1. To get a glimpse of life in the colonies in 1775, the year before the colonists claimed their independence from Britain.
2. To discuss wealth distribution in colonial America.
3. To discuss the changes in colonial society in the 18th century.
4. To examine the changing economic characteristics in 18th century colonial America.
5. To demonstrate how such changes, combined with the growing divisions among the colonists and between the colonies, led to a great deal of discontent and divisiveness.
6. To illustrate that despite such discontent and disunity,  the colonists were able to unite under the banner of several shared characteristics and beliefs in order to defeat the British.
7. To understand contemporary wealth distribution in America and compare it with wealth distribution in colonial America.

• The average child had a 50% chance of surviving to adulthood.
• Slavery was legal and protected in all 13 colonies.
• All cooking was done in or around the fireplace.
• Women could not vote, hold public office, and in most colonies, could not own property unless they were widowed.
• Travel was slow, unsafe, and uncertain. By water, ships relied upon the wind for locomotion; by land, a rider on horseback might cover 30 miles a day while a passenger in coach might cover 20 miles a day.
• The sole source of heat, aside from sunlight, was fire, usually in an open fireplace. After sunset, illumination was either by moonlight or candlelight.
• There was no indoor plumbing. Chamber pots, outhouses, and buckets were a way of life.
• Privacy was a rare privilege for all but the wealthy. People, including children at home and strangers in inns, routinely shared beds.
• Almost everybody was a farmer, with the exception of a small minority of city dwellers.
• There was no anesthesia for surgery or childbirth.
• Every household produced some, and in many cases all, of the food, soap, candles, and clothing required for daily living.
• The medieval notion of the four humors dominated medical theory. Good health required bloodletting and purging which restored the balance of black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.

• About 30% of the colonists were free, white men and about 50% of these Euro-American men owned land. However, only a small percentage of those men owning land owned a great deal of land - land that provided them with large profits.
• About 20% of all the colonists were slaves and about 50% were indentured servants. And a quick review of indentured servants is helpful here. While in your book, Voices of a People's History, you read two documents about how bad it was for indentured servants and Zinn explains that it was a difficult life for many, the majority of people who were indentured ended up with some land and a life of some upward mobility.

• In Boston, 1687...
  • Of a population of 6,000 people, about 1,000 or 1/6 owned property.
  • Of these, about 50 people, or 1% of the population, owned 25% of all the wealth in Boston.
  • Of the white adult males, 14% were extremely poor, had no property, and could not vote.
• In Boston, 1770...
  • Of the top 1% of the population, 44% owned all the city's wealth.
  • Of the white adult males, 29% were extremely poor, had no property, and could not vote.

This graph demonstrates that throughout much of the colonial period:

• In 1690, the wealthiest 10% of all the colonists owned about 47% of all the wealth; by 1775, they owned about 65% of all the wealth.
• In 1690, the next 30% owned between 37% of all the wealth; by 1775, they owned 28% of all the wealth.
• In 1690, the poorest 60% owned between 16% of all the wealth; by 1775, they owned 7% of all the wealth.

In short, for the top 10%, the percentage of wealth steadily increased throughout the colonial period while for the remaining 90% of the colonists, the percentage of wealth steadily decreased.

We can see this trend more clearly with these comparison statistics from Boston, Philadelphia, and Chester County, Pennsylvania.

So, if the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer in colonial North America, we can see that colonial society was quite unequal. In fact, the term equality - which the colonists began to liberally use during the pre-revolutionary period - had a very different meaning in the 1700s.

• Equality meant that no man held greater rights by birth than any other man.
• Equality meant eliminating the British practice of hereditary privilege - especially the extraordinary privilege granted to members of the House of Lords (who until 1911 could any veto legislation from the House of Commons).
• Thus, as we have already learned, the colonists did not believe that all men were truly equal. What they really believed is that all men were created equal and should have an equal opportunity to earn social privilege. The belief that all men were truly equal under the law did not become part of the American experiment until the 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War.

Goal #3: To discuss the changes in colonial society in the 18th century

Throughout the 18th Century, the colonies were becoming more diverse as their populations expanded. In fact, the population doubled every generation, largely because of high fertility, increased immigration, and lower mortality rates:

• in 1700, population was approximately 290,000;
• in 1750 = 1.3 million;
• in 1780 = 2.7 million.

It is important to remember that the colonies remained primarily English; thus, most of the colonists continued to think of themselves as Englishmen and women - as subjects of the British Empire. This began to change in the early 1800s. after North Americans won their freedom from England and when more immigrants were non-English - primarily German and Scots-Irish.

Except for large parts of Virginia and South Carolina, the colonial population was primarily white, European, and Protestant. Most Indians had been pushed into areas of non-white settlement. Only a few Jews and Catholics arrived during this period. (To see a great timeline of the history of religion in America from colonial times to the present, go to http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/religion/blrel_amrel_chron.htm

By 1790 during the first Federal Census, less than half of Americans were English in origin; approximately 20% were African; 15% were Scot or Irish; 7% were German; and the remainder were of other ethnic backgrounds.

1. Economic growth dramatically increased, giving British colonists a higher standard of living than their European counterparts.  In general, colonists engaged in four types of work:

• Agriculture -the primary way to earn a living: plantation agriculture based upon commercial single-crop commodities; commercial farming on smaller farms raising crops for sale; and self-sufficient family farming growing diversified crops for familial needs and using any surplus to pay taxes and buy necessary goods.
• Crafts - blacksmiths, coopers, weavers, carpenters, shipwrights worked  part time as part of their household trade, or full time as a master craftsman or apprentice.
• Mercantilism  - buying and selling of goods for profit
• Service provision - hair cuts, markets, butchers, etc.

• Rural capitalists -  southern planters and speculators who invested in more land, slaves, buildings, lands, tools, seeds.
• Merchant capitalists -  traders and sellers of goods and services who invested in commercial enterprises.
• Wage earning capitalists -  wage earners in various professions and industries who invested in industrial stock or various enterprises.

• In New England, the colonial legislatures granted six-mile-square townships beyond the settled frontier to groups of veterans of earlier colonial wars.  In turn, the veterans sold their shares to small groups of proprietors who then granted some lots to a select number of pioneers and sold the remaining land for profit
• In the Middle and Southern Colonies, proprietors or assemblies sold small lots of land, or gave huge amounts of acreage to colonial land speculators who promised to bring settlers.

Goal #5: To demonstrate how such changes, combined with the growing divisions among the colonists and between the colonies, led to a great deal of discontent and divisiveness.

Discontent and division among the colonists and between the colonies was common by the mid-1700s. The colonists had never been a homogeneous lot of people who looked, thought, acted, worshiped, or worked alike. There were differences and divisions among them from the very beginning.

• Many of the colonists were divided among themselves. Many were an intolerant and litigious lot
• The colonies were also divided - geographically, socially, and even politically.

  

• Political Divisions. None of the colonies were democratically ruled; just over half of all white colonial men could vote. While this number was much higher than their European contemporaries, almost half of all white men, all non-white men and all women could not vote. Thus, a minority of the population was eligible to vote. Further, democracy was not something that most colonial leaders sought. To them, the word usually implied mob rule and the overthrow of the natural political order.
• Societal Divisons. By the 1700s, five distinct societies had emerged: colonial farming societies, urban seaport societies, frontier societies, plantation/slave societies, and Native American societies.
  • Colonial Farming Societies.  The vast majority of New Englanders, as well as many inhabitants of the middle colonies and most farmers in the southern colonies still lived on small, family run and self-reliant farms.
  • Urban Seaport Societies.  Cities like Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston became major urban seaports and commercial centers populated by rich and poor alike.
    • In the 1700s, such cities were small and densely settled places characterized by congestion, ethnic and cultural diversity, high rates of poverty, and the many dangers of disease, fire, protest and riots.
    • Wealthy merchants and traders became economically and politically powerful, and the pathway to their profession was upwardly mobile
  • Frontier Societies.  As the next generation of colonists moved westward to find new, fertile land, they encountered plentiful acreage at cheap prices.  Frontier families lived with the bare necessities acquired through subsistence farming, created a widely dispersed society of equals, and were subjected to a disorganized existence without organized law and order, community institutions, or organized churches.  Thus, frontier communities became volatile and violent places where deep divisions festered between its residents and those of the eastern seaboard.
    • Ethnic Divisions - east tended to be English while frontier population was increasingly "foreign" - German, Scot-Irish, etc.
    • Economic Divisions - east tended to be small self-sufficient farmers or commercial farmers with greater security; frontier dramatically subsistence with little security.
    • Political Grievances of frontier farmers against eastern seaboard:  inadequate protection of settlers; unequal political representation of settlers in assembles; failure of east to provide courts for frontier; and disputed colonial boundaries.
  • Plantation/Slave Societies.  No colonial environment was so deeply unequal and violent as those of the southern plantations.  It was a world of free and slave, rich and poor - a world in which upward mobility was difficult if not impossible - and a world that was uniquely American.
  • Native American Societies.  Throughout the colonial period, the white settlers systematically excluded Native Americans from their society and  dispossessed them of their lands.  Indian peoples continued long-term population decline.  Estimates show that in 1500, about 10 million Indians lived in North America; about 1 million  remained by 1800.  Native tribes with a century or more of colonial contact most dramatically affected in 18th century with decreases of 50% or more.  Indian societies of the eastern coastal plain moved into or beyond the Appalachian Mountains.  As tribes were dispossessed, survivors moved west.  Societies of the interior, however, had not yet been dramatically affected.

• As can be seen in the table below, the wealth distribution was fairly stable over the course of the 20th century, although we see substantial gains for the top 1% in 1929 (right before the stockmarket crash) and a gradual increase in gains beginning in the 1980s under the Reagan Presidency. The only time we see gains for the bottom 99% were during the Great Depression, after World War II, and during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Presidencies.
• By the late 1980s, wealth distribution was almost as concentrated as it had been in 1929, when the top 1% had 44.2% of all wealth.
• It has continued to edge up since that time, with a slight decline from 1998 to 2001, before the economy crashed in the late 2000s.

1. Colonial society was quite unequal in terms of our modern understanding of equality.
2. The term equality - which the colonists began to liberally use during the revolutionary period - had a very different meaning in the 1700s. Equality meant that no man held greater rights by birth than any other man. When the colonists called for equality, they meant to undue to British practice of hereditary privilege. What they really believed is that all men were created equal and should have an equal opportunity to earn social privilege.
3. Americans have always witnessed deep divisions in wealth distribution.  Figures from the colonial cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York indicate that at the end of the 17th Century, the top ten percent of wealthiest citizens owned about 46% of all the wealth in all three cities.  By the end of the 18th Century in Boston and Philadelphia, the top ten percent owned 63.4% and 65.7% of all the wealth respectively, while in New York, the top ten percent owned about 3% less wealth than it had in the previous century. 
4. The nature of colonial America's society, population, and economy gradually changed throughout the 1700s. Such changes brought about social, economic, and political divisions among the colonists and between the colonies.
5. Given the extraordinarily diverse makeup of American society and and the growing divisions among many colonists and between the colonies, it is amazing that by the mid-17th century, many English colonists were able to unite to declare independence and create a new nation.
6. Yet, despite their divisions, the colonists shared enough common beliefs and traits to overcome their disagreements and fight the British.
7. Throughout most of the 18th Century, the colonists continued to think of themselves as Englishmen and women, or subjects of the British Empire.  Only when they stopped thinking of themselves as English and began thinking of themselves as distinctly American - with political, economic, and social goals and needs that were different from those of the English - did a significant number of colonial leaders seek permanent political independence from England.