Introduction The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century

After the upheavals of the period of the Glorious Revolution in England (late 1680s–early 1690s), the American colonies had settled down into an uneasy truce by the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century. During the first half of the eighteenth century—or, more precisely, from about 1710 until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763—the colonies settled into a relatively stable society and form of government. Stable, relative to the swift and dramatic changes of the preceding century, when the American colonies were founded. The history of the colonies during this period can therefore be examined in a far more cross-sectional, and less chronological, manner than can the earlier century, or the dramatic and exciting pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary eras that followed.

But the first half of the eighteenth century was not only a stable time for the colonies. It also saw far greater uniformity between the separate colonies than could have been imagined in the preceding century. The diversity—of religion, of motivation, of government, of culture—between the various colonies had been enormous. What possible connection could there be between the grim Puritan theocrats of Massachusetts Bay and the tolerant, pacific, and enterprising Quakers of Pennsylvania; between the Puritans and the aristocratic landed elite of tobacco-growing Virginia; or between the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the Swedes on the Delaware? But the events and upheavals of the 1680s and 1690s had sewn, for the first time, a firm thread of uniformity throughout the colonies. The common imposition of political institutions; a common relationship to the mother country, Great Britain—these common experiences were, slowly but surely, to weld a solidarity between these once totally disparate settlements, a solidarity that would ripen. Without these unifying experiences over the first half of the century, the united effort of the American Revolution would have been impossible. Politically, virtually every colony had a royally appointed governor, an upper house, or Council, and a democratically elected lower house, or Assembly, engaged in a quiet but critical power struggle with the royal appointees. Those colonies that remained proprietary (owned by an English recipient of royal largesse)—Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—were governed very similarly, the only difference being that the governors were appointed by a proprietor instead of by the Crown. Only the anomalous self-governing colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island were exceptions to this common experience of government during the eighteenth century.

Another vital unifying factor was the spread of a concious libertarian ideology throughout the colonies during this period, influenced directly by English libertarians who engaged not only in trenchant theoretical arguments but also in a caustic and powerful critique of the political institutions within Britain itself. In the vital field of religion, the contrasting deistic movement and the Great Awakening spread throughout the colonies; if the result was a deep and long-lasting split between the rationalistic elite and the evangelical masses, still both movements served to unify the colonies by cutting across the previously disparate and contrasting religious passions of the separate colonies.

Before turning to these common experiences, which tended to unify the colonies and which set the stage, directly or indirectly, for the new nation in the latter part of the century, let us turn to a rundown of the separate colonies, which, after all, were still separate and diverse in the first half of the century.