United States

The Humid East

The largest and in some ways the most important of the bioclimatic zones, the Humid East was where the Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, a fact of central importance in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world's humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers, rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminum compounds.

Both forests and soils, however, differ considerably within this vast region. Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences result from the length and severity of winters, which determine the length of the growing season. Winter, obviously, differs according to latitude, so that the Humid East is sliced into four great east–west bands of soils and vegetation, with progressively more amenable winters as one travels southward. These changes occur very gradually, however, and the boundaries therefore are extremely subtle.

The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga—a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the ferocious winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan's Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols—heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.

Farther south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colours. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive gray-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with humus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and a winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow covered for several months of the year.

Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region's northern boundary is one of the country's most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180–200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Throughout the South, summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie's “frosty mornings” bring a welcome respite in winter.

The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the coterminous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season—altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.

The Humid Pacific Coast

The western humid region differs from its eastern counterpart in so many ways as to be a world apart. Much smaller, it is crammed into a narrow littoral belt to the windward of the Sierra–Cascade summit, dominated by mild Pacific air, and chopped by irregular topography into an intricate mosaic of climatic and biotic habitats. Throughout the region rainfall is extremely seasonal, falling mostly in the winter half of the year. Summers are droughty everywhere, but the main regional differences come from the length of drought—from about two months in humid Seattle, Wash., to nearly five months in semiarid San Diego, Calif.

Western Washington, Oregon, and northern California lie within a zone that climatologists call Marine West Coast. Winters are raw, overcast, and drizzly—not unlike northwestern Europe—with subfreezing temperatures restricted mainly to the mountains, upon which enormous snow accumulations produce local alpine glaciers. Summers, by contrast, are brilliantly cloudless, cool, and frequently foggy along the West Coast and somewhat warmer in the inland valleys. This mild marine climate produces some of the world's greatest forests of enormous straight-boled evergreen trees that furnish the United States with much of its commercial timber. Mature soils are typical of humid midlatitude forestlands, a moderately leached gray-brown podzol.

Toward the south, with diminishing coastal rain the moist marine climate gradually gives way to California's tiny but much-publicized Mediterranean regime. Although mountainous topography introduces a bewildering variety of local environments, scanty winter rains are quite inadequate to compensate for the long summer drought, and much of the region has a distinctly arid character. For much of the year, cool, stable Pacific air dominates the West Coast, bringing San Francisco its famous fogs and Los Angeles its infamous smoggy temperature inversions. Inland, however, summer temperatures reach blistering levels, so that in July, while Los Angeles expects a normal daily maximum of 83 °F (28 °C), Fresno expects 100 °F (38 °C) and is climatically a desert. As might be expected, Mediterranean California contains a huge variety of vegetal habitats, but the commonest perhaps is the chaparral, a drought-resistant, scrubby woodland of twisted hard-leafed trees, picturesque but of little economic value. Chaparral is a pyrophytic (fire-loving) vegetation—i.e., under natural conditions its growth and form depend on regular burning. These fires constitute a major environmental hazard in the suburban hills above Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay, especially in autumn, when hot dry Santa Ana winds from the interior regularly convert brush fires into infernos. Soils are similarly varied, but most of them are light in colour and rich in soluble minerals, qualities typical of subarid soils.

The Dry West

In the United States, to speak of dry areas is to speak of the West. It covers an enormous region beyond the dependable reach of moist oceanic air, occupying the entire Intermontane area and sprawling from Canada to Mexico across the western part of the Great Plains. To Americans nurtured in the Humid East, this vast territory across the path of all transcontinental travelers has been harder to tame than any other—and no region has so gripped the national imagination as this fierce and dangerous land.

In the Dry West nothing matters more than water. Thus, though temperatures may differ radically from place to place, the really important regional differences depend overwhelmingly on the degree of aridity, whether an area is extremely dry and hence desert or semiarid and therefore steppe.

Americans of the 19th century were preoccupied by the myth of a Great American Desert, which supposedly occupied more than one-third of the entire country. True desert, however, is confined to the Southwest, with patchy outliers elsewhere, all without exception located in the lowland rain shadows of the Cordillera. Vegetation in these desert areas varies between nothing at all (a rare circumstance confined mainly to salt flats and sand dunes) to a low cover of scattered woody scrub and short-lived annuals that burst into flamboyant bloom after rains. Soils are usually thin, light-coloured, and very rich with mineral salts. In some areas wind erosion has removed fine-grained material, leaving behind desert pavement, a barren veneer of broken rock.

Most of the West, however, lies in the semiarid region, in which rainfall is scanty but adequate to support a thin cover of short bunchgrass, commonly alternating with scrubby brush. Here, as in the desert, soils fall into the large family of the pedocals, rich in calcium and other soluble minerals, but in the slightly wetter environments of the West, they are enriched with humus from decomposed grass roots. Under the proper type of management, these chestnut-coloured steppe soils have the potential to be very fertile.

Weather in the West resembles that of other dry regions of the world, often extreme, violent, and reliably unreliable. Rainfall, for example, obeys a cruel natural law: as total precipitation decreases, it becomes more undependable. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the problems of a family enticed to the arid frontier of Oklahoma during a wet period only to be driven out by the savage drought of the 1930s that turned the western Great Plains into the great American Dust Bowl. Temperatures in the West also fluctuate convulsively within short periods, and high winds are infamous throughout the region.

The Humid–Arid Transition

East of the Rockies all climatic boundaries are gradational. None, however, is so important or so imperceptibly subtle as the boundary zone that separates the Humid East from the Dry West and that alternates unpredictably between arid and humid conditions from year to year. Stretching approximately from Texas to North Dakota in an ill-defined band between the 95th and 100th meridians, this transitional region deserves separate recognition, partly because of its great size, and partly because of the fine balance between surplus and deficit rainfall, which produces a unique and valuable combination of soils, flora, and fauna. The native vegetation, insofar as it can be reconstructed, was prairie, the legendary sea of tall, deep-rooted grass now almost entirely tilled and planted to grains. Soils, often of loessial derivation, include the enormously productive chernozem (black earth) in the north, with reddish prairie soils of nearly equal fertility in the south. Throughout the region temperatures are severely continental, with bitterly cold winters in the north and scorching summers everywhere.

The western edge of the prairie fades gradually into the shortgrass steppe of the High Plains, the change a function of diminishing rainfall. The eastern edge, however, represents one of the few major discordances between a climatic and biotic boundary in the United States, for the grassland penetrates the eastern forest in a great salient across humid Illinois and Indiana. Many scholars believe this part of the prairie was artificially induced by repeated burning and consequent destruction of the forest margins by Indians.

The Western mountains

Throughout the Cordillera and Intermontane regions, irregular topography shatters the grand bioclimatic pattern into an intricate mosaic of tiny regions that differ drastically according to elevation and exposure. No small- or medium-scale map can accurately record such complexity, and mountainous parts of the West are said, noncommittally, to have a “mountain climate.” Lowlands are usually dry, but increasing elevation brings lower temperature, decreased evaporation, and—if a slope faces prevailing winds—greater precipitation. Soils vary wildly from place to place, but vegetation is fairly predictable. From the desert or steppe of intermontane valleys, a climber typically ascends into parklike savanna, then through an orderly sequence of increasingly humid and boreal forests until, if the range is high enough, one reaches the timberline and Arctic tundra. The very highest peaks are snow-capped, although permanent glaciers rarely occur outside the cool humid highlands of the Pacific Northwest.

Peirce F. Lewis

Early models of land allocation

From the beginning the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlement—to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown's grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift.

Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed in the socially cohesive towns, at least until about 1800. The relatively concentrated latter-day villages persist today as amoeba-like entities straggling along converging roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.

Creating the national domain

With the coming of independence and after complex negotiations, the original 13 states surrendered to the new national government nearly all their claims to the unsettled western lands beyond their boundaries. Some tracts, however, were reserved for disposal to particular groups. Thus, the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio gave preferential treatment to natives of Connecticut, while the military tracts in Ohio and Indiana were used as bonus payments to veterans of the American Revolution.

A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which were left within that state's jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.

The design universally followed in the new survey system (except within the French, Spanish, and Indian grants) was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth's curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.

This all-encompassing checkerboard pattern is best appreciated from an airplane window over Iowa or Kansas. There, one sees few streams or other natural features and few diagonal highways or railroads interrupting the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.

Distribution of rural lands

Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for distribution of the national domain. The most famous of these plans was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.

The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.

Patterns of farm life

During the classic period of American rural life, around 1900, the typical American lived or worked on a farm or was economically dependent upon farmers. In contrast to rural life in many other parts of the world, the farm family lived on an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbours; its property averaged less than one-quarter square mile. This farmstead varied in form and content with local tradition and economy. In particular, barn types were localized—for example, the tobacco barns of the South, the great dairy barns of Wisconsin, or the general-purpose forebay barns of southeastern Pennsylvania—as were modes of fencing. In general, however, the farmstead contained dwelling, barn, storage and sheds for small livestock and equipment, a small orchard, and a kitchen garden. A woodlot might be found in the least-accessible or least-fertile part of the farm.

Successions of such farms were connected with one another and with the towns by means of a dense, usually rectangular lattice of roads, largely unimproved at the time. The hamlets, villages, and smaller cities were arrayed at relatively regular intervals, with size and affluence determined in large part by the presence and quality of rail service or status as the county seat. But, among people who have been historically rural, individualistic, and antiurban in bias, many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings. Thus, much retail business was transacted by means of itinerant peddlers, while small shops for the fabrication, distribution, or repair of various items were often located in isolated farmsteads, as were many post offices.

Social activity also tended to be widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls; and the climactic event of the year might well be the county fair, political rally, or religious encampment—again on a rural site. Not the least symptomatic sign of the strong tendency toward spatial isolation are the countless family burial plots or community cemeteries so liberally distributed across the countryside.

Regional small-town patterns

There has been much regional variation among smaller villages and hamlets, but such phenomena have received relatively little attention from students of American culture or geography. The distinctive New England village, of course, is generally recognized and cherished: it consists of a loose clustering of white frame buildings, including a church (usually Congregationalist or Unitarian), town hall, shops, and stately homes with tall shade trees around the central green, or commons—a grassy expanse that may contain a bandstand and monuments or flowers. Derivative village forms were later carried westward to sections of the northern Midwest.

Less widely known but equally distinctive is the town morphology characteristic of the Midland, or Pennsylvanian, culture area and most fully developed in southeastern and central Pennsylvania and Piedmont Maryland. It differs totally from the New England model in density, building materials, and general appearance. Closely packed, often contiguous buildings—mostly brick, but sometimes stone, frame, or stucco—abut directly on a sidewalk, which is often paved with brick and usually thickly planted with maple, sycamore, or other shade trees. Such towns are characteristically linear in plan, have dwellings intermingled with other types of buildings, have only one or two principal streets, and may radiate outward from a central square lined with commercial and governmental structures.

The most characteristic U.S. small town is the one whose pattern evolved in the Midwest. Its simple scheme is usually based on the grid plan. Functions are rigidly segregated spatially, with the central business district, consisting of closely packed two- or three-story brick buildings, limited exclusively to commercial and administrative activity. The residences, generally set well back within spacious lots, are peripheral in location, as are most rail facilities, factories, and warehouses.

Even the modest urbanization of the small town came late to the South. Most urban functions long were spatially dispersed—almost totally so in the early Chesapeake Bay country or North Carolina—or were performed entirely by the larger plantations dominating the economic life of much of the region. When city and town began to materialize in the 19th and 20th centuries, they tended to follow the Midwestern model in layout.

Although quite limited in geographic area, the characteristic villages of the Mormon and Hispanic-American districts are of considerable interest. The Mormon settlement uncompromisingly followed the ecclesiastically imposed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four very large house lots, and the block surrounded by extremely wide streets. Those villages in New Mexico in which population and culture were derived from Old Mexico were often built according to the standard Latin-American plan. The distinctive feature is a central plaza dominated by a Roman Catholic church and encircled by low stone or adobe buildings.

Weakening of the agrarian ideal

The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Through purchase, inheritance, leasing, and other means, some of dubious legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. By the late 1980s, for example, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland and 20 percent of the cropland harvested, even though they comprised less than 3 percent of all farms. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.

The huge, heavily capitalized “neoplantation,” essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi Delta, but examples can be found in any state. There are also many smaller but intensive operations that call for large investments and advanced managerial skills. This trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population—a slump from the all-time high of some 32,000,000 in the early 20th century to about 5,000,000 in the late 1980s; but even in 1940, when farm folk still numbered more than 30,000,000, nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners.

As the agrarian population has dwindled, so too has its immediate impact lessened, though less swiftly, in economic and political matters. The rural United States, however, has been the source of many of the nation's values and images. The United States has become a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society far removed in daily life from cracker barrel, barnyard, corral, or logging camp. Although Americans have gravitated, sometimes reluctantly, to the big city, in the daydreams and assumptions that guide many sociopolitical decisions, the memory of a rapidly vanishing agrarian America is well noted. This is revealed not only in the works of contemporary novelists, poets, and painters but also throughout the popular arts: in movies, television, soap operas, folklore, country music, political oratory, and in much leisure activity.

Impact of the motor vehicle

Since about 1920 more genuine change has occurred in American rural life than during the preceding three centuries of European settlement in North America. Although the basic explanation is the profound social and technological transformations engulfing most of the world, the most immediate agent of change has been the internal-combustion engine. The automobile, truck, bus, and paved highway have more than supplanted a moribund passenger and freight railroad system. While many local rail depots have been boarded up and scores of secondary lines have been abandoned, hundreds of thousands of miles of old dirt roads have been paved, and a vast system of interstate highways has been constructed to connect major cities in a single nonstop network. The net result has been a shrinking of travel time and an increase in miles traveled for the individual driver, rural or urban.

Small towns in the United States have undergone a number of changes. Before 1970 towns near highways and urban centres generally prospered; while in the less-fortunate towns, where the residents lingered on for the sake of relatively cheap housing, downtown businesses often became extinct. From the late 1960s until about 1981 the rural and small-town population grew at a faster rate than the metropolitan population, the so-called metro–nonmetro turnaround, thus reversing more than a century of relatively greater urban growth. Subsequent evidence, however, suggests an approach toward equilibrium between the urban and rural sectors.

As Americans have become increasingly mobile, the visual aspect of rural America has altered drastically. The highway has become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to the local town or city now stretch for many miles along major roads.

Reversal of the classic rural dominance

The metropolitanization of life in the United States has not been limited to city, suburb, or exurb; it now involves most of the rural area and population. The result has been the decline of local crafts and regional peculiarities, quite visibly in such items as farm implements, fencing, silos, and housing and in commodities such as clothing or bread. In many ways, the countryside is now economically dependent on the city.

The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field, quarry, or lumber mill; and city location tends to determine patterns of rural economy rather than the reverse. During weekends and the vacation seasons, swarms of city folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs, beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts. For many large rural areas, recreation is the principal source of income and employment; and such areas as northern New England and upstate New York have become playgrounds and sylvan refuges for many urban residents.

The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. There is an increasing reliance upon distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants, and cities have gone far afield in seeking out rural disposal sites for their ever-growing volumes of garbage.

The majority of the rural population now lives within daily commuting range of a sizable city. This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while, at the same time, working part- or full-time at a city job, and it thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country. Similarly, many small towns within the shadow of a metropolis, with fewer and fewer farmers to service, have become dormitory satellites, serving residents from nearby cities and suburbs.

Classic patterns of siting and growth

Although more than 95 percent of the population was rural during the colonial period and for the first years of independence, cities were crucial elements in the settlement system from the earliest days. Boston; New Amsterdam (New York City); Jamestown, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; and Philadelphia were founded at the same time as the colonies they served. Like nearly all other North American colonial towns of consequence, they were ocean ports. Until at least the beginning of the 20th century the historical geography of U.S. cities was intimately related with that of successive transportation systems. The location of successful cities with respect to the areas they served, as well as their internal structure, was determined largely by the nature of these systems.

The colonial cities acted as funnels for the collection and shipment of farm and forest products and other raw materials from the interior to trading partners in Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa and for the return flow of manufactured goods and other locally scarce items, as well as immigrants. Such cities were essentially marts and warehouses, and only minimal attention was given to social, military, educational, or religious functions. The inadequacy and high cost of overland traffic dictated sites along major ocean embayments or river estuaries; the only pre-1800 nonports worthy of notice were Lancaster and York, both in Pennsylvania, and Williamsburg, Va. With the populating of the interior and the spread of a system of canals and improved roads, such new cities as Pittsburgh, Pa.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; and St. Louis, Mo., mushroomed at junctures between various routes or at which modes of transport were changed. Older ocean ports, such as New Castle, Del.; Newport, R.I.; Charleston, S.C.; Savannah, Ga.; and Portland, Maine, whose locations prevented them from serving large hinterlands, tended to stagnate.

From about 1850 to 1920 the success of new cities and the further growth of older ones in large part were dependent on their location within the new steam railroad system and on their ability to dominate a large tributary territory. Such waterside rail hubs as Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and San Francisco gained population and wealth rapidly, while such offspring of the rail era as Atlanta, Ga.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Tacoma, Wash., also grew dramatically. Much of the rapid industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in places already favoured by water or rail transport systems; but in some instances, such as in the cities of northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite region, some New England mill towns, and the textile centres of the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont, manufacturing brought about rapid urbanization and the consequent attraction of transport facilities. The extraction of gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and, in the 20th century, gas and oil led to rather ephemeral centres—unless these places were able to capitalize on local or regional advantages other than minerals.

A strong early start, whatever the inital economic base may have been, was often the key factor in competition among cities. With sufficient early momentum, urban capital and population tended to expand almost automatically. The point is illustrated perfectly by the larger cities of the northeastern seaboard, from Portland, Maine, through Baltimore, Md. The nearby physical wealth is poor to mediocre, and they are now far off-centre on the national map; but a prosperous mercantile beginning, good land and sea connections with distant places, and a rich local accumulation of talent, capital, and initiative were sufficient to bring about the growth of one of the world's largest concentrations of industry, commerce, and people.

New factors in municipal development

The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. The physical determinants of urban location and growth have given way to social factors. Increasingly, the most successful cities are oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial, and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters, communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. Washington, D.C., is the most obvious example of a metropolis in which government and ancillary activities have been the spur for vigorous growth; but almost all of the state capitals have displayed a similar demographic and economic vitality. Further, urban centres that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.

With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease of labour input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired—for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.

The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities were relatively small and compact, with a single clearly defined centre, and they grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or the later electric street railways.

The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new form of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes. These creations of private enterprise embody a novel concept of urban existence: a metropolitan module no longer reliant on the central city or its downtown. Usually anchored on a cluster of shopping malls and office parks, these “hypersuburbs,” whose residents and employees circulate freely within the outer metropolitan ring, offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for the modern life-style.

The new look of the metropolitan area

The outcome has been a broad, ragged, semiurbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan centre. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centres, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.

The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centres of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. Land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, toward the centre. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.

With some exceptions—e.g., large apartment complexes in downtown Chicago—people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area (and more open land and single-family residences) as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. The sharply defined immigrant neighbourhoods of the 19th century generally persist in a somewhat diluted form, though specific ethnic groups may have shifted their location. Later migrant groups, notably Southern blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighbourhoods of the inner cities.

Individual and collective character of cities

American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than of location. The relatively venerable centres of the Eastern Seaboard—Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore, Md.; Albany, N.Y.; Chester, Pa.; Alexandria, Va.; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example—are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of a regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, N.M., which reflect other times and regions. The townscapes of Pittsburgh; Detroit, Mich.; Chicago; and Denver, Colo., depict national modes of thought and the technological development of their formative years, just as Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nev.; San Diego, Calif.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Albuquerque, N.M., proclaim contemporary values and gadgetry more than any local distinctiveness. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it—as, for example, in Savannah, Ga.; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah—or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents—as in San Francisco or Seattle, Wash.—a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Fla.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Los Angeles.

As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact upon both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.

The American city is a place of sharp transitions. Construction, demolition, and reconstruction go on almost ceaselessly, though increasing thought has been given to preserving monuments and buildings. From present evidence, it would be impossible to guess that New York City and Albany date from the 1620s or that Detroit was founded in 1701. Preservation and restoration do occur, but often only when it makes sense in terms of tourist revenue. Physical and social blight has reached epidemic proportions in the slum areas of the inner city; but, despite the wholesale razing of such areas and the subsequent urban-renewal projects (sometimes as apartment or commercial developments for the affluent), the belief has become widespread that the ills of the U.S. city are incurable, especially with the increasing flight of capital, tax revenue, and the more highly educated, affluent elements of the population to suburban areas and the spatial and political polarization of whites and nonwhites.

In the central sections of U.S. cities, there is little sense of history or continuity; instead, one finds evidence of the dominance of the engineering mentality and of the credo that the business of the city is business. Commercial and administrative activities are paramount, and usually there is little room for church buildings or for parks or other nonprofit enterprises. The role of the cathedral, so central in the medieval European city, is filled by a U.S. invention serving both utilitarian and symbolic purposes, the skyscraper. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle's Space Needle, and Houston's Astrodome. Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators. The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals and marshaling yards.

Within many urban sites there has been radical physical transformation of shoreline, drainage systems, and land surface that would be difficult to match elsewhere in the world. Thus, in their physical lineaments, Manhattan and inner Boston bear scant resemblance to the landscapes seen by their initial settlers. The surface of downtown Chicago has been raised several feet above its former swamp level, the city's lakefront extensively reshaped, and the flow of the Chicago River reversed. Los Angeles, notorious for its disregard of the environment, has its concrete arroyo bottoms, terraced hillsides and landslides, and its own artificial microclimate.

The supercities

The unprecedented outward sprawl of American urban settlement has created some novel settlement forms, for the quantitative change has been so great as to induce qualitative transformation. The conurbation—a territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities whose peripheral zones have grown together—may have first appeared in early 19th-century Europe. There are major examples in Great Britain, the Low Countries, and Germany, as well as in Japan.

Nothing elsewhere, however, rivals in size and complexity the aptly named megalopolis, that supercity stretching along the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, past Richmond, Va. Other large conurbations include, in the Great Lakes region, one centred on Chicago and containing large slices of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana; another based in Detroit, embracing large parts of Michigan and Ohio and reaching into Canada; and a third stretching from Buffalo through Cleveland and back to Pittsburgh. All three are reaching toward one another and may form another megalopolis that, in turn, may soon be grafted onto the seaboard megalopolis by a corridor through central New York state.

Another example of a growing megalopolis is the huge southern California conurbation reaching from Santa Barbara, through a dominating Los Angeles, to the Mexican border. The solid strip of urban territory that lines the eastern shore of Puget Sound is a smaller counterpart. Quite exceptional in form is the slender linear multicity occupying Florida's Atlantic coastline, from Jacksonville to Miami, and the loose swarm of medium-sized cities clustering along the Southern Piedmont, from south-central Virginia to Birmingham, Ala.; also of note are the Texas cities of Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, which have formed a rapidly growing—though discontinuous—urbanized triangle.

One of the few predictions that seem safe in so dynamic and innovative a land as the United States is that, unless severe and painful controls are placed on land use, the shape of the urban environment will be increasingly megalopolitan: a small set of great constellations of polycentric urban zones, each complexly interlocked socially and physically with its neighbours.

New England

New England. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

During its first two centuries, New England had an unusually homogeneous population. With some exceptions, the British immigrants shared the same nonconformist religious beliefs, language, social organization, and general outlook. A distinctive regional culture took form, most noticeably in terms of dialect, town morphology, and folk architecture. The personality of the people also took on a regional coloration both in folklore and in actuality; there is sound basis for the belief that the traditional New England Yankee is self-reliant, thrifty, inventive, and enterprising. The influx of immigrants that began in the 1830s diluted and altered the New England identity, but much of its early personality survived.

By virtue of location, wealth, and seniority, the Boston metropolitan area has become the cultural economic centre of New England. This sovereignty is shared to some degree, however, with two other old centres, the lower Connecticut Valley and the Narragansett Bay region of Rhode Island.

The early westward demographic and ideological expansion of New England was so influential that it is justifiable to call New York, northern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, and much of the Upper Midwest “New England Extended.” Further, the energetic endeavours of New England whalers, merchants, and missionaries had a considerable impact on the cultures of Hawaii, various other Pacific isles, and several points in the Caribbean. New Englanders also were active in the Americanization of early Oregon and Washington, with results that are still visible. Later, the overland diffusion of New England natives and practices meant a recognizable New England character not only for the Upper Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas, but also in the Pacific Northwest in general, though to a lesser degree.

The South

The Upper South. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

The Deep South. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

A persistent deviation from the national mainstream probably began in the first years of settlement. The first settlers of the South were almost purely British, not outwardly different from those who flocked to New England or the Midland, but almost certainly distinct in terms of motives and social values and more conservative in retaining the rurality and the family and social structure of premodern Europe. The vast importation of African slaves was also a major factor, as was a degree of contact with the Indians that was less pronounced farther north. In addition, the unusual pattern of economy (much different from that of northwestern Europe), settlement, and social organization, which were in part an adaptation to a starkly unfamiliar physical habitat, accentuated the South's deviation from other culture areas.

In both origin and spatial structure, the South has been characterized by diffuseness. In the search for a single cultural hearth, the most plausible choice is the Chesapeake Bay area and the northeastern corner of North Carolina, the earliest area of recognizably Southern character. Early components of Southern population and culture also arrived from other sources. A narrow coastal strip from North Carolina to the Georgia–Florida border and including the Sea Islands is decidedly Southern in character, yet it stands apart self-consciously from other parts of the South. Though colonized directly from Great Britain, it had also significant connections with the West Indies, in which relation the African cultural contribution was strongest and purest. Charleston and Savannah, which nurtured their own distinctive civilizations, dominated this subregion. Similarly, French Louisiana received elements of culture and population—to be stirred into the special Creole mixture—not only, putatively, from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area but also indirectly from France, French Nova Scotia, the French West Indies, and Africa. In south central Texas, the Germanic and Hispanic influx was so heavy that a special subregion can be designated.

It would seem, then, that the Southern culture area may be an example of convergent, or parallel, evolution of a variety of elements arriving along several paths but subject to some single general process that could mold one larger regional consciousness and way of life.

Because of its slowness in joining the national technological mainstream, the South can be subdivided into a much greater number of subregions than is possible for any of the other older traditional regions. Those described above are of lesser order than the two principal Souths, variously called Upper and Lower (or Deep) South, Upland and Lowland South, or Yeoman and Plantation South.

The Upland South, which comprises the southern Appalachians, the upper Appalachian Piedmont, the Cumberland and other low interior plateaus, and the Ozarks and Ouachitas, was colonized culturally and demographically from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area and the Midland; it is most emphatically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) in character. The latter area, which contains a large black population, includes the greater part of the South Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and the lower Appalachian Piedmont. Its early major influences came from the Chesapeake Bay area, with only minor elements from the coastal Carolina–Georgia belt, Louisiana, and elsewhere. The division between the two subregions remains distinct from Virginia to Texas, but each region can be further subdivided. Within the Upland South, the Ozark region might legitimately be detached from the Appalachian; and, within the latter, the proud and prosperous Kentucky Bluegrass, with its emphasis on tobacco and Thoroughbreds, certainly merits special recognition.

Toward the margins of the South, the difficulties in delimiting subregions become greater. The outer limits themselves are a topic of special interest. There seems to be more than an accidental relation between these limits and various climatic factors. The fuzzy northern boundary, definitely not associated with the conventional Mason and Dixon Line or the Ohio River, seems most closely associated with length of frost-free season or with temperature during the winter. As the Southern cultural complex was carried to the West, it not only retained its strength but became more intense, in contrast to the influence of New England and the Midland. But the South finally fades away as one approaches the 100th meridian, with its critical decline in annual precipitation. The apparent correlation between the cultural South and a humid subtropical climatic regime is in many ways valid.

The Texas subregion is so large, distinctive, vigorous, and self-assertive that it presents some vexing classificatory questions. Is Texas simply a subregion of the Greater South, or has it acquired so strong and divergent an identity that it can be regarded as a major region in its own right? It is likely that a major region has been born in a frontier zone in which several distinct cultural communities confront one another and in which the mixture has bred the vigorous, extroverted, aggressive Texas personality so widely celebrated in song and story. Similarly, peninsular Florida may be considered either within or juxtaposed to the South but not necessarily part of it. In the case of Florida, an almost empty territory began to receive significant settlement only after about 1890, and if, like Texas, most of it came from the older South, there were also vigorous infusions from elsewhere.

The Midland

The Middle Atlantic region. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

It differed also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and many rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated Pennsylvania German.

Physiography and migration carried the Midland culture area into the Maryland Piedmont. Although its width tapers quickly below the Potomac, it reaches into parts of Virginia and West Virginia, with traces legible far down the Appalachian zone and into the South.

The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion, or New England Extended) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent, if slight, residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures, especially within the early 19th-century “Burned-Over District,” around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.

Toward the west the Midland retains its integrity for only a short distance—certainly no further than eastern Ohio—as it becomes submerged within the Midwest. Still, its significance in the genesis of the Midwest and the national culture should not be minimized. Its success in projecting its image upon so much of the country may have drawn attention away from the source area. As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with, or conscious of, a strong regional identity (excepting the Pennsylvania Dutch caricatures) than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks their strong political and literary traditions, though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.

The Midwest

The Midwest. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

Serious study of the historical geography of the Midwest began only in the 20th century, but it seems likely that this culture region was the combination of all three colonial regions and that this combination first took place in the upper Ohio valley. The early routes of travel—the Ohio and its tributaries, the Great Lakes, and the low, level corridor along the Mohawk and the coastal plains of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie—converge upon Ohio. There, the people and cultural traits from New England, the Midland, and the South were first funneled together. There seems to have been a fanlike widening of the new hybrid area into the West as settlers worked their way frontierward.

Two major subregions are readily discerned, the Upper and Lower Midwest. They are separated by a line, roughly approximating the 41st parallel, that persists as far west as Colorado in terms of speech patterns and indicates differences in regional provenance in ethnic and religious terms as well. Much of the Upper Midwest retains a faint New England character, although Midland influences are probably as important. A rich mixture of German, Scandinavian, Slavic, and other non-WASP elements has greatly diversified a stock in which the British element usually remains dominant and the range of church denominations is great. The Lower Midwest, except for the relative scarcity of blacks, tends to resemble the South in its predominantly Protestant and British makeup. There are some areas with sizable Roman Catholic and non-WASP populations, but on the whole the subregion tends to be more WASP in inclination than most other parts of the nation.

The problem of “the West”

The foregoing culture areas account for roughly the eastern half of the coterminous United States. There is a dilemma in classifying the remaining half. The concept of the American West, strong in the popular imagination, is reinforced constantly by romanticized cinematic and television images of the cowboy. It is facile to accept the widespread Western livestock complex as epitomizing the full gamut of Western life, because although the cattle industry may have once accounted for more than one-half of the active Western domain as measured in acres, it employed only a relatively small fraction of the total population. As a single subculture, it cannot represent the total regional culture.

It is not clear whether there is a genuine, single, grand Western culture region. Unlike the East, where virtually all the land is developed and culture areas and subregions abut and overlap in splendid confusion, the eight major and many lesser nodes of population in the western United States resemble oases, separated from one another by wide expanses of nearly unpopulated mountain or arid desert. The only obvious properties these isolated clusters have in common are, first, the intermixture of several strains of culture, primarily from the East but with additions from Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, and, second, except for one subregion, a general modernity, having been settled in a serious way no earlier than the 1840s. Some areas may be viewed as inchoate, or partially formed, cultural entities; the others have acquired definite personalities but are difficult to classify as first-order or lesser order culture areas.

There are several major tracts in the western United States that reveal a genuine cultural identity: the Upper Rio Grande region, the Mormon region, southern California, and, by some accounts, northern California. To this group one might add the anomalous Texan and Oklahoman subregions, which have elements of both the West and the South.

The Southwest. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

The general mosaic is a fabric of Indian, Anglo, and Hispanic elements, and all three major groups, furthermore, are complex in character. The Indian component is made up of Navajo, Pueblo, and several smaller groups, each of which is quite distinct from the others. The Hispanic element is also diverse—modally Mexican mestizo, but ranging from pure Spanish to nearly pure pre-Spanish aboriginal.

The northern Mountain region. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

The southern Mountain region. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

As in New England, the power of the human will and an intensely cherished abstract design have triumphed over an unfriendly habitat. The Mormon way of life is expressed in the settlement landscape and economic activities within a region more homogeneous internally than any other U.S. culture area.

California. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

Southern California is the most spectacular of the Western regions, not only in terms of economic and population growth but also for the luxuriance, regional particularism, and general avant-garde character of its swiftly evolving cultural pattern. Until the coming of a direct transcontinental rail connection in 1885, the region was remote, rural, and largely inconsequential. Since then, the invasion by persons from virtually every corner of North America and by the world has been massive, but since the 1960s in-migration has slackened perceptibly, and many residents have begun to question the doctrine of unlimited growth. In any event, a loosely articulated series of urban and suburban developments continue to encroach upon what little is left of arable or habitable land in the Coast Ranges and valleys from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.

Although every major ethnic and racial group and every other U.S. culture area is amply represented in southern California, there is reason to suspect that a process of selection for certain types of people, attitudes, and personality traits may have been at work at both source and destination. The region is distinct from, or perhaps in the vanguard of, the remainder of the nation. One might view southern California as the super-American region or the outpost of a postindustrial future, but its cultural distinctiveness is very evident in landscape and social behaviour. Southern California in no way approaches being a “traditional region,” or even the smudged facsimile of such, but rather the largest, boldest experiment in creating a “voluntary region,” one built through the self-selection of immigrants and their subsequent interaction.

The northern Pacific Coast. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

Wilbur Zelinsky

Virginia

English colonies in 17th-century North America. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

A new charter in 1609 significantly broadened membership in the Virginia Company, thereby increasing temporarily the supply of capital at the disposal of its directors; but most of the settlers continued to act as though they expected the Indians to provide for their existence, a notion that the Indians fiercely rejected. As a result, the enterprise still failed to yield any profits, and the number of investors again declined.

The crown issued a third charter in 1612, authorizing the company to institute a lottery to raise more capital for the floundering enterprise. In that same year John Rolfe harvested the first crop of a high-grade and therefore potentially profitable strain of tobacco. At about the same time, with the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale in the colony as governor in 1611, the settlers gradually began to practice the discipline necessary for their survival, though at an enormous personal cost.

Dale carried with him the “Laws Divine, Morall and Martial,” which were intended to supervise nearly every aspect of the settlers' lives. Each person in Virginia, including women and children, was given a military rank, with duties spelled out in minute detail. Penalties imposed for violating these rules were severe: those who failed to obey the work regulations were to be forced to lie with neck and heels together all night for the first offense, whipped for the second, and sent to a year's service in English galleys (convict ships) for the third. The settlers could hardly protest the harshness of the code, for that might be deemed slander against the company—an offense punishable by service in the galleys or by death.

Dale's code brought order to the Virginia experiment, but it hardly served to attract new settlers. To increase incentive the company, beginning in 1618, offered 50 acres of land to those settlers who could pay their transportation to Virginia and a promise of 50 acres after seven years of service to those who could not pay their passage. Concurrently, the new governor of Virginia, Sir George Yeardley, issued a call for the election of representatives to a House of Burgesses, which was to convene in Jamestown in July 1619. In its original form, the House of Burgesses was little more than an agency of the governing board of the Virginia Company, but it would later expand its powers and prerogatives and become an important force for colonial self-government.

Despite the introduction of these reforms, the years from 1619 to 1624 proved fatal to the future of the Virginia Company. Epidemics, constant warfare with the Indians, and internal disputes took a heavy toll on the colony. In 1624 the crown finally revoked the charter of the company and placed the colony under royal control. The introduction of royal government into Virginia, while it was to have important long-range consequences, did not produce an immediate change in the character of the colony. The economic and political life of the colony continued as it had in the past. The House of Burgesses, though its future under the royal commission of 1624 was uncertain, continued to meet on an informal basis; by 1629 it was officially reestablished. The crown also grudgingly acquiesced to the decision of the Virginia settlers to continue to direct most of their energies to the growth and exportation of tobacco. By 1630 the Virginia colony, while not prosperous, at least showed signs that it was capable of surviving without royal subsidy.

Maryland

Maryland, Virginia's neighbour to the north, was the first English colony to be controlled by a single proprietor rather than by a joint-stock company. George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) had been an investor in a number of colonizing schemes before being given a grant of land from the crown in 1632. Baltimore was given a sizable grant of power to go along with his grant of land; he had control over the trade and political system of the colony so long as he did nothing to deviate from the laws of England. Baltimore's son Cecilius Calvert took over the project at his father's death and promoted a settlement at St. Mary's on the Potomac. Supplied in part by Virginia, the Maryland colonists managed to sustain their settlement in modest fashion from the beginning. As in Virginia, however, the early 17th-century settlement in Maryland was often unstable and unrefined; composed overwhelmingly of young, single males—many of them indentured servants—it lacked the stabilizing force of a strong family structure to temper the rigours of life in the wilderness.

The colony was intended to serve at least two purposes. Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, was anxious to found a colony where Catholics could live in peace, but he was also eager to see his colony yield him as large a profit as possible. From the outset Protestants outnumbered Catholics, although a few prominent Catholics tended to own an inordinate share of the land in the colony. Despite this favouritism in the area of land policy, Baltimore was for the most part a good and fair administrator.

Following the accession of William and Mary to the English throne, however, control of the colony was taken away from the Calvert family and entrusted to the royal government. Shortly thereafter the crown decreed that Anglicanism would be the established religion of the colony. In 1715, after the Calvert family had renounced Catholicism and embraced Anglicanism, the colony reverted back to a proprietary form of government.

The New England colonies

Although lacking a charter, the founders of Plymouth in Massachusetts were, like their counterparts in Virginia, dependent upon private investments from profit-minded backers to finance their colony. The nucleus of that settlement was drawn from an enclave of English émigrés in Leyden, Holland. These religious Separatists believed that the true church was a voluntary company of the faithful under the “guidance” of a pastor and tended to be exceedingly individualistic in matters of church doctrine. Unlike the settlers of Massachusetts Bay, the Pilgrims chose to “separate” from the Church of England rather than to reform it from within.

In 1620, the first year of settlement, nearly half the settlers died of disease. From that time forward, however, and despite decreasing support from English investors, the health and the economic position of the colonists improved. The Pilgrims soon secured peace treaties with most of the Indians around them, enabling them to devote their time to building a strong, stable economic base rather than diverting their efforts toward costly and time-consuming problems of defending the colony from attack. Although none of their principal economic pursuits—farming, fishing, and trading—promised them lavish wealth, the Pilgrims in America were, after only five years, self-sufficient.

Although the Pilgrims were always a minority in Plymouth, they nevertheless controlled the entire governmental structure of their colony during the first four decades of settlement. Before disembarking from the Mayflower in 1620, the Pilgrim founders, led by William Bradford, demanded that all the adult males aboard who were able to do so sign a compact promising obedience to the laws and ordinances drafted by the leaders of the enterprise. Although the Mayflower Compact has been interpreted as an important step in the evolution of democratic government in America, it is a fact that the compact represented a one-sided arrangement, with the settlers promising obedience and the Pilgrim founders promising very little. Although nearly all the male inhabitants were permitted to vote for deputies to a provincial assembly and for a governor, the colony, for at least the first 40 years of its existence, remained in the tight control of a few men. After 1660 the people of Plymouth gradually gained a greater voice in both their church and civic affairs, and by 1691, when Plymouth colony was annexed to Massachusetts Bay, the Plymouth settlers had distinguished themselves by their quiet, orderly ways.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, like the Pilgrims, sailed to America principally to free themselves from religious restraints. Unlike the Pilgrims, the Puritans did not desire to “separate” themselves from the Church of England but, rather, hoped by their example to reform it. Nonetheless, one of the recurring problems facing the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony was to be the tendency of some, in their desire to free themselves from the alleged corruption of the Church of England, to espouse Separatist doctrine. When these tendencies or any other hinting of deviation from orthodox Puritan doctrine developed, those holding them were either quickly corrected or expelled from the colony. The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay enterprise never intended their colony to be an outpost of toleration in the New World; rather, they intended it to be a “Zion in the wilderness,” a model of purity and orthodoxy, with all backsliders subject to immediate correction.

The civil government of the colony was guided by a similar authoritarian spirit. Men like John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, believed that it was not the duty of the governors of society to act as the direct representatives of their constituents but rather to decide, independently, what measures were in the best interests of the total society. The original charter of 1629 gave all power in the colony to a General Court composed of only a small number of shareholders in the company. On arriving in Massachusetts, many disfranchised settlers immediately protested against this provision and caused the franchise to be widened to include all church members. These “freemen” were given the right to vote in the General Court once each year for a governor and a Council of Assistants. Although the charter of 1629 technically gave the General Court the power to decide on all matters affecting the colony, the members of the ruling elite initially refused to allow the freemen in the General Court to take part in the lawmaking process on the grounds that their numbers would render the court inefficient.

In 1634 the General Court adopted a new plan of representation whereby the freemen of each town would be permitted to select two or three delegates and assistants, elected separately but sitting together in the General Court, who would be responsible for all legislation. There was always tension existing between the smaller, more prestigious group of assistants and the larger group of deputies. In 1644, as a result of this continuing tension, the two groups were officially lodged in separate houses of the General Court, with each house reserving a veto power over the other.

Despite the authoritarian tendencies of the Massachusetts Bay colony, a spirit of community developed there as perhaps in no other colony. The same spirit that caused the residents of Massachusetts to report on their neighbours for deviation from the true principles of Puritan morality also prompted them to be extraordinarily solicitous about their neighbours' needs. Although life in Massachusetts was made difficult for those who dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy, it was marked by a feeling of attachment and community for those who lived within the enforced consensus of the society.

Many New Englanders, however, refused to live within the orthodoxy imposed by the ruling elite of Massachusetts, and both Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded as a by-product of their discontent. The Reverend Thomas Hooker, who had arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1633, soon found himself in opposition to the colony's restrictive policy regarding the admission of church members and to the oligarchic power of the leaders of the colony. Motivated both by a distaste for the religious and political structure of Massachusetts and by a desire to open up new land, Hooker and his followers began moving into the Connecticut valley in 1635. By 1636 they had succeeded in founding three towns—Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersford. In 1638 the separate colony of New Haven was founded, and in 1662 Connecticut and Rhode Island merged under one charter.

Roger Williams, the man closely associated with the founding of Rhode Island, was banished from Massachusetts because of his unwillingness to conform to the orthodoxy established in that colony. Williams' views conflicted with those of the ruling hierarchy of Massachusetts in several important ways. His own strict criteria for determining who was regenerate, and therefore eligible for church membership, finally led him to deny any practical way to admit anyone into the church. Once he recognized that no church could ensure the purity of its congregation, he ceased using purity as a criterion and instead opened church membership to nearly everyone in the community. Moreover, Williams showed distinctly Separatist leanings, preaching that the Puritan church could not possibly achieve purity as long as it remained within the Church of England. Finally, and perhaps most serious, he openly disputed the right of the Massachusetts leaders to occupy Indian land without first purchasing it from the natives.

The unpopularity of Williams' views forced him to flee Massachusetts Bay for Providence in 1636. In 1639 William Coddington, another dissenter in Massachusetts, settled his congregation in Newport. Four years later Samuel Gorton, another minister banished from Massachusetts Bay because of his differences with the ruling oligarchy, settled in Shawomet (later renamed Warwick). In 1644 these three communities joined with a fourth in Portsmouth under one charter to become one colony called Providence Plantation in Narragansett Bay.

The early settlers of New Hampshire and Maine were also ruled by the government of Massachusetts Bay. New Hampshire was permanently separated from Massachusetts in 1692, although it was not until 1741 that it was given its own royal governor. Maine remained under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts until 1820.

The middle colonies

English colonies in 17th-century North America. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

In February 1685 the Duke of York found himself not only proprietor of New York but also king of England, a fact that changed the status of New York from that of a proprietary to a royal colony. The process of royal consolidation was accelerated when in 1688 the colony, along with the New England and New Jersey colonies, was made part of the ill-fated Dominion of New England. In 1691 Jacob Leisler, a German merchant living on Long Island, led a successful revolt against the rule of the deputy governor, Francis Nicholson. The revolt, which was a product of dissatisfaction with a small aristocratic ruling elite and a more general dislike of the consolidated scheme of government of the Dominion of New England, served to hasten the demise of the dominion.

Pennsylvania, in part because of the liberal policies of its founder, William Penn, was destined to become the most diverse, dynamic, and prosperous of all the North American colonies. Penn himself was a liberal, but by no means radical, English Whig. His Quaker faith was marked not by the religious extremism of some Quaker leaders of the day but rather by an adherence to certain dominant tenets of the faith—liberty of conscience and pacifism—and by an attachment to some of the basic tenets of Whig doctrine. William Penn sought to implement these ideals in his “holy experiment” in the New World.

Penn received his grant of land along the Delaware River in 1681 from Charles II. The first “frame of government” proposed by Penn in 1682 provided for a council and an assembly, each to be elected by the freeholders of the colony. The council was to have the sole power of initiating legislation; the lower house could only approve or veto bills submitted by the council. After numerous objections about the “oligarchic” nature of this form of government, Penn issued a second frame of government in 1682 and then a third in 1696, but even these did not wholly satisfy the residents of the colony. Finally, in 1701, a Charter of Privileges, giving the lower house all legislative power and transforming the council into an appointive body with advisory functions only, was approved by the citizens. The Charter of Privileges, like the other three frames of government, continued to guarantee the principle of religious toleration to all Protestants.

Pennsylvania prospered from the outset. Although there was some jealousy between the original settlers (who had received the best land and important commercial privileges) and the later arrivals, economic opportunity in Pennsylvania was on the whole greater than in any other colony. Beginning in 1683 with the immigration of Germans into the Delaware valley and continuing with an enormous influx of Irish and Scotch-Irish in the 1720s and '30s, the population of Pennsylvania increased and diversified. The fertile soil of the countryside, in conjunction with a generous government land policy, kept immigration at high levels throughout the 18th century. Ultimately, however, the continuing influx of European settlers hungry for land spelled doom for the pacific Indian policy initially envisioned by William Penn. “Economic opportunity” for European settlers often depended on the dislocation, and frequent extermination, of the Indian residents who had initially occupied the land in Penn's colony.

New Jersey remained in the shadow of both New York and Pennsylvania throughout most of the colonial period. Part of the territory ceded to the Duke of York by the English crown in 1664 lay in what would later become the colony of New Jersey. The Duke of York in turn granted that portion of his lands to John Berkeley and George Carteret, two close friends and allies of the king. In 1665 Berkeley and Carteret established a proprietary government under their own direction. Constant clashes, however, developed between the New Jersey and the New York proprietors over the precise nature of the New Jersey grant. The legal status of New Jersey became even more tangled when Berkeley sold his half interest in the colony to two Quakers, who in turn placed the management of the colony in the hands of three trustees, one of whom was William Penn. The area was then divided into East Jersey, controlled by Carteret, and West Jersey, controlled by Penn and the other Quaker trustees. In 1682 the Quakers bought East Jersey. A multiplicity of owners and an uncertainty of administration caused both colonists and colonizers to feel dissatisfied with the proprietary arrangement, and in 1702 the crown united the two Jerseys into a single royal province.

When the Quakers purchased East Jersey, they also acquired the tract of land that was to become Delaware, in order to protect their water route to Pennsylvania. That territory remained part of the Pennsylvania colony until 1704, when it was given an assembly of its own. It remained under the Pennsylvania governor, however, until the Revolution.

The Carolinas and Georgia

The English crown had issued grants to the Carolina territory as early as 1629, but it was not until 1663 that a group of eight proprietors—most of them men of extraordinary wealth and power even by English standards—actually began colonizing the area. The proprietors hoped to grow silk in the warm climate of the Carolinas, but all efforts to produce that valuable commodity failed. Moreover, it proved difficult to attract settlers to the Carolinas; it was not until 1718, after a series of violent Indian wars had subsided, that the population began to increase substantially. The pattern of settlement, once begun, followed two paths. North Carolina, which was largely cut off from the European and Caribbean trade by its unpromising coastline, developed into a colony of small to medium farms. South Carolina, with close ties to both the Caribbean and Europe, produced rice and, after 1742, indigo for a world market. The early settlers in both areas came primarily from the West Indian colonies. This pattern of migration was not, however, as distinctive in North Carolina, where many of the residents were part of the spillover from the natural expansion of Virginians southward.

The original frame of government for the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions, drafted in 1669 by Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) with the help of the philosopher John Locke, was largely ineffective because of its restrictive and feudal nature. The Fundamental Constitutions was abandoned in 1693 and replaced by a frame of government diminishing the powers of the proprietors and increasing the prerogatives of the provincial assembly. In 1729, primarily because of the proprietors' inability to meet the pressing problems of defense, the Carolinas were converted into the two separate royal colonies of North and South Carolina.

The proprietors of Georgia, led by James Oglethorpe, were wealthy philanthropic English gentlemen. It was Oglethorpe's plan to transport imprisoned debtors to Georgia where they could rehabilitate themselves by profitable labour and make money for the proprietors in the process. Those who actually settled in Georgia—and by no means all of them were impoverished debtors—encountered a highly restrictive economic and social system. Oglethorpe and his partners limited the size of individual landholdings to 500 acres, prohibited slavery, forbade the drinking of rum, and instituted a system of inheritance that further restricted the accumulation of large estates. The regulations, though noble in intention, created considerable tension between some of the more enterprising settlers and the proprietors. Moreover, the economy did not live up to the expectations of the colony's promoters. The silk industry in Georgia, like that in the Carolinas, failed to produce even one profitable crop.

The settlers were also dissatisfied with the political structure of the colony; the proprietors, concerned primarily with keeping close control over their utopian experiment, failed to provide for local institutions of self-government. As protests against the proprietors' policies mounted, the crown in 1752 assumed control over the colony; subsequently, many of the restrictions that the settlers had complained about, notably those discouraging the institution of slavery, were lifted.

Political growth

The distance separating England and America, the powerful pressures exerted on royal officials by Americans, and the inevitable inefficiency of any large bureaucracy all served to weaken royal power and to strengthen the hold of provincial leaders on the affairs of their respective colonies. During the 18th century the colonial legislatures gained control over their own parliamentary prerogatives, achieved primary responsibility for legislation affecting taxation and defense, and ultimately took control over the salaries paid to royal officials. Provincial leaders also made significant inroads into the governor's patronage powers. Although theoretically the governor continued to control the appointments of local officials, in reality he most often automatically followed the recommendations of the provincial leaders in the localities in question. Similarly, the governor's councils, theoretically agents of royal authority, came to be dominated by prominent provincial leaders who tended to reflect the interests of the leadership of the lower house of assembly rather than those of the royal government in London.

Thus, by the mid-18th century most political power in America was concentrated in the hands of provincial rather than royal officials. These provincial leaders undoubtedly represented the interests of their constituents more faithfully than any royal official could, but it is clear that the politics of provincial America were hardly democratic by modern standards. In general, both social prestige and political power tended to be determined by economic standing; and the economic resources of colonial America, though not as unevenly distributed as in Europe, were nevertheless controlled by relatively few men.

In the Chesapeake societies of Virginia and Maryland, and particularly in the regions east of the Blue Ridge mountains, a planter class came to dominate nearly every aspect of those colonies' economic life. These same planters, joined by a few prominent merchants and lawyers, dominated the two most important agencies of local government—the county courts and the provincial assemblies. This extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few occurred in spite of the fact that a large percentage of the free adult male population (some have estimated as high as 80 to 90 percent) was able to participate in the political process. The ordinary citizens of the Chesapeake society, and those of most colonies, nevertheless continued to defer to those whom they considered to be their “betters.” Although the societal ethic that enabled power to be concentrated in the hands of a few was hardly a democratic one, there is little evidence, at least for Virginia and Maryland, that the people of those societies were dissatisfied with their rulers. In general they believed that their local officials ruled responsively.

In the Carolinas a small group of rice and indigo planters monopolized much of the wealth. As in Virginia and Maryland, the planter class came to constitute a social elite. As a rule the planter class of the Carolinas did not have the same long tradition of responsible government as did the ruling oligarchies of Virginia and Maryland, and, as a consequence, they tended to be absentee landlords and governors, often passing much of their time in Charleston, away from their plantations and their political responsibilities.

The western regions of both the Chesapeake and Carolina societies displayed distinctive characteristics of their own. Ruling traditions were fewer, accumulations of land and wealth less striking, and the social hierarchy less rigid in the west. In fact, in some western areas antagonism toward the restrictiveness of the east and toward eastern control of the political structure led to actual conflict. In both North and South Carolina armed risings of varying intensity erupted against the unresponsive nature of the eastern ruling elite. As the 18th century progressed, however, and as more men accumulated wealth and social prestige, the societies of the west came more closely to resemble those of the east.

New England society was more diverse and the political system less oligarchic than that of the South. In New England the mechanisms of town government served to broaden popular participation in government beyond the narrow base of the county courts.

The town meetings, which elected the members of the provincial assemblies, were open to nearly all free adult males. Despite this, a relatively small group of men dominated the provincial governments of New England. As in the South, men of high occupational status and social prestige were closely concentrated in leadership positions in their respective colonies; in New England, merchants, lawyers, and to a lesser extent clergymen made up the bulk of the social and political elite.

The social and political structure of the middle colonies was more diverse than that of any other region in America. New York, with its extensive system of manors and manor lords, often displayed genuinely feudal characteristics. The tenants on large manors often found it impossible to escape the influence of their manor lords. The administration of justice, the election of representatives, and the collection of taxes often took place on the manor itself. As a consequence, the large landowning families exercised an inordinate amount of economic and political power. The Great Rebellion of 1766, a short-lived outburst directed against the manor lords, was a symptom of the widespread discontent among the lower and middle classes. By contrast, Pennsylvania's governmental system was more open and responsive than that of any other colony in America. A unicameral legislature, free from the restraints imposed by a powerful governor's council, allowed Pennsylvania to be relatively independent of the influence of both the crown and the proprietor. This fact, in combination with the tolerant and relatively egalitarian bent of the early Quaker settlers and the subsequent immigration of large numbers of Europeans, made the social and political structure of Pennsylvania more democratic but more faction ridden than that of any other colony.

Population growth

The increasing political autonomy of the American colonies was a natural reflection of their increased stature in the overall scheme of the British Empire. In 1650 the population of the colonies had been about 52,000; in 1700 it was perhaps 250,000, and by 1760 it was approaching 1,700,000. Virginia had increased from about 54,000 in 1700 to approximately 340,000 in 1760. Pennsylvania had begun with about 500 settlers in 1681 and had attracted at least 250,000 people by 1760. And America's cities were beginning to grow as well. By 1765 Boston had reached 15,000; New York City, 16,000–17,000; and Philadelphia, the largest city in the colonies, 20,000.

Part of that population growth was the result of the involuntary immigration of African slaves. During the 17th century slaves remained a tiny minority of the population. By the mid-18th century, after Southern colonists discovered that the profits generated by their plantations could support the relatively large initial investments needed for slave labour, the volume of the slave trade increased markedly. In Virginia the slave population leaped from about 2,000 in 1670 to perhaps 23,000 in 1715 and reached 150,000 on the eve of the American Revolution. In South Carolina it was even more dramatic. In 1700 there were probably no more than 2,500 blacks in the population; by 1765 there were 80,000–90,000, with blacks outnumbering whites by about 2 to 1.

One of the principal attractions to the immigrants who moved to America voluntarily was the availability of inexpensive arable land. The westward migration to America's frontier—in the early 17th century all of America was a frontier, and by the 18th century the frontier ranged anywhere from 10 to 200 miles from the coastline—was to become one of the distinctive elements in American history. English Puritans, beginning in 1629 and continuing through 1640, were the first to immigrate in large numbers to America. Throughout the 17th century most of the immigrants were English; but, beginning in the second decade of the 18th century, a wave of Germans, principally from the Rhineland Palatinate, arrived in America: by 1770 between 225,000 and 250,000 Germans had emigrated to America, more than 70 percent of them settling in the middle colonies, where generous land policies and religious toleration made life more comfortable for them. The Scotch-Irish and Irish immigration, which began on a large scale after 1713 and continued past the American Revolution, was more evenly distributed. By 1750 both Scotch-Irish and Irish could be found in the western portions of nearly every colony. In almost all the regions in which Europeans sought greater economic opportunity, however, that same quest for independence and self-sufficiency led to tragic conflict with Indians over the control of land. And in nearly every instance the outcome was similar: the Europeans, failing to respect Indian claims either to land or to cultural autonomy, pushed the Indians of North America further and further into the periphery.

Economic growth

Provincial America came to be less dependent upon subsistence agriculture and more on the cultivation and manufacture of products for the world market. Land, which initially served only individual needs, came to be the fundamental source of economic enterprise. The independent yeoman farmer continued to exist, particularly in New England and the middle colonies, but most settled land in North America by 1750 was devoted to the cultivation of a cash crop. New England turned its land over to the raising of meat products for export. The middle colonies were the principal producers of grains. By 1700 Philadelphia exported more than 350,000 bushels of wheat and more than 18,000 tons of flour annually. The Southern colonies were, of course, even more closely tied to the cash crop system. South Carolina, aided by British incentives, turned to the production of rice and indigo. North Carolina, although less oriented toward the market economy than South Carolina, was nevertheless one of the principal suppliers of naval stores. Virginia and Maryland steadily increased their economic dependence on tobacco and on the London merchants who purchased that tobacco; and for the most part they ignored those who recommended that they diversify their economies by turning part of their land over to the cultivation of wheat. Their near-total dependence upon the world tobacco price would ultimately prove disastrous, but for most of the 18th century Virginia and Maryland soil remained productive enough to make a single-crop system reasonably profitable.

As America evolved from subsistence to commercial agriculture, an influential commercial class increased its power in nearly every colony. Boston was the centre of the merchant elite of New England, who not only dominated economic life but also wielded social and political power as well. Merchants like James De Lancey and Philip Livingston in New York and Joseph Galloway, Robert Morris, and Thomas Wharton in Philadelphia exerted an influence far beyond the confines of their occupations. In Charleston the Pinckney, Rutledge, and Lowndes families controlled much of the trade that passed through that port. Even in Virginia, where a strong merchant class was nonexistent, those people with the most economic and political power were those commercial farmers who best combined the occupations of merchant and farmer. And it is clear that the commercial importance of the colonies was increasing. During the years 1700–10, approximately £265,000 sterling was exported annually to Great Britain from the colonies, with roughly the same amount being imported by the Americans from Great Britain. By the decade 1760–70, that figure had risen to more than £1,000,000 sterling of goods exported annually to Great Britain and £1,760,000 annually imported from Great Britain.

Colonial culture

America's intellectual attainments during the 17th and 18th centuries, while not inferior to those of the nations of Europe, were nevertheless of a decidedly different character. It was the techniques of applied science that most excited the minds of Americans, who, faced with the problem of subduing an often wild and unruly land, saw in science the best way to explain, and eventually to harness, those forces around them. Ultimately this scientific mode of thought might be applied to the problems of civil society as well, but for the most part the emphasis in colonial America remained on science and technology, not politics or metaphysics. Typical of America's peculiar scientific genius was John Bartram of Pennsylvania, who collected and classified important botanical data from the New World. The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1744, is justly remembered as the focus of intellectual life in America. Men like David Rittenhouse, an astronomer who built the first planetarium in America; Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, whose accomplishments as a botanist and as an anthropologist probably outmatched his achievements as a politician; and Benjamin Rush, a pioneer in numerous areas of social reform as well as one of colonial America's foremost physicians, were among the many active members of the society. At the centre of the American Philosophical Society was one of its founders, Benjamin Franklin, who (in his experiments concerning the flow of electricity) proved to be one of the few American scientists to achieve a major theoretical breakthrough but who was more adept at the kinds of applied research that resulted in the manufacture of more efficient fireplaces and the development of the lightning rod.

American cultural achievements in nonscientific fields were less impressive. American literature, at least in the traditional European forms, was nearly nonexistent. The most important American contribution to literature was neither in fiction nor in metaphysics but rather in such histories as Robert Beverley's History and Present State of Virginia (1705) or William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line (1728–29, but not published until 1841). The most important cultural medium in America was not the book but the newspaper. The high cost of printing tended to eliminate all but the most vital news, and thus local gossip or extended speculative efforts were sacrificed so that more important material such as classified advertisements and reports of crop prices could be included. Next to newspapers, almanacs were the most popular literary form in America, Franklin's Poor Richard's being only the most famous among scores of similar projects. Not until 1741 and the first installment of Franklin's General Magazine did literary magazines begin to make their first appearance in America. Most of the 18th-century magazines, however, failed to attract subscribers, and nearly all of them collapsed after only a few years of operation.

The visual and performing arts, though flourishing somewhat more than literature, were nevertheless slow to achieve real distinction in America. America did produce one good historical painter in Benjamin West and two excellent portrait painters in John Copley and Gilbert Stuart; but it is not without significance that all three men passed much of their lives in London, where they received more attention and higher fees.

The Southern colonies, particularly Charleston, seemed to be more interested in providing good theatre for their residents than did other regions, but in no colony did the theatre approach the excellence of that of Europe. In New England, Puritan influence was an obstacle to the performance of plays, and even in cosmopolitan Philadelphia the Quakers for a long time discouraged the development of the dramatic arts.

If Americans in the colonial period did not excel in achieving a high level of traditional cultural attainment, they did manage at least to disseminate what culture they had in a manner slightly more equitable than that of most nations of the world. Newspapers and almanacs, though hardly on the same intellectual level as the Encyclopédie produced by the European philosophes, probably had a wider audience than any European cultural medium. The New England colonies, although they did not always manage to keep pace with population growth, pioneered in the field of public education. Outside of New England, education remained the preserve of those who could afford to send their children to private schools, although the existence of privately supported but tuition-free charity schools and of relatively inexpensive “academies” made it possible for the children of the American middle class to receive at least some education. The principal institutions of higher learning—Harvard (1636), William and Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1747), Pennsylvania (a college since 1755), King's College (1754, now Columbia), Rhode Island College (1764, now Brown), Queen's College (1766, now Rutgers), and Dartmouth (1769)—served the upper class almost exclusively; and most of them had a close relationship with a particular religious point of view (e.g., Harvard was a training ground for Congregational ministers, and Princeton was closely associated with Presbyterianism).

The Great Awakening

A series of religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening swept over the colonies in the 1730s and '40s. Its impact was first felt in the middle colonies, where Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a minister of the Dutch Reformed church, began preaching in the 1720s. In New England, in the early 1730s men such as Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most learned theologian of the 18th century, were responsible for a reawakening of religious fervour. By the late 1740s the movement had extended into the Southern colonies, where itinerant preachers such as Samuel Davies and George Whitefield exerted considerable influence, particularly in the backcountry.

The Great Awakening represented a reaction against the increasing secularization of society and against the corporate and materialistic nature of the principal churches of American society. By making conversion the initial step on the road to salvation and by opening up the conversion experience to all who recognized their own sinfulness, the ministers of the Great Awakening, some intentionally and others unwittingly, democratized Calvinist theology. The technique of many of the preachers of the Great Awakening was to inspire in their listeners a fear of the consequences of their sinful lives and a respect for the omnipotence of God. This sense of the ferocity of God was often tempered by the implied promise that a rejection of worldliness and a return to faith would result in a return to grace and an avoidance of the horrible punishments of an angry God. There was a certain contradictory quality about these two strains of Great Awakening theology, however. Predestination, one of the principal tenets of the Calvinist theology of most of the ministers of the Great Awakening, was ultimately incompatible with the promise that man could, by a voluntary act of faith, achieve salvation by his own efforts. Furthermore, the call for a return to complete faith and the emphasis on the omnipotence of God was the very antithesis of Enlightenment thought, which called for a greater questioning of faith and a diminishing role for God in the daily affairs of man. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards, one of the principal figures of the Great Awakening in America, explicitly drew on the thought of men like John Locke and Isaac Newton in an attempt to make religion rational. Perhaps most important, the evangelical styles of religious worship promoted by the Great Awakening helped make the religious doctrines of many of the insurgent church denominations—particularly those of the Baptists and the Methodists—more accessible to a wider cross section of the American population. This expansion in church membership extended to blacks as well as whites, and the ritual forms of Evangelical Protestantism possessed features that facilitated the syncretism of African and American forms of religious worship.

The tax controversy

George Grenville, who was named prime minister in 1763, was soon looking to meet the costs of defense by raising revenue in the colonies. The first measure was the Plantation Act of 1764, usually called the Sugar, or Revenue, Act, which reduced to a mere threepence the duty on imported foreign molasses but linked with this a high duty on refined sugar and a prohibition on foreign rum (the needs of the British treasury were carefully balanced with those of West Indies planters and New England distillers). The last measure of this kind (1733) had not been enforced, but this time the government set up a system of customs houses, staffed by British officers, and even established a vice-admiralty court. Sitting at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the court heard very few cases, but in principle it appeared to threaten the cherished British privilege of trials by local juries. Boston further objected to the tax's revenue-raising aspect on constitutional grounds, but, despite some expressions of anxiety, the colonies in general acquiesced.

Parliament next affected colonial economic prospects by passing a Currency Act (1764) to withdraw paper currencies, many of them surviving from the war period, from circulation. This was not done to restrict economic growth so much as to take out currency that was thought to be unsound, but it did severely reduce the circulating medium during the difficult postwar period and further indicated that such matters were subject to British control.

Grenville's next move was a stamp duty, to be raised on a wide variety of transactions, including legal writs, newspaper advertisements, and ships' bills of lading. The colonies were duly consulted and offered no alternative suggestions. The feeling in London, shared by Benjamin Franklin, was that, after making formal objections, the colonies would accept the new taxes as they had the earlier ones. But the Stamp Act (1765) hit harder and deeper than any previous parliamentary measure. As some agents had already pointed out, because of postwar economic difficulties the colonies were short of ready funds. (In Virginia this shortage was so serious that the province's treasurer, John Robinson, who was also speaker of the assembly, manipulated and redistributed paper money that had been officially withdrawn from circulation by the Currency Act; a large proportion of the landed gentry benefited from this largesse.) The Stamp Act struck at vital points of colonial economic operations, affecting transactions in trade. It also affected many of the most articulate and influential people in the colonies (lawyers, journalists, bankers). It was, moreover, the first “internal” tax levied directly on the colonies by Parliament. Previous colonial taxes had been levied by local authorities or had been “external” import duties whose primary aim could be viewed as regulating trade for the benefit of the empire as a whole rather than raising revenue. Yet no one, either in Britain or the colonies, fully anticipated the uproar that followed the imposition of these duties. Mobs in Boston and other towns rioted and forced appointed stamp distributors to renounce their posts; legal business was largely halted. Several colonies sent delegations to a Congress in New York in the summer of 1765, where the Stamp Act was denounced as a violation of the Englishman's right to be taxed only through elected representatives, and plans were adopted to impose a nonimportation embargo on British goods.

A change of ministry facilitated a change of British policy on taxation. Parliamentary opinion was angered by what it perceived as colonial lawlessness, but British merchants were worried about the embargo on British imports. The Marquis of Rockingham, succeeding Grenville, was persuaded to repeal the Stamp Act—for domestic reasons rather than out of any sympathy with colonial protests. In 1766 the repeal was passed, however, on the same day as the Declaratory Act, which declared that Parliament had the power to bind or legislate the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Parliament would not have voted the repeal without this assertion of its authority.

The colonists, jubilant at the repeal of the Stamp Act, drank innumerable toasts, sounded peals of cannon, and were prepared to ignore the Declaratory Act as face-saving window dressing. John Adams, however, warned in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law that Parliament, armed with this view of its powers, would try to tax the colonies again; and this happened in 1767 when Charles Townshend became Chancellor of the Exchequer in a ministry formed by Pitt, now Earl of Chatham. The problem was that Britain's financial burden had not been lifted. Townshend, claiming to take literally the colonial distinction between external and internal taxes, imposed external duties on a wide range of necessities, including lead, glass, paint, paper, and tea, the principal domestic beverage. One ominous result was that colonists now began to believe that the British were developing a long-term plan to reduce the colonies to a subservient position, which they were soon calling “slavery.” This view was ill-informed, however. Grenville's measures had been designed as a carefully considered package; apart from some tidying-up legislation, Grenville had had no further plans for the colonies after the Stamp Act. His successors developed further measures, not as extensions of an original plan but because the Stamp Act had been repealed.

Nevertheless, the colonists were outraged. In Pennsylvania the lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote a series of essays that, appearing in 1767 and 1768 as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, were widely reprinted and exerted great influence in forming a united colonial opposition. Dickinson agreed that Parliament had supreme power where the whole empire was concerned, but he denied that it had power over internal colonial affairs; he quietly implied that the basis of colonial loyalty lay in its utility among equals rather than in obedience owed to a superior.

It proved easier to unite on opinion than on action. Gradually, after much maneuvering and negotiation, a wide-ranging nonimportation policy against British goods was brought into operation. Agreement had not been easy to reach, and the tensions sometimes broke out in acrimonious charges of noncooperation. In addition, the policy had to be enforced by newly created local committees, a process that put a new disciplinary power in the hands of local men who had not had much previous experience in public affairs. There were, as a result, many signs of discontent with the ordering of domestic affairs in some of the colonies—a development that had obvious implications for the future of colonial politics if more action were needed later.

Constitutional differences with Britain

Very few colonists wanted or even envisaged independence at this stage. (Dickinson had hinted at such a possibility with expressions of pain that were obviously sincere.) The colonial struggle for power, although charged with intense feeling, was not an attempt to change government structure but an argument over legal interpretation. The core of the colonial case was that, as British subjects, they were entitled to the same privileges as their fellow subjects in Britain. They could not constitutionally be taxed without their own consent; and, because they were unrepresented in the Parliament that voted the taxes, they had not given this consent. James Otis, in two long pamphlets, ceded all sovereign power to Parliament with this proviso. Others, however, began to question whether Parliament did have lawful power to legislate over the colonies. These doubts were expressed by the late 1760s, when James Wilson, a Scottish immigrant lawyer living in Philadelphia, wrote an essay on the subject. Because of the withdrawal of the Townshend round of duties in 1770, Wilson kept this essay private until new troubles arose in 1774, when he published it as Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. In this he fully articulated a view that had been gathering force in the colonies (it was also the opinion of Benjamin Franklin) that Parliament's lawful sovereignty stopped at the shores of Britain.

The official British reply to the colonial case on representation was that the colonies were “virtually” represented in Parliament in the same sense that the large voteless majority of the British public was represented by those who did vote. To this James Otis snorted that, if the majority of the British people did not have the vote, they ought to have it. The idea of colonial members of Parliament, several times suggested, was never a likely solution because of problems of time and distance and because, from the colonists' point of view, colonial members would not have adequate influence.

The standpoints of the two sides to the controversy could be traced in the language used. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty was expressed in the language of paternalistic authority; the British referred to themselves as parents and to the colonists as children. Colonial Tories, who accepted Parliament's case in the interests of social stability, also used this terminology. From this point of view, colonial insubordination was “unnatural,” just as the revolt of children against parents was unnatural. The colonists replied to all this in the language of rights. They held that Parliament could do nothing in the colonies that it could not do in Britain because the Americans were protected by all the common-law rights of the British. (When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, one of its first acts was to affirm that the colonies were entitled to the common law of England.)

Rights, as Richard Bland of Virginia insisted in The Colonel Dismounted (as early as 1764), implied equality. And here he touched on the underlying source of colonial grievance. Americans were being treated as unequals, which they not only resented but also feared would lead to a loss of control of their own affairs. Colonists perceived legal inequality when writs of assistance—essentially, general search warrants—were authorized in Boston in 1761 while closely related “general warrants” were outlawed in two celebrated cases in Britain. Townshend specifically legalized writs of assistance in the colonies in 1767. Dickinson devoted one of his Letters from a Farmer to this issue.

When Lord North became prime minister early in 1770, George III had at last found a minister who could work both with himself and with Parliament. British government began to acquire some stability. In 1770, in the face of the American policy of nonimportation, the Townshend tariffs were withdrawn—all except the tax on tea, which was kept for symbolic reasons. Relative calm returned, though it was ruffled on the New England coastline by frequent incidents of defiance of customs officers, who could get no support from local juries. These outbreaks did not win much sympathy from other colonies, but they were serious enough to call for an increase in the number of British regular forces stationed in Boston. One of the most violent clashes occurred in Boston just before the repeal of the Townshend duties. Threatened by mob harassment, a small British detachment opened fire and killed five people, an incident soon known as the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were charged with murder and were given a civilian trial, in which John Adams conducted a successful defense.

The other serious quarrel with British authority occurred in New York, where the assembly refused to accept all the British demands for quartering troops. Before a compromise was reached, Parliament had threatened to suspend the assembly. The episode was ominous because it indicated that Parliament was taking the Declaratory Act at its word; on no previous occasion had the British legislature intervened in the operation of the constitution in an American colony. (Such interventions, which were rare, had come from the crown.)

British intervention in colonial economic affairs occurred again when in 1773 Lord North's administration tried to rescue the East India Company from difficulties that had nothing to do with America. The Tea Act gave the company, which produced tea in India, a monopoly of distribution in the colonies. The company planned to sell its tea through its own agents, eliminating the system of sale by auction to independent merchants. By thus cutting the costs of middlemen, it hoped to undersell the widely purchased, inferior, smuggled tea. This plan naturally affected colonial merchants, and many colonists denounced the act as a plot to induce Americans to buy—and therefore pay the tax on—legally imported tea. Boston was not the only port to threaten to reject the casks of taxed tea, but its reply was the most dramatic—and provocative.

On December 16, 1773, a party of Bostonians, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the ships at anchor and dumped some £10,000 worth of tea into the harbour. British opinion was outraged, and America's friends in Parliament were immobilized. (American merchants in other cities were also disturbed. Property was property.) In the spring of 1774, with hardly any opposition, Parliament passed a series of measures designed to reduce Massachusetts to order and imperial discipline. The port of Boston was closed; and, in the Massachusetts Government Act, Parliament for the first time actually altered a colonial charter, substituting an appointive council for the elective one established in 1691 and conferring extensive powers on the governor and council. The famous town meeting, a forum for radical thinkers, was outlawed as a political body. To make matters worse, Parliament also passed the Quebec Act for the government of Canada. To the horror of pious New England Calvinists, the Roman Catholic religion was recognized for the French inhabitants. In addition, Upper Canada (i.e., the southern section) was joined to the Mississippi valley for purposes of administration, permanently blocking the prospect of American control of western settlement.

The Continental Congress

There was widespread agreement that this intervention in colonial government could threaten other provinces and could be countered only by collective action. After much intercolonial correspondence, a Continental Congress came into existence, meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774. Every colonial assembly except that of Georgia appointed and sent a delegation. The Virginia delegation's instructions were drafted by Thomas Jefferson and were later published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). Jefferson insisted on the autonomy of colonial legislative power and set forth a highly individualistic view of the basis of American rights. This belief that the American colonies and other members of the British Empire were distinct states united under the king and thus subject only to the king and not to Parliament was shared by several other delegates, notably James Wilson and John Adams, and strongly influenced the Congress.

The Congress' first important decision was one on procedure: whether to vote by colony, each having one vote, or by wealth calculated on a ratio with population. The decision to vote by colony was made on practical grounds—neither wealth nor population could be satisfactorily ascertained—but it had important consequences. Individual colonies, no matter what their size, retained a degree of autonomy that translated immediately into the language and prerogatives of sovereignty. Under Massachusetts' influence, the Congress next adopted the Suffolk Resolves, recently voted in Suffolk county, Massachusetts, which for the first time put natural rights into the official colonial argument (hitherto all remonstrances had been based on common law and constitutional rights). Apart from this, however, the prevailing mood was cautious.

The Congress' aim was to put such pressure on the British government that it would redress all colonial grievances and restore the harmony that had once prevailed. The Congress thus adopted an Association that committed the colonies to a carefully phased plan of economic pressure, beginning with nonimportation, moving to nonconsumption, and finishing the following September (after the rice harvest had been exported) with nonexportation. A few New England and Virginia delegates were looking toward independence; but the majority went home hoping that these steps, together with new appeals to the king and to the British people, would avert the need for any further such meetings. If these measures failed, however, a second Congress would convene the following spring.

Behind the unity achieved by the Congress lay deep divisions in colonial society. In the mid-1760s upriver New York was disrupted by land riots, which also broke out in parts of New Jersey; much worse disorder ravaged the backcountry of both North and South Carolina, where frontier people were left unprotected by legislatures that taxed them but in which they felt themselves unrepresented. A pitched battle at Alamance Creek in North Carolina in 1771 ended that rising and was followed by executions for treason. Although without such serious disorder, the cities also revealed acute social tensions and resentments of inequalities of economic opportunity and visible status. New York provincial politics were riven by intense rivalry between two great family-based parties, the DeLanceys, who benefited from royal government connections, and their rivals, the Livingstons. (The politics of the quarrel with Britain affected the domestic standing of the parties and eventually eclipsed the DeLanceys.) Another phenomenon was the rapid rise of dissenting religious sects, notably the Baptists; although they carried no political program, their style of preaching suggested a strong undercurrent of social as well as religious dissent. There was no inherent unity to these disturbances, but many leaders of colonial society were reluctant to ally themselves with these disruptive elements even in protest against Britain. They were concerned about the domestic consequences of letting the protests take a revolutionary turn; power shared with these elements might never be recovered.

When the British general Thomas Gage sent a force from Boston to destroy American rebel military stores at Concord, Massachusetts, fighting broke out between militia and British troops at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Reports of these clashes reached the Second Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia in May. Although most colonial leaders still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, the news stirred the delegates to more radical action. Steps were taken to put the continent on a war footing. While a further appeal was addressed to the British people (mainly on John Dickinson's insistence), the Congress raised an army, adopted a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and appointed committees to deal with domestic supply and foreign affairs. In August 1775 the king declared a state of rebellion; by the end of the year, all colonial trade was banned. Even yet, General George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, still referred to the British troops as “ministerial” forces, indicating a civil war, not a war looking to separate national identity.

Then in January 1776 the publication of Thomas Paine's irreverent pamphlet Common Sense abruptly shattered this hopeful complacency and put independence on the agenda. Paine's eloquent, direct language spoke people's unspoken thoughts; no pamphlet had ever made such an impact on colonial opinion. While the Congress negotiated urgently, but secretly, for a French alliance, power struggles erupted in provinces where conservatives still hoped for relief. The only form relief could take, however, was British concessions; as public opinion hardened in Britain, where a general election in November 1774 had returned a strong majority for Lord North, the hope for reconciliation faded. In the face of British intransigence, men committed to their definition of colonial rights were left with no alternative; and the substantial portion of colonists—about one-third according to John Adams; however, contemporary historians believe the number to have been much smaller—who preferred loyalty to the crown, with all its disadvantages, were localized and outflanked. Where the British armies massed, they found plenty of loyalist support; but, when they moved on, they left the loyalists feeble and exposed.

The most dramatic internal revolution occurred in Pennsylvania, where a strong radical party, based mainly in Philadelphia but with allies in the country, seized power in the course of the controversy over independence itself. Opinion for independence swept the colonies in the spring of 1776. The Congress recommended that colonies form their own governments and assigned a committee to draft a declaration of independence.

This document, written by Thomas Jefferson but revised in committee, consisted of two parts. The preamble set the claims of the United States on a basis of natural rights, with a dedication to the principle of equality; the second was a long list of grievances against the crown—not Parliament now, since the argument was that Parliament had no lawful power in the colonies. On July 2 the Congress itself voted for independence; on the 4th it adopted the Declaration.

J.R. Pole

Problems before the Second Continental Congress

When the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia in May 1775, revolution was not a certainty. The Congress had to prepare for that contingency nevertheless and thus was confronted by two parallel sets of problems. The first was how to organize for war; the second, which proved less urgent but could not be set aside forever, was how to define the legal relationship between the Congress and the states.

In June 1775 the Congress provided for the enlistment of an army and appointed Colonel George Washington (who had made a point of turning up in uniform) commander in chief. It then turned to the vexatious problems of finance. An aversion to taxation being one of the unities of American sentiment, the Congress began by trying to raise a domestic loan. It did not have much success, however, for the excellent reason that the outcome of the operation appeared highly dubious. At the same time, authority was taken for issuing a paper currency. This proved to be the most important method of domestic war finance, and, as the war years passed, Congress resorted to issuing more and more Continental currency, which depreciated rapidly and had to compete with currencies issued by state governments. (People were inclined to prefer local currencies.) The Continental Army was a further source of a form of currency because its commission agents issued certificates in exchange for goods; these certificates bore an official promise of redemption and could be used in personal transactions. Loans raised overseas, notably in France and the Netherlands, were another important source of revenue.

In 1780 Congress decided to call in all former issues of currency and replace them with a new issue on a 40-to-1 ratio. The Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, who was appointed superintendent of finance in 1781 and came to be known as the Financier, guided the United States through its complex fiscal difficulties. Morris' personal finances were inextricably tangled up with those of the country, and he became the object of much hostile comment, but he also used his own resources to secure urgently needed loans from abroad. In 1781 Morris secured a charter for the first Bank of North America, an institution which owed much to the example of the Bank of England. Although the bank was attacked by radical egalitarians as an unrepublican manifestation of privilege, it gave the United States a firmer financial foundation.

The problem of financing and organizing the war sometimes overlapped with Congress' other major problem, that of defining its relations with the states. The Congress, being only an association of states, had no power to tax individuals. The Articles of Confederation, a plan of government organization adopted and put into practice by Congress in 1777, although not officially ratified by all the states until 1781, gave Congress the right to make requisitions on the states proportionate to their ability to pay. The states in turn had to raise these sums by their own domestic powers to tax, a method that state legislators looking for reelection were reluctant to employ. The result was that many states were constantly in heavy arrears, and, particularly after the urgency of the war years had subsided, the Congress' ability to meet expenses and repay its war debts was crippled.

The Congress lacked power to enforce its requisitions and fell badly behind in repaying its wartime creditors. When individual states (Maryland as early as 1782, Pennsylvania in 1785) passed legislation providing for repayment of the debt owed to their own citizens by the Continental Congress, one of the reasons for the Congress' existence had begun to crumble. Two attempts were made to get the states to agree to grant the Congress the power it needed to raise revenue by levying an impost on imports. Each failed for want of unanimous consent. Essentially, an impost would have been collected at ports, which belonged to individual states—there was no “national” territory—and therefore cut across the concept of state sovereignty. Agreement was nearly obtained on each occasion, and, if it had been, the Constitutional Convention might never have been called. But the failure sharply pointed up the weakness of the Congress and of the union between the states under the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation reflected strong preconceptions of state sovereignty. Article II expressly reserved sovereignty to the states individually, and another article even envisaged the possibility that one state might go to war without the others. Fundamental revisions could be made only with unanimous consent, because the Articles represented a treaty between sovereigns, not the creation of a new nation-state. Other major revisions required the consent of nine states. Yet state sovereignty principles rested on artificial foundations. The states could never have achieved independence on their own, and in fact the Congress had taken the first step both in recommending that the states form their own governments and in declaring their collective independence. Most important of its domestic responsibilities, by 1787 the Congress had enacted several ordinances establishing procedures for incorporating new territories. (It had been conflicts over western land claims that had held up ratification of the Articles. Eventually the states with western claims, principally New York and Virginia, ceded them to the United States.) The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided for the phased settlement and government of territories in the Ohio valley, leading to eventual admission as new states. It also excluded the introduction of slavery—though it did not exclude the retention of existing slaves.

The states had constantly looked to the Congress for leadership in the difficulties of war; now that the danger was past, however, disunity began to threaten to turn into disintegration. The Congress was largely discredited in the eyes of a wide range of influential men, representing both old and new interests. The states were setting up their own tariff barriers against each other and quarreling among themselves; virtual war had broken out between competing settlers from Pennsylvania and Connecticut claiming the same lands. By 1786, well-informed men were discussing a probable breakup of the Confederation into three or more new groups, which could have led to wars among the American republics.

State politics

The problems of forming a new government affected the states individually as well as in confederation. Most of them established their own constitutions—formulated either in conventions or in the existing assemblies. The most democratic of these constitutions was the product of a virtual revolution in Pennsylvania, where a highly organized radical party seized the opportunity of the revolutionary crisis to gain power. Suffrage was put on a taxpayer basis, with nearly all adult males paying some tax; representation was reformed to bring in the populations of western counties; and a single-chamber legislature was established. An oath of loyalty to the constitution for some time excluded political opponents and particularly Quakers (who could not take oaths) from participation. For the rest, the state constitutions reflected the firm political ascendancy of the traditional ruling elite. Power ascended from a broad base in the elective franchise and representation through a narrowing hierarchy of offices restricted by property qualifications. State governors had in some cases to be men of great wealth. Senators were either wealthy or elected by the wealthy sector of the electorate. (These conditions were not invariable; Virginia, which had a powerful landed elite, dispensed with such restrictions.) Several states retained religious qualifications for office; the separation of church and state was not a popular concept, and minorities such as Baptists and Quakers were subjected to indignities that amounted in some places (notably Massachusetts and Connecticut) to forms of persecution.

Elite power provided a lever for one of the most significant transformations of the era, one that took place almost without being either noticed or intended. This was the acceptance of the principle of proportional representation as the determining rule of political action. It was made not only possible but attractive when the larger aggregations of population broadly coincided with the highest concentrations of property: great merchants and landowners from populous areas could continue to exert political ascendancy so long as they retained some sort of hold on the political process. (This would hardly have been possible if American politics had been ruled by class war, but this was not the case.) The principle reemerged to dominate the distribution of voters in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college under the new federal Constitution.

Relatively conservative constitutions did little to stem a tide of increasingly democratic politics. The old elites had to wrestle with new political forces (and in the process they learned how to organize in the new regime). Executive power was weakened. Many elections were held annually, and terms were limited. Legislatures quickly admitted new representatives from recent settlements, many with little previous political experience.

The new state governments, moreover, had to tackle major issues that affected all classes. The needs of public finance led to emissions of paper money. In several states these were resumed after the war, and, since they tended (though not invariably) to depreciate, they led directly to fierce controversies. The treatment of loyalists—adherents of the British cause—was also a theme of intense political dispute after the war. Despite the protests of men like Alexander Hamilton, who urged restoration of property and rights, in many states loyalists were driven out and their estates seized and redistributed in forms of auction, providing opportunities for speculation rather than personal occupation. Many states were depressed economically. In Massachusetts, which remained under orthodox control, stiff taxation under conditions of postwar depression trapped many farmers into debt. Unable to meet their obligations, they rose late in 1786 under a Revolutionary War officer, Captain Daniel Shays, in a movement to prevent the court sessions. Shays's Rebellion was crushed early in 1787 by an army raised in the state. The action caused only a few casualties, but the episode sent a shiver of fear throughout the country's propertied classes. It also seemed to justify the classical thesis that republics were unstable. It thus provided a potent stimulus to state legislatures to send delegates to the convention called (following a preliminary meeting in Annapolis) to meet at Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.

The Constitutional Convention

The Philadelphia Convention, which met in May 1787, was officially called for by the old Congress solely to remedy defects in the Articles of Confederation. But the “Virginia Plan” presented by the Virginia delegates went beyond revision and boldly proposed to introduce a new, national government in place of the existing confederation. The Convention thus immediately faced the question of whether the United States was to be a nation. This decision was effectively made when the plan for a bicameral legislature was approved. The alternative, based on the old single chamber representing autonomous states, was passed over when the hastily drafted New Jersey Plan was defeated in mid-June.

The Constitution as it emerged after a summer of debate embodied a much stronger principle of separation of powers than was generally to be found in the state constitutions. The chief executive was to be a single figure (a composite executive was discussed) and was to be elected by an electoral college, meeting in the states. This followed much debate over the Virginia Plan's preference for legislative election. The principal control on the president was the rather remote threat of impeachment (to which James Madison attached great importance). The Virginia Plan's proposal that representation be proportional to population in both houses was severely modified by the retention of equal representation for each state in the Senate. After some contention, antislavery forces gave way to a compromise by which three-fifths of the slaves would be counted as population for purposes of representation (and direct taxation). Slave states would thus be perpetually overrepresented in national politics; provision was also added for a law permitting the recapture of fugitive slaves, though in deference to republican scruples the word “slaves” was not used.

Contemporary theory expected the legislature to be the most powerful branch of government. Thus, to balance the system, the executive was given a veto, and a judicial system with powers of review was established. It was also implicit in the structure that the new, federal judiciary would have power to veto any state laws that conflicted with either the Constitution or with federal statutes. States were forbidden to pass laws impairing obligations of contract—a measure aimed to encourage capital—and the Congress could pass no ex post facto law. But the Congress was endowed with the basic powers of a modern—and sovereign—government. This was a republic, and the United States could confer no aristocratic titles of honour. The prospect of eventual enlargement of federal power appeared in the clause giving the Congress powers to pass legislation “necessary and proper” for implementing the general purposes of the Constitution.

The states retained their civil jurisdiction; but there was an emphatic shift of the political centre of gravity to the federal government, of which the most fundamental indication was the universal understanding that this government would act directly on citizens, as individuals, throughout all the states, regardless of state authority. The language of the Constitution told of the new style: it began, “We the people of the United States,” rather than “We the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.”

The draft Constitution aroused widespread opposition. Anti-Federalists—so-called because their opponents deftly seized the appellation of “Federalists,” though they were really nationalists—were strong in states such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, where the economy was relatively successful and many people saw little need for such extreme remedies. Anti-Federalists also expressed fears—here touches of class conflict certainly arose—that the new government would fall into the hands of merchants and men of money. Many good republicans detected oligarchy in the structure of the Senate, with its six-year terms. The absence of a bill of rights aroused deep fears of central power. The Federalists, however, had the advantages of communications, the press, organization, and, generally, the better of the argument. Anti-Federalists also suffered the disadvantage of having no internal coherence or unified purpose.

The debate gave rise to a very intensive literature, much of it at a higher intellectual level than can be found in to-day's public debates. The most sustained pro-Federalist argument, written mainly by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (assisted by John Jay) under the pseudonym of Publius, appeared in the newspapers as The Federalist. These essays attacked the feebleness of the Confederation and claimed that the new Constitution would have advantages for all sectors of society while threatening none. In the course of the debate, they passed from a strongly nationalist standpoint to one that showed more respect for the idea of a mixed form of government that would safeguard the states. Madison contributed assurances that a multiplicity of interests would counteract each other, preventing the consolidation of power continually charged by their enemies.

The Bill of Rights, steered through the first Congress by Madison's diplomacy, mollified much of the latent opposition. These first 10 amendments, ratified in 1791, adopted into the Constitution the basic English common-law rights that Americans had fought for. But they did more. Unlike Britain, the United States secured a guarantee of freedom for the press and the right of (peaceable) assembly. Also unlike Britain, church and state were formally separated in a clause that seemed to set equal value on nonestablishment of religion and its free exercise. (This left the states free to maintain their own establishments.)

In state conventions held through the winter of 1787 to the summer of 1788, the Constitution was ratified by the necessary minimum of nine states. But the vote was desperately close in Virginia and New York, respectively the 10th and 11th states to ratify, and without them the whole scheme would have been built on sand.

The Federalist administration and the formation of parties

The United States, 1783–1812. [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.]

A party opposed to Hamilton's fiscal policies began to form in Congress. With Madison at its centre and with support from Jefferson, it soon extended its appeal beyond Congress to the constituencies. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and France's subsequent declaration of war against Great Britain, Spain, and Holland further divided American loyalties. Democratic-Republican societies sprang up to express support for France, while Hamilton and his supporters, known as Federalists, backed Britain for economic reasons. Washington pronounced American neutrality in Europe, but to prevent a war with Britain he sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a treaty (1794). The United States gained only minor concessions and—humiliatingly—accepted British naval supremacy as the price of protection for American shipping.

Washington, whose tolerance had been severely strained by the Whiskey Rebellion and by criticism of the Jay Treaty, chose not to run for a third presidential term. In his farewell address (in a passage drafted by Hamilton) he denounced the new party politics as divisive and dangerous. Parties did not yet aspire to national objectives, however, and, when the Federalist John Adams was elected president, the Republican Jefferson, as the presidential candidate with the second greatest number of votes, became vice president. Wars in Europe and on the high seas, together with rampant opposition at home, gave the new administration little peace. Virtual naval war with France had followed from American acceptance of British naval protection. In 1798 a French attempt to solicit bribes from American commissioners negotiating a settlement of differences (the so-called XYZ Affair) aroused a wave of anti-French feeling. Later that year the Federalist majority in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which imposed serious civil restrictions on aliens suspected of pro-French activities and penalized U.S. citizens who criticized the government, making nonsense of the First Amendment's guarantee of free press. The acts were most often invoked to prosecute Republican editors, some of whom served jail terms. These measures in turn called forth the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, drafted respectively by Madison and Jefferson, which invoked state sovereignty against intolerable federal powers. War with France often seemed imminent during this period, but