A PEOPLE
PROVIDENTIAL, ELECT, AND OPPORTUNISTIC:
COMMON
EXPERIENCE IN COLONIAL BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
Eric L. Gross
Florida State University
During the past two decades, scholars of America's
colonial period have increasingly stressed the diverse demographic and cultural
nature of British North American settlement.
The ground-breaking work of Bernard Bailyn in The Peopling of British North America and Voyagers to the West shows the flow of immigrants to be complex and
multi-charactered. Following in the footsteps
of Robert Gross's The Minutemen and Their
World and Darrett Rutman's A Place in
Time, a growing number of local and regional studies have brought out the
intricate social individualities of numerous colonial communities. John McCusker's and Russell Menard's
impressive work in The Economy of British
America reveals a multifaceted and dynamic world of colonial commerce, rich
in local nuance and regional variation.
Richard Dunn's Sugar and Slaves
compellingly looks into the unique dynamics of a sometimes over-looked theater
of British North American settlement, the Caribbean. Most notable of all, David Hackett Fischer's controversial Albion's Seed makes a case for four
great, separate migratory waves which carved out their own distinct and lasting
dominant cultures upon the North American continent.(1)
These works, a handful among many, have helped to
shatter any lingering vision of a monolithic and homogeneous British colonial
cultural experience. Indeed, in the
words of Bernard Bailyn, they show the colonial world as something akin to
"The Rings of Saturn," which may, from afar, appear smooth and
uniform, but when viewed closely reveal a rough, even chaotic, amalgam of
disparate parts.(2)
Given the magnificent geographic sweep of North
America alone, the diversity of the British colonies should not prove too great
a surprise. Stretching over 2,000 miles
from the fog-shrouded, craggy approaches of the Maritime Provinces to the
hurricane-swept, jungled islands of the Caribbean, the variety of weather and
landscape guaranteed each new settlement its own distinction.
Into this wild land came equally dissimilar groups
of immigrants, who, though largely English in the area under consideration in
this essay, came from different places and were armed with different religions,
different conceptions of society, different traditions, and different
intentions. Instead of a single,
integrated community of transplanted Europeans spread across the New World, a
kaleidoscope of regional and local societies emerged, each molded by the
demands of its geography and climate and shaped by the diverse origins,
mind-set, and expectations of its immigrants.
English Puritans poured into New England in a
brief, intense exodus from 1629 through 1640.
From the 1640s through the 1670s, a much larger wave, an odd mixture of
a royalist elite, lesser gentry, and a mass of laborers and servants,
overwhelmingly male and largely Anglican in its religion, flowed into the
Chesapeake. From 1675 to 1715, a third
great wave, dominated by Quakers, left England and Europe to settle into the
rich Delaware Valley and Pennsylvania.
The fourth and greatest migration rolled over the continental mainland
in successive waves between 1717 and 1775.
This tide of immigrants largely arrived from England's
"borderland," the northern counties, Scottish lowlands, and the north
of Ireland, and it drained away from America's coast into the "back
country" of the colonies. These
peoples pressed the boundaries of settlement westward toward and over the crest
of the Appalachians and Alleghanies.
In the seventeenth century, the great British rush
to the Caribbean in pursuit of sugar, "white gold," created a
movement of people which easily eclipsed these other migrations. Of the estimated 378,000 British immigrants
to North America between 1600 and 1700, some 220,000 went to the islands. Beyond these, over 300,000 blacks were
imported to power the mighty economic machinery of the cane plantations.
In addition to these primary currents of English
immigration, flowing westward from Europe dozens of smaller eddies swirled
along the stream. These carried
numerous nationalities, varying sects, and splinter religious groups; they
carried refugees from persecution, seekers of safe harbor, and followers of
dreams, monetary and spiritual.
Across this vast canvas of colonization, the
portrait was painted in many colors. It
is hard to imagine two communities more different than, say, the restrained
orderliness of a small, tight-knit, Puritan Massachusetts town, complete with
its undertone of stretched passions and Calvinistic angst, and the earthy,
raucous spectacle of Jamaica's Port Royal and its collection of soldiers,
sailors, planters, merchants, ne'er-do-wells, and thieves. Yet, as markedly dissimilar as these
colonial communities were, they represented not the apposition of poles but
opposite ends of the same spectrum.
Both communities were part of the same continuum of expansionist
settlement. Owing their origin and
livelihood to the wave of largely English immigration that swept across the
Atlantic in the seventeenth century, both were part of the same colonial
world. The same can be said of almost
every other combination of North American colonial settlements.
If all of these varied regions with their peculiarities
are thought of as complex and different tapestries, can it then be said that
they might share some common thread?
The answer, at least in some ways, is yes.
There is no denying the catalytic power of
religion in the settling of British North America. Numerous religious groups found immigration to the colonies the
answer to pressing spiritual and temporal problems. Still many other voyagers, if not directly moved to cross the
Atlantic by matters of God, at least brought Him along as their travelling
companion, for in the seventeenth-century western world, the Christian religion
was an inescapable cultural reality.
It is possible, however, to be so over-awed by the
amazing variety of immigrating religious groups and to be so fascinated with their
differences as to miss the obvious element that binds most of them. Whether Anglican, Presbyterian,
Congregationalist (Arminian or Antinomian), Separatist, Anabaptist, Quaker or
any of a myriad other sects, sub-groups, pietist movements, or splinters,
colonial religion was overwhelmingly Christian and largely Protestant.
In an American century that is heir to the
Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Science, the legacy of
Darwin, and, finally, the endless propagation of denominations rippling down
from the two Great Awakenings which hide the relative homogeneity of colonial
Christian thought and practice, the great significance of this is easily
lost. Irrespective of its diversity,
Christianity in the seventeenth century occupied far more definite theological
boundaries than it does today, and if not of direct, personal significance to
the immigrant, it at least formed a major part of the cultural and social
background against which the voluntary immigrants lived. Besides its very ubiquitousness, what facet
of Christianity can be found at work across the range of colonial experiences?
The majority of Christian colonists took as a fact
the existence of a spiritual world beyond the physical, the role of Christ as
the savior of a sinful mankind, and the existence of God as the single creative
force, the ultimate power, the ultimate judge and ultimate arbiter of man's
fate. Though some would argue on
exactly how and to what degree God was active in worldly affairs, few denied
that God worked directly and indirectly in human affairs to accomplish His
purposes. In short, the colonial
Christian tended to view the world in a providential fashion--the world was
God's domain and His hand was ever active in it.
Events, especially those beyond the individual's
control, manifested divine purpose. The
Puritans, for example, often spoke of "God's Remarkable Providence in the
World," or simply, "remarkables," which might be anything from the
omen of a falling star, to the deflection of a fire by a shift in the wind or
the course of economics. "It
pleased the Lord," wrote Governor Winthrop in 1647, "to open to us
trade with Barbados and other islands in the West Indies."(3)
In the Chesapeake among a largely Anglican
society, providence was expressed directly, and additionally in an indirect
form through the strong belief in fortuna,
or fate. Fortune moved strongly in the
Chesapeake mind. Fate explained
much: the course of a man's life lay
determined by a greater power residing in higher, unfathomable places, and it
manifested itself in myriad ways. God's
favor or will could be found in a streak of luck at cards or could be sealed in
death. Speaking of his servants, William
Byrd wrote in his famous diary, "My people were still ill. God save them if it be his good pleasure. .
. . God gives and God takes
away."(4)
In the backlands of the colonies, the successive
waves of so-called "Scotch-Irish" often combined their raw-boned
religion with deep strains of mysticism and tints of sorcery. Folk-remedies, incantations, and charms were
visible evidence of a deep belief that the physical world moved to the powers
and designs of a spiritual realm.
In this colonial world where events were divinely
scripted, even the enslavement of other men could be a providential
blessing. A Barabadian commented upon
the profitable switch from tobacco to sugar and the switch from white servants
to black slaves, "There is a great change on this island of late, from
worse to the better, praised be God."(5)
Providence certainly was most easily considered manifest in
tragedy. When half of Port Royal fell
into the sea during the great earthquake of 1692, almost everyone agreed that
the city had been punished for its manifold sins.
Such attitudes and examples fill the breadth of
colonial experience and record, for the providential mind-set, no matter its
particular form or depth, constituted a basic part of seventeenth-century
life. In a violent, unpredictable world
where economic failure, pestilence, calamity, and war often swept suddenly
across the land, the providential mind-set provided an understanding of the
world, a shield against the monumental uncertainty of life, an explanation of
failure and a justification for success.
One reason Christians could believe so deeply in
the providential nature of life was that they believed with equal or greater
depth in the fact of their own special status as the elect, as God's chosen
people in the world. Though
"election" is almost always associated with Calvinist theology and
the Puritans' inner turmoil, every Christian group considered themselves to be the saved, God's children, destined for
eternal life with Him. The concept of
election, a special relationship between the believer and Creator, was an
inevitable adjunct to the Christian faith and a powerful force present all
along the continuum of colonial experience.
Christianity, in its orthodox Protestant forms, is
a religion which brooks no haziness or uncertainty--one is either a believer or
a pagan, saved or damned, a possessor of eternal truth or a slave to darkness
dwelling in falsehood. Even the most
anxious Puritan, though he may doubt his own salvation, did not hesitate to
count himself in the camp of true believers and condemn those outside the
fold. Puritan New England's record of
religious intolerance speaks volumes in this account. The implications, nuances, and force of this conviction worked
themselves out in different ways from group to group, but its power and place
in the colonial mind-set seem obvious.
Its effects ranged from a fiery sense of special mission and purpose in
the world, to a confident sense of superiority, to a rigid and conservative
mind-set fearing all innovation and change.
In its most negative manifestations, this conviction led to the
distorted attitude of complete disdain for all other creeds, nationalities, and
races.
Both Puritans and Quakers came determined to show
the world how true Christianity should be practiced in individual and communal
ways. Their societies, at least in the
early generations, were marked by an order and stability partly rising from
their firm belief and confidence in who they were and what they were
about. That Quakers proved more
tolerant of religious diversity than did Puritans is not so much because The
Friends entertained doubts about their own rightness, but because they were
willing to let others have the freedom to be wrong.
In the Chesapeake and Caribbean, the Anglican
manifestation of this mind-set evidenced itself in other ways. The notions of providence and election
reinforced the planter elite's conception of a hegemonic world in which they
held complete sway. God, after all, had
blessed them and appointed them to their lot.
The confidence gained from knowledge of one's own saved, elect status
could manifest itself in basic ways.
For example, when William Byrd regularly ended diary notations of his
sexual conquests and laxity in prayer with ". . . for which God forgave
me,"(6) he was not so much invoking a talismanic phrase as he was voicing
confidence in the surety of his own forgiveness and his stature before
God. He might temporarily depart from
the straight and narrow, but he never doubted his place in the cosmos or his
relationship to the creator of that cosmos.
In the Chesapeake and Caribbean, however, the
negative possibilities of this mind-set also found powerful expression. If surety of one's own rightness could
instill a wholesome sense of self-confidence, it could also magnify a sense of
superiority. Convinced of the preeminent
nature of his religion and his culture, the colonial Christian at times found
ready intellectual and emotional support for the most horrific acts against the
"savage" and "barbaric" Indians and for the economically
advantageous enslavement of blacks. Planters
in the West Indies, plunging into the fantastically profitable sugar market,
embraced chattel slavery and created the most brutal manifestation of that
institution in the English colonies.
The continental mainland, lacking such a marketable product, only inched
into slavery. Yet, in both locales, the
superiority the colonists felt played a substantial role in their willingness
to accept slavery in its new and most exploitive form. The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 captured
this mind-set in its description of the black as "heathenish, brutish and
an uncertain, dangerous kinde of people . . . as being created Men, though
without the knowledge of God in the world."(7)
The power of Christian belief in election worked
itself out in diverse but omnipresent ways.
That colonists latched on more easily to the intoxicating possibilities
of Christian confidence than they realized the more difficult call to Christian
compassion, testifies more to the seductive power of that confidence and the
frailty of human nature than it does to the irrelevancy of their beliefs to
their lives.
If a providential mind-set and a sense of election
were common to the colonial experience, so were optimism and opportunism. That the British colonization of North
America was driven, in part, by the seeking of self-advancement and personal
gain is no new idea. Most recently,
Jack Greene strongly expressed this concept in his Pursuits of Happiness,(8) where he finds opportunism at work both
across the colonial landscape and in the parent nation. America offered the
immigrant seemingly boundless possibilities to those wealthy, crafty,
determined, courageous, lucky, or desperate enough to seek them. Despite the many differences between the various
migrating peoples, the voluntary immigrants were united in their belief that
the colonies offered opportunities that could be achieved.
To both the Puritans and the Quakers, America
offered an opportunity to escape persecution, and both hoped that in that
distant and fertile America, they might construct a Christian society for the
world to see. Catholics, though in
smaller numbers, similarly sought Maryland as a refuge. Hope for spiritual reward was in no way
limited to large movements or flight from hostility--innumerable sects, splinters,
and offshoots voyaged to the New World in search of their own particular
goals. Thus, optimistic that they would
find "the dear Lord Jesus," Johannes Kelpius led The Woman in the
Wilderness Sect into the Pennsylvania wilds.(9) Likewise, Johann Beissel ruthlessly manipulated his Ephrata
cloister in a tortured search for God's mystical truths.(10)
That this success too often and by too many has
been misunderstood in terms of physical gain is understandable, but also
unfortunate, for to so define it is to miss the fact that many immigrants were
also spiritual opportunists chasing unworldly dreams. To overlook this aspect of opportunism is to lessen the power of
an elemental force in the colonial experiences and to diminish our
understanding of the bonds that linked a diverse people.
Yet, the truth is that opportunism and optimism
are most easily seen at work in things material. Though the term "capitalistic" is perhaps anachronistic
when applied to people rooted in an age of mercantilism, it is applicable to a
people profoundly sensitive to economic opportunity. Energetic, acquisitive, exploitative, and, by the standards of
the time, entrepreneurial, thousands of colonists hoped to carve out a better
life. United in their optimistic search
for material improvement, they varied only in relative starting points, degree
of resources, the nature of local opportunity, and the scope of their
aspirations. In the Indies a hopeful
elite came hungry for quick fortune, seeking to make their profits and to return
home to enjoy new status and position in English society. In the process they deforested and
cultivated whole islands; they wrecked existing ecologies; they displaced
native populations; they created a new Caribbean civilization; and they erected
a technically complex, proto-industrial economic system of agrarian
manufacturing.
Lusting after the rank and comfort in English
society that success might grant them, in the Chesapeake and Carolinas similar
hopefuls constructed a plantation economy centered around rice, indigo, and
tobacco. That more planters achieved
their goals in the Indies than on the mainland is less a comment on the intent
of the Chesapeake's elites than it demonstrates the market ascendancy of sugar.
Nor was it only elites with capital who grasped
the opportunities available in the colonies.
The vast majority of seventeenth-century, voluntary immigrants to the
plantation regions came as servants already in, or headed for, bonded
servitude. If they survived the voyage
and their term of service, the prospect of freedom clearly meant to them an
opportunity to achieve things beyond their grasp at home. Though chances for a freeman to rise from
yeomanry to planter dropped dramatically after the first generation of
settlement, the chance for an artisan or laborer to gain land, trade, or a
business for himself remained real and a powerful incentive. That perhaps 80 percent or more of voluntary
immigrants came as servants, indicates the price people were willing to pay to
gain access to colonial opportunity.
In the 1700s, the large numbers of
"Scotch-Irish" who poured into the back-country suffered much in
transit and came to a region fraught with danger and plagued with the greatest
economic inequality on the North American mainland. Yet, so harsh were the conditions from where they had left and so
different the land into which they had come that their optimism remained intact
and the opportunities still seemed worth the cost. "I do not know one that has come here," wrote a
Pennsylvania immigrant in 1767, "that desires to be in Ireland
again."(11)
The struggle to seize the opportunities inherent
in the newly opened lands at the Empire's edge cut across lines of region,
religion, society, and economic orientation.
The catholic nature of the phenomena is nowhere better illustrated than
in the colonial fascination with land speculation. Speculation in North America constituted, in the words of Bernard
Bailyn, a "ubiquitous enterprise."(12) From Massachusetts to the Delaware Valley, across the Chesapeake,
throughout the western back-country, and across the Caribbean basin "every
farmer with an extra acre of land became a land speculator."(13) Thus the land itself became both the coin
and symbol of the optimistic opportunism which characterized the colonial
experience.
Opportunism, and its more extreme and negatively
connoted manifestation, exploitation, are double-edged swords. The process of seeking and grasping is a
dynamic one, and dynamism inherently implies change and evolution. In chasing his dreams, spiritual and
physical, the colonial immigrant brought himself into a new environment and
triggered chains of reactions which multiplied upon themselves and drew both
land and settler into a spiral of economic, cultural, political, social, and
religious transition.
If the wilderness of North America presented the
colonists with a seemingly infinite source of possibilities, it also
threatened, challenged, and changed them in powerful ways. Over the variety of patterns which characterized
the details of colonial settlement, the inescapable, elemental power of the
frontier experience loomed large.
Whether described as life "beyond the line" or living on
"the periphery" of the Empire, pressed against an untamed and
unsettled environment, the colonist's world lay at the margins of European
civilization. Extremes of weather and
distance, strange flora and fauna, wary and often hostile indigenous
populations, isolation, tenuous and distant authorities, limited resources, the
brooding threat of wars--these fearsome realities hovered over all the colonies
in ways often more immediate and profound than had any threats back home. As such, they provided constant stress and
proved a constant catalyst to change.
Perched on the edge of the realm, the tensions
between the bounds of society, the breadth of opportunity, and the thin nature
of authority strained and warped the threads of civilization in strange and
dangerous ways. Endemic violence,
extremes in exploitation, piracy, rebellion, lawlessness, vigilante justice,
near-genocidal Indian wars--all of these found fertile ground in the tumultuous
and unpredictable world "beyond the line." Perhaps it is not surprising that the most harsh and wild environment,
the Caribbean, produced the colonies' most radical excesses and worst moral
collapses.
Against this rock even Puritan will broke, with
their Caribbean colony of Providence Island collapsing in chaos and decay. Even in the salubrious climate of New
England, the force of the frontier could not be escaped. The Puritans knew their own sufferings,
Indian wars, crimes, and violence. The
dark woods on the margins of their settlements loomed large and threatening,
not just because of the visceral, primal fear of the unknown, but also because
the wilderness and the Indians it harbored constantly reminded them that here
civilization had only a thin and tenuous hold, and that they were all,
physically and spiritually, just a few steps away from barbarism.
The power and reality of change bred from opportunism
and environment operated across the breadth of colonial experience, and even
the most stout fortresses of colonial religious will eventually caved to the
forces unleased. For example, though
the Puritan and Quaker religions contained strong warnings against the
corrupting power of Mammon's pursuit, they also were plagued by the paradoxical
belief that earthly success among believers likely indicated election, God's
favor, and the deserved fruits of a devout, diligent character. The presence of a particularly strong strain
of the Protestant work ethic in each society further blurred the lines between
opportunity well-grasped and greed unbridled.
Here arose the dilemma of Boston's premier
merchant, Robert Keayne. In 1639 he
found himself charged in General Court with the rare and grievous crime of
oppressing the poor--seemingly not so much for the fact of his wealth, as the proceedings revealed, but for his
arrogant attitude toward it.(14) The
passage of two and three generations in the land, however, abated each
society's "ascetic" strains, and Puritanism's or Quakerism's ultimate
compatibility with economic opportunism is demonstrated by the shipping,
banking, manufacturing, and merchant edifices each society constructed in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
From the beginning of their own particular
experiences in the new land, colonists seemed aware of the surrounding currents
of change and dislocation. Against this
force, immigrants clung determinedly to those elements of their homes which
they had brought with them and longed nostalgically for the things they had
been forced to leave behind. Different
groups of voyagers carried with them the pillars and trappings of the
particular English society that spawned them--common law, church, parish,
vestry, militia, representative assemblies, building styles, fashions, foods,
recoreations--and they held on to them even when impractical and even
dangerous. The longing for and
preservation of the rituals, traditions, and ornaments of home served numerous
purposes, but it ultimately provided a connection with the familiarity and
relative security of a known past and a bulwark against an uncertain future and
potentially harmful change.
Faced with the daunting reality of the frontier, colonists
almost universally responded with some mixture of nostalgia for their past and
anxiety for their future. Though there
was optimism for the exploitation of opportunities, secular and spiritual,
there was also fear that their delicately transplanted and painstakingly
crafted societies might be irrevocably altered by time and the very
opportunities they sought to master.
This anxiety was not without reason, for no society is absolutely
static, and the passage of time assures change. The forces of the frontier and the new realities of life
"beyond the line" were already entering into the evolution of each
regions' unique character. So, after a
generation the surviving Puritan pioneers watched with horror as their
posterity, born to the new world, began to think more in terms of worldly than
in heavenly pursuits. Quaker families
found themselves painfully breaking ties with children, who, in ever greater
numbers, began to marry outside The Society.
Faced with a threat to their world, Caribbean planter elites turned to
increasingly oligarchic and coercive government to limit competition, and those
who had introduced slavery to their economic benefit now had to deal with the
volatile and new culture. Everywhere
the character of the periphery was in flux, with change begetting change. In its midst the colonist lived in a dynamic
world, both embracing it for what it had to offer and fearing it for what it
might cost.
It is evident that the amazing variety of
experiences in the colonial world share at least some elements in common. The voluntary immigrants to the British
North American colonies were overwhelmingly Protestant Christians sharing a
tendency toward a providential, mystical mind-set which explained and ordered
the world in terms of divine direction and intervention. As Christians they largely shared a
conviction of their own election and of the correctness of their beliefs,
practices, and lifestyles. From this they
gained a certain confidence, even if sometimes tenuous, of their place in creation
and their relationship to God. While
this confidence and conviction of their own righteousness provided a powerful
personal bulwark in a tumultuous life, it often also engendered a certain
rigidity of view and helped create within them a sense of personal, religious,
and cultural superiority, a mind-set which played an important part in their
dealings with both each other and different ethnic and racial groups.
The immigrants were also an optimistic and
opportunistic people, drawn to the colonies by hopes and expectations of
spiritual and material gain. In
striving for these goals they evidenced great energy and a genius for
exploitation. In achieving their goals,
they created new societies, established new ideas, and left an indelible mark
upon the landscape. However, that
landscape, in all its varieties and with all its opportunities, immersed the
colonists in a demanding, often harsh frontier lifestyle, where natural,
social, and moral forces could often blur the line between civilization and savagery. Against this unsettling environment,
colonists tended to react with a mixture of nostalgia for their past and
anxiety about their future. They sought
to preserve elements of their origins and to protect the stability of their
society, while new immigration and change unfolded unceasingly around them.
***
Mr. Gross is completing
his Ph.D. in American History at Florida State University and is now writing
his dissertation on an episode in Florida's history, "'Somebody Got
Drowned, Lord': The Great Okeechobee Hurricane Disaster of 1928."
ENDNOTES
1. Bernard
Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage
in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf,
1986); Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of
British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986); Richard
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the
Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1973); David Hackett Fischer, Albion's
Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989); Robert Gross, The Minutemen and
Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); John McCusker and Russell
Menard, The Economy of British North
America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);
Darrett Rutman, A Place in Time:
Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1740 (New York: Norton, 1984).
In addition to these
works, the following have also made some contribution to the ideas expressed in
this paper. In general, Colonial British America: Essays in the New
History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984) provides an excellent historiographical survey, while Richard
Hofstadter's America at 1750: A Social
Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1971) serves as a good general text. Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967) works to integrate environmental circumstance and cultural
development. Michael Kammen's People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the
Origins of American Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1972) is
thought-provoking. The numerous and
impressive works of Perry Miller, especially his classic, The New England Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1953), are indispensable in understanding the New England experience. Patricia Bonomi's Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) is a relatively recent
and good general study of early American religion.
2. Bailyn, Peopling, 47-50.
3. James Savage, ed., John Winthrop: The History of New England
from 1630-1649 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 312.
4. Maude H. Woodfin, ed.,
Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of
Westover, 1739-1741 (Richmond, 1742), 8.
5. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 59.
6. Louis B. Wright and
Marion Tinling, eds., William Byrd of
Virginia, The London Diary, 1717-1721, and Other Writings (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958), passim.
7. Barbados Act for the
Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, Sept. 27, 1661, Barbados MSS Laws,
1645-1682, C.0. 30/2/16-25.
8. Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social
Development of Early British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
9. Bailyn, Peopling, 123-24.
10. Ibid.,, 125-27, 185-86.
11. A. C. Davies,
"'As Good a Country As Any Man Needs to Dwell In': Letters from a Scotch
Irish Immigrant in Pennsylvania, 1766, 1787 and 1784," Pennsylvania History 50 (1983), 313-22.
12. Bailyn, Peopling, 69.
13. Ibid., 67.
14. Fischer, Albion's Seed, 156, 161.