A.P. U.S. History Chapter 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1692

1. A.P. U.S. HistoryChapter 4American Life in the Seventeenth Century1607-1692

2. The Chesapeake Bay region was especially difficult to live in with frequent malaria, dysentery, and typhoid among residents. • Half of the people in VA and MD didn’t live to see 20. • This region depended greatly on new settlers from England. • Men outnumbered women by 6 to 1 in 1650, and 3 to 2 at the end of the century.

3. Many young girls were already pregnant when they married (1/3rd in MD) • Because so many people died early, Southern women enjoyed very liberal property rights and inheritance rights compared to their New England counterparts.

4. Generations of settlers gradually developed immunities to the diseases and by 1700 VA was the most populous colony with 59,000 residents, ahead of MA and MD.

5. Tobacco • Tobacco was the main cash crop in the Chesapeake. • It exhausts the soil easily, so residents were constantly moving inland and upriver (up the many rivers of the region) in search of new land to farm (and provoking even more hostilities with Native Americans) • The Chesapeake region was exporting 40 million pounds of tobacco by 1700 (which also depressed prices)

6. Most of the early plantation laborers were indentured servants from England in the 1600s. (Indians died too quickly of disease and African slaves were too expensive)

7. The Headright System • Whoever paid the passage of a laborer to the colonies received the right to acquire 50 acres of land (not the laborer). • 100,000 indentured servants came to the region by 1700 making many headrights wealthy plantation owners with estates of several thousand acres. • Indentured servants made up 75% of all European immigrants to VA and MD in the 1600s.

8. Bacon’s Rebellion • 1676 • Led by Nathaniel Bacon who organized a mob of about a thousand backwoods frontiersmen (landless, poor, former servants) who were angry at the VA assembly and Governor William Berkeley who refused to retaliate on Indians who had recently raided several settlements on the frontier. • The mob destroyed the capital and ravaged many estates in the tidewater region of VA. • Effect of Bacon’s rebellion: plantations became increasingly dependent on African slave labor and less on indentured servants.

9. Colonial Slavery • By the 1680s slaves began to outnumber indentured servants in terms of new arrivals in the South. • By 1750 slaves made up half of VA’s population and they outnumbered whites by 2 to 1 in S.C.

10. Southern Slavery • Most African slaves were captured by African tribesmen and sold to white slave traders on the West Coast of Africa. • Slave life in the Deep South was especially harsh. Rice plantations were sparse and the work more demanding than the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake where the plantations were closer together and the work not as demanding. • The slave population of the Chesapeake began to perpetuate itself by its own natural reproduction.

11. Southern Society • Social, economic, and political power in the south was held in the hands of the planter class who were few in number but owned estates that measured in the tens of thousands of acres. • These “planters” owned the vast majority of the slaves.

12. Southern Society • The largest group (in numbers) were small farmers who owned small plots of land and few or no slaves who barely made a living for their families. • Beneath the small farmers were landless whites who were mainly former indentured servants. • Just above black slaves were the white indentured servants still serving out their sentence of time in servitude.

13. The South had few cities because plantations were largely self-sufficient

14. New England Life • Had a much higher life expectancy. • A cooler climate and cleaner water slowed the spread of disease compared to the South. • Most European immigrants lived 10 years longer in New England than their Old World counterparts (or in the South they lived 10 years less) • The first generations of Puritan colonists lived to be about 70 years old • Very close to life expectancies today!

15. New England • Entire families tended to immigrate to New England and not as single males like in the South. • New England had very high birth rates and a constantly rising population. • Women typically married in their early 20s and had a baby every other year until menopause. • MA Governor William Phips was one of 27 children born all to the same mother!

16. New England • Premarital pregnancies were not common in New England like they were in the Chesapeake • Divorce was very rare and separated couples were often forced to reunite by authorities. • Abandonment and adultery were among a very short list of grounds for divorce. • Women caught in adultery were publicly whipped and forced forever to wear an “A” sewn to their outer clothing.

17. New England • Most New Englanders lived in small villages and farms. • Expansion in New England was orderly and well planned out where land was distributed by local “proprietors,” as opposed to the Chesapeake and South where usually lone-wolf planters moved west and acquired new plots by their own initiative and undertaking.

18. New England • In most New England town, town meetings settled local governmental affairs where the adult males met together and each man voted. • They met regularly to elect officials, appoint schoolmasters, and discuss mundane matters like road repairs. • Thomas Jefferson once stated that the town meeting was “the best school of political liberty the world ever saw.”

19. New England • Puritan religion began to lose some of its zeal that the original settlers cherished so much in early New England. • The “Half-Way Covenant” lessened the requirements for Church membership. • Strict religious purity was sacrificed for greater membership and participation.

20. The Salem Witch Hunts- 1692 • 19 people were hanged and one pressed to death (his dying words were “more weight.” • 2 dogs were hanged. • Witch hunts were common in Europe at that time. • The accused were usually property owning women, and older women, and those from Salem Town which was more economically thriving than Salem Village. • The accusers were usually poorer subsistence farmers.

21. New Englanders earned a reputation for being hard workers, inventive, frugal, and stubborn. • Although farming was possible in New England, the soil was very rocky and less fertile than in the South. • Small farmers couldn’t afford slaves like plantation owners in the South.

22. Many New Englanders were fishermen off of the coast of Newfoundland, some of the best fishing grounds in the world.

23. Most colonial Americans were small farmers, despite which region they lived in. • American colonists made about 3 times more money than their European counterparts. • Land was fairly abundant (except in the South in areas dominated by plantations) and an acre of land in America cost about what a carpenter could earn in a day’s wage.