Colonial Society and Culture

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how Enlightenment thought reached the British colonies through print, correspondence, and the colonial colleges, and identify the work of Benjamin Franklin and the influence of John Locke as defining examples.
• Describe the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, including the open-air revivals of George Whitefield, the published sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and the split between Old Lights and New Lights that fractured colonial Protestantism.
• Explain how the maturing colonial print culture, including newspapers, almanacs, and the 1735 acquittal of John Peter Zenger, expanded the public sphere and supported a tradition of jury independence and informed criticism of public officials.
• Compare the colonial colleges (Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and others) and the older Anglican charity schools and Quaker schools, and explain how each institution shaped a different layer of colonial society.
• Account for the social class structure of the British colonies on the eve of the French and Indian War and explain how that structure shaped political life.
• Apply Skill 1.A to identify and describe the cultural and political processes that produced an emerging colonial American identity by 1754, and to compare colonial and metropolitan British goals as those goals began to diverge.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard shared a culture that no settler in 1620 could have predicted. Colonists drank tea, wore wigs, and read the same novels as Londoners, and at the same time they listened to itinerant evangelical preachers, ran colonial assemblies that set their own taxes, and printed almanacs that were proudly American. Two parallel processes drove the change. The first was the long Atlantic flow of commercial, religious, philosophical, and political ideas between Britain and the colonies, which the CED captures in KC-2.2.I and which Topic 2.7 traces through the ARC theme. The second was the gap that gradually opened between what colonists wanted from imperial rule and what London officials thought colonial rule was for, which the CED captures in KC-2.1.III.D and KC-2.2.I.D and which Topic 2.7 traces through the NAT theme.

The Enlightenment in the colonies was less a unified philosophical movement than a habit of confidence in human reason that worked its way into law, religion, science, and politics through print and correspondence (KC-2.2.I.A). Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1706 and at work in Philadelphia from 1723, became the most visible colonial Enlightener. His Poor Richard's Almanack, first issued in 1733, sold across the colonies for twenty-five years and packaged practical wisdom in plain language. His electrical experiments, published as Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1751, won him election to the Royal Society of London. His civic projects in Philadelphia, including a subscription library, a fire company, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, modeled the Enlightenment idea that reasoned association could improve the conditions of common life. John Locke was read across the colonies by mid-century. His Two Treatises of Government (1689) supplied the language of natural rights, government by consent, and the right to alter or abolish a government that violated the trust placed in it. Colonial newspaper essays, election sermons, and assembly resolutions drew on Lockean vocabulary decades before independence was on anyone's agenda.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s ran on a parallel track. Where Enlightenment thinkers prized reason, the revivalists prized direct, emotional experience of conversion. George Whitefield, an Anglican minister from England, made seven preaching tours of the colonies between 1739 and 1770, preaching open-air sermons to crowds of as many as twenty thousand from Georgia to Maine. Jonathan Edwards, a Northampton, Massachusetts, pastor and the most theologically sophisticated colonial Calvinist, delivered his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741, and then circulated the printed text across the colonies. The revivals split colonial Protestants into two camps: the Old Lights defended the established settled clergy and educated, decorous worship, while the New Lights embraced the itinerant revivalists, the conversion experience, and the lay exhorters that the revivals produced. Denominations fractured along the line. Congregationalist churches in New England divided. Presbyterians split into Old Side and New Side synods. Most importantly, the revivals accelerated the growth of Baptist congregations across the southern colonies and prepared the ground for the Methodist societies that would expand rapidly after 1760. The Awakening was the first event that nearly every colonist, north and south, lived through together (KC-2.2.I.A, Theme ARC).

The colonial print culture that carried both the Enlightenment and the Awakening matured during the same decades (KC-2.2.I.B). Boston had four newspapers by 1740, Philadelphia three, and Charleston, Williamsburg, New York, and Annapolis each had at least one. Almanacs, including Franklin's Poor Richard and Nathaniel Ames's Astronomical Diary and Almanack, sold tens of thousands of copies a year and circulated through taverns, coffeehouses, and homes. Sermons, pamphlets, captivity narratives, and political essays moved up and down the seaboard on the same coastal sloops that carried tobacco and rum. The single most consequential moment for colonial press freedom was the John Peter Zenger trial of 1735. Zenger, the New York printer of the opposition New York Weekly Journal, was prosecuted for seditious libel after publishing pieces critical of the royal governor William Cosby. His attorney Andrew Hamilton argued that a published statement could not be libelous if it was demonstrably true, and the New York jury acquitted Zenger in defiance of the trial judge's instructions. The verdict did not change English law on libel and prior restraint of the press remained possible across the empire for decades, but the case produced a popular memory of jury independence and truthful criticism of public officials that pamphleteers, newspaper editors, and assembly leaders invoked again and again across the next half century.

Colonial education reflected the same Anglicized but expanding pattern. The first wave of colonial colleges was Puritan and Anglican: Harvard, founded in 1636 in Massachusetts Bay to train Congregationalist ministers, and William and Mary, chartered in Williamsburg in 1693 to train Anglican clergy. Yale followed in 1701, founded by Connecticut Congregationalists who feared that Harvard had drifted from Calvinist orthodoxy. The Awakening shaped a second wave. Princeton (the College of New Jersey) was chartered in 1746 by New Side Presbyterians who needed an institution that would train New Light ministers for the revivalist congregations the awakening was producing. The colonial colleges were tiny, training perhaps one hundred fifty graduates a year across the seaboard by mid-century, but they produced a remarkable share of the political class that argued with London and led the Revolution. Below the colleges sat a thinner layer of secondary education: the Anglican charity schools sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the Quaker schools that William Penn's followers built in the Middle colonies, the dame schools and town schools of New England, and the private tutors who taught the children of the southern gentry. Literacy rates among free white adults were among the highest in the British world.

Colonial society on the eve of the French and Indian War was sharply layered (KC-2.2.I.D). At the top sat a small colonial gentry of plantation owners in the Chesapeake and southern Atlantic colonies, prosperous merchants in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and a handful of clergymen, lawyers, and royal officials. Below the gentry sat a substantial colonial middle class of yeoman farmers, master craftsmen, shopkeepers, and small merchants, larger as a share of the free population than its counterpart in any European country. Below the middle class sat the laboring poor: tenant farmers, journeymen, sailors, fishermen, and casual urban workers. Indentured servants, still arriving from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the German states, occupied a temporary unfree status that ended when their contracts expired, usually after four to seven years. Enslaved Africans and African Americans sat at the bottom of the legal order, classified as chattel property, denied the rights of English subjects, and concentrated in the southern colonies where they made up the majority of the population in South Carolina and a sizable minority in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The class structure interacted with the political structure: in nearly every colony, only adult white male property holders could vote for the elected lower house of the colonial assembly, but the property requirement was lower than in England and the proportion of free white men who could vote was correspondingly higher.

The political consequence of all this is the second half of Topic 2.7 (LO 2.I, KC-2.2.I.D, Theme NAT). By 1754, colonial assemblies had spent more than a century setting their own taxes, electing their own speakers, and making local laws under the eighteenth-century policy of salutary neglect. Colonists pointed to those assemblies as the legitimate representatives of colonial interests, in much the same way that the House of Commons represented English interests in London. Imperial officials, by contrast, treated the assemblies as inferior bodies whose laws could be vetoed by royal governors and disallowed by the Privy Council in London. The divergence between colonial and metropolitan goals that the CED notes in KC-2.1.III.D shows up in routine eighteenth-century clashes over military funding for frontier defense, the regulation of paper currency, and the enforcement of the Navigation Acts. By the eve of the French and Indian War, colonists could simultaneously celebrate themselves as British subjects, with all the rights that label implied, and complain that London officials misunderstood the realities of life in North America. That paradox is what Lesson 8 will set up the comparison essay around, and what the rest of the AP US History course will track from the imperial reforms of Period 3 through the constitutional debates that follow.

Three excerpts that map the cultural and political turn of Topic 2.7. A revival sermon, a press freedom verdict, and a Franklin essay model the dual ARC and NAT focus of the topic.

1. (Comparison) Compare the ways the Enlightenment and the First Great Awakening reached colonial readers. Both depended on the same printing presses, the same coastal trade routes, and the same network of ministers, pamphleteers, and merchants. What did each movement do with that infrastructure that the other did not?
2. (Causation) Account for why the Zenger acquittal of 1735 mattered as a cultural event even though it did not change English law. At what later moment in Period 3 do you expect the colonial memory of Zenger to surface again, and why?
3. (Comparison) Compare the older colonial colleges (Harvard, William and Mary, Yale) with the newer ones (Princeton, the College of Philadelphia, King's College). What does the founding of the second wave of colleges, in the 1740s and 1750s, reveal about the political and religious changes that the lesson traces?
4. (Continuity and Change) Pick one element of colonial life that became more British across the eighteenth century (consumption, religious practice, political vocabulary, fashion) and one that became more distinctly colonial (assembly authority, the network of revival ministers, evangelical denominations, newspaper culture). How can both kinds of change be true at the same moment?
5. (Causation) Account for the divergence between colonial assemblies and royal governors that the lesson traces. Identify two specific eighteenth-century points of conflict (paper currency, military funding, frontier defense, religious establishment, or the regulation of trade) and explain how each one looks different from the perspective of a Virginia or Massachusetts assemblyman than from the perspective of a Whitehall official.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.