Jon Butler - Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776

JON BUTLER

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

Copyright 2000 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Third printing, 2001

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001

Butler, Jon, 1940
Becoming America : the revolution before 1776 / Jon Butler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-674-00091-9 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-00667-4 (pbk.)
1. United StatesHistoryColonial period, ca. 16001775.
2. United StatesCivilizationTo 1783. I. Title.
E188 .B97 2000
973.2dc21 99-054646

Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt

FOR MY MOTHER
GENEVIEVE VIRGINIA SORENSON BUTLER
AND IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER
HAROLD JASON BUTLER
19121998

You can see things on the Minnesota prairie
that you cant see anywhere else.

One
PEOPLES

Two
ECONOMY

Three
POLITICS

Four
THINGS MATERIAL

Five
THINGS SPIRITUAL

Six
1776

E ACH summer, for more than two hundred years, Americans have clambered across the eastern seaboard searching for the colonies and olden times. The trek is fun but doubly ironic. The homes, public buildings, and churches they tour generally represent only the last half of the colonial era, that is, the years between 1680 and 1770. They see very little from the seventeenth-century colonies established between 1607 and 1680 except through modern reconstructions, such as those at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and at Jamestown Settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. And however odd it may seem, the buildings that look so quaint and so colonial, such as the famous House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, through which Nathaniel Hawthorne symbolized a crabbed seventeenth-century Puritanism, actually exemplify the first flowering of modernity in America. Taken together, these buildings embody a revolution that utterly transformed the original seventeenth-century British colonies, marking the creation of the first modern society in Britains colonies before independence. This transformation, which emerged with unplanned force in Britains mainland colonies between 1680 and 1770, pointed to the future far more than it pointed to the past. It shaped the Revolution of 1776, including the social and political upheaval unleashed by independence, although it cannot be said to have precipitated the Revolutionary War.

This book traces the enormous social, economic, political, and cultural changes that created a distinctively modern and, ultimately, American society in Britains mainland colonies between 1680 and 1770. By 1770 Britains mainland settlements contained a polyglot population of English, Scots, Germans, Dutch, Swiss, French, and Africans, although in 1680 most European settlers were English. By 1770 slavery had profoundly reshaped colonial life everywhere, whereas it cast only curious shadows in the mainland colonies as late as 1670. As early as 1720 cities of real urban complexity emerged from the meanest and simplest of towns. Modest as well as prosperous farmers increasingly thrust themselves into international market economies, some happily, some less so. Eighteenth-century colonial merchants and planters created and inherited wealth so vast that their predecessors scarcely could have comprehended it. Complex, sophisticated politics replaced the rudimentary political mechanisms typical of the seventeenth-century colonies. New patterns of production and consumption accompanied the rise of refined crafts and trades. A vigorous religious pluralism overran the old orthodoxy of the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Anglicans in Virginia. Here, then, was an America already modern in important ways.

Britains eighteenth-century mainland colonies were not completely modern, of course. Two characteristics of modern society never appeared in the colonies. Britains mainland settlements never were overwhelmingly urban, and they were not driven by or beset with the massive technological change that transformed nineteenth-century America and Europe. But the colonies emerged as surprisingly modern in five other important ways. They became ethnically and nationally diverse, not homogeneous. They developed transatlantic and international economies that supported a vigorous domestic trade and production. Their politics looked ahead to the large-scale participatory politics of modern societies. They exhibited the modern penchant for power, control, and authority over both humanity and nature that brooked few limitations or questions about their propriety. And they displayed a religious pluralism that dwarfed the mild religious diversity found in any early modern European nation.

The modern features of Britains eighteenth-century colonies were not fully developed even on the eve of the Revolution. Ethnic and national diversity did not obviate a strong British dominance in government and culture; regional disparities and increasing stratification of wealth typified colonial economic development; patronage and status inflected colonial politics; and even in the 1760s not everyone accepted religious pluralism as legitimate in principle, even if it was present in fact. Yet the changes were so pronounced that most foreign observers had long since described the colonies as profoundly different from modern Europe. The America of the British mainland colonies had come to mean a new kind of society even if strong remnants of older societies still persisted past the American Revolution.