Chapter Overview

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 the backcountry, the seaport, and the plantation slave community. 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. Wars fought in both Europe and America between 1689 and 1748 culminated in the Seven Years' War.

Benjamin Franklin's 1754 Albany Plan would have provided for greater political coherence for the British North American empire, but the colonies rejected it, reflecting the jealous localism and social distinctiveness of eighteenth-century Americans.

Forces of Division

American population nearly doubled every 25 years -- partly from accelerated immigration, partly from natural increase. The pressure of that expanding population pushed settlement westward and created communities that developed different interests and distinct cultures from those along the coast.

Most Americans on the move settled in the backcountry; some swelled the populations of major colonial seaports. The arrival of non-English immigrants and increasingly heavy slave importations only intensified continuing ethnic and sectional divisions. 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. As more and more Africans arrived, the black community was divided internally between native-born slaves and West African newcomers and was marked by various strategies of slave resistance. Differences among blacks lessened after about 1750. A distinctively African-American culture emerged, although black families remained vulnerable.

Enlightenment and Awakening in America

Differences in thought and belief both transcended local differences and compounded the tensions of racial, regional, and ethnic diversity.

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 Great Awakening provided a common experience for many different folk from throughout the colonies. Yet their conversions also sharpened tensions.

Anglo-American Worlds of the Eighteenth Century

Despite their differences, a majority of white Americans shared a pride in their common English ancestry. 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. Some Americans who crossed the Atlantic recognized that the English elite had purchased benefits for the few at a high social cost and expressed reservations about the economic and social inequality and 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. Leadership in both America and England faced a great climactic war for the empire, during which both the balance of power in North America and the nature of imperial administration would shift dramatically.