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The book argues that all eighteenth-century farmers sought first and foremost to provide basic subsistence for their families. The first aim of all farmers was self-provisioning. Even large planters who exported tobacco or wheat and purchased luxuries sought to provision themselves with their own labor on their own land. All farmers also engaged in trade to obtain what they could not make for themselves. They were subsistence and market farmers at the same time. Besides providing for themselves year by year, farmers hoped to set up their children on farms. With older children coming into the workforce, farmers could acquire enough to provide for those children as they left the family. Tragically, family farming with its assurance of security required ever more land, resulting in the relentless expulsion of Native Americans from their possessions. Within this basic North American farming system, agricultural regimens differed greatly from section to section. Slavery prevailed from Georgia to Maryland because warm winters allowed farmers to use their work force all year around, justifying the cost of slaves. From Pennsylvania northward, farmers relied on family or on cottagers who could be dismissed in winter.The cultural and political division between North and South corresponded to the contours of the climate-based growing season. This agricultural system changed little until after 1800, when the growing urban populations motivated farmers to develop new and more profitable crops. Farmers benefited from expanding markets which enabled them to purchase the goods necessary to achieve middle-class respectability. Although gradually eroded, self-provisioning persisted until after World War II, when it was largely abandoned.

This book explores Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, he combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. The author treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad. Drawing on archival research, he examines such themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, and freedom and slavery. In each case, the author shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society. The book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.

This book discusses John Davenport, cofounder of the colony of New Haven, who has been neglected in studies that view early New England primarily from a Massachusetts viewpoint. It restores the importance of clergyman by examining his crucial role as an advocate for religious reform in England and the Netherlands before his emigration, his engagement with an international community of scholars and clergy, and his significant contributions to colonial America. The author shows that Davenport was in many ways a remarkably progressive leader for his time, with a strong commitment to education for both women and men, a vibrant interest in new science, and a dedication to upholding democratic principles in churches at a time when many other Puritan clergymen were emphasizing the power of their office above all else. This biography of an important figure in New England history provides a unique perspective on the seventeenth-century transatlantic Puritan movement.

This book examines the physical objects found in elite Virginia households of the eighteenth century to discover what they can tell us about their owners' lives and religious practices. The author looks closely at punch bowls, needlework, mourning jewelry, baptismal gowns, biscuit molds, cookbooks, and many other items, illuminating the ways Anglicanism influenced daily activities and attitudes in colonial Virginia, particularly in the households of the gentry. In the highly laicized environment that was Virginia's Anglican Church, laypeople not only adapted English forms of church governance to the new Virginia environment. The book also focuses on religious education and girls' education, both of which were highly charged issues in eighteenth-century Virginia. It further examines the Anglicans' sturdy defences of liturgical prayer, their concomitant critiques of more self-reflexive prayers that had softened, and their prayerful sensibilities, which had begun to encompass both traditional liturgy and the more subjective prayer associated with evangelicalism by the last decade of the century.

This book traces the history of Shawnee nation-building and diaspora through the era of European colonialism and state-making in North America. Focusing on Native American politics, it argues that the Shawnee people created two competing strategies for coping with the colonial invasion. In the late seventeenth century the shockwaves of the European intrusion scattered the Shawnees from their Ohio Valley homelands across eastern North America. This diaspora taught many Shawnees to rely on mobility and flexible community fissions to survive in the colonial world. Others, however, came to see dispersal as dangerous and began to seek security from broader national cooperation. They built institutions of collective decision-making and developed a notion of a shared Shawnee country where the entire nation could gather together. The book reveals that these strategies were based on two competing and continually evolving visions of society, peoplehood, and space. Neither vision was more or less “traditional” than the other. Both stemmed from cultural ideas, social structures, and political philosophies that were unquestionably old; yet the Shawnees constantly reworked these roots creatively in new settings. This book, then, encourages historians to pay serious attention to dynamic political thinking and debates in Native American societies and to explore how such thinking and debates shaped the interactions between Indians and Euroamericans. It argues that understanding Native American political ideologies and strategies as creative and powerful forces is essential for understanding American history.

In the years prior to the American Revolution, George Whitefield was the most famous man in the colonies. This biography explores the extraordinary career of the most influential figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity, examining his sometimes troubling stands on the pressing issues of the day, both secular and spiritual, and his relationships with such famous contemporaries as Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley. Based on studies of Whitefield's original sermons, journals, and letters, this history chronicles the phenomenal rise of the trailblazer of the Great Awakening. Whitefield's leadership role among the new evangelicals of the eighteenth century and his many religious disputes are meticulously covered, as are his major legacies and the permanent marks he left on evangelical Christian faith.

This book is a biography of one of the most colorful and least well-known of the founding fathers. A plain-spoken, racy patrician who distrusted democracy but opposed slavery and championed freedom for all minorities, an important player in the American Revolution, later an astute critic of the French Revolution. Gouverneur Morris remains an enigma among the founding generation. This biography tells his robust story, including his celebrated love affairs during his long stay in Europe. Morris's public record is astonishing. One of the leading figures of the Constitutional Convention, he put the Constitution in its final version, including its opening Preamble. As Washington's first minister to Paris, he became America's most effective representative in France. A successful, international entrepreneur, he understood the dynamics of commerce in the modern world. Frankly cosmopolitan, he embraced city life as a creative center of civilization and had a central role in the building of the Erie Canal and in laying out the urban grid plan of Manhattan. The book describes Morris's many contributions, talents, sophistication, and wit, as well as his romantic liaisons, free habits, and free speech. It brings to life a fascinating man of great stature, a founding father who receives his due at last.

On America's western frontier, myths of prosperity concealed the brutal conditions endured by women, slaves, orphans, and the poor. As poverty and unrest took root in eighteenth-century Kentucky, western lawmakers championed ideas about whiteness, manhood, and patriarchal authority to help stabilize a politically fractious frontier. This book combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging narrative to examine how conditions in Kentucky facilitated the expansion of rights for white men in ways that would become a model for citizenship in the country as a whole.

Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696–1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order’s only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright’s life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.

During the early eighteenth century, colonial New England witnessed the end of Puritanism and the emergence of a revivalist religious movement that culminated in the evangelical awakenings of the 1740s. This book explores the religious history of New England during the period and offers new reasons for this change in cultural identity. After England's Glorious Revolution, New Englanders abandoned their previous hostility toward Britain, viewing it as the chosen leader in the Protestant fight against world Catholicism. They also imagined themselves as part of an international Protestant community and replaced their Puritan beliefs with a revival-centered pan-Protestantism. The book discusses the rise of “the Protestant interest,” and provides a compelling argument about the origins of both eighteenth-century revivalism and the global evangelical movement.

This book sets the story of American independence within a long and fierce clash over the political and economic future of the British Empire. The book traces this decades-long debate, which pitted neighbors and countrymen against one another, from the War of Austrian Succession to the end of the American Revolution. As people from Boston to Bengal grappled with the growing burdens of imperial rivalry and fantastically expensive warfare, some argued that austerity and new colonial revenue were urgently needed to rescue Britain from unsustainable taxes and debts. Others insisted that Britain ought to treat its colonies as relative equals and promote their prosperity. Drawing from archival research in the United States, Britain, and France, this book shows how disputes over taxation, public debt, and inequality sparked the American Revolution, and reshaped the British Empire.

This book explores U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas from the American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War. It shows how U.S. citizens engaged in multiple forms of participation in the slave trade and how these forms changed over time. The book discusses the emergence of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of independence and its quick dismantling in the early nineteenth century. It then looks at the forms of U.S. participation in a highly internationalized contraband slave trade that supplied captives to Brazil and Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of these forms of U.S. participation resonated in the U.S. public sphere, contributing to growing tensions around the slavery issue in the 1850s, and in the international arena, stimulating frictions between the British Empire and the United States. This work explores these national and international tensions and the role of slave-trading networks in exploiting and prolonging them.