities were organized around families and households.

Even so, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had established themselves as places where trade and manufacturing, rather than farming, formed the essential basis of life. Lesser centers, such as Newport, Albany, and Baltimore, which expanded in the eighteenth century, developed in the same direction. None was large by modern standards. Even the biggest were “walking towns,” easily crossed on foot, full of places and faces familiar to their residents.

Boston occupied no more than a small peninsula that jutted into Massachusetts Bay, linked to the mainland by a narrow spit called Boston Neck. Although the town grew steadily for a century, around 1750 its population leveled off at about 15,000. It governed itself by the same  town meetings of freemen that were used in the smallest  New England settlements. Ordinary Bostonians highly valued these open meetings in which they had a voice. . As early as 1708 they resoundingly defeated a proposal to abandon them and create a mayor and a board of aldermen, not least because people objected to the £1,000 wealth qualification for holders of the new offices. As one pamphleteer argued, “The rich will exert that right of Dominion, which they think they have exclusive of all others . . . and then the Great Men will no more have the Dissatisfaction of seeing their Poorer Neighbours stand up for equal Privileges with them.” Boston would retain its town meeting, in fact, until 1821, when it was deemed large enough for a city form of government.

New York and Philadelphia exceeded Boston in size, but not by much. As late as 1770, New York filled only the southernmost part of Manhattan Island, where the financial district now stands, and boasted a mere 21,000 inhabitants. Philadelphia was North America’s fastest-growing city. Its population of 25,000 in 1770 made it, after London, one of the largest settlements in the English-speaking world. Even so, its people occupied little more than the modern downtown area. Both cities were governed differently than Boston. In New York, a mayor was picked by the colony’s royal governor, but aldermen were chosen by election. Philadelphia, like many English boroughs, was run by a “closed” corporation, a body of officials who picked their own successors.

Port towns fulfilled many functions. They were important commercial centers, whose merchants dispatched and received ships and their cargoes over thousands of miles. Colonial ships carried fish from the Grand Banks, flour from Pennsylvania, barrel staves from New York’s forests, flaxseed for Irish linen growers, lemons, salt, oil, and wine. They also carried enslaved persons: from the 1720s onward merchants in Boston, Providence, Newport, and other New England ports became active in the Atlantic slave trade. After the mid-eighteenth century, Newport was the largest slave port in North America; its ships carried enslaved persons from Africa either to the West Indies, or to the mainland for sale to southern planters. As their commerce grew, the port towns increasingly became centers of wealth as well, and some of their richest merchants enjoyed fortunes respectable even by British standards.

The main ports were also centers of politics and the arts. They were provincial capitals, where men with a claim to rule gathered to conduct public business. They were home to colleges, playhouses, concerts, and artists, such as the painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who matched Europe’s best. Philadelphia in particular was emerging as an intellectual hub, noted for its contributions to science and high-quality craftsmanship.

Colonial towns fostered manufactures  as well as upper-class culture. Shipyards, ropewalks, iron foundries, and sailmaking shops arose in Boston and other New England ports to build, equip, and supply fishing boats and cargo-carrying vessels. Skilled artisans and laborers ran the yards and shops, and the ships they built earned a high reputation around the Atlantic. By 1760, American shipyards were building one-third of all new British commercial ships, and their growing number of employees with wages to spend attracted other occupations. Towns became hives of activity, where wagoners, seamstresses, craftsmen, laborers, coopers, dressmakers, midwives, and prostitutes plied their trades.

How do seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones reveal white New England residents’ views about family, religion, and community?

Northern towns developed their own social order, with different classes following distinct ways of life. Wealthy “elites,” or upper classes, emerged, enjoying connections in international networks and colonial administrations. The richest were likely to be merchants trading across the Atlantic; others, usually less wealthy, conducted trade along the American coast and to the Caribbean. A professional class, too, began to take shape, starting with the Protestant ministry. In the eighteenth century, lawyers emerged as a second group, using their specialized skills to serve landowners and merchants as laws became more elaborate and business expanded. Ministers and lawyers formed an intellectual elite, producing much of early America’s writing and scholarship.

Merchant elites varied in character. Boston’s divided between Puritan descendants of early settlers and more recent arrivals, many of whom were Anglican. Philadelphia’s early Quaker merchants were joined later by those of other faiths. Boston and Philadelphia merchants were relatively uninvolved in rural landholding, since New England’s and Pennsylvania’s independent farming economies kept them at arms’ length. Some of New York’s prominent merchant families, however, were also among the colony’s manorial estate holders.

Some women, mostly widows, succeeded in business, most of them running small stores. A few of these “she-merchants” prospered as long-distance traders. Perhaps the most notable was the Bostonian Elizabeth Murray Smith, whose wealth enabled her, as she proudly put it, “to live and act as I please.” But even she did not attain public positions. In 1733 some New York businesswomen complained to the governor that “We are Housekeepers, Pay our Taxes, carry on Trade and most of us are she Merchants, and as we in some measure contribute to the Support of Government, we ought to be entitled to some of the Sweets of it.” Even when financial independence was not a factor, gender remained an obstacle to political power.

During the eighteenth century urban elites increased their share of colonial wealth. In 1687 in Philadelphia, the top 5 percent of taxpayers owned 30 percent of all property, but by 1774 they owned 55 percent. In Boston, the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 46 percent in 1687 to 63 percent in 1771. A few had connections to the highest circles in England. By 1750 a daughter of New York’s DeLancey family had married a knighted British admiral, and one of the DeLancey sons was close to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Such families lived in a cosmopolitan world in which events thousands of miles away were just as important as those close at hand, and where men and women adopted European customs and fashions to demonstrate that they were not mere colonists.

Most townspeople, however, were not merchants or ministers or lawyers, but belonged to the “laboring classes” and worked with their hands. Workmen’s practical dress—leather work-aprons and long trousers— contrasted with the elite’s satin coats, wigs, and knee breeches. Women’s clothing made for the rigors of kitchen work, sewing, and washing, was clearly distinct from the silk garments of well-to-do women.

Seamen lived in a shipboard world with its own conditions and customs. Inhabitants of the ocean as much as any port town, they faced low pay, constant discomfort, and harsh discipline, as well as the danger of shipwreck, the fear that the British navy might forcibly “impress” them into its service, or that a privateer or enemy warship might capture them. Landsmen, too, worked in connection with maritime commerce, though often under considerably better circumstances. Shipwrights and ironworkers employed in the largest manufacturing establishments had skills and status that gave them considerable freedom and control of their own time.

Most laboring townsmen aimed to become master artisans or “mechanics,” which meant serving several years of apprenticeship, learning the skills of a trade while legally bound in service to a master. Completing an apprenticeship, the laborer became a journeyman, hired for a time as he saved to acquire a shop of his own. A master in his own right had to be many things: a producer, using his tools to turn out goods; a businessman, buying raw materials and selling finished products; a teacher, training apprentices; and an employer, hiring journeymen as he himself had once been hired. Just as on farms, urban work was based in households. Most master craftsmen had the support of a hardworking wife who provided housing, food, clothing, and laundry services for himself and his apprentices.

Some master artisans, like the Boston silversmith Paul Revere, achieved considerable comfort. Under special circumstances an artisan might claim international fame: the Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin became one of the foremost scientific figures of the eighteenth century. The mottoes he printed in Poor Richard’s Almanac showed Franklin’s belief that hard work and self-discipline would carry a man far in the world. Yet more typical was the life of the Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, who never grew wealthy. Financial uncertainty and poverty were very real for someone like Hewes, for whom one bad year could mean the humiliation of debtors’ prison or the poorhouse. Such difficulties were worse still for the day laborers who loaded and unloaded ships or carted goods, and for the growing numbers of widows and orphans who could barely support themselves adequately in the absence of a male wage earner. For them economic insecurity was part of life.

Larger towns offered women more options than the countryside did. They took in lodgers, ran taverns, made fashionable clothes for the well-to-do, or practiced midwifery. One Boston midwife, a Mrs. Phillips, was said to have delivered over 3,000 babies by the time she died in her early forties in 1761. Widows of artisans quite often took charge of their husbands’ shops. Elizabeth Holt succeeded her husband as the publisher of the New York Journal, and she became New York State’s official printer during the Revolution. But most working women were confined to tasks that paid little money, or just bed and board. Some women worked as prostitutes. In smaller ports, like Salem, Massachusetts, women formed a majority of the working population because many men were away at sea. Rarely able to obtain well-paid employment, women also formed a significant proportion of the poor in port towns. With their husbands at sea amid the hazards of accident, disease, and shipwreck, many of these women could also expect to face the trials of premature widowhood.

Indeed, poverty was increasingly common in eighteenth-century towns. In Boston, the problem was economic stagnation. In the 1760s, the town spent almost six times as much per person for poor relief as it had forty years before. But Philadelphia’s expanding economy also provided a struggle for laboring people, as a constant flow of migrants from the countryside and overseas competed for jobs. Of Philadelphia laborers and journeymen who got married in 1756, for example, one-fifth owned no property at all, and another three-fifths owned only the bare necessities for setting up a home. Over the next eleven years only about one in four of them improved their position. The share of property held by the bottom 30 percent of Philadelphia taxpayers fell from 2.6 percent in 1687 to barely 1 percent in 1774.

Poor though they might be, laborers and journeymen could console themselves that they were at least free. At the bottom of the colonial social scale were many people—white and Black, indentured servants and enslaved persons—who were not.

Indentured servants came to the Middle Colonies, as they did to the South, throughout the colonial period. At first most were single males from London and the south of England, who reached colonial ports like Philadelphia, where they worked off their indentures and stayed on. More than half were artisans, and another quarter were laborers and personal servants. The iron and construction industries were hungry for skilled workers, and some servants bargained themselves into good situations. By the mid-eighteenth century a growing proportion of bound servants arriving in Pennsylvania were from places other than England, especially the north of Ireland and Germany.

Young families also came as indentured servants. They tended to work off their indentures in agricultural areas such as western New York, at the edges of colonial settlement, where they hoped to find land of their own when their service was complete. These were people whose circumstances in Europe were so hard that they were willing to sell a portion of their adult lives to escape, knowing that in America they would be sold to a stranger who would govern them for four to seven years. Not surprisingly, their “fondness for freedom” often led to disputes with their masters, complaints of harsh treatment, or bids to escape.

Unlike the majority of indentured servants, most northern enslaved persons were town-dwellers. In the late seventeenth century, they were often employed as domestics, but their functions broadened with the North’s involvement in the slave trade. From 1710 to 1742, the number of enslaved persons in Boston quadrupled, to about thirteen hundred, or 8.5 percent of the population. Enslaved persons made up 18 percent of New York’s population in 1731 and 21 percent in 1746. Perhaps half of New York City households owned an enslaved person by the 1740s.

These urban enslaved persons usually lived in their enslaver’s house without the company of other enslaved persons. Most were men, working as general laborers, porters, or dockworkers; enslaved women tended to work in domestic service, meaning they were particularly isolated. One New Yorker advertised his enslaved person for sale, noting that “she drinks no Strong Drink, and gets no Children” and was, consequently, “a very good Drudge.” A few Black men lived as freedmen in northern cities, although they could neither vote nor own property.

Many white people were hostile toward this growing African American population, fearing slave insurrection. In 1712, twenty enslaved persons in New York set ablaze and then fired on a group of white people who arrived to put it out, touching off a major panic. The white militia quickly routed the enslaved, but for weeks there were arrests, trials, suicides, and executions. Nineteen convicted enslaved persons were hanged, or burned alive and cut into pieces. But even such brutal punishment did little to quell the fear of slave revolt, and the New York events spurred efforts by Pennsylvanians to curb slave imports into their province. In another episode in 1741, enslaved persons in New York accused of arson and theft were alleged to have conspired with Irish and free Black laborers to kill white inhabitants. Eighteen Black people were hanged or burned to death along with four white servants implicated in the conspiracy.

 By modern standards, the northern colonies were not democratic. Most people had no official part to play in public life. Only men who owned some property and who could claim to be independent of others’ authority had the right to vote or hold political office. This excluded enslaved persons, servants, women, youths, and adult men who did not meet the minimum property requirements. The last group amounted to almost half of free adult males. Altogether, up to 80 or 90 percent of the population was disenfranchised.

War and economic fluctuations in the mid-eighteenth century added to the strains already emerging in rural and urban societies, tended to reinforce and even enhance the inequalities contained within them. At the same time, however, there were patterns of opportunity both in towns and the countryside that helped the northern colonies avoid the wider economic disparities evident further south. And changes in both political and religious culture produced challenges to the most hierarchical assumptions of colonial life, and to the power of rural and urban elites.

Even those men who did vote frequently deferred to their social “betters”—the merchants, planters, lawyers, and large landowners who occupied most seats in the colonial assemblies. Rarely did genuine farmers or artisans reach the circles that wielded real political power. In New England, where each organized town normally chose its own assembly delegate, farmers were frequently elected, but even there the voices that counted most belonged to great merchants, to graduates of Harvard and Yale, and to the well-connected “River Gods” of the Connecticut Valley. In New York’s provincial government there was little pretense of democracy. The assembly had fewer than thirty seats, three of them effectively hereditary, and members of the landed and mercantile elite expected to fill them. In 1761, Abraham Yates, an Albany shoemaker-turned-lawyer, tried to win a seat in the New York assembly, but was defeated by no less a figure than Sir William Johnson. This rebuff would spur Yates to try, during the American Revolution, to overturn the elite’s hold on government.

Much power in fact lay with wealthy men who held appointive, rather than elective offices. These included the royal governor in most colonies, whichever member of the Penn family occupied the Pennsylvania proprietorship, members of the governors’ councils (except in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), as well as mayors, judges, sheriffs, and the members of Philadelphia’s closed corporation.

Yet compared with almost anywhere else in the eighteenth century, the northern colonies were quite democratic. Following the Glorious Revolution and the granting of new charters for these colonies, voting rights in New England were no longer tied to church membership and eligibility to vote followed the same basic rule that held in England: a man had to have a freehold valued at forty pounds or a tenancy worth forty shillings per year. In England this limit was high enough to deny the vote to the vast majority, but in America, where land was more easily obtained, a little over half of free adult males met the requirement. This included most of the tenants on New York’s great estates, although there was no secret ballot and voice voting meant that the landlord’s candidate rarely lost. There were other ways to be eligible to vote as well. In New York City and in Albany the status of “freeman,” open to most craftsmen, conferred voting rights and was an important avenue to political expression among urban workingmen.

For women no such possibilities for voting existed. They found the churches their best arena for public involvement. The radical sects of seventeenth-century England had flirted boldly with the idea of gender equality. Quaker women could preach. Even some mainstream Puritans leaned toward the notion of equality. Puritan women were sometimes members of a church while their husbands were not. Though this gained them no formal voice in church affairs, such as men enjoyed, they nevertheless had the prestige of being “visible saints.” Yet they still risked censure if they overstepped their “proper” roles, and they remained unable to preach or to exercise authority.

Outside their churches, colonists governed themselves under their own version of the British political system. In each colony a governor represented the king, and in most he was appointed by the king. Often he was a fortune hunter intent on increasing his own wealth. But he found himself having to placate both his royal master, who issued detailed instructions, and the leading figures of the province, who often had distinct interests of their own. The other main political institutions were the council, a pale imitation of the House of Lords, and the assembly, whose members liked to compare themselves with the House of Commons and to assert similar constitutional privileges. The governor had an absolute veto on colonial laws, as did the crown (a power it ceased to exercise in Britain itself after the early eighteenth century). Some governors also exercised considerable patronage through grants of land and appointments to public offices.

Although most colonists, particularly urban dwellers, depended in one way or another on commerce, the Navigation Acts and other British regulations meant that they were not free to organize trade as they chose. Although in theory colonial economies were meant to supply the mother country with goods that it needed, the northern colonies posed more of a challenge to Britain than the South, with its staple export crops. A higher proportion of northern output was either of little use to or duplicated goods produced in Britain. As colonial manufacturing grew and threatened to undercut British producers, Parliament sought to restrain it. An act of 1699 banned the export of woolen goods from the colonies, and in 1732 Parliament prohibited the sale of hats across provincial boundaries. By 1750, colonial ironworks, mainly in the Middle Colonies, were producing one-eighth of the world’s crude iron. Parliament that year prohibited them from refining iron, requiring that it be shipped to Britain for further processing. Yet these restrictions did little to alter the pattern of colonial work or production. The laws were poorly enforced, and in some instances they directly benefited the colonies. Defining colonial-built ships as “British,” for instance, they enabled American shipyards to become important suppliers to British as well as colonial shipowners.

Colonial governments also regulated commerce, particularly in urban areas. European thinkers debated the advantages of letting an open market determine supplies and prices. The foremost proponent of free markets, the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, would publish his arguments in a book called The Wealth of Nations in 1776. But these were new and uncommon ideas. Most colonists accepted an older view of trade, that government had an obligation to see that the market provided what people needed, at a quality they would accept, and at a price they could afford.

In New York both the Dutch and English authorities set up controlled markets, in which it was illegal to influence or speculate upon price changes by “engrossing” (buying a crop that was still in the fields), “forestalling” (buying provisions on their way to market), or “regrating” (buying in the market in order to sell again). Cities also regulated the price and weight of an ordinary loaf of bread. Such measures aimed to provide farmers and bakers with a decent return on their work, and also to protect purchasers—especially the poor—against sudden price rises or unscrupulous dealing when supplies were scarce. In crises, the authorities took even stronger steps. In 1748 New York’s mayor and aldermen warned that “great and unusual exportations” of wheat had made it “most excessive dear, to the very great oppression of all degrees of people, but more especially to the industrious poor” of the city and its surroundings. They asked the provincial assembly to lay an embargo on export shipments to conserve the city’s supplies and keep the price of wheat within peoples’ means. Their call expressed a traditional concept of justice, that private profit should not take priority over public needs.

If authorities failed to uphold these principles, ordinary people sometimes took matters into their own hands. “Food riots” were common in eighteenth-century North America, as they were in Britain and elsewhere. Most often food rioters aimed to prevent suppliers from taking advantage of scarcity at the expense of the poor. When, in 1713, the Boston merchant Andrew Belcher ignored Boston selectmen’s pleas not to ship his grain to the Caribbean and so create a shortage in the town, two hundred women and men broke into Belcher’s stores and seized the grain. The lieutenant-governor was wounded when he tried to intervene. The rioters’ object was not to steal supplies outright, but to regulate distribution at a price they deemed fair.

Such crowd actions demonstrated popular opinion about a variety of other issues, too, exerting the people’s presence and the threat or actuality of violence at individuals or officials regarded as unjust or incompetent. As in many food riots, participants often included women. In 1704, Boston women fed up with a failed military campaign doused returning soldiers with the contents of their chamberpots. Bostonians resisted elite efforts to curb street vendors and restrict the sale of produce to public market-houses; in the 1730s women led protests to get the public markets abolished, culminating in a riot in 1737. Private actions, such as a creditor’s efforts to collect debts, also provoked collective resistance if they were perceived as unjust. There was a common view that, despite being outside the law, crowd action could be justified. Violence was rarely indiscriminate. Even the Massachusetts chief justice and lieutenant-governor Thomas Hutchinson observed that “Mobs, a sort of them at least, are constitutional.”

Crowd protests were often ritualized, forming part of a broader tradition of unofficial popular participation in public life. Poorer Bostonians gathered each November 5th to commemorate “Pope’s Day,” when in 1605 English Catholic conspirators had been discovered preparing to blow up the King and Parliament. Laborers, seamen, and artisans, demonstrating their Protestantism and claim to the benefits of “English liberty,” paraded effigies through the streets and burned them on a bonfire. New York and Albany enslaved persons gathered for the annual festival of “Pinkster,” whose name derived from the feast of Pentecost, but which incorporated African traditions, while enslaved persons in several parts of New England had initiated annual “Negro Election Days,” which enacted and satirized the political activities from which the enslaved were excluded. Crowd actions also extended other avenues by which ordinary people—men in particular—could take part in northern public life. Militia units, sheriff’s posses, and volunteer fire companies were vehicles for popular public involvement, as were craft societies like the “Carpenters’ Company” founded by Philadelphia builders in 1724, which were formed to assist members in difficulty, but also began to regulate prices, decide who could enter the trade, and set rules for apprenticeship.

Popular involvement also became part of formal politics. In New England town meetings, participants could discuss whatever issues they chose. Several times in eighteenth-century Boston, popular efforts prevented the town meeting from becoming a preserve of the wealthy and privileged. Between 1718 and his death in 1733 the physician Elisha Cooke, Jr., helped form the Boston Caucus to represent artisans and small shopkeepers in the town meeting, backed policies to promote local manufacturing, and helped mobilize opposition to market reforms. After Cooke died, the Massachusetts governor tacitly acknowledged his success at being a thorn in the side of privilege, referring to him as “the late . . . head of the scum.” After 1750, however, Boston’s economic decline put popular participation at risk by sinking many men below the property qualification for voting. New York had no town meeting, but public life there was more open than in any other city. It had the highest proportion of men able to vote, and laboring men were a powerful presence at elections. Thirty percent of the councilmen chosen in New York in the early 1760s were artisans—three times the proportion in Boston.

Workingmen in the northern port towns found themselves neither wholly included nor wholly excluded from the political arena. They might be courted at election time by popular politicians like Cooke, or even by rich men like New York’s Morrises, DeLanceys, and Livingstons. They made their voices heard in the parades that often accompanied elections. A politician who scorned the popular element, such as Boston’s Thomas Hutchinson, might find himself despised. “Let it burn,” a crowd shouted when Hutchinson’s house caught fire in 1750. More prudent political leaders let it be known that they would find it “an honour to receive a visit from the meanest freeholder, nay condescend to shake hands with the dirtiest mechanic in the country.” Public power remained a privilege of elites, but popular politics was becoming more important.

By 1760 the northern colonies were mature societies, with rapidly growing populations. Two of the great ports in particular, New York and Philadelphia, grew increasingly prosperous as international and domestic trade increased dramatically in mid-century. A colonial elite of landlords, lawyers, and merchants had emerged and was busily consolidating its power. Its members treated themselves to elegant houses, fine furniture, and imported carriages. The new colleges they founded—Princeton, Brown, the College of Philadelphia, King’s College in New York—joined Harvard and Yale as places at which to educate their sons. Colonial writers praised America as a good place to live, and immigration from Europe, especially to the Middle Colonies, rose.

But maturity brought poverty and conflict as well as prosperity. War was part of the problem. Since the 1680s a great struggle had been under way between England and France for mastery of the Atlantic world. Four major wars occupied no less than forty-one of the seventy-five years from 1689 to 1763. Colonial farmers’ sons and workingmen fought in all of them. In the French and Indian War that began in 1754, one-third of all Massachusetts men of fighting age served in the military. Some perceived that wartime suffering was not shared equally, that some grew rich—or even richer—in war years, and that some elite achievements came at the expense of working people.

In eastern New England, population densities approached English levels, and the agricultural system could not support all the inhabitants. The small, worn-out farms some would inherit would not permit all New Englanders to remain in the places where they had been born. Laborers without property or regular work, male and female servants seeking employment, swelled the slowly rising numbers of the “strolling poor.”

From the second quarter of the eighteenth century, rigid patriarchal controls over women and children were also starting to weaken. In longer-settled regions, such as eastern Massachusetts and the outskirts of Philadelphia, few household heads now controlled enough land to promise farms for all their sons. Young men had to turn to other occupations than their fathers’ to seek their livelihoods. This led many young people to challenge their parents’ authority.

Parents, for instance, expected to control their children’s choice of marriage partners, but many sons and daughters circumvented them and chose for themselves. A growing number of young Quakers were “disowned” by the sect for marrying outside it. In Massachusetts by the 1720s and 1730s, between one-third and one-half of brides were pregnant at marriage, almost always by the prospective husband, obliging parents to accept spouses of whom they would otherwise have disapproved.

Migrant New Englanders opened up new town sites in the Massachusetts and Connecticut highlands and trekked northward to New Hampshire, Maine, and an ill-defined region, claimed by both New Hampshire and New York, which lay between the upper Connecticut Valley and Lake George and Lake Champlain. Moving helped solve some of their problems, for they found land in abundance. But migration created new problems, too—disputes over control of newly settled land and conflict with the Native peoples already living there.

These social tensions both encouraged and were intensified by the spread of the Great Awakening in the northern colonies. The movement first took root in New England, following publication of the minister Jonathan Edwards’s account of a religious revival in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts.  Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” remains one of the masterpieces of American preaching. A Scots-Irish Pennsylvanian, Gilbert Tennent, encouraged religious fervor among Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies. Edwards and Tennent, along with such men as the Englishman George Whitefield and James Davenport of Connecticut, abandoned the dry, logical arguments of the traditional Puritan sermon style and reached straight for the heart. Their message was simple: only sinners who cast themselves on God’s mercy would be saved. This message was particularly appealing to people whose communities were undergoing upheaval, and who were anxious to measure up to the standards of an earlier generation.

Preachers and worshippers influenced by the revival challenged the authority of their established ministers. Whitefield, Tennent, Davenport and others were “itinerants,” who traveled from place to place to preach. Their audiences could be huge. Whitefield’s last appearance in Boston in 1740 was before a crowd of 20,000 on the Common. Where itinerants went, disruption often followed. Connecticut passed a law against wandering preachers, and a number of them were jailed.

Like their counterparts in the southern colonies, northern revivalists began to recapture the visions of equality that had seized the poor of England during the Civil War a century earlier. Their sermons addressed contentious political and economic questions, especially whether Massachusetts should set up a land bank, which would serve ordinary people, or a silver bank which would serve the rich. Men without formal religious training became exhorters and preachers; in some cases women did so too. Churches split. New denominations like the Baptists began to grow, challenging the established Congregational churches. Church separations exacerbated the divisions within towns and spurred migration to new regions. Antirevivalist ministers were outraged at the challenge that the Awakening posed to their authority and the threat that it implied to established patterns of cultural and political hierarchy.

Yet even as tensions spread across the north, the colonies themselves continued to expand in both population and trade. Pressure to occupy more land for farm settlements remained strong. Traders, farmers, and artisans with control of their own property and households valued their personal independence and their “English liberties.” They carefully guarded their freehold rights. They sought obedience and respect from the dependents in their own households, and this helped preserve their deference for officials and colonial rulers. But this public deference was conditional upon the recognition of their own rights and interests. As prosperity and inequality grew in the eighteenth century, challenges to authority became more common. In politics, in their churches, in direct action to uphold what they saw as just, ordinary people had started to make their influence felt.

The 1750s would bring renewed war between Britain and France, the climax of their long rivalry for empire in North America. The war would tie the people of the colonies more closely than ever before to the web of British colonial interests, but it would also intensify the inequalities and disputes that had been growing in colonial life. People already used to challenging others’ power would start to question the very nature of their colonies’ connections with Britain. Ordinary people and popular politics would play a crucial part in the crisis that ensued.