Prof: Okay.
So Thursday, last--long ago,
last week, we began to set the scene for
this course by talking about the experience of being a British
colonist, and as you remember we talked
about the connection the colonists had with England both
positive and negative; we talked about their sense of
England--and particularly London--as being the sort of the
center of the empire and almost the center of the universe;
and we talked about the colonists' simultaneous concerns
about maybe not quite being as good as the people who were at
that wonderful sophisticated center of the universe.
And I closed the lecture by noting that in many ways the
colonists were never as British as when they began to object and
then ultimately rebel against their mother country for not
being given their full rights as British subjects.
Okay.
So if Thursday's lecture was about how the colonists
identified with the mother country, today's lecture sort of
does the opposite.
And what I'm going to be talking about today is the ways
in which the colonists and the colonies were different from
people back in the mother country.
Basically, as the title of this lecture suggests,
I'm going to be talking about being a British American as
opposed to being a British colonist,
which was last week.
Now connected with what I suggested on Thursday,
it's important to note that the American colonists weren't
necessarily aware of the ways in which some of their ideas and
attitudes were different, or certainly were evolving
differently from those in England,
and I'll come back to this again in this lecture but I'll
mention it here.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the period that we're really
talking about now, there had already been several
generations of colonists in the colonies.
So certainly there were people in the colonies who themselves
had never been to England, perhaps they didn't know very
many people who had been to England,
and so they didn't necessarily have an amazingly accurate sense
of really what it meant to be a British subject in England,
living in England proper, as opposed to their experience
of being in the colonies.
And that's going to be an important thing to think about
as we continue on in this course,
this idea that ideas are evolving differently in the
colonies than they're evolving in England,
and the colonists didn't necessarily realize that these
differences existed.
Okay.
So I want to begin this lecture on being a British American with
just a handful of examples and --
really, kinds of snapshots of life in the colonies in the
1740s.
And as you'll see with these little examples,
they're going to each be demonstrating something that I'm
going to come back to later in the lecture,
but I at least wanted to give you sort of a sense of what it
looked like before I actually talked about it.
And I've pulled all of these examples--
there's three or four of them--all from the same source,
which is from a really well-known diary by a
Dr. Alexander Hamilton.
And this is not the Alexander Hamilton.
I always feel bad for this guy because [laughter]
he's gone down to posterity as not the real Alexander Hamilton.
[laughter] He's the not real--he's the
unknown, unimportant Alexander Hamilton,
poor guy-- who lived in Maryland as a
doctor, and actually he does have a really interesting diary.
I'll be reading a couple of sections from it,
but he's not the founder, tough break for Alexander
Hamilton.
Okay.
So in 1744, he decided to take a trip north from Maryland for
his health, and that's when he keeps this
sort of a travel diary, and in it he recorded his
observations with a lot of detail,
as you'll hear, that show a lot about habits of
behavior and thought in the colonies or certain--
and they also will show a lot, as you'll see,
about Mr. Hamilton, but also they sort of show you
what he saw through the lens of him--but still they'll give you
a sense of some trends.
Okay.
And I'll--Actually, I'll add here one little brief
point, and that is I'm--in a sense
this is touching on something that I'm going to be focusing on
in Thursday's lecture-- and that's the idea that to
many people-- and you'll hear it sort of
underlying what he's saying here--
to many people, their individual colony really
was what felt to them like their country,
and people often referred to--Jefferson called Virginia
"my country" well into the 1790s,
if not beyond.
So you'll be hearing how people really feel about their colony
versus those other foreign colonies,
that people often felt as though they were different
countries with strange habits and weird speech patterns,
so you'll kind of hear that, beneath what I'm going to read
here by Hamilton.
Okay.
So one thing that Hamilton wrote about in his diary shows
the impact of the Great Awakening.
During the time that he was traveling,
which is the 1740s, the colonies were actually
right in the middle of the Great Awakening,
which was this really vast religious revival that really
swept through the colonies, and in the course of Hamilton's
travels he said he could always tell when he came across a
revivalist because they always had a really dour expression on
their face as though they were just about to ask you to repent
for your sins.
So he says at one point he came across one of these revivalists.
He said the fellow was named Mr. Thomas Quiet and,
as Hamilton put it in his diary: "This fellow I
observed had a particular down-hanging look,
which made me suspect" that he is one of the
revivalists.
"I guessed right, for he introduced a
discourse" concerning George Whitefield,
who is the renowned preacher of the Great Awakening.
He traveled throughout the colonies preaching,
and in a lot of ways he was sort of the guiding force behind
this Great Awakening in America.
So Mr. Thomas Quiet "enlarged pretty much and
with some warmth upon the doctrines of that apostle,
speaking much in his praise.
I took upon me, in a ludicrous manner,
to impugn some of his doctrines."
Charming: he was like 'oh, well, since this means a lot to
him, I'll just make fun of it.'
"Which by degrees put Mr. Quiet in a passion."
So--and he successfully upsets Mr. Quiet.
"He told me flatly that I was damned without
redemption."
[laughter] A really fun conversation.
"I replied that I thought his name and behavior were very
incongruous, and desired him to change it
with all speed, [laughter]
for it was very improper that such an angry turbulent mortal
as he should be called by the name of Thomas Quiet."
Okay.
This tells you a lot about Alexander [laughter]
Hamilton.
It just--As you'll hear, he doesn't sound like a really
charming fellow, but certainly that passage
gives you a sense of the sort of religiosity that marked this
particular period.
Okay.
So sometime later, Hamilton met three men from
Pennsylvania and he decided he was going to treat them to punch
in an off-roads tavern.
Now to Hamilton, as you'll hear,
clearly these three men were not gentlemen or certainly he
assumed that they were beneath him.
As he noted in his diary: One of them seemed to have to
think really, really hard about every word
that came out of his mouth.
One of them was "profuse in compliments,
which were generally blunt, and came out in an awkward
manner," and the third one was a
"very roughspun, forward, clownish blade,
much addicted to swearing, at the same time desirous to
pass for a gentleman, notwithstanding which ambition,
the conscientiousness of his natural boorishness obliged him
frequently to frame ill-timed apologies for his misbehaviour,
which he termed frankness and freeness.
It was often," quote, "Damn me,
gentlemen, excuse me; I am a plain, honest fellow;
all is right down plain-dealing,
by God."
So he manages to apologize and swear in the same sentence,
which is pretty tricky.
Now that fellow --that Hamilton refers to as the sort of odd
cursing fellow-- went on to curse Sir Robert
Walpole, who was a recent British Prime
Minister, as a rascal,
and as Hamilton put it: "We asked him his reasons
for cursing Sir Robert but he would give us no other"
than this, "that he was certainly
informed by some very good gentlemen who understood the
thing right well, that the said Sir Robert was a
damn rogue," so he must be.
[laughs] 'Well, important gentlemen have
told me he was and thus he must be,
and I will now quote it to anyone I meet in random taverns
by the side of the road.'
So here you see three average people trying clearly,
or at least to Hamilton, trying clearly to impress or
please him in some way.
Clearly, he is sort of snarkily feeling as though he's above
them in social status.
His tavern companions feel a little bit awkward.
They're apologizing all the time and saying,
'Well, I'm just a plain speaker,' all of which Hamilton
clearly finds amusing.
And this anecdote suggests two things.
First it shows people of different social ranks obviously
socializing, and shows several,
well, what Hamilton would have considered common folk trying
to, in his mind, pass for gentlemen.
But second, you see a group of people who all perceive
differences in status on all sides.
So they're hanging out together, but they also
understand that there's a little bit of a difference that's
making them feel somewhat awkward.
Okay.
So at another tavern--So Hamilton's going tavern to
tavern I guess in this portion of the trip.
At another tavern he said he dined "with a very mixed
company of different nations and religions.
There were Scots, English, Dutch,
Germans," Irish,
"Roman Catholicks, Churchmen,
Presbyterians, Quakers, Newlightmen,
Methodists, Seventhdaymen, Moravians,
Anabaptists, and one Jew."
[laughter] I like the fact that he counted
that one guy.
So obviously here you see diversity,
great diversity of all kinds--religious diversity,
ethnic diversity--which also represents something that was
typical of the colonies in a general way,
though more in some places than in others.
And actually Pennsylvania, which is where I think he is at
this point, was known at the time for being particularly
diverse.
One last anecdote.
So at one point he--Hamilton says he ended up in a
conversation with some Pennsylvanians about how low
Maryland was in comparison with Pennsylvania,
which clearly was a much better colony.
As Hamilton put it, the Pennsylvanians
"enlarged upon the immorality,
drunkenness, rudeness, and immoderate
swearing, so much practiced in Maryland,
and added that no such vices were to be found in
Pennsylvania.
I heard this and contradicted it not, because I knew that the
first part of the proposition was pretty true."
He's like, [laughs] 'yeah, we are drunk and we do
swear a lot and we're rude in Maryland so, okay.
I think that's true.'
[laughter] "But what appeared most
comical in their criticism was their making a merit of the
stoniness of the roads."
As one put it: "'One may ride ...
fifty miles in Maryland and not see as many stones upon the
roads as fifty paces of roads in Pennsylvania.'
This I knew to be false, but as I thought there was no
advantage in stony roads, I ...
let them take the honour of it to themselves,
and did not contradict them."
Now to me, one of the interesting things about this
anecdote: It makes me think about almost a century later
when we're talking about de Tocqueville,
and he's wandering around America talking with random
Americans, and one of the things that
drives him a little bit nuts is that no matter what American he
talks to, no matter where he is,
the American always tells him how everything is best in
America, better than anywhere else in
the world.
So what Tocqueville is witnessing in the middle of
the-- towards the middle of the
nineteenth century is national pride,
and what you're seeing here is a close equivalent,
but obviously it's colonial pride.
It's pride in your own individual colony.
And in a sense, again, it's a reminder that
people are seeing their colony as their country.
So in all of these little--these snapshots,
these anecdotes--we've seen a few things about life in the
colonies.
We've seen religiosity and the impact of the Great Awakening;
we've seen diversity of all types, sometimes at one dinner
table; we've seen a middling society;
and we've seen how people saw their own colony as their own
country and in a sense other colonies as other countries.
To varying degrees in all of the colonies,
all of these things were characteristic.
So with that introduction, I want to turn now to really
look at what was different about the American colonies.
Why were people here different?
Why was life here different from what it would have been
like to be a British subject back in England?
So that's going to be what I mainly address for the rest of
the lecture, and I'm going to talk about it by focusing on
three different points.
Point number one: I'm going to talk a little bit
about the distinctive character of the people who migrated to
the colonies.
It gives you such a sense of power when you're lecturing and
you say, "There are three
reasons" and the entire room goes:
"Oh."
[laughter] "Three.
There are three."
So there are three.
So number one is the distinctive character of the
people who migrated to the colonies.
Number two is the distinctive conditions of life in British
America,--and that point I'll talk about for the longest.
And then number three is the nature of British colonial
administration.
And I'll repeat that: the distinctive character of
the people who migrated to the colonies,
the distinctive conditions of life in British North America,
and the nature of British colonial administration.
So let's start off first by looking at that first category
of difference, the character of the people who
migrated to the colonies-- and, as you'll see,
in some ways a distinctive kind of person migrated to the
colonies-- or at least tended to--in ways
that will make perfect sense.
So for one thing--and in a way this sounds obvious once you
think about it--people who migrated to the colonies tended
to be risk-takers.
These were people who were willing to take a risk.
They were willing to make the hazardous passage across the
sea, put themselves at a distance of
several months' travel from everything that they knew,
and start life anew in what they assumed to be some kind of
a wilderness.
They were people who wanted something, maybe to better their
condition, and they weren't afraid to act on that desire,
to reach for it.
Obviously, these are people who are going to be pretty
independent and they were often people who didn't simply accept
the status quo.
Now all of these are really big, broad generalizations,
but as big and broad as they are, you can see in a general
sense that people who are deciding to migrate in this way
-- certainly, many of them would
have shared some of these characteristics to some degree.
And, as we're going to see in the next few weeks,
in a general way this spirit ran through all of the colonies,
this sort of sense of really being willing to push for what
you wanted.
In the Old World, naturally enough,
things were more tradition-bound.
In the New World, just by deciding to go to the
colonies, you were already breaking with
tradition and behaving differently from the average
British subject.
So if you put this different sort of person in a different
kind of environment, as in the colonies,
you begin to understand the slow creation of something that
ends up being a kind of colonial American mindset or mentality.
And this brings us to my second category of differences in the
colonies, which is: the conditions of life in
British North America.
You have a different kind of person.
Now you're putting them in a different kind of living
situation-- and there were a number of
things that were different about living conditions in the
colonies.
First, as I mentioned last time, more people owned land in
the colonies.
There was a lot of land, "empty land,"
some of it actually empty land, some of it land owned by
Indians that people considered to be "empty,"
but there was more land that was certainly accessible to
settlers in the colonies.
So these risk-taking types who came to the colonies could get
land and set up their own farms a lot more easily than they
could in England, which gave more people a more
independent lifestyle in the colonies,
and a sense meant they could be and maybe were raising
themselves up in the world in a way that might not have been as
easy to do back in England.
A second difference in living conditions involved voting and
political participation, because logically enough and
generally speaking, landholding and the vote went
hand in hand, the idea being in the colonies
that you should only let people vote who were really invested in
a community, and landholders are pretty
literally invested in their communities.
So in the colonies where you have a lot--a much larger number
of landholders, you have a much wider franchise
than in England.
So an example of that: In the 1760s in England,
roughly twenty percent of white men had the vote.
In the colonies, roughly sixty to eighty percent
of white men had the vote depending on the colony,
which is a pretty big difference.
And that one fact alone represents a big shift in
mindset.
In the colonies you had lots of landholders who knew that they
had the right to be directly involved in the political
process.
Equally important, not only were more people able
to be active in the political process,
but the process in which they were taking part was really
localized, so people felt able to
understand and effect that process.
A lot of times you knew--or at least perhaps had met--
many of the people that held government offices--
and elections could be won or lost by just a handful of votes.
Now when I first taught this course,
that always used to be an amazing fact,
'well, an election could be lost by a handful of votes,' and
somehow in the last ten years that doesn't seem amazing
anymore.
[laughs] We do that all the time now.
I don't know why that happens.
Okay.
So I want to look for just a couple of minutes at how voting
actually worked in the colonies, and it varies from colony to
colony, so again I'm talking in a
general kind of a way here.
Elections first of all --and this is generally true in all of
the colonies-- they had to take place over the
course of a few days, because people were often
traveling from very far away to get to a polling place.
And once they got there, because it was such a big deal
for people to get to a polling place,
they generally discovered what in essence was a kind of a fair.
Election Day was a big sort of celebration day.
There were a lot of people mulling about.
There was a lot happening.
There was a lot of alcohol.
The alcohol was provided by the candidates.
[laughter] 'Here.
You must vote for me.'
[laughs] 'Have another.'
And the candidates themselves would have been present,
helping to pour, and mingling with prospective
voters.
Now a couple of years ago--I knew this fact for myself.
I hadn't ever sort of thought about how it played out,
and then a couple of years ago I was researching in the
Virginia Historical Society.
I was of course looking for something else,
but what I came across was a bunch of documents that clearly
involved some kind of legal dispute that broke out because
of a problem on one of the election days in Virginia.
And apparently what happened was, the brother of one of the
candidates showed up with a pack of his friends,
drank a lot, got really drunk and then stood
at the door of the polling place with guns and threatened to
shoot anyone who didn't vote for the brother of the guy standing
there.
[laughter] 'Don't vote for my brother,
you die.'
A strong persuasive component.
So obviously, at least in that election,
you had drinking, celebrating,
and guns, which is a bad combination,
[laughter]-- but elections were really kind
of rowdy occasions.
Now what that kind of hints of, that sort of 'door persuasion,'
is that actually, once you went in to the polling
place, assuming that you weren't shot
first, there were no secret ballots.
You actually stepped to the front of the room,
there usually was a table, at the table were sitting the
candidates and maybe some official,
perhaps a local sheriff, and you declared who you voted
for in front of everybody and in front of the candidates.
So one example actually from a document from the time period:
We're in Virginia and one voter, a Mr. Blair,
came forward to this table in the front of the room,
a candidate on each side of the table,
the sheriff in the middle, and the sheriff says,
"Sir, who do you vote for?"
and Mr. Blair says, "Mr. Marshall,"
and Mr. Marshall responds, "Your vote is appreciated,
Mr. Blair."
It's a very personal exchange.
The next voter, a Mr. Buchanan,
is asked the same question and he says that he votes for
Mr. Clapton and Mr. Clapton responds, "Mr. Buchanan,
I shall treasure that vote in my memory.
It will be regarded as a feather in my cap forever."
[laughter] That's such a politician,
[laughs] Isn't it?
Already you can hear.
So obviously this is a very personal process in which
certainly you could feel some pressure to vote a certain way.
It's actually a surprisingly long period of time before
people figure out that maybe ballots are a great idea;
maybe voting in person is not so good.
Okay.
So you've got more land holding in the colonies,
which leads to a broader franchise in the colonies.
You have voters taking part in a very localized,
immediate political process.
Another significant difference in colonial conditions of life
connects with something that I had mentioned briefly on
Thursday, and that's the nature of the
colonial social structure.
As I mentioned last week, you did have an elite in the
colonies, but the proportions of elite and laboring people was
different.
In England, half of the population roughly was of the
laboring class, people who did not own land and
labored for others.
And the other half of the population--which included small
farmers and gentry and nobility--owned most of the
land.
In the colonies, two-thirds of the white men
owned land or businesses-- again, which gives you a sense
of why the colonies are often known as a sort of middling
society.
Also in the colonies there wasn't such a stark contrast
between the top and the bottom of the social spectrum.
So in England, you had the royal Court and the
courtiers and opulence and court ritual and sort of kowtowing to
the King at the very top of the social spectrum.
Obviously, the colonies did not have something like that.
They did have royal governors, and certainly royal governors
lived in fine style in comparison with others,
and there was certainly a distinction between average
people and gentlemen, but the contrast between
governors and farmers was nowhere near the extreme
contrast between a member of the entrenched British nobility and
a landless commoner.
So in America the spectrum--It's like the top and
the bottom of that spectrum have been sort of lopped off and
what's in between is a little bit more pliable.
So more landholding, broader franchise and
everything that that entails, more of a middling society,
and now yet another colonial difference that I hinted about
at the start of today's lecture: the fact that several
generations of colonists had lived and died in the colonies
having never been to England.
By the mid-eighteenth century you had a colonial society full
of people who often had no actual personal tie to England
except an emotional tie, and I talked about those
emotional ties last week.
So just think about this comparison.
The length of time between the first settlement at Jamestown
and the Declaration of Independence is roughly the same
as the length of time between the Declaration of Independence
and World War II.
Okay.
We tend to collapse all of early America into one big blob
of early America, and we assume it's a kind of a
small blob, but if you think about that,
Declaration of Independence to World War II,
Jamestown to the Declaration of Independence,
we are talking about a broad expanse of time.
So these people, or at least many of them,
are truly British Americans at this point.
Colonists were also not Britons in yet another way--
another distinctive feature of colonial society--
and that's again something I referred to at the beginning,
and that's the great ethnic and religious diversity.
As our friend, Mr.***Hamilton, or Dr.***Hamilton, was noting,
there were immigrants from Germany,
Scotland, Ireland, there were Quakers,
there were Roman Catholics, Congregationalists,
and then later on Methodists and Baptists.
So generally speaking, it's a reasonably pluralistic
society with a relatively high tolerance for diversity,
although New Englanders in some ways,
particularly in early colonial times,
are a little bit less tolerant.
Related to this diversity is yet another colonial
distinction, and that's the religiosity in
the colonies, which is really heightened by
the Great Awakening, which was roughly from the
1730s to the 1760s.
Now I've said that, but what I really want to also
point out: I'm not saying that the Great Awakening is a purely
colonial phenomenon, because it isn't.
And as a matter of fact it spread to the colonies from
England and from Ireland, but its impact on the colonies
would be different when you combined it with some of the
other things that were distinctive about colonial
society and life as I'm talking about here.
Now we can have a little Yale moment here.
I'm always looking for a Yale moment.
This is a little Yale moment, because Jonathan Edwards is
someone of importance in the spread of the Great Awakening.
His preaching really sparked the New England branch of the
Great Awakening.
Edwards preached that God was wrathful,
that endless torture awaited the sinner,
but God was also loving and wanted sinners to convert and
turn towards God's love and, most important,
you could choose heaven or hell depending on whether you chose
to repent.
And I can't resist--Whenever I get to this part of the course,
I can't resist offering a little snippet of one of
Edwards' most famous sermons, which is Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God.
How many of you have read?
A good number of you have read.
That's a great sermon, 1741.
I can't resist giving you your own Great Awakening moment
because that means I get to actually be Edwards for a little
bit and offer you the wrath of God,
so I will offer you a tiny snippet from Edwards' sermon.
I think it's different when you hear it from when you read it.
"The God that holds you over the pit of hell,
much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the
fire, abhors you and is dreadfully
provoked.
His wrath towards you burns like fire.
He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into
the fire.
He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight.
You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the
most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
You have offended him infinitely more than ever a
stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his
hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.
It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell
the last night, that you were suffered to awake
again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep,
and there was no other reason to be given why you have not
dropped into hell since you arose this morning and that
God's-- but that God's hand has held
you up.
There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to
hell since you have sat here.
Oh, sinner, consider the fearful danger you are in.
You hang by a slender thread with the flames of divine wrath
flashing about it, ready every moment to singe it
and burn it asunder, and you have no interest in any
mediator and nothing to lay hold of save yourself,
nothing to keep off the flames of wrath,
nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever
done, nothing that you can do to
induce God to spare you one moment."
I think--wow, that's sermonizing.
That's "pow" in-your-face sermonizing.
So that, kind of, is the core of the Great
Awakening, right?
This belief in the sinfulness and helplessness of humankind
and the possibility of redemption if you individually
make the choice and repent.
And as suggested by Edwards' sermon, there were often some
tearful emotional conversions at the big camp meetings that took
place at this time.
And I actually have an eyewitness account of a camp
meeting, which I offer you partly
because, as you'll see, there's an aspect of it which I
consider truly ridiculous.
But it's offered by Benjamin Franklin,
which I also think is interesting, and you'll see the
Enlightenment and the Great Awakening come up right against
each other in this little passage.
Franklin actually is in Pennsylvania and he says he sees
Whitefield preaching to a crowd.
As he describes it, "In 1739 arrived among us
from Ireland the Reverend Mr. Whitefield,
who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher.
He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches;
but the clergy, taking a dislike to him,
soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in
the fields.
The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his
sermons were enormous, and it was a matter of
speculation to me, who was of that number,
to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his
hearers and how much they admired and respected him,
notwithstanding his common abuse of them,
by assuring them that they were naturally "half beasts and
half devils."
Being among the crowd, "being among the hindmost
of the crowd"-- so he's towards the back of the
crowd" -- "I had the curiosity to
learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards ..."
Okay.
So now Franklin says, 'I wonder how far I could back
away and still hear him preaching.'
Clearfully -- Clearly, at this moment,
he's not really thinking about the message.
So I backed away "towards the river,
and I found his voice distinct 'till I came near Front Street,
when some noise in the street obscured it."
And at this point you can really hear the sort of
Enlightenment come banging up against the Great Awakening.
"Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance
should be the radius," [laughter]
"and that it was filled with auditors,
to each of whom I allowed two square feet.
I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty
thousand.
This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having
preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields,
and to the histories of generals haranguing whole armies
of which I had sometimes doubted."
So he computes out the radius, an area.
Wow.
You can actually be preaching to 30,000 people.
Now, that said, Franklin says by the end of the
sermon--when clearly there was a collection plate that was going
to be passed around--Franklin said,
"I first silently resolved he should get nothing from me.
I had in my pocket a handful of copper money,
three or four silver dollars and five gold pieces.
As he proceeded, I began to soften and concluded
to give the copper.
Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and
determined me to give the silver;
and he finished so admirably that I emptied my whole pocket
into the dish, gold and all."
So even Franklin sort of has to admire and ultimately contribute
to what's going on there.
So even this sort of true man of the Enlightenment found
himself affected by this oratory.
Okay.
So what was the impact of such Great Awakening sentiment in the
colonies?
Well, in part, given the distinctive state of
affairs in the colonies, it suggested to people that
they had the personal ability to change their lives through their
own free will.
It was personally empowering, and in that sense it was sort
of a democratizing force.
I almost hesitated when I was writing this to use the word
"democratizing" because I didn't want to be--
As I mentioned on that first day, you put the
"democracy" word out there and all kinds of
lights go off, but I just couldn't think of a
better word, so democratizing I'll stick
with.
Also, the Great Awakening preached spiritual equality,
and included women, African Americans and the
poor-- and the power of making
choices, though the impact of that,
as we'll see, might not have been so great.
Plus it was an anti-authoritarian force led by
unorthodox preachers and people not attached to an established
church.
So we have here a mix of individualism and personal
empowerment and throw in an emotional sort of righteousness.
That's a really kind of a heady mixture of feelings and ideas
that would eventually help to encourage a real spirit of
political resistance.
Okay.
I'm going to mention a few more basic things about colonial life
that were different from England.
Very quickly.
First, the realities of living on a frontier,
which not only fostered a sense of independence,
but also a sense of community, partly in a defensive way
because of fears about Indians and because of the difficulties
of forging a homestead or creating a community.
On a more positive side, colonists generally had
healthier living conditions than in England.
Food was plentiful, there were plenty of open
spaces, and you can actually see this
concretely when you look at the average size of an English man
and an English woman and a colonial man and colonial woman
towards the turn-- the middle of the eighteenth
century.
Basically, the average size of an Englishman in the middle of
the eighteenth century was 5 foot 6.
And the--This made me happy.
The average size of an English woman was 5 feet,
which is basically me.
[laughs] It makes me so happy to think
there's a time when I was average height.
I feel so tall.
However, colonial men and women on average tended to be a couple
of inches taller.
So you could see--plentiful food, wide-open spaces--
actually people are healthier and bigger,
which was true also among soldiers as a matter of fact,
which was interesting; you could see it.
This brings us to the third major category of things that
contributed to the difference--differences in being
a British American colonist.
So we have the type of person who migrated;
we just had a whole bunch of living conditions in the
colonies.
This is the third category, which is the nature of the
British administration of the colonies,
which, as I mentioned last week, was kind of light-handed,
so colonial government and society could develop in ways
that Britain might not necessarily have desired or even
recognized.
One of the most striking effects of this lack of imperial
control was the power of the typical colonial legislature.
Left alone, the colonists developed strong legislatures
which often were full of very contentious individuals who felt
entitled and compelled to fight for their rights,
or what I discussed last week, their English liberties.
Some of these colonial legislatures were so strong that
they often won battles against royal governors--
battles that were not taken much note of by the Crown at the
time, because the Crown wasn't
administering to the colonies very closely.
And in fact, by the 1760s most of the
colonies had in place all of the conditions necessary to be
self-governing states.
They had elective assemblies and other institutions of local
government, and these institutions had
broad powers over the internal affairs of the colonies.
They had a reservoir of political leaders drawn from the
elite.
And colonists recognized and were jealous of their power of
self-government, and were not shy about fighting
royal officials for this power.
So by the 1760s, there's a lot of things in
place for these colonies, in a sense, to be
self-governing, although obviously they were
not already.
So in summary, what does all of this add up
to?
What do I mean when I refer to being a British American?
Well, we've talked about a tradition of voicing opinions
and grievances.
We've talked about a sense of entitlement to owning property
and land.
We've talked about assumptions about active participation in
the political process.
We've talked about a willingness to take risks and
fight for what you wanted.
We've talked about an independent spirit and jealousy
about your independence.
And we've talked about relative tolerance of ethnic and
religious diversity.
You can hear this sort of mixture of things in a comment
by a British officer in the colonies during the French and
Indian War.
And he observed and wrote back home, "'Tis the nature of
this people to do all in their power to pull down every legal
authority.
There is no law prevailing at present here."
That's a little bit of an exaggeration I would say--but
another arrogant British quote.
I always do lots of arrogant British quotes.
"There is no law prevailing at present here,
that I have met with, but the rule every man pleases
to lay down to himself.
Every man insists upon following the dictates of his
own will without control."
A little bit of an exaggeration,
but you can see certainly what he feels like he's seeing as
compared with what he knows from back in England.
Or as a member of the Massachusetts legislature put
it, "Our people were not calculated to be kept in any
particular service.
They soon grow troublesome and uneasy by reflecting upon their
folly" by-- "in bringing themselves
into a state of subjection when they might have continued free
and independent."
Now that sounds like a sort of wonderful thing,
impressive, admirable, like 'oh, our people are--
they like to be independent and if they commit to something,
they're not happy about that commitment,
because they think--wow, I could have been free and
independent; what have I done?'
The problem with that is: try putting a bunch of those
people into an army and then expecting them to stay in it for
a long period of time.
George Washington was not a happy camper for part--
a good part of the Revolution because he was stuck with a lot
of soldiers who had that point of view--
like, 'Well, I'll do this for a little while
and then I'll leave.
Bye.
" And so it's kind of hard to command that kind of an army,
as we'll see, and--I guess I can't say I'm
proud to say-- Connecticut was a problem.
[laughs] Connecticut--as we'll see,
Connecticut had issues; Rhode Island too.
I think I mentioned that in the first lecture,
but Connecticut too.
Soldiers particularly had problems wanting to stick
around, but that was a general problem
as well, the sort of spirit of
independence and 'I've done what I wanted to do;
I'm going to now do something different.'
So we've looked at being a British colonist.
We've looked at being a British American.
The next step that we're going to be taking on Thursday is
going to be looking at intercolonial relations--
looking at how the colonies felt about each other,
looking at how the colonies interacted with each other,
how they felt about each other, what their sense was of any
kind of cooperation or union between these sort of
colony-states.
And by the end of Thursday's lecture, we're going to see the
first glimmers of tension with the passage of the Stamp Act.
So by the end of the next lecture--You can see why,
when I mentioned in that first lecture that there was someone
in-- when I first taught this
course--who raised his hand, probably at the end of this
lecture, and said, "Where are the
dates?," that we've had two lectures
without a lot of dates, but the Stamp Act--We have an
actual concrete thing coming on Thursday [laughs]
and then actual events of the Revolution.
But hopefully with these three lectures you have some kind of a
sense of the-- sort of--foundation of where
we're working from, as we're now going to show
people basically getting upset, working themselves a logic of
resistance, and then acting on that logic.
I think it's important obviously to understand where
the colonists were coming from before you plunge right in to
seeing them rebelling against what they've had and for
something else.
But I think certainly in these two first lectures,
you do get a sense of some of the ways in which the colonies
were prepared to resist, or maybe predisposed to resist,
and some of the reasons why it took actually,
as you'll see, a pretty long time for the
colonists to decide to actually rebel--
that it took a while.
People sort of let go, finger by finger,
of the British Empire.
They let go, piece by piece,
until finally they felt that there was no alternative except
a revolution.
I will end there.
I will see you on Thursday.
If you have questions, come up and see me now at the
end of class or e-mail them to me and I will see you on
Thursday.