Because more women and children arrived than in earlier decades, higher birthrates and a more youthful population resulted. At the same time, most North American colonists enjoyed a better diet than their counterparts in Europe and had access to more abundant timber, furs, fish, and other resources. Thus colonists in the eighteenth century began living longer, with more adults surviving to watch their children and grandchildren grow up.

As the population soared, the chance for individuals to obtain land or start a business of their own diminished. Even those with land did not always thrive: Farmers living in New England where the soil was exhausted or in swampy frontier regions or in areas already claimed by Indian, French, or Spanish settlers found that owning land did not automatically lead to prosperity. In the South Carolina backcountry, a visitor in the mid-eighteenth century noted that many residents “have nought but a Gourd to drink out of, nor a Plate, Knive or Spoon, a Glass, Cup, or anything.” In the Carolinas and along the Hudson River, many farmers rented land from large landowners, thus ensuring limited profits even in years of relative abundance.

In prosperous parts of Middle Atlantic colonies like Pennsylvania, many landless laborers abandoned rural life and searched for urban opportunities. They moved to Philadelphia or other towns and cities in the region, seeking jobs as dockworkers, street vendors, or servants, or as apprentices in one of the skilled trades. But newcomers found the job market flooded and the chances for advancement growing slim (Figure 4.1).

In the South, too, divisions between rich and poor became more pronounced in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Tobacco was the most valuable product in the Chesapeake, and the largest tobacco planters lived in relative luxury. Families with extensive landholdings and large numbers of slaves grew rich. They developed mercantile contacts in seaport cities on the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean and imported luxury goods from Europe. They also began training some of their slaves as domestic workers to relieve wives and daughters of the strain of household labor.

The profits from tobacco allowed a larger percentage of southern than northern whites to own land. In 1750 two-thirds of white families farmed their own land in Virginia, and an even higher percentage did so in the Carolinas. Yet small farmers became increasingly dependent on large landowners, who controlled markets, political authority, and the courts. Many artisans, too, depended on wealthy planters for their livelihood, working either for them directly or for the shipping companies and merchants that relied on plantation orders. And the growing number of tenant farmers relied completely on large landowners for their sustenance.

Some southerners fared far worse. One-fifth of all white southerners owned little more than the clothes on their backs in the mid-eighteenth century. Thus those with small plots of land could easily imagine what their future would be if they suffered a bad season, a fall in tobacco prices, or the death of a father or husband. At the same time, free blacks in the South found their opportunities for landownership and economic independence increasingly curtailed, while enslaved blacks had little hope of gaining their freedom and held no property of their own.