5. Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701

Introduction to Chapter 5

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Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century

1701–1770

TEXTILE SAMPLE BOOK These cloth samples assembled by an English textile manufacturer allowed North American colonial merchants to choose from a wide range of designs, textures, and fibers that they believed customers would purchase.

Norfolk Museums Service.

CONTENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

Understand the link between eighteenth-century colonial population growth and economic growth.
Explain how the market economy developed in New England and in what ways Puritanism was weakened.
Discern how the population growth of the middle colonies differed from that of New England and the South.
Recognize how the large influx of slaves into the southern colonies shaped the region’s economy, society, and politics.
Identify the shared experiences that unified the culture of the colonies of British North America.
Understand how the policies of the British empire provided a common framework of political expectations and experiences for American colonists, including their relations with Native Americans throughout North America.

THE BROTHERS AMBOE ROBIN JOHN AND LITTLE EPHRAIM ROBIN JOHN lived in Old Calabar on the Bight of Biafra in West Africa. The Robin Johns were part of a slave-trading dynasty headed by their kinsman Grandy King George, one of the most powerful leaders of the Efik people. Grandy King George owned hundreds of slaves whom he employed to capture still more slaves in the African interior. He sold these captives to captains of European slave ships for transport to the sugar, tobacco, and rice fields in the New World.

British slave ship captains and Grandy King George’s African rivals conspired in 1767 to destroy the king’s monopoly. In a bloody battle, Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin John were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies.

Unlike most slaves, the Robin Johns spoke and wrote English, a skill they had learned as slave traders in Old Calabar. The Robin Johns escaped from the man who bought them in the West Indies and boarded a ship “determined to get home,” Little Ephraim wrote. But the ship captain took them to Virginia instead and sold them as slaves. Their new master “would tie me up & whip me many times for nothing at all,” Ancona testified, adding that he “was exceedingly badly man ever I saw.” After their master died in 1772, the Robin Johns heard that a slave ship from Old Calabar had recently arrived in Virginia, and the captain promised to take them back to Africa if they would run away. They did, but the captain took the Robin Johns to Bristol, England, and sought to sell them as slaves yet again.

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While imprisoned in Bristol harbor, the Robin Johns smuggled letters to a Bristol slave trader they had known in Old Calabar. With his help, the Robin Johns appealed to the chief justice of England for their freedom on the grounds that they were unjustly enslaved because they “were free people . . . [who] had not done anything to forfeit our liberty.” After complex negotiations, they won their freedom.

As free Africans in Bristol, the Robin Johns converted to Christianity, but they longed to return to Africa. In 1774, they left Bristol as free men on a slave ship bound for Old Calabar, where they resumed their careers as slave traders.

The Middle Passage This nineteenth-century print illustrates conditions common during the eighteenth century aboard African slave trade ships on the Middle Passage between West Africa and the New World. Here enslaved Africans have been brought onto the upper deck to be fed. A barricade separated enslaved men and women, preventing the men from protecting the women. On the right, a crewman beats a shackled enslaved man while another African appears to dance, perhaps to avoid a beating. On the left, crewmen abuse enslaved women. Prudery kept the artist from realistically portraying the rapes crewmen routinely inflicted on the African women.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France/Bridgeman Images.

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The Robin Johns’ quest to escape enslavement and redeem their freedom was shared but not realized by millions of Africans who were victims of slave traders such as Grandy King George and numberless merchants, ship captains, and colonists. In contrast, tens of thousands of Europeans voluntarily crossed the Atlantic to seek opportunities in North America—often by agreeing to several years of contractual servitude. Both groups illustrate the undertow of violence and deceit beneath the surface of the eighteenth-century Atlantic commerce linking Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and British North America. Many people, like the Robin Johns, turned to the consolations of religious faith as a source of meaning and hope in an often cruel and unforgiving society.

The flood of free and unfree migrants crossing the Atlantic contributed to unprecedented population growth in eighteenth-century British North America. In contrast, Spanish and French colonies in North America remained thinly populated outposts of European empires interested principally in maintaining a toehold in the vast continent. While the New England, middle, and southern colonies retained regional distinctions, commercial, cultural, and political trends built unifying experiences and assumptions among British North American colonists.

CHRONOLOGY

1711	North Carolina founded.
1730s	Jonathan Edwards promotes Great Awakening.
1732	Georgia founded.
1733	Benjamin Franklin publishes Poor Richard’s Almanack.
1739	Stono Rebellion takes place in South Carolina.
1740s	George Whitefield preaches religious revival.
1745	Olaudah Equiano born.
1750s	Colonists move down Shenandoah Valley.
1754	Seven Years’ War begins.
1769	First California mission established.
1770	Mission and presidio established at Monterey, California. British North American colonists number more than two million.