Saints and Sinners in British North America

Colonial Societies and Economies, 1660-1760

Albion’s Seed—4 British Folkways

• Puritans from East Anglia

• Cavaliers from Southern England

• Quakers from the North Midlands

• Celts and Scots-Irish from Ireland, Scotland, and the North Country.

• (N. B.: Scotch is a malted beverage; Scots are people!)

Changing Landscape

• Colonial practices exacerbated the alterations in the landscape and in flora and fauna

• British Populations (Black and White) increased dramatically

• 250,000 souls in 1700• 2.5 million in 1775.• High birthrate• Lower death rate

Women and Work

• Femme Covert

• Patriarchal assumptions

• If women were the “weaker vessel,” why did they survive all of the hard work.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)

• Managed large plantations in S. C.

• Developed Indigo cultivation

• Parented two important sons, Charles Cotesworth and Thomas

• Republican Motherhood

• George Washington was pallbearer at her funeral

Colonial Economics

• Staple Crop and Slave labor based agriculture in the south

• Mixed economies in the middle colonies

• Shipping, small manufactures in Pa and NY

• Shipping and fishing in New England

• Niche economies—Naval Stores in N. C.

Colonial Labor Systems

• Indentured Servitude for whites

• Slavery for Africans• Slavery practiced in

all colonies but predominated in South

• Africans came from diverse regions, spoke different languages, and practiced different religions

• Slave Culture (names, folktales, and religion)

British North America and the Atlantic Economy

Major Happenings and their Meanings

• Salem Witch Hysteria (1692)

• First Great Awakening (1730s-1760s)

• The Enlightenment

Salem Witch Trials

• Thaumaturgy—major world view

• Maleus Maleficarum

• Gender Issue

• Generational Issue

• Indian War on the Frontier—Mary Beth Norton Thesis

• 20 people executed

Witch Trials

First Great Awakening

• Sense of religious decline

• Jonathan Edwards• William Tennet• George Whitefield

• Denominations split into old side and new side

• Emergence of Evangelicalism

• Pluralism

Jonathan Edwards

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

George Whitefield

The Enlightenment

• Mechanical, natural explanations for phenomenon

• Quest for discerning and then applying the laws of nature to human governance and society

• Enlightenment in British North America focused more on finding practical solutions and inventions.

Benjamin Franklin

• Experiments with electricity

• Franklin Stove

• Glass Harmonica

• Lightning rod