Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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Like a camera's zoom lens, the chapter provides three different portraits of eighteenth-century North America. Its most precise focus is on the growing diversity of peoples, interests, and outlooks-in three new settings: the backcountry, the seaport, and the plantation slave community. With a wider angle of vision, it also contrasts British colonial society with the society of the parent country. Most broadly, it takes in the most far-reaching evidence of diversity-and conflict-in eighteenth-century North America, the international struggle for control of the continent waged by the French, the English, and native Indian tribes. That rivalry erupted into three major wars fought in both Europe and America between 1689 and 1748. It culminated in the Seven Years' War, a conflict discussed at greater length in Chapter 5.

The chapter introduction links these three by narrating an episode from 1754. Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan would have provided for greater political coherence for the British North American empire as it sought to win Indian sympathies for resistance to French imperial expansion. But the colonies rejected it, reflecting the jealous localism and social distinctiveness of eighteenth-century Americans. In 1754, an American political union appeared highly improbable.

Forces of Division

American population grew at a rapid rate-partly from accelerated immigration, partly from natural increase- nearly doubling every twenty-five years. The pressure of that expanding population on older towns and villages pushed settlement westward, creating communities that developed different interests and distinct cultures from those along the coast.

Most Americans on the move, both native-born and new immigrants, settled in the backcountry. Yet some swelled the populations of major colonial seaports. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston mushroomed from small villages into major centers of commerce and culture. The arrival of non-English immigrants and increasingly heavy slave importations only intensified continuing ethnic and sectional divisions. Disorder was common in congested, polyglot seaports; but the most serious social and political conflict drew its strength from controversies between east and west, contests between colonies over boundaries, and quarrels over tenancy.

Slave Societies in the Eighteenth-Century South

The plantation districts of the eighteenth-century southern coast became regions of tension and conflict, too. It was a period of massive slave importation. As more Africans arrived, the black community was infused with a more direct exposure to West African culture, divided internally between native-born slaves and newcomers and marked by various strategies of slave resistance.

Differences among blacks lessened after about 1750, as slave importations tapered off and the growth of a native-born population brought greater coherence to black communal and family life. A distinctively African American culture emerged. Even so, black families remained vulnerable.

Enlightenment and Awakening in America

Differences in thought and belief among eighteenth-century Americans both transcended local differences and at the same time compounded the tensions of racial, regional, and ethnic diversity. The two key cultural events that intensified conflict were the spread of Enlightenment ideas and the influence of the first Great Awakening.

While the Enlightenment prompted some American elites to conceive of a benevolent God of moralistic "rational Christianity," an even larger number of Americans embraced the evangelical Christianity preached by revivalists. The Awakening, sparked especially by the preaching of George Whitefield, provided a common experience for many different folk from throughout the colonies. Yet their conversions sharpened tensions within denominations, between social classes, and between westerners and the ruling elites.

Anglo-American Worlds of the Eighteenth Century

Despite the divisions within colonial society, a majority of white Americans shared a pride in their common English ancestry. The parent country set the tone for American taste and fashion, and colonials revered the British constitutional system as providing the world's best and freest form of government.

Yet England was different from America. England's economy was more commercially and industrially developed. Its society was more urbanized and aristocratic, and hence had much greater extremes of rich and poor. Thus, an undercurrent of ambivalence characterized colonial attitudes toward England. While Americans who crossed the Atlantic gloried in English education and culture, and aped the fashions and manners of English aristocrats, some recognized that the English elite had purchased benefits for the few at a high social cost. Many colonial observers, even while celebrating English constitutional principles, expressed reservations about the extent of economic and social inequality in England and the corruption of English politics. Even so, American criticism of England in the middle of the eighteenth century was muted by the advantages that an imperial policy of benign neglect afforded.

Toward the Seven Years' War

1754 changed the imperial relationship. As Franklin sought unity at Albany, George Washington suffered a military defeat by the French in western Pennsylvania. Leadership in both America and England faced a great climactic war for empire, during which both the balance of power in North America and the nature of imperial administration would shift dramatically.

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