CHAPTER XVIII SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE IN THE COLONIES (1652-1689) 'HE number of the colonists in 1689 may be esti THE mated at from two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand, variously distributed: New Hampshire contained about five thousand inhabitants; Massachusetts, including Plymouth and Maine, fifty thousand; Rhode Island, four thousand; Connecticut, between seventeen and twenty thousand; New York, between eighteen and twenty thousand; East New Jersey, somewhat fewer than ten thousand; West New Jersey, four thousand; Pennsylvania and Delaware, twelve thousand; Maryland, thirty thousand; Virginia, between fifty and sixty thousand; North Carolina, between two and three thousand; and South Carolina not more than three thousand. The territory thus occupied extended for about a thousand miles from Pemaquid to Charles Town, for the colonists passed but short distances back from the ocean, and then chiefly along the navigable rivers. Between adjoining colonies, even in 1689, boundaries were largely undefined, and, except where rivers determined the line of division, were destined to be a source of perplexity and trouble, in some instances for a century to come. Territorial claims growing out of conflicting royal grants continued to offer to the colonists difficult and vexatious problems that could be solved only by compromise and agreement; and unfortunately in some cases the mutual good will essential to such a solution was wanting. 1 In the main the settlers were of English stock. New England was ethnically almost homogeneous, though a few French Huguenots, Scots-Irish, and Jews were found scattered among her people. In New York more than half the inhabitants were Dutch, the remainder English and French, the former largely predominating, and a sufficient number of Jews to warrant the building of a synagogue.' New Jersey was largely English, though there were many Scots, Dutch, and French living here and there in the towns and plantations. West New Jersey contained many Swedes and Dutch as well as English; and Pennsylvania was a composite of Finns, Swedes, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Welsh, and English. Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina were settled by Englishmen only; South Carolina, on the other hand, a colony of one city, had already begun to show diversity of stocks, and though in large part settled by Englishmen, included French 1 Miller, Description of New York, 31, 37; Lodwick, "Account of New York," Sloane MSS., in British Museum, 3339, f. 252. VOL. V.-19 men and Scots among its inhabitants. Not until the next century, however, did the immigration of Swiss, Scots-Irish, and German palatines into South Carolina begin in earnest. This population was made up of free settlers, bond servants, and slaves, though bondage and slavery played a very small part in New England, where the economic conditions were unfavorable to such labor. Still, Randolph could report two hundred slaves there in 1676,1 and we know that, notwithstanding the Quaker protest against the slave trade in Rhode Island, Newport was the receiving and disbursing centre for most of the negroes who were brought from Guinea and Madagascar. In New York slaves were used chiefly as body servants and for domestic purposes, and Coxe mentions four in West New Jersey in 1687. 2 Even in the South the economic importance of slavery was as yet hardly recognized, and though there were many slaves in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, they did not form the indispensable laboring class that they afterwards became. Berkeley, writing in 1671, said that there were forty thousand persons in Virginia, of whom two thousand were "black slaves" and six thousand "Christian servants"; and that in the preceding seven years but two or three ships of negroes had come to the 1 Hutchinson Papers, II., 219. 'Amer. Antiq. Soc., Proceedings, October, 1887, p. 111. colony.' Yet the numbers increased rapidly, and towards the end of the century a planter, stocking a new plantation, was able to draw his supply from the colony itself." During the seventeenth century in the south, white servants were preferred to the negroes as laborers, and Berkeley could say that fifteen hundred came every year to Virginia. Many were Irish and Scottish, but the great mass of the servants was English. They came to America under the indenture or redemption system, according to which servants bound themselves to work for a certain number of years, generally from four to six, on the lands or in the houses of the masters who advanced money to pay the shipmasters for their passage. This practice became one of the most efficient aids to colonization in the seventeenth century, and thousands of settlers came to America under this obligation to labor. The New-Englanders had few servants, except on hired wages, but they experimented with Indians, who proved very inefficient as laborers and servants, being not only inapt but unwilling. 3 Writers differ somewhat in their estimates of the servant's life in America. Dankers and Sluyter, the Labadist missionaries, strongly prejudiced 1 Berkeley's Answers to Queries, in Public Record Office, Colonial Papers, XXVI., No. 77, i. 2 Bruce, Econ. Hist. of Virginia, II., 87, 88. • Hutchinson Papers, II., 219. against the practice, spoke in terms of severe condemnation of the "planter's avarice, which must be fed and sustained by the bloody sweat of their poor slaves." 1 But other accounts are more favorable. Alsop, himself an indentured servant, believed that the position was less grievous than that of the ordinary apprentice in England.' Hammond says that servants were not put to "so hard or continuous labor as husbandmen and handicraftsmen were obliged to perform in England. . . . Little or nothing is done," he adds, "in winter time, none ever work before sunrising or after sunset. In the summer they rest, sleep, or exercise themselves five hours in the heat of the day; Saturday afternoon is always their own, the old holidays are observed, and the Sabbath spent in good exercise.' G. L., writing from West New Jersey, confirms this account when he says that "servants work here, not so much by a third as they do in England, and I think feed much better, for they have beef, pork, bacon, pudding, milk, butter, fish, and fruit more plentiful than in England, and good beer and syder." "3 However hard the servant's life may have been, there was always the expectation of serving their time and becoming hired laborers at two shillings or two shillings and sixpence a day. Some of the 1 Dankers and Sluyter, Journal, 191, 192. Alsop, Character of the Province of Maryland, chap. iii. "Quaker's Account of New Jersey," Rawlinson MSS., in Bod. Lib., D 810, f. 55. |