Ch. 4 U.S.
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Created by:
Evelyn_F on June 3, 2012
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North Hollywood Highly Gifted Magnet Quizlet Group
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39 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Chesapeake | disease ravaged; half the people born there did not survive to celebrate their 20th birthdays; others did not live to see their 50th; the great majority of immigrants were single men in their late teens & early 20s; women were outnumbered 6 to 1 in 1650; and 3 to 2 at the end of the century; families were few & fragile; most marriages were destroyed by the death of a partner within 7 years; scarcely any children reached adulthood; there were many pregnancies among unmarried young girls; hospitable to tobacco cultivation; black slaves here had a somewhat easier lot - tobacco plantations were larger & closer to one another than rice plantations (allowing for more contact with friends & relatives) & tobacco was a less physically demanding crop;the proportion of females began to rise, making family life possible; the slave population here was one of the few slave societies to perpetuate itself by its own natural reproduction |
| Virginia | in the 18th century was the most populous colony; had 59 thousand people |
| Maryland | had 30 thousand people & was the 3rd largest colony |
| tobacco | grown in the Chesapeake; seeking fresh field, cultivators of this plant moved up the river valleys, provoking Indian attacks; ships annually hauled 1.5 million pounds of this out of Chesapeake Bay by the 1640s & 40 million pounds by 1700; the enormous production of this depressed prices, causing tobacco growers to grow more |
| headright system | Virginia & Maryland employed this to encourage the import of servant workers; whoever paid the passage of a laborer received the right to acquire 50 acres of land; masters thus reaped the benefits of landownership from this; |
| merchant-planters | some masters soon parlayed their investments in servants into huge fortunes in real estates (because of the headright system); lords of vast riverfront estates that came to dominate the agriculture & commerce of the southern colonies |
| white slaves | indentured servants; Chesapeake planters brought some 100,000 of these to the region by 1700; represented more than 3/4s of all European immigrants to Virginia & Maryland in the 17th century; led a hard but hopeful life in the early days of the Chesapeake settlements; as prime land became scarcer masters became resistant to including land grants in "freedom dues"; misbehaving servants might be punished with an extended term of service; even after freedom was granted, the penniless freed workers had little choice but to hire themselves out for low wage to their former masters |
| freemen | mostly single young men; were frustrated by their broken hopes of acquiring land and their failure to find single women to marry; the Virginia assembly in 1670 disenfranchised most of them, accusing them of "having little interest in the country" & causing "tumults at the election to the disturbance of his majesty's peace" |
| Berkeley | Virginia's Governor; lamented his lot as ruler of the freemen "How miserable that man is that governs a people where six parts of seven at least are poor, endebted, discontented & armed"; crushed the Virginia uprising; Charles II complained, "That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father" |
| (Nathaniel) Bacon | this man led a thousand Virginians to break out of control in 1676; 29 year old planter; died of disease during the war, allowing Berkeley to crush the uprising |
| Bacon's Rebellion | a thousand Virginians broke out of control in 1676 led by Nathaniel Bacon; most of the rebels were frontiersmen who had been forced into the backcountry in search of arable land; they fiercely resented Berkeley's friendly policies toward the Indians whose thriving fur trade the governor monopolized; when Berkeley refused to retaliate for a series of Indian attacks on frontier settlements, Bacon & his followers fell murderously upon the Indians, chased Berkeley from Jamestown & put the torch to the capital; chaos swept Virginia; Berkeley crushed the uprising when Bacon died of disease; Berkeley hung more than 20 rebels; ignited the smoldering unhappiness of landless former servants & he had pitted the backcountry frontiersmen against the haughty gentry of the tidewater plantation |
| black slaves | 10 million Africans were carried to the New World in the 300 years after Columbus's landing; only 400,000 of them ended up in North America, the great majority arriving after 1700; by the mid 1680s, these slaves outnumbered white servants among the plantation colonies' new arrivals; accounted for nearly half the population of Virginia by 1750; in South Carolina, they outnumbered whites 2 to 1; most of the slaves came from the west coast of Africa; were originally captured by African coastal tribes who traded them in crude markets on the shimmering tropical beaches to itinerant European & American flesh merchants; usually branded & bound, they were taken aboard ships for the middle passage; a few of the earliest of them gained their freedom & some became slaveowners themselves; life for them was especially harsh in the South; blacks in the tobacco-growing Chesapeake region had a somewhat easier lot; helped to build the country with their labor; a few became artisans, but chiefly they performed the sweaty toil of clearing swamps, grubbing out trees & other menial tasks; revolts in New York City & South Carolina; the first American slaves were mostly males, sent off to small isolated farms where social contact with other Africans, especially women was an unheard-of luxury; some were able to buy their freedom in the 17th century; by 1740, American-born slaves outnumber African-born & the importation of African slaves slowed; female slaves were forced to perform double duty - to work & care for their family; women used knitting & weaving time to develop close bonds; most slaves became Christians, but added African-influenced music & rituals to the services; Methodism (one of the most popular denominations in slave quarters) banned dancing as sinful, but they still clapped & beat time with their feet (led to ringshouting); rejected predestination & emphasized the lowly early place of Jesus, & earthly deliverance of Joshua, Daniel & Moses |
| Royal African Company | in 1698, this lost its crown-granted monopoly on carrying slaves to the colonies |
| middle passage | African slaves were taken aboard ships to America; death rates ran as high as 20%; |
| slave codes | statues appeared that formally decreed the iron conditions of slavery for black; these made blacks & their children the property for life of their white masters; some colonies made it a crime to teach a slave to read or write; not even conversion to Christianity could qualify a slave for freedom; |
| Gullah | on the sea islands off South Carolina's coast, blacks evolved this language; probably a corruption of Angola, the African region from which many of them had come; blended English with several African languages, including Yoruba, Ibo, & Hausa; through it many African woulds have passed into American speech - such as goober (peanut), gumbo (okra) & voodoo (witchcraft) |
| ringshout | a West African religious dance performed by shuffling in a circle while answering a preacher's shouts; was brought to colonial America by slaves & eventually contributed to the development; someone would walk around the ring, singing in unison; derived from African religions (used in the African Methodists meetings) |
| Anthony Johnson | a slave who bought his freedom; of Northampton County, Virginia; actually became a slaveholder himself |
| First Families of Virginia (FFVs) | just before the Revolutionary War, 70% of the leaders of the Virginia legislature came from families established in Virginia before 1690; Fitzhughs, the Lees & the Washingtons; for the most part they were a hardworking businesslike lot, laboring long hours over the problems of plantation management |
| small farmers | the largest social group in the South; they tilled their modest plots & might own 1 or 2 slaves; lived a ragged, hand-to-mouth existence |
| landless whites | most of these were luckless former indentured servants; low on the social scale in the South; beneath them were indentured servants |
| South | life here revolved around the great plantations, distantly isolated from one another; waterways provided the principal means of transportation; roads were so wretched that in bad weather funeral parties could not reach church burial grounds; fragility of southern families advanced the economic security of southern women, especially of women's property rights; |
| New England | clean water & cool temperatures retarded the spread of killer microbes here; settlers here added 10 years to their life spans by migrating from the Old World; "a sip of New England's air is better than a whole draft of old England's ale"; the first generation of Puritan colonists had a 70 year lifespan; many migrated in families; family was the center of this life; the population grew from natural reproductive increase; early marriages - women wed by their early 20s & produced babies about every 2 years thereafter until menopause; dying from childbirth was not uncommon; children grew up in nurturing environments where they received love & guidance from their parents & grandparents - this novel intergenerational continuity has inspired the observation that New England "invented" grandparents; low premarital pregnancy rates; women usually gave up their property rights when they married; women were generally denied rights of inheritance; evolved a tightly knit society, the basis of which was small villages & farms; Puritanism made for unity of purpose; the crusade for abolishing black slavery sprang from the New England conscience, with Puritan roots; grew in a more orderly fashion - new towns were legally chartered & the distribution of land was entrusted to the steady hands of sober-minded town fathers (proprietors); towns of more than 50 families were required to provide elementary education & a majority of the adults knew how to read & write; democratic; back-bending toil put a premium on industry & penny-pinching frugality, for which New Englanders became famous; 3 stages of progress were "to get on, to get honor, to get honest"; less ethnically mixed; summers were hot & winters very cold; tobacco did not flourish, black slavery could not exist profitable on small farms (although attempted); the English settlers condemned the Indians for "wasting" the earth by underutilizing its bounty & used this logic to justify their own expropriation of the land from the native inhabitants - they "improved" the land by clearing woodlands for pasturage & tillage, building roads & fences & laying out permanent settlements; introduced livestock - pigs, horses, sheep & cattle (there heavy hooves compacted the soil, speeding erosion & flooding; the growing herds needed more pasturelands, so the colonists cleared forests); became experts in shipbuilding & commerce; exploited the codfish (the fishy "gold mines of New England which yielded more wealth than all the treasure chests of the Aztecs); tried to recreate on a modified scale the social structure they had known in the Old World |
| William Phips | Massachusetts governor; was one of 27 children, all by the same mother |
| proprietors | the distribution of land in New England was entrusted to the steady hands of sober-minded town fathers; after receiving the grant of land, they would move themselves & their families to the designated place & laid out their town - the town usually consisted of a meetinghouse, which served as the place of worship & the town hall, surrounded by houses; also marked out was a village green where the militia could drill; each family received several parcels of land |
| Harvard (College) | in 1636 (just 8 years after Massachusetts founding) the Puritans established this; today the oldest corporation in America; originally established to train local boys for the ministry |
| William and Mary | only in 1693 (86 years after the founding of Jamestown) did the Virginians establish their first college, known as this |
| town meeting | the freemen met together & each man voted (in New England); exhibited democracy in its purist form; villagers from the outset gathered regularly in their meetinghouses to elect their officials, appoint schoolmasters & discuss such mundane matters as road repairs; Thomas Jefferson said this was "the best school of political liberty the world ever saw" |
| jeremiad | new form of sermon was heard form Puritan pulpits in the middle of the 17th century; taking their cue from the doom-saying Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, earnest preachers scolded parishioners for their waning piety; |
| Half-Way Covenant | in Congregational Church; troubled ministers in 1662 (because of the decline in conversions) announced this new formula for church membership; offered partial membership rights to people not yet converted; dramatized the difficulty of maintaining at fever pitch the religious devotion of the founding generation; as time went on, Puritan churches swung fully open to all comers, whether converted or not (gradually erased the distinction between the elect & other members of society); in effect, strict religious purity was sacrificed somewhat to the cause of wider religious participation; from this time onward, women made up a larger proportion fo the Puritan congregations |
| Salem witch trials | a group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women; a witch hunt ensued, leading to the legal lynching in 1692 of 20 individuals (18 of whom were hanged & one of whom was pressed to death); 2 dogs were also hanged; most of the accused witches were associated with Salem's prosperous merchant elite; their accusers came largely from the ranks of the poorer families in Salem's agricultural hinterland; this reflected the widening social stratification of New England as well as the anxieties of many religious traditionalists that the Puritan heritage was being eclipsed by Yankee commercialism; ended in 1693 when the governor, alarmed by an accusation against his own wife & supported by the more responsible members of the clergy, prohibited any further trials & pardoned those already convicted; this marked an all-time high in American experience of popular passions run wild; "witch hunting" passed into the American vocabulary as a metaphor for the often dangerously irrational urge to find a scapegoat for social resentments |
| Nutmeg State | Connecticut came in time to be called this because some of the traders palmed off wooden nutmegs |
| Boston | righteous New Englanders boasted that this was "the hub of the universe" - at least spiritually; a famous jingle came about |
| farmers | the majority of colonists were this; they planted in the spring, tended their crops in the summer, harvested in the fall & prepared in the winter to begin the cycle anew; usually rose at dawn & went to bed at dusk; chores might be performed after nightfall only if they were "worth the candle" |
| women | wove, cooked, cleaned & cared for children |
| men | cleared land, fenced, planted & cropped it; cut firewood; butchered livestock as needed |
| children | helped with their parent's tasks & picked up such schooling as they could |
| Leisler's Rebellion | in New York; animosity between lordly landholders & aspiring merchants fueled this; an ill-starred & bloody insurgency that rocked New York City from 1689 to 1691 |
| "meaner sort" | American blue bloods resented the pretension of these people & passed laws to try to keep them in their place; Massachusetts in 1651 prohibited poorer people from "wearing gold or silver lace"; in 18th century a tailor was fined & jailed for arranging to race his horse - "a sport only for gentlemen" |
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