Collectively, they financed a large fishing fleet and then transported the catch of mackerel and cod to the West Indies and Europe.
Some merchants exploited the vast amounts of timber along the coasts and rivers of northern New England. They funded sawmills that supplied cheap wood for houses and shipbuilding. Hundreds of New England shipwrights built oceangoing ships, which they sold to British and American merchants.
As in New England, the majority of the elite in the Middle Colonies were merchants. Wealthy merchants in Philadelphia and New York, like their counterparts in New England, built elegant Georgian-style mansions. Many merchants became wealthy by providing goods to the agricultural population; many of this group came to dominate the society of seaport cities.
Unlike the life of yeoman farm households, these merchants lived lives that resembled those of the upper classes in England. Mimicking their English peers, they lived in elegant two and a half-story houses. Mount Vernon : Mount Vernon was the plantation home of George Washington, who was a member of the Virginia gentry class prior to becoming the first U.
Merchants often bought wool and flax from farmers and employed newly arrived immigrants who had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany, to work in their homes spinning the materials into yarn and cloth. Large-scale farmers and merchants became wealthy, while farmers with smaller farms and artisans only made enough for subsistence.
In terms of the white population of Virginia and Maryland in the midth century, the top five percent were estimated to be planters who possessed growing wealth and increasing political power and social prestige. They controlled the local Anglican church, choosing ministers and handling church property and disbursing local charity. They owned increasingly large plantations that were worked by African slaves. The plantations grew tobacco, indigo, and rice for export and raised most of their own food supplies.
By the end of the s, a very wealthy class of rice planters who relied on slaves had attained dominance in the southern part of the Carolinas, especially around Charles Town.
Lee, epitomizes the American gentry class in the South. Differentiate between the economic activities of the middle classes of the New England, mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies. In New England, the Puritans created self-governing communities of religious congregations of farmers yeomen and their families.
High-level politicians gave out plots of land to male settlers, or proprietors , who then divided the land among themselves. Every white man who was not an indentured servant was intended to have enough land to support a family. Many middle-class farmers lived in a style of home known as saltbox houses. Most New England parents tried to help their sons establish farms of their own.
Families increased their productivity by exchanging goods and labor with each other. They loaned livestock and grazing land to one another and worked together to spin yarn, sew quilts, and shuck corn.
By , a variety of artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants provided services to the growing farming population. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and furniture makers set up shops in rural villages.
There they built and repaired goods needed by farm families. Illustration of a saltbox house : Saltbox-style homes of the middle class became popular in New England after Economic patterns of the middle class in the mid-Atlantic region were very similar to those in New England, with some variations for the ethnic origins of various immigrant communities.
For instance, German immigrants were renowned for their skill with animal husbandry, and unlike women in New England, women in German immigrant communities worked in the fields. Before , most colonists in the mid-Atlantic region worked with small-scale farming and paid for imported manufactures by supplying the West Indies with corn and flour. In New York, a fur pelt export trade to Europe flourished, adding additional wealth to the region. After , mid-Atlantic farming was stimulated by the international demand for wheat.
The Middle Colonies enjoyed a successful and diverse economy. Largely agricultural, farms in this region grew numerous kinds of crops, most notably grains and oats. Logging, shipbuilding, textiles production, and papermaking were also important in the Middle Colonies.
Big cities such as Philadelphia and New York were major shipping hubs, and craftsmen such as blacksmiths, silversmiths, cobblers, wheelwrights, wigmakers, milliners, and others contributed to the economies of such cities.
This activity can be copied directly into your Google Classroom, where you can use it for practice, as an assessment, or, to collect data. Upgrade to MrN to access our entire library of incredible educational resources and teacher tools in an ad-free environment. If you like MrNussbaum. African Americans and the indigenous Indians, with religious traditions of their own, added further variety to the Middle Colony mosaic.
But no two-word phrase can capture the essence of those who set the mold for Middle Colony religious culture. To see why this is so, we must look a little closer.
The Dutch were the first Europeans to claim and settle lands between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, a region they named New Netherland. Yet half of the inhabitants attracted to the new colony were not Dutch at all but people set adrift by post-Reformation conflicts—including Walloons , Scandinavians, Germans, French, and a few English. In New Netherland was conquered by England. Suffolk County at the eastern end of Long Island, settled by migrating New Englanders, was the stronghold of Congregationalists.
French Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in , established their own town at New Rochelle in Westchester County, for decades keeping local records in French.
From its earliest years a port of entry for assorted newcomers, the city increasingly came to reflect its polyglot heritage. A woodblock of shows a skyline etched by church spires—eighteen houses of worship to serve a population of at most 22, New Jersey, if slower to develop, also embraced a variety of religious groups. By the colony had forty-five distinct congregations; unable to afford churches, most met in houses or barns.
And because clergymen were few, lay leaders frequently conducted services, with baptism and communion being offered only by the occasional itinerant minister. All denominations in New Jersey expanded rapidly over the eighteenth century.
A church survey in lists the active congregations as follows:. William Penn, an English gentleman and member of the Society of Friends, founded the colony of Pennsylvania in the early s as a haven for fellow Quakers.
Such groups as the Amish, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Mennonites, and later the Moravians made small if picturesque additions to the heterodox colony. The most influential religious bodies beside the Quakers were the large congregations of German Reformed, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians.
Episcopal church established by Welsh settlers G Presbyterian church established by a Scotch-Irish community G Three churches established in the mid s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania photographed in Courtesy National Archives.
Delaware, first settled by Scandinavian Lutherans and Dutch Reformed, with later infusions of English Quakers and Welsh Baptists, had perhaps the most diverse beginnings of any middle colony.
Yet over the eighteenth century Delaware became increasingly British, with the Church of England showing the most striking gains before the Revolution. Adding further diversity to the region were inhabitants some missionaries considered ripe for conversion to Christianity—African Americans, who may have comprised 15 to 20 percent of the population of New York City and parts of New Jersey, and the native Indians.
African Americans appear on the roles of almost every religious denomination, if usually in small numbers. Congress, Yet slave owners throughout the Middle Colonies, as in the South, feared that admitting slaves to church membership would make them proud and rebellious. A number of Middle Colony clergymen expressed concern for the souls of Native Americans, if primarily to counter the success of rival French Canadian Jesuits in drawing some tribes to Roman Catholicism.
But when the Indians resisted surrendering their native ways as a prerequisite to conversion, most missionaries lost heart. It was not until the s, with the arrival of the Moravians—a sect less focused on sin and uniquely respectful of native cultures—that any Middle Colony mission made significant inroads among the local Indians.
The availability of land in rural sections often led to thinly settled communities, which for reasons of economy shared church buildings and even preachers.
In more urban areas, social mixing, economic interdependence, and intermarriage blurred religious differences or reduced their importance. One of the earliest efforts to assess the character of the Middle Colonies was that of J. Hector St. Early American churchmen and churchwomen soon discovered that if they wanted to practice their beliefs unmolested in a diverse society, they had to grant the same right to others.
This wisdom did not come easily. Another way to think about the rise of religious toleration which is not the same thing as religious liberty on principle is to see it as a kind of trade-off. Yet over time, along with bickering and competition among denominations, there also were bargains, accommodations, and compromises.
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