NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES

The thirteen North American English colonies came into existence to enrich European royalty, high-level government bureaucrats, merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers. With the major exception of the Puritan settlements in New England, the English colonies were primarily business enterprises known as plantations. (For instance, the official name of the state of Rhode Island is "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.") Although common people formed collective, cooperative, communal, or community work relations in the thirteen colonies, such colonial endeavors were most extensive and developed in New England. The colonies also served as a beacon for Europeans of middling, laboring, and peasant backgrounds who hoped for material and social advancement and freedom from feudal or other moral economic obligations that they regarded as onerous. Colonial investors and authorities conceived and structured the colonies in such a way that obliterated Native American patterns of labor, that slowly embedded the slave trade and slavery as crucial components of colonial economies, and that took little notice of the aspirations of European yeomen (independent or free small farming people) and indentured servants.

The English-speaking Atlantic North American colonies evolved into a cluster of established, if not always stable, societies. They varied enormously in regional diversity, including demography, topography, economy, social hierarchy, political structures, and settlers' motivations, expectations, and experiences. The English established a variety of labor systems and had much specialization of labor. The English Atlantic North American colonies divided into southern and northern colonies. The southern colonies, first the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland, than later South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, began as commercial ventures. They had highly pronounced social hierarchies encompassing Europeans, Africans, and, for a few decades, Native Americans. These colonies had labor systems built upon cultivation of cash crops and the distribution of much of the wealth and power to the upper social strata, especially to the planter elite. (A planter is another name for a plantation owner.) The northern colonies consisted of the New England colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and the Middle Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These northern colonies had economies not centered on cash crops. They evolved into societies with some slaves and many free laborers, yeomen, and indentured servants. New England had a pronounced labor system based on family units. All colonies had labor systems characterized by harsh conditions and coercion.

Artisan and free wage labor, indentured servitude, and slavery coexisted in the southern colonies. In the seventeenth century, indentured servants and landless common laborers comprised the large majority of people, including a significant number of Africans and their descendants. Much to the dismay of planters, merchants, government officials, and other members of the English southern colonial elites, white and black laboring people shared many things and engaged in much camaraderie. A series of events in the latter half of the seventeenth century, like the Bacon Rebellion in 1676 in Virginia that challenged the planter elites, convinced the authorities to change relations between white and black working people of the lower orders or classes. The authorities structured a racial hierarchy overlaying a social hierarchy and turned white laboring people into a buffer group between the elites who were overwhelmingly English planters and merchants and black laboring people who were mainly slaves. Hence, the elites continued to exploit the labor power of black and white working people. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, while some white colonists were planters, merchants, yeomen, artisans, many white colonists lived as indentured servants or free, propertyless common laborers, but nearly all black colonists were slaves.

Note: Edmund Morgan, Theodore Allen, and other historians of colonial Virginia see the Bacon Rebellion of 1676 as a turning point when the planter elites began to rely more on slavery, not indentured servitude, as the key labor system to generate wealth. The elites "racialized" the labor system. Morgan sees the beginnings of a major paradox: racism and slavery existing in what later became a nation that proclaimed liberty while a certain segment of the population remained enslaved. Allen sees the elites using white laboring people as a weapon of social control that worked to bind white people of all social classes into a "white race," that forced white working people to identify with the interests of the white elites and to assist the elites in preventing enslaved workers from rebelling against their masters.

The northern colonies also had artisan and free wage labor, indentured servitude, and slavery. The northern colonies had a diverse social system consisting of large landowners, merchants, yeomen, artisans, apprentices, common wage laborers, landless tenant farmers, indentured servants, and slaves. Their economic systems featured family-based farming, small-scale craft production, and commercial and maritime ventures mainly in urban and small-town seaports. The New England colonies developed a high level of homogeneity based on common Puritan origins, family-based farms, craft production, and small town democracy limited to property-owning men. New York (the conquered Dutch colony of New Amsterdam) retained a system of large manorial estates with their feudal-like landlord-tenant relations dominating rural life. Pennsylvania owed its origins to Quaker toleration of cultural and religious diversity that encouraged widespread distribution of landownership and power to farmers and artisans.

By 1750, colonial English-speaking America was a stratified world not overly burdened by recurring famines or incessant class warfare. The rhythms of work were not measured by the clock or labor discipline, but by traditions rooted in pre-modern and preindustrial practices. Slaves and indentured servants, however, were governed by labor discipline and regimentation. The colonies possessed artisans, journeymen, apprentices, free wage laborers, indentured servants, and slaves; all worked in a wide range of occupations. Many worked, for instance, as agriculturalists: agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, or farmers. Many engaged in, for example, shipbuilding, brewing, flour milling, cooperage (barrel making), tanning, saddler, brickmaking, weaving, sawing, tailoring, staymaking (making strips to stiffen garments like corsets), baking, iron manufacturing, butchering, chairmaking, candlemaking, fishing, merchant shipping, carpentry, masonry, shoemaking, and ropemaking. In fact, shipbuilding was a major industry, employing numerous craftsmen, including caulkers, shipwrights, smiths, joiners, and sailmakers. Artisans were masters over apprentices and sometimes journeymen. Artisans, apprentices, and journeymen shared a value system and most likely shared civic duties and recreational activities. Women worked alongside their husbands or male relatives in many of the above-mentioned occupations in workshops or other worksites or performed many of such tasks in their homes.

Laboring people did not have an easy work life in English-speaking North America. Most working people were free farming people, artisans, apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and others who worked outside of a wage system. Free wage laborers remained a fraction of the total population of colonial working people, and many of them were temporary (a few months or a few years) rather than permanent wage earners. Of course, slaves and indentured servants had little, if any, respite. Most free wage working people had to contend with employers who sought wage regulations over price regulations. They faced employers and others who argued that high wages were temptation to insolence, laziness, violence, and vice. Still, free wage laborers received higher wages in colonial America than workers did in Europe. The authorities and members of the upper classes wanted laboring people to dress in clothing and to act in ways appropriate for lower-class status. In seventeenth-century colonial America, authorities often punished anyone, age twelve or older, accused of vagrancy or idleness by whipping. In the eighteenth century, authorities frequently forced or sentenced vagrants, unwed mothers, the unemployed, and orphans to serve a time at labor in workhouses. Comparatively speaking, laboring people in colonial America, however, remained better off than their counterparts did in Europe.