UNIT 1: THE COLONIAL PERIOD

PART I: Establishment of English Colonies in North America. Exploration & Settlement

I.1. SETTLEMENT OF ENGLISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA

For some nations, the principal reason for exploration and adventure beyond the Atlantic Ocean
was the finding of a direct route which could lead to gold and spices. For others, it was the
discovering of a way to penetrate into the “rearguard” of the Islam realms.
Portuguese seafarers were the first to get an advantage in Atlantic exploration. But in 1479, the
Spanish Catholic Kings recognized the Portuguese dominium over the African coastline. This
obliged them to find an alternative route to the Far East. At the end of the 15th century, the Spanish
Monarchy acquired sovereignty over the Canary Islands, which served as a stop for Christopher
Columbus in his way to America, or what he thought was the coast of China.
English traders however continued to do business with the North of Europe. Even during the
kingdom of Henry VIII (1509-1546), England had other priorities which were addressed to their
rupture with Rome and the consolidation of his dynasty on the English throne. At this time, the
French Monarchy started to promote the exploration of North America. Jacques Cartier, sponsored
by Francis I, went up the Saint Lawrence River and founded the first settlements of the future
Canada. Only with Queen Elizabeth I, in the second half of the 16th century, did the English
Monarchy begin its strategy of colonial deployment. The causes for this are two:
• First, a political-religious one: when Phillip II decided to stop by force the Protestant riots in
the Netherlands, Elizabeth –she had proclaimed the Anglican faith of her kingdom in 1585-
opted to give support to the rebels. The growing Anglo-Spanish hostility had its projection
in the Atlantic politics of the English Monarchy.
• Secondly, the war in the Low Countries helped to aggravate the English economic crisis.
Therefore, English traders searched for new markets in the Baltic, the East Mediterranean,
and Africa, as well as began to participate in the lucrative slave trade between Guinea and
the Caribbean Sea. In the 1570’s, the English Monarchy started to practice two new
strategies: the corso (stealing of treasures from the Spanish ships) and the establishment of
colonies, mainly in order to find gold and silver mines.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert made the first attempt to establish English colonies in North America. For
Gilbert, colonization should accomplish a double instrumental role:
1. to serve as bases from which to attack the Spanish dominions.
2. to allow for the stopover of English ships in transit to the Asian coasts.
His half-brother, Walter Raleigh, also wrote about the three reasons for the founding of colonies in
North America:
• religious, to convert the Indians to Anglicanism
• political, to attack the Spaniards
• social, to give shelter to the unemployed and the dissidents.
Raleigh commissioned two failed attempts at colonization in Roanoke(Virginia) first in 1585 to
Richard Greenville, and later in 1587 to John White; from here on, Raleigh moved his attention to
the South of America (Guyana and the Orinoco region).

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I.2. FIRST COLONIES: VIRGINIA I
The promotion of colonization (carried out by Raleigh until 1590) was executed now by privileged
trade companies, the joint stock companies. To these, the English Monarchy gave the monopoly of
trade with a certain distant region.
After Raleigh ended his involvement, two groups of shareholders joined to form the Virginia
Company.
1. One group was based in Plymouth (New England) (Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s relatives) and
supported by fishing, fur and sassafras (thought to cure the plague and the syphilis) trading.
2. The other was headed by Richard Hakluyt and constituted by London traders.
Elizabeth Tudor had died in 1603 and James I Stuart brought the war with Spain to an end in the
London Treaty (1604), which preserved the rights of England to found colonies away from the
Spanish influence.
In less than a year, the Plymouth group failed in its intent because of its deficient organization, the
hard climactic conditions, and the hostility of Indians in that area. The London group was luckier.
In December 1606 its expedition of three ships and 144 men set sail from England and arrived in
Chesapeake Bay (Virginia) in April 1607. The hundred survivors founded Jamestown, but these
men were mainly interested in getting riches as soon as possible and not in developing
agriculture, nor in the evangelization of Indians. In less than a year, 75% of the men had died, and
200 new men arrived in Virginia in 1608, commanded by the Captain John Smith, and only the
sporadic help of the natives (Pocahontas episode) made possible the survival of the colony.
The next years were very tough and the colony was almost at the edge of extinction until 1619. In
1612, the Dale Laws (Thomas Dale), one of the company delegates, imposed a severe military
discipline, but even with this, the colony didn’t expand beyond 350 inhabitants, due to the
contradiction between the company projects and the colonists’ wishes: while the former wanted to
build a flourishing agricultural community to export raw materials to London, the latter objected to
working the land and centred their hopes in searching for precious metals. This problem was finally
coped with in 1618-1619, when Edwin Sandys found a solution in the combination of three factors:
tobacco -imitating the curing method of tobacco used by the Indians (Pocahontas)-, private
property, and women. But as we will see, this was not a final solution.

I.3. First Colonies: Virginia II

To promote the break up and improvement of land, Sandys offered large expanses of land to the
different investor groups of the Company, so that they could in turn redistribute them among the
planters, who traveled to Virginia. Most of the colonists arrived in America as servants, subject to
contract, indentured servants. Only after a period of 4 to 7 years, could the servant acquire the
right to settle on his own. This land distribution system was called head-right, and implied a
handing over 50 acres at the end of the contract.
This authorization of private, autonomous plantations, led by different groups of shareholders
stimulated the appearance of sub-colonies, called hundreds, constituted by a group of farms, and
dispersed, rustic country estates devoted mainly to tobacco cultivation. In 1619 began the arrival in
Virginia of the first contingent of women, contributing to the idea that the colonists would end up
taking root in the New World.
Lastly, we should add a fourth factor of a political character. In 1619 the Dale Laws were
derogated and a legislative assembly was erected, called House of Burgesses. This assembly

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constituted 22 elected members and was presided over by a Governor and his Council, and was
elected by the landowners. Even though the colony was already built to last, there were many
problems in those years, such as chronic malnutrition and very high mortality, expansion of land to
the cost of Indian territories with the consequent Indian attacks, which in 1624 ended up with the
dissolution of the Virginia Company, and the English Crown assuming the Government of the
colony.

I.4. First Colonies: New England I

As the twelve-year truce between Holland and Spain was coming to an end (1609-1622), thirty
English Puritans exiled in Leiden started to think about the option of finding refuge in America.
Along with another group of London Puritans, these “Pilgrim Fathers”, set sail from the port of
Plymouth, aboard the Mayflower in September 1620, mooring in Cape Cod. This settlement
remained out of Virginia’s jurisdiction; thus, the pilgrims decided, through the Mayflower
Compact, to take control and named William Bradford their Governor. They had the financial
support of the Council of New England, which reserved the land property and the exploitation
profits during the first seven years. In 1621 the Company disappeared, and the decision to privatise
the land became basic to the Plymouth survival, which continued as an independent colony until
1691, when it was annexed to Massachusetts.

I.5. First Colonies: New England II

In 1623 the Council of New England gave permission to a group of adventurers to establish
themselves in Massachusetts Bay. In 1628, a group of puritan traders created the Company of New
England to finance the settlement of puritans in Salem, a religious refuge. John Winthrop would
write in his History of New England, that they were the “elected” to start a new life in their
“promised land”. Therefore, in 1630 a group of 2000 puritans left for Massachusetts, where they
grew thanks to their pilgrim fathers, spreading all around to cities such as Charlestown and
Boston.
In 1634, Massachusetts would create two councils (houses):
• low, constituted by all city representatives.
• high, consisting of a Governor and the Salem Council, all of them sanctioned by a property
qualification.
The Massachusetts colony differed from Virginia in that these were not adventurers searching for
fortune, but a group of people united by their religious faith. They were not poor and uneducated
people, but literate traders, farmers and craftsmen. All these characteristics led to differences in the
economic structures of both areas. While Virginia became mostly a plantation colony (tobacco),
New England adopted a mixed agriculture that allowed their sustenance through other resources
such as fishing, furs, timber, etc., and trading with them too.

I.6. First Colonies: New England III

Religious tensions were the main reason for pushing some dissidents away from the colonies,
giving birth to new settlements. For example, Roger Williams denied the legality of the colony of
Massachusetts Bay, because the property had been usurped from the Indians and also because he
claimed for the separation of church and state. He found refuge among the Narragansett Indians,
learned their language, and in 1636, acquired lands to found Providence, in Rhode Island.

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Likewise:
• Ann Hutchinson and her husband founded Portsmouth
• William Coddington, founded Newport
• Samuel Gorton, founded the city of Warwick.
The whole colony was named Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

I.7. First Colonies: New England IV

In 1636 the puritan Minister Thomas Hooker, whose idea of political order was more democratic
and participative than that of the Massachusetts governors, founded Hartford, in the Connecticut
valley. The yearning for peace and harmony between the different towns contributed to the writing
of the first constitutional text, Fundamental Rules of Connecticut, which conferred upon it a
government similar to Massachusetts. In 1662, the New Haven confederation was incorporated,
founded by radical puritans in disagreement with the “relaxed” moral and political atmosphere.
The puritan Minister, John Wheelwright, decided upon exile from these lands and founded the city
of Exeter, origin of New Hampshire. Soon many Puritans and Anglicans arrived and this
contributed to its prosperity, and in 1677 New Hampshire became a royal colony.

I.8. Maryland: The Catholic Colony

Lord Baltimore explored the land between the Delaware and the Chesapeake bays with the
intention of finding the perfect site for a refuge for the English Catholics. Up to 1634 the majority
of the first colonists arriving were Protestant, what means the impossibility of establishing the
traditional model. From 1640, the Calverts promised to reward with land families that crossed the
Atlantic as “servants subjected to contract”, according to the head-right system, already attempted
in Virginia. Here the freemen enjoyed more political rights than in the rest of the colonies. This
similarity with Virginia caused the colonists to specialize in tobacco crops and saw the introduction
of slave labour for its production.

I.9. Culmination of Colonies: from Restoration to George II (I)

The English Restoration of the Stuarts, after the proclamation of Charles II, began a new phase in
colonization, which covered the gap between New England and the Chesapeake region and
extended the British sovereignty further south, up to the limits of the Florida peninsula, Spanish
possession from the 16th century.
The “Carolana” (Carolinas, 1663) in honour of the king Charles I, was first a refuge for French
Huguenots, but the project never succeeded, because the rich promoters of colonization were
mainly interested in the cultivation of agricultural products such as oil, wine or silk for exportation
to the Mediterranean countries and in the “hunger for land”. While in the north colonists
established small farms where they cultivated tobacco and bred pigs, in the south the early
implantation of slave labour and the perfect adaptation of rice (later indigo and cotton) to the
climactic and edaphic conditions of the region, quickly transformed the economic and social
structures. They also began to trade in buying slaves from the Indians to the point that in 1708
there were 1400 Indian slaves in South Carolina.

I.10. Culmination of Colonies: from Restoration to George II (II)

In New York (1664), from the beginning of the 17th century, Dutchmen had explored the Hudson
River, and in 1621 they founded the colony of New Holland, embracing the whole Hudson valley
and Manhattan Island (and Long Island). Thanks to the fur trade with the Iroquois Indians, the city

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of New Amsterdam flourished to concentrate most of the colony’s inhabitants by the beginning of
the 1660s.
Due to geopolitical reasons, the British invaded, without violence. Long Island and New Holland
became divided into two regions:
• the northern part called New York
• the Southern one called New Jersey.
From here on, New York (1664) now received thousands of immigrants from the British Isles,
France, Flanders and Germany, creating a peculiar crucible of races and religions.
In New Jersey (1664), there was not such a huge immigration and Lord Berkeley sold in 1674 his
eastern part to a Quaker congregation (the Friends’ Society), and Carteret his western part in 1682
to William Penn and other Quakers.

I.11. Culmination of Colonies: from Restoration to George II (III)

In Pennsylvania,
1. the principal aim of Penn was to create a “community of saints”, a paradise of tolerance
where the Quakers, not only English but from all Europe, could live in peace.
2. the second objective was to increase his family’s fortune through the selling of lands,
which produced the exodus of many English and Welsh Quakers as well as German
Protestants.
In the first third of the 17th century, the first Europeans to inhabit Delaware were Swede and
Dutch, though they received well the British conquest in 1664. In 1701 Penn authorizes the
separation of Pennsylvania
The last of the thirteen colonies was Georgia, whose birth dates from 1732. The authentic leader of
colonization was James Oglethorpe, who planned to colonize this territory with convicts accused of
debts. He ruled a military regime, until the 1750s, when Oglethorpe’s laws were annulled and the
colony really started to grow, from 5000 to 9000 in only a decade. A third of these were slaves
devoted to the cultivation of rice and indigo, as in the neighbouring South Carolina. Finally, the
whole territory between the French Canada and the Spanish Florida was inhabited and under British
sovereignty.

PART II: Consolidation of Colonies: Economic & Social Structures. Culture & Religion

II.1. Impact of British Colonization over the Native Peoples

The process of colonization was a double process:
1. construction of permanent social structures
2. destruction of existent cultures and ways of life.
Unlike the Spaniards, the British Crown always remained in the background, leaving her
subjects, adventurers, traders or religious dissidents, the power of decision in the invasion of the
American coast.
The Spanish monarchy put the Indians in the last step of the social ladder, these were always
considered subjects of the Spanish Crown. On the contrary, the British Crown never integrated

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the natives into the social structure of the colonies. There was hardly any racial mix, nor any
mutual cultural influence. For the Spaniards, the evangelization of the Indians was an obligation
contracted with the Catholic church (papal bull Inter Caetera by Alexander VI, 1493); whereas the
British colonists did not show any interest in preaching the Christian faith to the North Western
natives, though this did not mean a high tolerance on the part of the British colonists.
There was not any mechanism for the exploitation of native labour, similar to the ones in the
Spanish colonies, such as the encomienda and the mita, used by the Spaniards. In the first case, a
certain number of Indians were given to an encomendero, who would Christianize them in exchange
for their work on the land. On the other hand, the mita was an Inca institution by which some men, -
chosen by a lottery- would work during several days in the lands of the Great Inca or the priests. In
practice this was sometimes a means of slavery for the Indians.
The differences in both kinds of colonization were due not only to the diverse planning of the
conquerors, but also due to the disparity of social structures of the conquered peoples. The British
did not find centralized native cultures such as the Inca or the Aztec, which would allow them to get
a profit like the Spaniards did. Therefore, they resorted to the import of slave labour from Africa.
Anthropologists tend to group the native peoples from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Coast, from
Maine to North Carolina in two big ethnic-linguistic groups:
• eastern Algonquin
• North Iroquois, who lived basically on “the three sisters” –corn, beans and pumpkins- and
fishing and hunting.
Both groups shared three basic principles:
a) subjection of personal actions to the group and collective traditions
b) community of goods
c) integration of man in nature.
Land was a collective possession, and every individual knew that his actions had to be subject to the
decision of the community.

II.2. Growth and Structure of the Colonist Population up to the Revolution

Once the first difficulties of adaptation to the environment were overcome, the population of the
thirteen colonies went up much faster than the metropolitan. In 1700, the colonist population
amounted to 250,000 inhabitants. One century later, in 1800, the total population born in American
amounted to 5.3 million, which represents a secular growth of more than 2,000% (in 1 year).
In the beginning of the colonies, the continuous migratory flow was a fundamental factor, but the
demographical explosion cannot be understood without considering the local population growth by
itself. The sum of both made it possible that the population could double each 25 years from that
time until the Revolution. Actually, the main cause of the extraordinary population growth was the
lower mortality, both ordinary (relation between deceases and births) and extraordinary. No doubt
the basic reason for this lower mortality was the better feeding of the American colonists, which
made them more resistant to disease, but the dispersed habitat contributed to reducing the harmful
effect of epidemics. Lastly, despite the frequency of wars in the Atlantic coast, there was not any
demographical catastrophe similar to the Europeans, such as the sum of the “three Parcae”, as the
war, the famine and the plague were called.
During the 18th century, the need of labour of the southern planters and the competence among the
slave traders contributed to considerably increment the size of the black population in the colonies.

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By mid-century, Virginia had more than 120,000 black slaves, Maryland 40,000 and South Carolina
more than 60,000, which meant that in 1760 the black population was double that of the whites.
All in all, on the eve of the Revolution, black population in the American colonies amounted to
575,000 inhabitants, which represented a fifth of the total population. Approximately 90% of the
black slaves lived in the southern colonies, where their conditions of existence were pitiful.
Systematic segregation was so brutal in the British colonies that there was no more ethnic mix
except that resulting from the sexual exploitation of female slaves by their owners.
During the 17th century the colonists coming from England were the huge majority (close to 90%),
but from the next century on, the origin of the immigrants diversified: the bulk of them were
Scottish Presbyterians from the Ulster, due to economic and religious reasons. Another big group
were the French Huguenots, which started to arrive in the last decade of the 17th century, settling
themselves mainly in the southern colonies. The third group of immigrants in the 17th century were
the German speakers, consisting basically of Rhenish and Swiss Protestants, who escaped the
Catholic prosecution, mainly to Pennsylvania.

II.3. Socio-economic structures of the English colonies

II.3.a. Puritan America: New England
New England colonies lived basically from subsistence agriculture and its commercial
diversification. But in the absence of any agrarian incentive, fishing transformed into the motor
element of the economic development of New England. From mid XVII century, the naval
industry flourished in the area, and the idea of a Puritan America began to degrade, especially in the
port cities of Boston or Newport, due to the emergence of a rich and entrepreneur mercantile
bourgeoisie, which grew cosmopolitan and deviating from Puritan orthodoxy.

II.3.b. America of Plantations 1: Chesapeake

The colonies of Virginia and Maryland were devoted to the production of high quality tobacco for
exportation to England. The economy of Chesapeake depended much more than New England on
transatlantic trade. The average price of a young African man tripled during the XVIII century: from
25 pounds to 75. But leaving aside black slaves, the inequalities among the white population
were quite notable. At the end of the XVII century, the Virginian elite, formed by 10% of the white
population owned almost ¾ of the croplands. The rest of lands belonged to a middle strata of
planters, between 20 and 30% of the population, who exploited their farms with their families and a
few labourers. The rest of people, 60-70% possessed nothing and worked for others. The high class
of Virginian “aristocrats” recreated a life style reminiscent of the English court. Therefore, it is
not strange that the bastion of the Anglican Church in North America was Virginia, and that their
principal preoccupation was the perpetuation of the status quo of the high class, in detriment of the
gospel and the alphabetisation of people.

II.3.c. America of Plantations 2: Carolina

As in Chesapeake, the Carolinas followed the trend of exportation of crops to England. They
cultivated tobacco in the north and rice and indigo in the south. However, unlike agriculture in
North Carolina, they diversified a little with the cultivation of wheat, corn and vegetables for their
own consumption as well as cattle breeding. The economy of South Carolina focussed progressively
on the cultivation of rice and indigo for the exportation.
The inherent hardships of rice cultivation (aggravated by malaria) were the cause by which the
owners imported slaves for their production. Therefore, the society in the Carolinas and Georgia,

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started to look like the Antilles, where a white minority of great planters dominated a majority
black population.

II.3.d. Mid-Atlantic Area

The colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware were from the very
beginning a crucible of cultures, languages and religions. Something similar can be said about their
economy, based on a mix agriculture, which made of them the granary of the colonial North
America, and a diversified overseas trade.
Production focused on wheat, with such success that they were known as the Breadbasket
Colonies. The great production of cereals afforded, at once, the breeding of cattle and pigs for
exportation to the Caribbean islands, and the production of other foods for their own consumption.
The ideal of peaceful cohabitation of the Quakers, which ignored the differences of faith or
nation, caused that the members of this church and others like them to move in big waves from
every European country to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. More than half of its
inhabitants had, at the end of the 18th century, originated in a different country from England.

II.3.e. Occidental Frontier

Although the Peace of Paris in 1763 opened the door to British expansion to the West, beyond the
Appalachians and the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, at that time expansion had already commenced.
The demographical pressure and the quest for new lands to replace the exhausted ones after a
century and a half of exploitation, pushed thousands of small farmers to follow the path of
explorers and trappers, who had already traversed the Appalachian barrier. In 1770, there were
more than 15,000 colonists in the present territories of Kentucky and Tennessee. Something
similar happened in the northwest of New England, where 20,000 people established the present
state of Vermont.
The rapidity of these settlements and the brutal competition for land, gave the society of the frontier
its essential characteristics: disorder and violence. There was no recognized authority, so that the
administration of justice and the safekeeping of order were commissioned by the colonists to private
groups: The Regulators of South Carolina, the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, the Connecticut
Yankees, the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania. The problem was that the frontier self defence groups
took advantage of their strength to steal land from the farmers of other colonies. In a tough and
primitive society such as this, problems were solved by extra-judicial methods, the principle of
“might is right”.

II.4. Culture & Religion

One of the fundamental characteristics of Anglo American society was the diversity of faiths and
religious practices. Unlike in Hispano America, the official church –the Anglican- could not
impose its control. A community of faith constituted the axis around which social and political life
of many towns and whole colonies were organized.
The origins of the Anglican Church go back to the rupture with Rome and the institution of
royal supremacy during the reign of Henry VIII. The final step was taken during the reign of
Elizabeth I, who dictated a list of laws to impose the new church. (1562-63) upon the nation.
Doctrine was essentially Protestant:
• scripture the supreme norm
• justification by faith

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 • rejection of mediation
• acknowledging of only two sacraments: baptism and communion
• liturgy /’litergi/ in English, etc.
There still persisted some Catholic vestiges and for this reason, for many believers close to Calvin –
such as the Puritans and Presbyterians - the “Elizabethan establishment” was more a starting point
than the end of the Protestant reformation in England.
During the 17th century the Anglican Church evolved more in a Catholic direction than Protestant
due 2 reasons.
1. Charles I identified with Arminianism (denied the Calvinist doctrine /’dactrin/ of
predestination and gave more relevance to free will).
2. Unlike the Calvinists, who underlined the function of a minister as an interpreter of the
Scripture and preacher of the gospel, King Charles wanted to emphasize the sacramental
and ceremonial function of a minister, which worked in favour of the ecclesial hierarchy.
(Crypto-catholic or Philo-papist).
However, overseas the power of the Anglican Church was felt much less. In fact, it only established
itself by imposing its will. In Virginia, Maryland, BUT NOT in the Carolinas and Georgia, taxes
were introduced to provide for the needs of the Anglican clergy. If a colonist wanted to be ordained,
he had to travel to England for the clergy in America did not have this power. Nor could they
repress unruly ministers. Therefore, the effective influence of the Anglican Church was weak,
though it counted 500,000 followers before the Revolution, which made it second in size to all
faiths at that time.
The largest confession was the Puritan or Congregationalist Church (575,000 followers before the
Revolution). In its doctrine, Puritans ascribed to the principles of Calvinism accorded in 1619 in
Dort (Netherlands):
➢ predestination
➢ limited redemption (Christ died only to redeem the elected)
➢ believe in human depravation due to original sin
➢ divine grace (salvation is the work of God: man does not contribute at all in his own
salvation, but he cannot avoid it)
➢ durable grace in the “saints” (the elected, despite their temporary faults, do not lose their
divine grace).
Puritans reject the ceremonial function of a minister. The minister’s function is not to administer
the sacrament, but to preach the word of God and explain the Scriptures. They despised the
hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church, and rejected any image or crucifix (even bell towers
at the beginning). Authority lapses into the local congregation. Nevertheless, not all of them can
ingress, but only the “visible saints”, that is, those who have the awareness of having been
redeemed by the grace of God and are capable of giving proof of it before the congregation,
describing a mystical experience or a revelation, something which manifests without doubt their
sanctification.
But the local autonomy was precisely the seed of discord. Discrepancies among congregations or
between ministers of the church some times finished up with foundation of new populations
away from the original settlements, as in the case of Rhode Island and the Providence
Plantations.

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As a colony grew up, the recently arrived and the next generations found it more difficult to prove
their “sanctity”, which favoured the Puritans who controlled political positions, but in the end this
worked against the same congregational church for it acted as a disintegrating factor. Between the
end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th, the ideal of the saintly community which had
pushed Puritans to colonize New England began to lose its meaning. Another perverse event was
the case of the Salem trials in 1692.
Presbyterianism was, just before the Revolution, the third confession in numbers of adherents,
400,000 (more than half from Irish and Scottish origins). Presbyterians shared with the Puritans
their Calvinist faith, though they disagreed in organizational principles: the last authority in
ecclesiastic matters is not in the individual congregation –as in the Puritan Church-, but in an
assembly of ministers or presbytery; and also Presbyterians call for the total separation between
church and state.
The Quakers or Society of Friends, emerged by mid 17th century, right after the English Civil War.
1) The success of this church stems from its open anti-clericalism and its opposition to the
pay of taxes, for clergy must not be remunerated. More importantly, they proposed a
rejection of formalism: ceremonies, any liturgy and all sacraments.
2) The nerve of spirituality is not even the Bible, but the mystical ecstasy, the inner light, in
Fox’s words. In their meetings, it was frequent that they remained silent until the “inner
light” enlightened them and they started to shake and tremble.
3)The third important and characteristic element is the defence of the rights of women.
4)But the central point was the doctrine of salvation, which is within the reach of everyone,
and it is the individual who must take the initiative to look for God inside themselves. There
are no elected people, nor exclusive rights of belonging to the church.
In the primitive plan of Penn, all men must contribute to good government, to the maintenance of
peace, to justice and equality. They were also pioneers in the abolition of slavery, as well as
pacifists in their rejection of fire arms and also their reluctance as to the paying of taxes destined for
military purposes.
One of the most relevant cultural milestones in American colonial history was the Great
Awakening, which in short was the wave of religious fervour coming from the old Europe that
shook all the colonies between 1730 and 1760. With the passing of time, churches settled in
American soil were undergoing a process of stagnation, replacing their primitive enthusiasm by
more attention to formality (also theological controversies). Deep down, the American colonist still
was a profoundly devout person, but they could not find the appropriate way to channel their
spiritual concerns.
The pioneers of this awakening were Theodore Frelinghuysen, William Tennent and Jonathan
Edwards. The one who raised the sermon to a category of dramatic art was Jonathan Edwards,
minister of the congregational church of Massachusetts. A good writer and a brilliant theologian,
Edwards was convinced that the most convenient way to convert his followers was to provoke
emotions in their hearts. He reached fame with his sermon Sinners in the hands of an angry God
(1741). In this way, with the threat of hell, Edwards attempted to guide his believers to the kingdom
of heaven.
Edwards’s work, and others’ prepared the way for George Whitefield, responsible for the true
“religious awakening”. Whitefield was a collaborator of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist
Church (a division of the Lutheran church in the 17th century, with emphasis on individual

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sentiments and behaviour), who was sent to Georgia by the promoters of the colony. His gesture,
dramatic, and sensationalist style of preaching immediately caught on among Whitefield
followers and provoked many challenges to the established churches in the colonies. Overcome by
the unexpected wave of religious fervour, alienated by the Great Awakening, the ministers of these
churches were divided into two factions:
• The defenders of the New Light, who embraced the new method of preaching, based on the
ability of a cleric to move believers,
• The defenders of the Old Light, who insisted on adequate theological formation from the
clergy.
Two new confessions benefited from the division caused by the Great Awakening: Baptists and
Methodists. Both shared the belief in the possibility of salvation for everyone, and gain adherents
especially among the poorest social sectors and among the black population (both admitted blacks
in their congregations and even to the clergy).
The two religious minorities in colonial America were Catholics and Jews. Due to the traditional
enmity between Protestants and Catholics, Catholics suffered more discrimination in the colonies
than the Jews did. In 1740, the Westminster Parliament prohibited the colonies giving citizenship to
Catholic immigrants, and annulled their right to vote and to occupy public positions. However, both
confessions were freely allowed to celebrate their religious ceremonies and develop any kind of
economic activity. In the eve of Revolution, there were 25,000 Catholics and 1,500 Jews in the
colonies.

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