Saints and Sinners in British North America

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Saints and Sinners in British North America

• Colonial Societies and Economies, 1660-1760

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Albions Seed4 British Folkways

• Puritans from East Anglia
• Cavaliers from Southern England
• Quakers from the North Midlands
• Celts and Scots-Irish from Ireland, Scotland, and
  the North Country.
• (N. B. Scotch is a malted beverage Scots are
  people!)

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Changing Landscape

• Colonial practices exacerbated the alterations in
  the landscape and in flora and fauna
• British Populations (Black and White) increased
  dramatically

• 250,000 souls in 1700
• 2.5 million in 1775.
• High birthrate
• Lower death rate

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Women and Work

• Femme Covert
• Patriarchal assumptions
• If women were the weaker vessel, why did they
  survive all of the hard work.

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Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793)

• Managed large plantations in S. C.
• Developed Indigo cultivation
• Parented two important sons, Charles Cotesworth
  and Thomas
• Republican Motherhood

• George Washington was pallbearer at her funeral

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Colonial Economics

• Staple Crop and Slave labor based agriculture in
  the south
• Mixed economies in the middle colonies
• Shipping, small manufactures in Pa and NY

• Shipping and fishing in New England
• Niche economiesNaval Stores in N. C.

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Colonial Labor Systems

• Indentured Servitude for whites
• Slavery for Africans
• Slavery practiced in all colonies but
  predominated in South

• Africans came from diverse regions, spoke
  different languages, and practiced different
  religions
• Slave Culture (names, folktales, and religion)

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British North America and the Atlantic Economy
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Major Happenings and their Meanings

• Salem Witch Hysteria (1692)
• First Great Awakening (1730s-1760s)
• The Enlightenment

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Salem Witch Trials

• Thaumaturgymajor world view
• Maleus Maleficarum
• Gender Issue
• Generational Issue
• Indian War on the FrontierMary Beth Norton
  Thesis
• 20 people executed

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Witch Trials
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First Great Awakening

• Sense of religious decline
• Jonathan Edwards
• William Tennet
• George Whitefield

• Denominations split into old side and new side
• Emergence of Evangelicalism
• Pluralism

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Jonathan Edwards
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Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in
it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and
bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that
you are held over in the hand of that God, whose
wrath is provoked and incensed as much against
you, as against many of the damned in hell. You
hang by a slender thread, with the flames of
divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every
moment to singe it, and burn it asunder and you
have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to
lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off
the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing
that you ever have done, nothing that you can do,
to induce God to spare you one moment.
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George Whitefield
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The Enlightenment

• Mechanical, natural explanations for phenomenon
• Quest for discerning and then applying the laws
  of nature to human governance and society
• Enlightenment in British North America focused
  more on finding practical solutions and
  inventions.

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Benjamin Franklin

• Experiments with electricity
• Franklin Stove
• Glass Harmonica
• Lightning rod