Transcript web1d7yrswarx - Iredell

Political-Economy of Colonial America
The last half of the 1600s saw significant growth of the colonial economy. One of the first
acts of King Charles II upon Restoration was to find ways the colonies could benefit the
mother country.
The idea of controlling the colonial economy became a policy, called mercantilism.
England had created its empire to produce the goods needed to make it “self-sufficient,”
making the country richer and more powerful. It believed the colonies should provide it
with resources and with a market for English manufactured goods.
Parliament created a mercantilist regulatory system under the Navigation Acts of 1651.
Charles II expanded the law to restrict trade of tobacco, sugar, indigo, and ginger. More restrictions came in
the early 1700s.
Colonials often ignored the laws, smuggling goods from the Spanish and French West
Indies.
Wars for Empire and their Effects on the Colonies
The regime of William and Mary, which came to the throne after the Glorious Revolution
of 1688, began a series of wars with France over control of global empires.
King William’s War: A tie, the French take English territories of Newfoundland and
Hudson Bay, and England gets Gibraltar at the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea.
Queen Anne’s War: Colonists from Charleston destroy St. Augustine. New Englanders
attack Quebec, but fail to take it. England regains Hudson Bay, Acadia, and
Newfoundland.
King George’s War: As a world war, it is a tie. In North America, Britain took a major
French fort, Louisbourg, showing naval dominance and paving the way for an assault on
Quebec.
The wars left Britain in debt.
The debt caused Prime Minister Robert Walpole to look for ways to
cut spending. In 1723, he created a policy called Salutary Neglect. It
stopped enforcement of the Navigation Acts and let the colonial
economy run essentially unregulated.
Loosening English oversight had broad effects on the colonies. The colonies grew closer together and
formed a sense of identity different from Britain.
During this time of unsupervised growth, the colonies experienced the Great Awakening and the
Enlightenment. When it was abruptly ended, it caused a groundswell of opposition that grew into an
independence movement.
The Great Awakening
Religious tensions had occurred before, but now it
seemed the masses were rejecting the “city upon the
hill.” These tensions mingled with social unrest,
natural disasters, and an apparent increase in immoral
behavior to bring on a religious revival in the mid1700s.
The real catalyst of the Great Awakening was George Whitefield, a 27 year old Anglican
minister from England.
In 1739, he arrived in Philadelphia to stir up piety. By
December, he had won renown preaching to crowds of as
many as 6000. He continued his tour of the colonies in
Georgia and then New England.
Whitefield was a showman. He performed in the pulpit-acting out the horrors of damnation and the joy of the
regenerate.
The core of Whitefield’s message was the idea of “new
birth”--the need for a sudden and emotional moment of
conversion and salvation where a sinner would testify his
(or more often her) finding Christ.
Whitefield’s meetings were so popular they often
were moved outside to accommodate the audience.
The Great Awakening affected colonial society in several ways.
Because the three original colleges – Harvard (Puritan, 1636), William and Mary (Anglican,
1693), and Yale (Puritan, 1701) – did not serve colonists’ needs, the new churches established
schools:
Presbyterian College of New Jersey (Princeton, 1746)
Anglican King’s College of New York (Columbia, 1754)
Baptist College of Rhode Island (Brown, 1764)
Dutch Reformed Queen’s College in New Jersey (Rutgers, 1766)
Congregationalist Dartmouth in New Hampshire (1769).
A secular school opened in Philadelphia in 1754, it became the University of Pennsylvania.
Territorial boundaries broke down. Itinerant preachers spread sects across borders, helping
to create a national, as opposed to regional, religious culture.
Thirdly, religion became increasingly an individual choice.
Finally, the rise of individual conscience fostered the breakdown of the “state church.”
Religious libertarians began to push for the freedom of conscience that would become a
rallying cry after the revolution.
The Great Awakening helped create what became Iredell County.
Headstones in the Fourth Creek Burying Ground on West End Avenue, and the First
Presbyterian Church history inform us that in about 1749, a group of Scots-Irish Presbyterians
made their way along the Great Wagon Road south to the Piedmont of North Carolina. The
Rev. John Thompson held outdoor services at which he preached sermons that could last for
two or more hours. Development of the Fourth Creek congregation was slowed by the French
and Indian War (1756-63). The town of Statesville began to form around the church's location.
Source: Henry Middleton Raynal, Old Fourth Creek Congregation: The Story of the First Presbyterian Church, Statesville, 1964-1989 (1995).
The Enlightenment
In the late 1600s, was experiencing a change in world-view.
Known as the “Enlightenment,” it reflected the advance of the
scientific revolution that had been ongoing for more than a
century.
The most important scientist of the revolution was Isaac Newton.
Newton excelled in physics, theoretical mathematics, and optics.
The scientific revolution bred new approaches to other elements of
life, including politics. The most important political thinker of the
English Enlightenment is John Locke.
The Enlightenment in America was limited to the upper and the
educated middle classes. It had less effect on the poor than the Great
Awakening. But the upper class was politically powerful; so the
Enlightenment is significant.
The Enlightenment reached its peak in America in the 1740s when
several scientists formed the American Philosophical Society.
The society's principal founder was Benjamin Franklin.
Perhaps the smartest man in the colonies and certainly the most famous,
Ben Franklin embodied the Enlightenment in America as a man of
science and letters, and as a deist.
Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, the son of a candle and soap maker.
He was apprenticed to his older brother as a printer, but at the age of
seventeen he decided he'd had enough of that and ran away, finally
ending up in Philadelphia.
By 1730, Franklin established a print shop and published the
Pennsylvania Gazette. Colonial newspapers were the main means of
getting information about local activities. But they were also a reservoir
of axioms. In 1733, Franklin gathered some of them, added more and
created the first almanac in the colonies: Poor Richard's Almanac
included maxims, home remedies, astrological information, and other
tidbits. It was revised many times. It was hugely popular.
Franklin was particularly interested in economy and thrift. In 1758, he
created Father Abraham to deliver a sermon on frugality and the evils of
idleness. Father Abraham’s popularity was astronomical and not just in
the colonies. Father Abraham raised the celebrity of Franklin in Europe,
as well.
Franklin retired from the printing business in 1748 to pursue his interest
in science and public service.
Franklin devised many practical inventions, including: the bifocal lens (to save having to
switch spectacles to read and see at a distance); the Franklin stove (a small fireplace that
generated great heat with less fuel); swim fins that fit onto one's hands like gloves; and the
odometer (to measure distance to speed up the mail); among other things.
His greatest scientific achievement, however, related to the
studies of electricity and weather. His most famous
experiment involved the discovery that lightning was
really electrified air. He also created the lightning rod,
which reduced the danger of fires started by lightning
hitting homes, barns, and other buildings. His Experiments
and Observations on Electricity was published in 1751.
Franklin was also a statesman and public servant. He
helped organize the first volunteer fire department in
America. He organized the financing of a sewer system and
paved roads in Philadelphia. He created the first lending
library in the colonies.
He led the colonies in the French and Indian War, the
American Revolution, the Confederation Era, and in
creating the U.S. Constitution. He died in 1790.
The French and Indian War
In 1747, several wealthy Virginians established the Ohio Company. Hoping to make money
in the fur trade and in land speculation, in 1748, the company received a 200,000 acres grant
in Pennsylvania at the forks of the Ohio River, near present-day Pittsburgh. The land was
also claimed by France and in 1749, French troops went to the region to shore up France’s
claim by building a series of forts, and befriending the Indians.
In October 1753, George Washington led an expedition to demand a French withdrawal. The
French refused. On the trip back, in January 1754, Washington’s troops fought French and
Indian forces near Fort Duquesne. Returning in May, Washington and his troops fought the
French and Indians. Winning the skirmish, the Americans built Fort Necessity. The French
attacked, forcing Washington's withdrawal (July 4th, 1754). The skirmishes led to the Seven
Years’ War.
As conflict brewed on the Pennsylvania frontier, conditions of peace in up-state New York
deteriorated.
The Hudson River was the essential “highway” of colonial New York since Henry Hudson
first sailed up-river and parlayed with the Mohawks, creating a fur trade in the early 1600s.
North of the rapids above Albany, a short portage took travelers to Lake George which led to
Ticonderoga (“Land between the Lakes”) and another short portage into Lake Champlain
then the Richelieu River and the St. Lawrence. Following this route took one could travel
from Manhattan to Montreal and Quebec City in a matter of days. Control of the route meant
control of the interior of the continent from New France to Long Island.
Three groups – the British, the French, and the Iroquois – divided control of the route. The
French controlled the northern end of the route above Ticonderoga. The British controlled
the southern end from Lake George to New York City. The Iroquois controlled land west of
the river through the Mohawk River Valley from the Hudson to Lake Erie.
Organized into the Iroquois League, the Six Nations of the Iroquois ensured their interests
and power through a defense and trade alliance among themselves. They also entered into
relations with the European powers. A Covenant Chain was made between the Iroquois and
the British as early as 1684. The Iroquois understood it as one of many agreements with
neighboring peoples and had no problem pursuing relations with the French, as well. So as
often happened, the Iroquois would play one power against the other to secure their own
best interests.
The British understood it differently. First, they saw the Covenant Chain as an alliance
against the French. On this point, the French agreed because of the Iroquois’ participation
against them in Queen Anne’s War. Secondly, the British saw the agreement as hierarchical –
as patron and client; while the Iroquois saw it as equitable – two sovereign entities agreeing
to work together for mutual benefit.
Global conflict between the British and French in King George’s War upset the generationlong balance of power between those empires and persistent British encroachment into the
Mohawk Valley in the 1740s upset the Iroquois. By 1753, the Mohawk complained that the
British had broken the Chain.
In 1754, the British Board of Trade called for colonial delegates to meet in the Albany
Congress to negotiate a new alliance with the Iroquois against the French and their Huron
allies in the war.
Ben Franklin took this opportunity to offer the Albany Plan of Union, calling for a governing
council for the colonies.
Franklin’s Plan was not an independence movement. Some colonies thought it was a good
idea, but it did not pass because most colonies did not want to give up any power to another
layer of government.
The war was inconsistent. In 1755, Gen. Edward Braddock was killed leading troops into an ambush by
Indians and Frenchmen in Indian costumes. Little else happened until the fall of Louisbourg in 1758.
Pitt’s policies turned the tide of war. British troops made significant gains, including building Fort Pitt at
the forks of the Ohio.
In September 1759 came the death blow for the French in North America. Gen. James Wolfe led a British
force against the Marquis de Montcalm at Quebec. Both commanders were killed in the British victory in
the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
The Treaty of Paris (1763) ended the French and Indian War. In it, France gave up all claims to North
America, ceding land east of the Mississippi River to Britain and west of it to Spain.
The land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River posed an opportunity and a problem for
Britain. Colonials wanted the land, but the Indians, led by an Ottawa Chief, named Pontiac, fought to keep
them out.
So King George III banned colonists from entering the region. The Proclamation of 1763 banned all
settlement west of the Appalachians. Colonists were outraged. Many, including NC trailblazer Daniel
Boone, ignored it and went anyway. The Proclamation ended the era of Salutary Neglect.