Part 2 (1/2)

This was only the beginning of the Ulster-Scotch migration. From 1720, for the next half-century, about 500,000 men, women, and children from northern Ireland and lowland Scotland went into Pennsylvania. A similar wave of Germans and Swiss, also Protestants, from the Palatinate, Wurttemberg, Baden, and the north Swiss cantons, began to wash into America from 1682 and went on to the middle of the 18th century, most of them being deposited in New York, though 100,000 went to Pennsylvania. For a time indeed, the population of Pennsylvania was one-third Ulster, one-third German. Land in Pennsylvania cost only 10 a hundred acres, raised to 15 in 1732 (plus annual quitrents of about a halfpenny an acre). But there was plenty of land, and the rush of settlers, and their anxiety to start farming, led many to sidestep the surveying formalities and simply squat. The overwhelmed chief agent of the Penn family, James Logan, complained that the Ulstermen took over 'in an audacious and disorderly manner,' telling him and other officials that 'it was against the laws of G.o.d and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread.' How could he answer such a heartfelt point, except by speeding up the process of lawful conveyance?

The further south you went, the cheaper the land got. Indeed it was often to be had for nothing. From the I720s onwards, Germans, Swiss, Irish, Scotch, and others, moved down from the northeast along the rich inland valleys of the mountain area-the c.u.mberland, Shenandoah, and Hagerstown valleys, then through the pa.s.ses east into what is now North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Shortly after the mid-century they were getting into Georgia this way. As F. J. Turner was later to note, in The Frontier in American History, this moving ma.s.s of people contained children with names like Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and James Robertson, and the forebears of Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, John C. Calhoun, James K. Polk, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Stonewall Jackson. This was when Andrew Jackson's father set up in Carolina piedmont and Thomas Jefferson's built his home on the frontier at Blue Ridge.

South of the Chesapeake, the framework of government became weaker. In the Carolinas there was constant bickering between north and south, as well as between Tidewater grandees and inland settlers in the piedmont. In 1691 the Carolina proprietors recognized the fait accompli of a northern region by dividing the colony into two provinces, with a deputy governor living in the town of Albemarle, capital of what was already being called North Carolina. On May 12, 1712 the separation was completed and North Carolina became a colony on its own. It had already run its own legislature, be it noted, for forty-seven years-five years longer than South Carolina's in Charleston. This did not solve the problem in either half, for the proprietors were absentee landlords-the absentee grandee was the curse of the early South, as it always was in Ireland-and that meant there was a lack of control and purpose in the governor's mansion, leading to tardy and inadequate response to Indian raids, a poorly led and equipped militia, and other evils. The settlers pet.i.tioned London for help-it is significant that, even in the 1720s, colonists still had the 'look homeward' reflex and saw the crown as their father and savior. The crown responded: South Carolina became a royal colony on May 29, 1721 and North Carolina followed eight years later on July 25, 1729. But that did not mean the arrival of royal soldiers or a.s.sured protection from London.

Nor were the Indians the only threat. In 1720, for instance, South Carolina had only 7,800 whites, as opposed to 11,800 black slaves-the largest ratio of blacks to whites, about 6o percent, in any colony. And it was bringing in more slaves fast; another 2,000 in the years 1721-5 alone. Many slaves escaped, and these maroons, as they were called, tended to organize themselves into gangs to break out of British territory into Spanish Florida, which issued a decree in 1733 stating that slaves who defied the British and managed to reach land under the Spanish flag would be considered free. The result, in 1739, was a series of slave revolts. A band of Charleston slaves set out for Spanish St Augustine and freedom, killing all whites they met on the way, a total of twenty-one; forty-four of these maroons were rounded up and executed on the spot. On the Stono River, a black firebrand called Cato led an even bloodier uprising-thirty whites and about fifty blacks were killed before order was restored. There was a third revolt in St John's Parish, in Berkeley County.

Violence between blacks and whites was by no means confined to Carolina, of course, as the number of blacks imported from Africa and the West Indies steadily increased. In 1741 a series of mysterious fires in New York City, where blacks were a fifth of the population, led to rumors that a negro conspiracy was to blame and that the slaves were planning to take over the city. Many blacks were arrested, eighteen were hanged, and eleven burned at the stake, though a public prosecutor, Daniel Horsemanden, later admitted that there was no evidence such a conspiracy ever existed. But in the Carolinas, especially towards the south and in the back-country, security was much more fragile. Stability was not established until a first-cla.s.s royal governor, James Glen, took over in 1740. He was even able to get some action from the crown: early in 1743 General James Oglethorpe, with a fierce body of Scottish Highlanders, as well as local militia, thrashed a Spanish force four times its size at the Battle of b.l.o.o.d.y Marsh.

James Oglethorpe (1696-1785) was a fascinating example of the bewildering cross-currents and antagonisms which make early American history so confusing at first glance. He was a rich English philanthropist and member of parliament, who came to America as a result of his pa.s.sionate interest in prison reform. He was particularly interested in helpless men imprisoned for debt and believed they ought to be freed and allowed to work their way to solvency on American land. In 1732, George II gave him a charter to found such a colony between the Savannah and the Altama rivers, to be named Georgia after himself. Oglethorpe himself went out with the first band of settlers in January 1733. This was another utopian venture, though with humanitarian rather than strict religious objectives-an 18th-century rationalist as opposed to a 17th-century doctrinaire experiment. Oglethorpe and his supporters wanted to avoid extremes of wealth, as in South Carolina, to attract victims of religious persecution and the penal system, and to create a colony of small landowners, with total landholdings limited by law, and slavery prohibited. He was also a military man and he intended, with British government backing, to set up Georgia as a defended cordon sanitaire against Spanish troublemaking in the South. He built forts, recruited a militia, and attracted fighting Highlanders for a defensive colony on the Altamaha frontier, which they called New Inverness. His victory at b.l.o.o.d.y Marsh not only put an end to the Spanish threat but was a warning to the Indians too-though he made it clear his approach to them was essentially friendly by setting up Augusta as an advance post for the Indian trade. In every respect, Georgia was intended to be a model colony of the Age of Enlightenment. Oglethorpe planned to introduce silk-production, and in Savannah, his new capital, he even set up what was called the Trustees Garden, an experimental center for plants.

The colony itself prospered; but the experiment in reason, justice, and science failed. Just as in North Carolina, attempts to ban slavery came up against the ugly facts of economic interest and personal greed. Georgia was too near to the rambunctious but undoubtedly flouris.h.i.+ng planter economy of South Carolina to remain uncorrupted. Oglethorpe's regulations were defied. Slaves were smuggled in. So was rum-another banned item. Then the Savannah a.s.sembly legitimized widespread disobedience by changing the law. Rum was officially admitted from 1742. Five years later the laws against slavery were suspended and in 1750 formally repealed. These changes brought a flood of newcomers from north of the Savannah, including experienced planters and their slaves, taking up Georgia's cheap land. The utopian colony was Carolined. Oglethorpe was already in trouble with the English authorities for muddling the military finances. So the man who, in the words of Alexander Pope, went to America 'driven by strong benevolence of soul,' returned to England disillusioned and disgusted, surrendering his charter in 1752.

By mid-century all the original Thirteen Colonies were in actual, though not always legal, existence, and all were being rapidly transformed by unequal, sometimes patchy, but on the whole overwhelming prosperity. It was already a region accustomed to dealing in millions-the land of the endless noughts.' In 1746 a New Hamps.h.i.+re gentleman, John Mason, sold a tract of land totaling 2 million acres, which had been in his family for generations, to a group of Portsmouth businessmen for a planned settlement of new towns. This was merely the largest single item in a continuing process of buying and selling farms, estates, and virgin soil, which had already made British America the biggest theater in land-speculation in human history. Everyone engaged in it if they could-a foreshadowing of the eagerness with which Americans would take to stock-market speculation in the next century.

Four years later in 1750, the population of the mainland colonies pa.s.sed the million mark too. The British authorities of course saw North America as a whole, and missed the significance of this figure. But whereas at mid-century Barbados had a population of 75,000 and Bermuda-Bahamas 12,000 and Canada, Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Nova Scotia, plus Newfoundland, had a further 73,000, Ma.s.sachusetts and Maine together were approaching a quarter-million, Connecticut had 100,000, Rhode Island and New Hamps.h.i.+re had 35,000 each, there were 34,000 in East Jersey, 36,000 in West Jersey, 75,000 in New York, 1165,000 in Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties, 130,000 in Maryland, 135,000 in the Carolinas-plus 4,000 in infant Georgia-and a ma.s.sive 260,000 in Virginia. Greater New England had 400,000, Greater Virginia 390,000, Greater Pennsylvania 230,000, and Greater Carolina nearly 100,000. These four major self-sustaining growth-centres were the main engines of demographic increase, attracting thousands of immigrants every year but also ensuring high domestic birth-rates with a large proportion of children born reaching adulthood, in a healthy, well-fed, well-housed family system.

Noting all these facts, Benjamin Franklin, writing his Observations Concerning the Increase of Making, Peopling of Countries etc (1755), felt that the country had doubled in population since his childhood and calculated it would double again in the next twenty years, which it did-and more. In attracting yet more people, to keep up the impetus of growth, local authorities did not worry too much about boundaries, an early indication of how the whole territory was beginning to meld together. Thus in 1732 Maryland invited Pennsylvanian Germans to take up cheap 200-acre plots in the difficult country between the Susquehanna and Patapsco, which became an inland district for the new and soon flouris.h.i.+ng town of Baltimore. Equally, in the 1750s there was a large movement from Pennsylvania at the invitation of the Virginia government into the western region of the colony, where large blocks in the Shenandoah Valley were offered at low prices. This created, from an old Indian tract, the famous Great Philadelphia Waggon Trail, which became a major commercial route too. Thus Greater Pennsylvania merged into Greater Virginia, creating yet more movement and dynamism. As settlement expanded inland from the tidewaters, colonies lost their original distinctive characteristics and became simply American.

The historian gets the impression, surveying developments in the first half of the century, that so many things were happening in America, at such speed, that the authorities simply lost touch. Their information, such as it was, quickly got out of date and they could not keep up. Strictly speaking, in an economic sense, the colonies were supposed to exist entirely for the home country's benefit. A report to the Board of Trade sent by Lord Cornbury, governor of New York 1702-8, reveals that all governors were instructed 'To discourage all Manufactures, and to give accurate accounts of any Indications of the Same,' with a view to their suppression. One member of the Board of Trade stated flatly in 1726, that certain developments in a colony were eo ipso unlawful whether or not there was a specific statute forbidding them:

Every act of a dependent provincial government ought to terminate to the advantage of the Mother State unto whom it owes its being and protection in all valuable privileges. Hence it follows that all advantageous projects or commercial gains in any colony which are truly prejudicial to and inconsistent with the interests of the Mother State must be understood be illegal and the practice of them unwarrantable, because they contradict the end to which the colony has a being and are incompatible with the terms on which the people claim both privileges and protection ... for such is the end of colonies, and if this use cannot be made of them it is much better for the state to do without them.

This was hard doctrine, manifestly unjust and equally clearly unenforceable. There were of course many legislative efforts to turn it into reality. An Act of 1699 forbade the colonies to s.h.i.+p wool, woolen yarn, or cloth. Another in 1732 vetoed hats. An Act of 1750 admitted entry of bar-iron into England but banned slitting or rolling mills, plat-force, or steel furnaces. But iron casting was not specifically forbidden and so the colonies produced such things as kettles, salt-pans, and kitchen utensils, as well as cannon. According to Board of Trade economic doctrine these must be inherently unlawful. But they continued to be made. And what about s.h.i.+pbuilding? The sea was Britain's lifeblood and s.h.i.+ps were made, compet.i.tively, in yards all over England and Scotland. But with wood so cheap and accessible, America had a huge compet.i.tive advantage in s.h.i.+pbuilding before the age of iron and steam. By mid-century New England yards were turning out s.h.i.+ps at an average cost of $34 a ton, 20 to 50 percent cheaper than in Europe. They had vigorously promoted s.h.i.+pbuilding from the 1640s and as early as 1676 were turning out thirty a year for the English market alone; this rose to 300 to 400 a year by 1760. By this time fully a third of the British merchant fleet of 398,000 tons was American-built, and the colonies were turning out a further 15,000 tons a year. The reason for permitting this obvious anomaly was the British need for cheap timber. A British merchant could sail his s.h.i.+p to Boston, sell his cargo, then with the proceeds build an additional s.h.i.+p, and load both with timber. The British authorities unwittingly encouraged this procedure, paying substantial bounties on timber-related products such as pitch, tar, rosin, turps and water-rotted hemp, to reduce its dependence on supplies from the Continent.

This cheapness of wood, and so of s.h.i.+ps, also encouraged the development of an enormous fis.h.i.+ng fleet which again, strictly speaking, was a challenge to British interests. As early as 1641 figures show that New England was exporting 300,000 cod a year plus halibut, mackerel, and herring. By 1675, 4,000 men and 600 s.h.i.+ps were involved in the industry. By 1770 its exports were worth $225,000 a year. The largest and most difficult-to-cure fish were eaten locally; small, damaged, or tainted fish were sent to the West Indies to be eaten by slaves; the best smaller fish were cured and sent to Britain. All this stimulated a large cooperage industry, again encouraged by cheap wood-New England farmers often increased their incomes by turning out barrels on the side. As New England made bigger and better s.h.i.+ps, it went into worldwide deep-sea whaling, already important by 1700 and growing rapidly. For its own mysterious reasons the home government again favored this activity, paying a pound bounty per ton (1732) on whalers of 200 tons of more, and raising it (1747) to 2 pounds a ton. By midcentury America had the most skillful whalers in the world, 4,000 of them from New Bedford and Provincetown, Nantucket and Marblehead, operating over 300 s.h.i.+ps.

The fact is, though America's was largely an agricultural economy, far more so than Britain's, it was stealthily catching up in manufactures of all sorts. When the Board of Trade wrote to colonial governors, asking for figures of goods produced locally, the governors, with their eye on local opinion, deliberately underestimated output. A lot of phony statistics pa.s.sed across the Atlantic in the 18th century-not for the last time, either. Comptroller Weare wrote anxiously to the Board of Trade c.1750: 'The Planters throughout all New England, New York, the Jersies, Pennsylvania and Maryland (for south of that province no knowledge is here pretended) almost entirely clothe themselves in their own woollens, and generally the people are sliding into the manufactures proper to the Mother Country, and this not through any spirit of industry or economy, but plainly for want of some returns to make to the shops.' Another report at the same time suggested that American producers were competing successfully with English ones, even in exports, in cotton yarn and cotton goods, hats, soap and candles, woodwork, coaches, chariots, chairs, harness and other leather, shoes, linens, cordage, foundry ware, axes, and iron tools.

American spokesmen, like Benjamin Franklin, were anxious to play down how well the colonies were doing in this respect, for fear of arousing the wrath of the jealous Mother Country. As Agent of Pennsylvania, he informed a House of Commons committee in 1766 that his colony imported half a million pounds' worth of goods from Great Britain but exported only 40,000 in return. Asked how the difference was made up he replied: 'The balance is paid in our produce to the West Indies, or sold in our own island, or to the French, Spaniards, Danes or Dutch; by the same carried to other colonies in North America, or to New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Carolina and Georgia; by the same carried to different parts of Europe, as Spain, Portugal and Italy: in all which places we receive either money, bills of exchange or commodities that suit our remittance to Britain; which together with all the profits on the industry of our merchants and mariners, arising in those circuitous voyages, and the freights made by their s.h.i.+ps, center finally in Britain, to discharge the balance and pay for British manufactures . . . ' Separating 'visibles' from 'invisibles,' distinguis.h.i.+ng between all the different elements in triangular or quadrilateral trading patterns-it was all too difficult for an amateur group of parliamentary gentlemen, and all too easy for Franklin to bamboozle them, though it is very likely that his own figures were inaccurate and many of his a.s.sumptions misleading. The truth is, by the mid-18th century, mercantilism was on its last legs, overwhelmed by the complexity of global trade and the inability to distinguish what was in the true long-term interests of a country with burgeoning self-sustaining dominions. Entrepreneurial capitalism, spanning the Atlantic, was already too subtle and resourceful for the state to manage efficiently.

In any case, the British economic strategists-if that is not too fancy a name for cla.s.sically educated Whig country gentlemen advised by a handful of officials who had never been to America (or, in most cases, to the Continent even)-were slow to grasp the speed with which the American mainland colonies were maturing. The conventional wisdom in London was to treat them as poor and marginal. They had played little part in the great wars of King William and Queen Anne's day. Tobacco was the only thing they produced of consequence. In the early 18th century they accounted for only 6 percent of Britain's commerce, less than one-sixth of the trade with northern Europe, two-thirds or less of that with the West Indies, even less than the East Indies produced. Almost imperceptibly at first this situation changed. By 1750 the mainland American colonies had become the fastest-growing element in the empire, with a 500 percent expansion in half a century. Britain, with the most modern economy in Europe, advanced by 25 percent in the same period. In 1700 the American mainland's output was only 5 percent of Britain's; by 1775 it was two-fifths. This was one of the highest growth-rates the world has ever witnessed.

It seems as though everything was working in America's favor. The rate of expansion was about 40 percent or even more each decade. The availability of land meant large family units, rarely less than 60 acres, often well over 100, huge by European standards. Couples could marry earlier; a wife who survived to forty gave birth on average to six or seven children, four or five of whom reached maturity. Living standards were high, especially in food consumption. Males ate over 200 pounds of meat a year, and this high-protein diet meant they grew to be over two inches taller than their British counterparts. They ate good dairy food too. By 1750 a typical Connecticut farm owned ten head of cattle, sixteen sheep, six pigs, two horses, a team of oxen. In addition the farm grew maize, wheat, and rye, and two-fifths of the produce went on earning a cash income, spent on British imports or, increasingly, locally produced goods. It is true that widows might fall into poverty. But only 3 to 5 percent of middle-aged white males were poor. One-third of adult white males held no appreciable property, but these were under thirty. It was easy to acquire land. Over the course of a lifecycle, any male who survived to be forty could expect to live in a household of median income and capital wealth. In short by the third quarter of the 18th century America already had a society which was predominantly middle cla.s.s. The shortage of labor meant artisans did not need to form guilds to protect jobs. It was rare to find restriction on entry to any trade. Few skilled men remained hired employees beyond the age of twenty-five. If they did not acquire their own farm they ran their own business. In practice there were no real cla.s.s barriers. A middle-aged artisan usually had the vote and many were elected to office at town and county level. These successful middle-aged men were drawn not just from the descendants of earlier settlers or from the ranks of the free immigrants but from the 500,000 white Europeans who, during the colonial period, came to America on non-free service contracts running from four to seven years. White servitude, unlike black slavery, was an almost unqualified success in America.

The policy, begun in 1717, of transporting convicts to the American mainland, for seven years as a rule, worked less well-far less well than it later did in Australia. This was subsidized by the British state, which wanted to get rid of the rogues, but was also a private business tied to the s.h.i.+pping trade. The convicts left Britain in the spring, were landed in Philadelphia or the Chesapeake in the summer, and the s.h.i.+ps which transported them returned in the autumn loaded with tobacco, corn, and wheat. In half a century, 1717-67, 10,000 serious criminals were dumped on Maryland alone. They arrived chained in groups of ninety or more, looking and smelling like nothing on earth. Marginal planters regarded them as a good buy, especially if they had skills. They went into heavy labor-farming, digging, s.h.i.+pbuilding, the main Baltimore ironworks, for instance. In 1755 in Baltimore, one adult male worker in ten was a convict from Britain. They were much more troublesome than non-criminal indentured labor, always complaining of abuses and demanding 'rights.' People hated and feared them. Many were alcoholics or suicidal. Others had missing ears and fingers or gruesome scars. Some did well-one ex-thief qualified as a doctor and practiced successfully in Baltimore, attracting what he called 'bisness a nuf for 2.' But there were much talked-about horror-stories-one convict went mad in 1751 and attacked his master's children with an axe; another cut off his hand rather than work. From Virginia, William Byrd II wrote loftily to an English friend: 'I wish you would be so kind as to hang all your felons at home. There were public demands that a head-tax be imposed on each convict landed or that purchasers be forced to post bonds for their good behavior. But the British authorities would never have allowed this. As a result of the convict influx we hear for the first time in America widespread complaints that crime was increasing and that standards of behavior had deteriorated. All this was blamed on Britain.

Indeed the historian notes with a certain wry amus.e.m.e.nt, as the century progressed, an American tendency to attribute everything good in their lives to their country and their own efforts, and to attribute anything which went wrong to Britain. Certainly, America showered blessings on its people, as English newcomers noticed. One visitor said that 'Hoggs in America feed better than Hyde Park d.u.c.h.esses in England.' Another called the country 'a place of Full Tables and Open Doors.' Miss Eliza Lucas, much traveled daughter of an English army officer, discoursed eloquently in a letter home of 'peaches, nectarines and mellons of all sorts extremely fine and in profusion, and their oranges exceed any I ever tasted from the West Indies or from Spain or Portugal.' There were many more, and better, vegetables than were available in England. German immigrants were particularly good at producing in quant.i.ty and for market, at low prices, apples, pears, quinces, chestnuts, and a wide range of strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, and cherries for preserves. Ordinary people filled their stomachs with beef, pork, and mutton, as well as 'jonny cake' and 'hoe cake.' A contributor to the London Magazine in 1746 thought the American country people 'enjoy a Life much to be envied by Courts and Cities.' And there were always new evidences of nature's bounty to those who looked hard enough for it. Clever Miss Lucas, left in charge of a South Carolina plantation, took advantage of a parliamentary bounty on indigo, raised to sixpence a pound in 1748, to experiment successfully with a crop. Thanks to her, the Carolinas were exporting 1,150,662 pounds of it in 1775, and it became the leading staple until displaced by cotton after the Revolution.

While the pioneers pushed inland, opening up new sources of wealth, and gradually creating the demographic base from which America could take off into an advanced industrial economy, the cities of the coast were coining money and spending it. The queen of the cities was Philadelphia, which by mid-century had become the largest in the entire British Empire, after London. Its Philosophical Society (1743) was already famous and its Academy (1751) burgeoned into the great University of Pennsylvania. New York City was also growing fast and was already the melting-pot in embryo. By 1700 the English and the Huguenots outnumbered the original Dutch inhabitants: half a century later, many of the Dutch had become Anglicans and all were bilingual or English-speaking. They had been joined by mult.i.tudes of Walloons and Flemings, Swedes, Rhineland Protestants, Norwegians, and North Germans, as well as Scotch and English Calvinists and Quakers, freed slaves, Irish, and more Dutch. By mid-century the Lower Hudson, including East and West Jersey, joined as the royal colony of New Jersey in 1702, was a collection of communities-Dutch in Harlem and Flatbush, lowland Scots in Perth Amboy, Baptist settlers from New Hamps.h.i.+re in Piscataway, New England Quakers in Shrewsbury, Huguenots in New Roch.e.l.le, Flemings in Bergen, New Haven Puritans in Newark and Elizabeth, and pockets of Scotch, Irish, and Germans upriver, as well as many Dutch-Albany was a Dutch town then, though English-speaking. It was already competing with French Montreal for the Indian and wilderness trade in furs, with an offshoot at Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario.

The economic and political freedom enjoyed in English America, with its largely unrestricted enterprise, self-government, and buccaneering ways, was already reflected in growth-rates which made Canada, in which the French state had invested a huge effort but also a narrow system of controls, seem almost static. By 1750 there were well over 100,000 in the Hudson Valley alone, compared to only 60,000 in the vast St Lawrence basin, and New York City was four times the size of Quebec. And unlike inward-looking and deadly quiet Quebec, New York and its politics were already noisy, acrimonious, horribly factionridden, and undoubtedly democratic.

The venom of New York politics led to America's first trial for seditious libel in 1735, when John Peter Zenger, who had founded New York's Weekly Journal two years earlier, was locked up for criticizing the governor, William Cosby, and finally brought to trial after ten months behind bars. Zenger was by no means America's first newspaper publisher. That honor goes to the postmaster of Boston, William Campbell, who set up the News-Letter in 1704 to keep friends scattered around the Bay Colony informed of what was going on in the great world. By mid-century more than a score of newspapers had been started, including the Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury (1719), the Boston New England Courant (1721), started by Benjamin Franklin's elder brother James, and Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette, which he acquired in 1729. There was also an Annapolis paper, the Maryland Gazette (1727), and the Charlestown South Carolina Gazette (1732). It is significant that Zenger, or rather his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, put forward truth as his defense. That would not have been admitted in an English court where anything was criminally libelous, whether it was true or not, which fostered 'an ill opinion of the government.' Indeed, it was an axiom of English law, in seditious libel, that 'the greater the truth, the greater the libel.' In Zenger's case the judge tried to overrule his defense, but the jury acquitted him all the same-and that was the last of such prosecutions. This in itself was an indication of what critics of society could get away with in the heady air of colonial America-prosecutions for criminal libel continued in England until the 1820s and even beyond.

Not all these cities were booming or bustling. Charleston, the only city in the South for more than a century, had little over 8,000 people in 1750, but it was s.p.a.cious, tree-shaded, elegant, and free-spending, with a recognizable gentry living in town mansions and parading in their carriages. Annapolis was another gentry town, though even by 1750 it had only 150 households. It was brick-built with paved streets, as good as any in Boston, and had fine shops selling silverware, gold, well-made furniture, and paintings. Not only did it have its own newspaper, it also sported a bookstore-publisher from 1758. By the 1740s it was holding regular concerts and claimed its own gifted composer, the Rev. Thomas Bacon (1700-68 ), who also compiled The Laws of Maryland. In June July 1752 it had a theatrical season in which visiting professional players performed Gay's Beggar's Opera, the great London hit, and a piece by Garrick. A permanent theater was opened in 1771, the first in all the colonies to be brick-built. Its opening night was attended by a tall young colonel called George Was.h.i.+ngton. Its Tuesday Club, attended chiefly by clerics and professional men, was the center of scientific inquiry. Williamsburg, which became the capital of Virginia Colony in 1699, developed into a similar place, small, elegant, select, with a conscious air of cultural superiority, generated from its William and Mary College, the second oldest in the colonies (1693). Its main building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

These miniature red-brick cities were adorned by the rich of the Chesapeake with fine town houses. Many of them were modeled on one built in Annapolis by the secretary of Maryland Colony, Edmund Jennings, a magnificent building set in 4 acres of gardens at the foot of East Street. Another with splendid gardens-and no fewer than thirty-seven rooms-was built by William Pace. The chimneys of James Brice's mansion towered 70 feet above street-level. Many of the finest houses were the work of the local architect-craftsman William Buckland, credited with turning the place into the 'Athens of America.' Annapolis had an English-style Jockey Club from 1743, which supervised the regular race-meetings and was the meeting-place of local breeders. By the third quarter of the century over 100 English-bred horses of Arab strains had reached the Chesapeake and the gentry could attend races held near both these elegant cities-they were within commuting range. City artisans had c.o.c.kfighting. But, as in England, the artisans went to the races if they could afford it, and the gentry certainly attended c.o.c.kfights.