Life in the eighteenth century

Front matter

LIFE IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A LITTLE HISTORY OF* COLONIAL,

Introduction

THE social and political institutions of every country are the outgrowths of that country's life conditions, except in so far as institutions may be imposed upon a people by an authority outside of themselves.

In our country outside authority has never been able thus to impress itself upon the minds and lives of the people. The development of American institutions, American ideas, and American life, has been exclusively from within. Our system, from top to bottom, is the creation of the people who live under it. It is therefore peculiarly well adapted to their needs, and peculiarly an expression of their common thought and aspiration.

The men and women who founded the English colonies in America, and the men and women who built those colonies up into great, self-governing commonwealths, were from the beginning men and women in revolt against the life conditions into which they were born. They were inspired by a vi INTRODUCTION

determined purpose to better those life conditions, to organize society and the state in accordance with their own needs and in answer to their own aspirations of liberty and self government.

In this volume and in the one preceding it, " Our First Century," an effort has been made to show how the colonists and the earlier native Americans did this work of social and political construction. It is a story which every American must know thoroughly if he would understand the institutions, the ideas, and the natural impulses of the Great Republic as they now are.

Surely there could be no more enlightening story than that of our country's beginnings and early development ; for out of those beginnings and through that development there has come into being the greatest, richest, freest and most potent nation that has at any time existed on the face of the earth. It is at the same time the happiest, best fed, and most prosperous of nations. It is the only civilized land in which every man has an equal share with every other man in the government, the only land in which the conditions of life are such that the poorest laborer may have meat on his table every day in the year, while his children, with education free, and with no barriers of caste to fix their status or to say

INTRODUCTION vii

nay to their ambitions, may freely and hopefully aspire to the very highest achievement.

It has been the author's endeavor to tell the story of all this briefly, and with only so much of detail as is necessary to a just understanding of events, while showing forth what manner of men and women the builders of the nation were, what conditions surrounded them, how they lived, what clothes they wore, what sort of habitations they built, how they cooked and ate, what schools they had, and everything else that constituted their environment, including their ignorance of sanitation, their lack of pavements, sewers and water supply in towns, the imperfection of their means of intercommunication, their consequent isolation and the like. Attention has been given to their sports, their punishments, their methods of farming and fighting, their commerce, their manufactures, their fisheries. Their deprivation of many things that in our time are accounted common necessaries of life, is contrasted with their indulgence in luxuries of dress and living which we should now regard as foolish extravagance and ostentation.

In the preceding volume — " Our First Century " — the period of Colony planting is dealt with. In the present volume the steady and resistless advance viii INTRODUCTION

of the colonies toward National Independence is traced, as the most vital fact of American life during the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, and one which dominated and colored all other conditions of the life of that time.

In this volume, as in the previous one, the author and publishers have availed themselves of the aid of many illustrations which show forth the conditions of life in aid of the written text.

Contents

chapter. page

Introduction ..... v

i. when the eighteenth century dawned i

Chapter I When The Eighteenth Century Dawned

AT the beginning of the eighteenth century the colonists, north and south, had learned in a considerable degree how to live in America. They had learned in each colony something of what crops the soil and the climate favored. They had learned in each of the colonies how to care for their domestic animals and fowls. In brief, they had learned fairly well how to live in their new homes, and how to produce there all that they needed for sustenance, together with a considerable surplus for export.

They were no longer dependent upon the mother

country for food, and if they were still dependent

upon it for manufactured articles, at any rate their

surplus food products, ship stores, fish, and the like,

a 1 were amply sufficient to buy all that they needed of manufactures.

The colonists were to a great degree dependent upon the mother country — which they were by that time strongly disposed to regard as a stepmother country — for all sorts of supplies that were

New York in 1697. (City Hall and Great Dock.)

the products of factories. Yet many of the colonists, both north and south, were rich enough to have all these things in plenty in their houses — brasses, rugs, mahogany furniture, leather, carpets, mirrors, chests of drawers, rich tapestries, porcelain, pewter utensils, tables of rosewood, tablecloths — which they called carpets — and napkins of fine linen, clocks of artistic manufacture, combs of ivory, brushes of great value, and a multitude of other articles of luxurious use. In the " plantation book " of one old Virginia family I once found this entry under date of 1701 : " Bought sixteen towels for the bath, rough in texture, but excellent in absorbing capacity, for four shillings apiece." The shilling in Virginia was i6f cents, but it represented a value greater than twenty-five cents does in our time, so that these sixteen ordinary bath towels cost my lady the equivalent of sixteen dollars or more of our money.

In another plantation book there is this entry under date of 1 720 : " Sarah Jane return* 1 from Madera by way of Eng d . Wheat sold at good advtg. Brought me six casks Madera, one port and two Bordeau. Allso 1 pretty China tea setts and traits [trays], cost 12 pounds 3 s 6 d ."

It was the custom even that early for a number of planters to club together, freight a little ship with wheat, send it to Madeira, and thence to England and home again with wines and other luxuries for home use. The " Sarah Jane," was doubtless a New England ship chartered for an expedition of this kind.

All these things meant luxury, and the-better-to-do colonists certainly lived in luxury when the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began.

The conditions in New England were not widely different from those at the south, except as the cir-

New York City Hal], Wall Street. Comer stone laid in 1699.

cumstances, the climate and the temperament of the people made them so. A good many well-to-do men, and some wealthy men, had come into the New England colonies, and they built fine houses and fared sumptuously. So, too, in Maryland, and still more in the Carolinas, there had been a considerable immigration of wealthy gentry, who had established fine plantation " seats," there where they intended that their children after them should live in state. The Quakers of Pennsylvania made less display, but they were thrifty folk who prospered mightily in the new land, and they were minded to enjoy the fruits of their labor in their own fashion. Their clothing was of Quaker cut, but the cloths and silks of which it was made were of the best. Their houses were plain in structure but the life within them suffered no lack of any luxury that abundant money could buy.

In order to understand the state of mind of the colonists at the beginning of this new century it is necessary to bear always in mind the fact that from the beginning, or almost from the beginning, all the acts of these people had been dominated by a spirit of discontent with things as they were, and by a fixed purpose to make them better. All these people — whether Puritans in New England or Cavaliers in Virginia, or Quakers in Pennsylvania, or Catholics in Maryland, or Huguenots in the Carolinas, or Germans in Pennsylvania — had crossed the ocean in protest against conditions in their home lands. They had all come to this country in search of liberty to live their own lives in their own way. The fundamental idea in the minds of all of them was the idea of the right of men and communities to govern themselves free from interference from without. If they were themselves sometimes intolerant, their intolerance was mainly self-defensive, and those who found conditions unsatisfactory in one colony, were free to remove to another. A vast, unoccupied continent lay before them where to choose. Thus when conditions in Massachusetts became unbearable to such liberty-loving spirits as Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and their followers, those persecuted ones removed to Rhode Island. And when later a lesser discontent sprang up in Massachusetts, a large body of the people living there migrated to Connecticut, in search of a larger liberty. In the same way, when the Germans in New York felt themselves hardly used, they removed to Pennsylvania. So, too, though later, the Scotch-Irish and others, in the Carolinas, crossed the mountains and made new settlements in the wilderness at cost of great hardship to themselves, and, having done so, threw off the yoke of the colonies from which they had come and set up little states of their own.

Everywhere the dominating thought found expression in revolt against all authority from without, and the assertion of the principle of local self-government.

Even within each of the colonies, this thought was crystallized into institutions such as the New England Town Meeting and the Virginia County Court — each a little sovereignty in itself, claiming and exercising the right of home rule.

It is not too much to say that every one of the colonies had been planted in the spirit of revolt against conditions or institutions that had bred discontent, and that the history of their growth and extension had been a story of successive revolts and removals in obedience to the all-dominating doctrine that every community has a right to manage its own affairs in its own way. That thought continued to control the history of the colonies during the period from the dawn of the century to the outbreak of the Revolution. The history of the eighteenth century is a story of revolt in the name of liberty and independence.

The seventeenth century had been a period of colony planting in America. That work of planting had been successfully done by brave and resolute men. By the time that the sixteen hundreds ended, and the seventeen hundreds began, the foundations of a great nation had been securely laid on these shores.

From Maine to South Carolina there were firmly fixed and thoroughly organized English colonies. These were no longer experimental settlements. They were colonies in which life had taken permanent form. Colonies in which institutions — political, social, religious and industrial — had taken root in the soil and become fixed for good or ill.

The men and women who inhabited America when the year 1701 introduced a new century, had come hither to stay.

Many of them had been born here and knew no other country except by tradition. They had built up homes for themselves. Sawing boards.

They had organized their political institutions with reference to their own political needs. They had arranged their religious affairs in each colony in accordance with their several beliefs, but mainly with a larger tolerance for differences than had been permitted at first. They had organized society upon somewhat new lines, more democratic than those that prevailed in England, but still with marked distinctions between classes.

In Virginia the first colonists had been succeeded by a large immigration of well-to-do, middle-class Englishmen, including a few persons of noble blood. In that colony the dominating impulse had been to set up plantations which should become great " estates " in the English sense of the term. This impulse really determined the history of Virginia for generations afterwards, the great planters constituting a dominant and controlling class, just as the clergymen were in New England and the patroons in New York.

At first the houses of the colonists had been hovels, or holes dug in the ground, or bush shelters, or bark huts. When New York consisted of thirty houses, twenty-nine of them were bark hovels. A little later the colonists built log cabins with earthen floors. A little later still the houses had been log cabins with " puncheon " or hewed timber floors, windows made of greased cambric, or greased paper, and chimneys built of sticks and daubed with mud. But as the quality of the immigrants improved, and as the wealth of the colonists increased, the houses became steadily better and better.

After the policy of the private ownership of land was adopted in the colony, the young English gentlemen who settled in Virginia had an easy road open to them. They had only to secure a grant of Virginia lands, a thing not difficult to do. Then, upon their arrival in the colony, they had only to select the land they desired and make it their own. Next they bought white servants or negro slaves to till the land they had secured by patent or grant.

In the main they employed white servants, at least during the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. During that time, as we have seen in " Our First Century," there had been a very small importation of negro slaves into the colony. As late as 1671 there were only about two thousand negroes there, while the white servants in the same year numbered no less than six thousand.

As soon as well-to-do Englishmen began to come to the colony there was a very great improvement in the quality and character of the dwellings erected. Brick quickly came into use. At first bricks were used mainly in the construction of chimneys. These were often built in the middle of the house, with fireplaces in the corners of four rooms on each floor of the house, so that one chimney served eight rooms.

But these chimneys were built upon cellar foundations that employed brick enough to build two or three houses under modern methods of construction.

There were a good many houses built entirely of brick both in Virginia and South Carolina. These houses were usually very plain, box-like structures, with piazzas all around them, but they were in that time esteemed almost as palaces, while their owners, as dwellers in brick houses, were held to be something akin to nabobs.

A. o.

A curious misapprehension has arisen out of this brick building. There were two kinds of bricks used — English bricks and Holland bricks. For a long time it was supposed by the descendants of these builders that English bricks had been imported from

Smith St» i»n innkeeper) in 1701,/wj61SO

England, and Holland bricks from Holland. Even Washington Irving, with all the minuteness of his learning, has fallen into that error. But in fact all, or very nearly all, these bricks, whether English or Dutch, were made in America, as later scholarly research has conclusively proved. The only difference between English bricks and Dutch bricks was one of dimensions. The small bricks, molded upon a Dutch model, were known as Holland bricks. The much larger ones, molded upon an English model, were called English bricks. The very learned and scholarly historian of South Carolina, Mr. McCrady, has conclusively proved that the so-called English bricks used in the construction of Carolina houses could not have been imported from England. By simple arithmetical calculation he has shown that all the ships landing in the Carolinas during the seventeenth century — even if all of them had been loaded exclusively with bricks^could not have brought in enough bricks to build one half or one fourth the " English brick " houses of that part of the country.

And there was no need. In all the colonies there was clay fit for brickmaking and in all of them there were skilled brickmakers. In New York the brickmakers, being Dutchmen, naturally adopted the model and dimensions of the Holland brick mold, and made Holland bricks along the Hudson. In Virginia and the Carolinas, as the brickmakers were Englishmen, they very naturally made use of English dimensions in the manufacture of their bricks. So extensive was this industry indeed that the Virginians began exporting bricks early in the seventeenth century.

But, in the main, colonial houses were built of wood. In all the colonies there was timber of the best sort and in limitless abundance. There were sawmills in America before there were any in England, and, even before the introduction of sawmills, the colonists found it cheaper and better to build of wood than to construct brick walls.

They built substantially, however. They laid sills of heart pine twelve or fourteen inches square, upon brick or stone foundations. Into these they mortised — not the " two by fours " of flimsy modern construction — but solid, heart pine or white ash or oaken uprights eight inches square, and to these at the top they mortised great " wall plates," a foot or more in diameter, upon which they imposed a roof with rafters seven or eight inches thick, both ways.

Many of those early colonial houses endure even unto this day, both in the south and in the north, bearing eloquent witness to the honesty and the conscientiousness of early colonial building.

The laws made in England were mainly antagonistic to colonial manufactures. It was intended that the colonies should be " feeders " of English pros-

Old iron furnace near Warwick, N. Y. perity. It was hoped that they would send to England large supplies of raw materials, and largely buy the products of English manufacture, thus paying a double tribute to English interests.

It was hoped, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, that a considerable supply of crude iron might be smelted in the colonies and sent to England for manufacture there into articles of use. Coal had not yet come into general use as a fuel supply anywhere in the world, and the woodlands of England were to a great extent exhausted. So it was thought that iron might be more cheaply smelted in the colonies, where there were limitless forests to furnish fuel, than in England. But the English manufacturers very jealously wanted the profit of converting the colony-smelted iron into utensils of every kind which could be sold back to the colonies. Accordingly, in 1719, and later, the same English laws which encouraged the smelting of iron in the colonies, peremptorily forbade the colonial manufacture of such iron into instruments of use. The plan was to have the crude iron made on the American side of the ocean, shipped to England and there manufactured into" articles of use which might be sent back to the colonies and there sold for a rich profit.

In the same way, and in a like spirit, the English laws during the early part of the eighteenth century encouraged the manufacture of glass in Virginia, where fuel was cheap and plentiful, but forbade the colonial manufacture of beads and trinkets of such glass. Beads and trinkets were used as currency in trade with the Indians, and certain people in London enjoyed a monopoly of the Indian trade. So while the colonists were encouraged to make crude glass they were absolutely forbidden to make beads and bangles of it. That must be done in England.

Spinning flax.

Under a like impulse the English law encouraged, with tobacco bounties, the manufacture of linen on this side of the ocean, simply because there was no great interest in England in such manufacture. And in the same way England encouraged the production here of ship stores, by liberal bounties. But the English laws at the same time forbade the manufacture of woolen cloths here, on the ground that the colonists should buy such cloths from England. In brief, the English laws encouraged the colonists to do the best they could for themselves so long as they did not compete with British interests. Beyond that line the English law said " Nay ! " to colonial enterprise.

All these are illustrative examples only. We have already seen, in " Our First Century," how resolutely the colonists acted upon their own impulses, and in answer to their own needs. In spite of the laws, which for a long time were not rigorously enforced, they converted their crude iron into such utensils as they needed. In spite of the foreign law they made woolen clothing for themselves. Even in the very earliest days of the Virginia colony a restrictive law did not prevent the colonists from making glass beads and trading them to the Indians for corn.

All these things tended to the ultimate establishment of American liberty and independence. These, and like things, were causes of friction, and out of that friction came revolt and revolution quite as a matter of course. The colonies had been planted in America for the benefit of English companies and English Lords Proprietors and English manufacturers and the English King. The colonists had conquered a wilderness and created an empire.

Spinning wool.

They very naturally desired to reap for themselves the harvest of the planting they had done at so great a cost of hardship, suffering, danger and limitless toil. There was in the future inevitable war between these two aims and aspirations, though that war was

DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 2l

long delayed in its coming. It is the purpose of this volume to tell how events slowly led up to the outbreak.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no thought of other than local independence in the colonies. The colonists already had grievances, but the idea of final and resolute revolt had not yet been born in their minds. All that came later. In the meanwhile, as we shall see in later chapters of this volume, they were beset by difficulties and dangers sufficient to occupy their attention to the utmost limit.

Chapter II

DURING the first half of the eighteenth century, two influences were at work that vitally

affected the character and history of the colonies. One of these was a succession of wars between the Englishmen in America, and the French and Spanish with their Indian allies. These wars, of which the details are so fully given in all the school histories that they need not be repeated here except in barest outline, vexed the colonies and sorely afflicted the colonists. They cost many lives and much treasure ; they involved the destruction of many outlying towns and the ravaging of many farms, whose men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately. But the wars served to strengthen the colonies, and especially to breed among the people a spirit of self-reliance and selfconfidence which served them in good stead when the time came, later in the century, for the final struggle for independence. They taught the colonies that they could stand alone and take care of themselves. More important still, they accustomed the colonists to think of America, rather than of

Map illustrating the French and Indian Wars.

England, as their own country. The subtle influence of this changed habit of mind is clearly seen in the steady and continuous growth of the spirit of independence, which we shall trace as we go on with the story.

The first of these French and Indian wars — known in history as King William's War — came to an end in 1697, just before the dawn of the eighteenth century. In the making of peace, unfortunately for the colonists, the English government gave up all that the Americans had won for themselves by their heroic endeavors and still more heroic sacrifices. The French were left in possession of all the territory they had ever held in America, and they were free to continue their policy of pushing their trading posts into the great fertile region west of the mountains, a region which they already claimed as their own. It is true that the English colonists had not yet begun to go into that country to any considerable extent, and so, for the time being at least, the French advance into it gave the colonists no trouble. But statesmanship must even then have foreseen those later consequences which proved so hazardous to the growth of the English settlements'.

The peace made in 1697, lasted no more than five years. In 1702, upon Queen Anne's accession to the English throne, war broke out anew between England and France, and it involved the English and French colonies in America, as a matter of course. At the same time the Spanish assailed the Americans, thus doubly endangering the English colonies. The French lay north of New England, while the Spanish lay south of the Carolinas, and both were aided by savage Indian allies.

The war lasted for eleven years, involving much of slaughter, especially in the New England colonies which were continually ravaged. It ended at last, however, with distinct advantage to the English colonists. At the south a Spanish expedition against Charleston was beaten off, and the Carolinians under Colonel Moore conquered and permanently held all that part of what was then Florida, which now constitutes most of the State of Georgia. At the north, the English colonists, with the assistance of English war ships, again conquered Acadia and when peace was made the English retained control of that region, restoring to it its old name of Nova Scotia, and changing the name of its capital from Port Royal to Annapolis Royal.

Queen Anne.

The peace made in 17 13 lasted until 1744, but only in a half peaceful way, so far as the French and English in America were concerned. So long as England and France were at peace on the other side of the ocean, their colonies in America were forbidden to make war upon each other. But the hostility

Acadia, Port Royal and Louisbourg and the route by sea between Boston and Quebec.

between them remained in full force, and the French not only encouraged Indian incursions into the English colonies, but furnished French leaders for such irruptions.

The other influence to which reference has been made as one vitally affecting the future of this country, was the large and varied immigration that poured into the colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century. That immigration not only increased the numerical strength of the colonists but it brought with it new ideas and new modes of living which had their influence upon life in America. During the earlier colonial period, including nearly the whole of the seventeenth century, nearly

all the immigrants who had come to the English colonies, except the Dutch in New York and a small number of Swedes, were Englishmen. But near the end of the seventeenth century a new and important inflow began, which continued, in greater or less force, for more than forty years.

There were many little sects in Germany who, upon religious grounds, were averse to war and who therefore desired to escape from a country in which every man was expected to serve as a soldier. These sects were persecuted for their religion and additionally upon the ground that they refused to do the work of soldiers. There were still other Germans who for political reasons came to America. Atone time as many as thirteen thousand of them removed from the Palatinate of the lower Rhine to England and asked the government there to send them to America. They were sent to many of the colonies and scattered through them. They gave an impulse of German ideas, and German civilization, and German ways of living, to the communities in which they settled. It is noteworthy that many years later, when the time came for real fighting to be done, for real principle, these Germans proved to be excellent soldiers in spite of the prejudice that many of them felt against war.

In the early part of the eighteenth century a considerable number of Germans immigrated into New York. They became dissatisfied with conditions there and a little later they removed themselves to Pennsylvania, where they were well received and where the spirit of the government accorded with their own. These Germans were the forefathers of the thrifty and sturdy Americans who were for long ignorantly called Pennsylvania Dutch.

During this same period there began what afterward became a very large immigration of men and women who were commonly known as Scotch-Irish. They were properly not Irishmen and Irishwomen in blood but Scotchmen and Scotchwomen. They were Presbyterians whose forefathers had removed themselves from Scotland to the north of Ireland where they had engaged in the business of manufacturing linen.

That industry was an uncertain one at that time, so that many of these so-called Scotch-Irish were often thrown out of work by reason of a depression in the linen industry. Many of them managed to emigrate to America where they introduced the linen industry and the cultivation of the potato.

The so-called Irish potato is one of the noteworthy American contributions to the sustenance of man. But it was probably not found in a wild state