Prof: So let's actually
begin today's lecture,
which is titled "Ever At
Variance and Foolishly Jealous--
Intercolonial Relations."
 
And the quote part of that
title, "Ever At Variance
and Foolishly Jealous,"
actually comes from a colonist
named Joseph Warren who was
writing to a friend,
probably 1766,
I think--it doesn't matter;
it's--actually the quote's not
highly significant for you--
but the point of it is,
he was writing to a friend and
what he says to his friend is:
until the passage of the Stamp
Act the colonies had always
been,
quote, "ever at variance
and foolishly jealous,"
which is kind of going to be
the point of today's lecture.
"Ever at variance and
foolishly jealous"--but now
with the Stamp Act,
boy, people seemed to be a
little bit more united.
 
So today's lecture is the
foolishly jealous part and on
Tuesday we plunge into the Stamp
Act,
which moves us to the more
united part and actually begins
a sort of series of events that
are actually going to build up
to a logic of resistance.
 
So I'm going to be talking
today about basically
intercolonial relations,
about how people in the
different colonies viewed each
other,
about how the colonies as
entities interacted with each
other,
and towards the end of the
lecture I'm going to talk about
colonial attempts before the
1760s for them to unite--
colonial attempts to unite and
act together--
and, as we're going to see
today, they weren't really
amazingly successful,
those attempts,
so--and there were only three
of them that I'm going to talk
about--
but unity is not taken for
granted.
That, I suppose,
will be one message of today's
lecture: Don't take
unity--colonial unity for
granted.
 
And that's going to lead us up
perfectly to the next lecture on
the Stamp Act crisis,
which is then going to have
people shifting a point of view
because of the crisis at hand.
Okay.
 
So basically,
in a way, today's lecture is
the third and last in a series
of lectures that's really been
laying the groundwork for our
immersion into colonial
conflict.
 
So we've looked at the links
between colonists and the mother
country,
we've looked at aspects of
colonial life and settlement
that were kind of distinctly
colonial American,
and now we're sort of laying
the last plank in,
of the British-American mindset
at the time,
and that's: how the colonies
were relating with each other.
 
Okay.
 
And I--again I sort of--in
Freeman's Top Five Tips that I
offered in the introductory
lecture that I gave,
the Top Five Tips Towards
Understanding the Revolution--
and I said, "remember
contingency"--
and I suppose that's a sort of
subtheme of today's lecture,
because we so assume the logic
and inevitability of a unified
nation at some point down the
pike.
I think it's really easy for us
to forget some of the things
that I'm going to be talking
about today,
which all add up to:
unity did not make sense a lot
of the time.
 
Now I think to really
appreciate ultimately how
significant the first little
glimmerings at union were,
we first have to understand the
vast differences between the
different colonies and the
different regions,
because people at the time
definitely did.
They were always complaining
and remarking on people from
other regions,
about how weird they were,
about their bizarre manners,
about the weird way they
dressed, about their strange
attitude: constantly,
people from all regions,
all colonies sort of remarking
in a not necessarily favorable
way about people from other
places.
 
And I want to start--I want to
offer you a couple of examples,
and I want to start with Thomas
Jefferson,
who in the 1780s devoted some
of his energies to explaining
America to a French audience.
 
And as you'll hear in some of
these quotes,
he's going to definitely be
sounding like a Virginian.
And of course what's
interesting to note about
Jefferson is--
I'll quote him another time in
today's lecture--
Jefferson's strongest remarks
about America or American
character are always made to a
foreign audience.
 
Right?
 
He doesn't make them to
Americans.
So like, Notes on the State
of Virginia,
which has some remarkable
passages in it--
he didn't think that Americans
were going to be reading that.
That was actually for a French
audience and it sort of came
back across the ocean.
 
So a lot of what I'm going to
be quoting here today,
he was not quoting for
Americans.
He's actually speaking to the
French, which--You can say a lot
of blunt things to the French
that you wouldn't necessarily
say to fellow Americans.
 
So, okay.
 
In 1786, he wrote to a French
correspondent who clearly had
written to him in some way and
said, "Tell me about
America."
 
So Jefferson writes back,
and I'm going to talk a little
bit about his view of all of the
states,
but in this particular instance
he writes back and says he's
very curious about why Rhode
Island is opposed to every
useful proposition.
 
Okay.
 
I told you about Rhode Island.
 
I forewarned you about Rhode
Island.
We have to have a Rhode Island
moment here because it appears--
it's going to appear again and
I mentioned also that
Connecticut was going to appear
again--
Rhode Island was particularly
troublesome.
It was actually the last state
to join the Union,
and it actually joined the
Union after the Constitution had
already gone into effect.
 
So when Washington becomes
President and he goes on his
first grand triumphal tour--
'I will now go around the
nation showing everyone that I
am President"--
he first swings through the
North, and he actually refuses
to cross the border into Rhode
Island because Rhode Island is a
foreign country,
and he doesn't want to go there.
Okay.
 
He was making kind of a strong
statement.
Rhode Island wasn't really
happy about this but it was
their fault because they hadn't
ratified the Constitution yet.
A really popular thing to do at
the time in taverns was to drink
12 toasts,
not 13, as a deliberate insult
to Rhode Island,
[laughter]
like -- 'so there,
Rhode Island.'
Of course, you also get to
drink 12 toasts that day,
and that's the other happy
thing about that,
but at any rate--[laughter].
 
So Rhode Island is an issue,
and it's going to come up again
today even.
 
So Jefferson was trying to
figure out, what is the deal
about Rhode Island?
 
And here is what he--how he
explains it.
Rhode Island's "geography
accounts for it with the aid of
one or two observations.
 
The cultivators of the earth
are the most virtuous
citizens."
 
(It's very Jeffersonian.)
 
Merchants are the least
virtuous.
"The latter reside
principally in the seaport
towns, the former in the
interior country.
Now, it happened that of the
territory constituting Rhode
Island and Connecticut,
the part containing the
seaports was erected into a
State by itself,
and called Rhode Island,
and that containing the
interior country was erected
into another State called
Connecticut.
 
For though it has a little
sea-coast, there are no good
ports in it.
 
Hence it happens that there is
scarcely one merchant in the
whole State of Connecticut,
while there is not a single man
in Rhode Island who is not a
merchant of some sort,"
which is probably a little bit
of an exaggeration.
"This circumstance has
decided the characters of the
two States and the remedies to
this evil are hazardous.
One would be to consolidate the
two States into one."
Right?
 
That's a really popular idea.
 
"Another would be to
banish Rhode Island from the
Union."
 
[laughter]
Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.
Is anyone here from Rhode
Island?
Are there no Rhode Islanders?
 
Am I bashing safely?
 
Wow.
 
[laughter]
No one can come get me.
One time someone did say,
'Excuse me.
[laughter]
I'm from Rhode Island.'
[laughter]
So [laughs]
I'm safe.
 
This is dangerous.
 
So number one,
you could consolidate
Connecticut and Rhode Island.
 
Number two, you could banish
Rhode Island from the union.
Number three would be to compel
the submission of Rhode Island
to the will of the other states.
 
Right?
 
He has an issue with Rhode
Island, but Rhode Island has
issues.
 
He's speaking partly as a
southerner but a lot of other
people had questions about Rhode
Island as well.
At about the same time,
different French correspondent,
once again Jefferson is writing
about the character of the
northern states and the
character of the southern
states.
 
And Jefferson writes:
"In the North they are
cool,
sober, laborious,
persevering,
independent,
jealous of their own liberties
and just to those of others,
interested, chicaning,
(cheating) superstitious and
hypocritical in their
religion."
Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.
 
"In the South they are
fiery,
voluptuary, indolent,
unsteady, independent,
zealous for their own liberties
but trampling on those of
others,
generous, candid,
without attachment or
pretensions to any religion but
that of the heart."
 
Spoken like a Virginian.
 
And according to Jefferson,
as he explains to this
Frenchman,
"An observing traveler
without the aid of a quadrant
may always know his latitude by
the character of the people
among whom he finds
himself"
--
like, he really believes that
it's very different people in
the different colonies.
 
And to Jefferson,
Pennsylvania was sort of the
perfect happy medium where the
two characters kind of met and
blended and formed a people
which,
as he put it,
were "free from the
extremes both of vice and
virtue."
Now, that's Jeffersonian
rhetoric.
There's a lot of Jeffersonian
rhetoric.
George Washington,
a man of much fewer words,
put his views about the North a
lot more succinctly.
Okay.
 
To Washington,
New Englanders were,
as he put it in 1777,
right when he joined the
continental army,
and the continental army is in
Massachusetts--
Washington joins the army,
he heads up to Massachusetts
and the army is largely made of
New Englanders;
he confronts the army and he
writes to a friend and says,
"New Englanders are an
exceeding dirty and nasty
people."
[laughs] Okay. That's us.
 
[laughs]
Sorry, father of our country.
We didn't live up to his
demands.
Now New Englanders,
to be fair, had similar
feelings about the South.
 
Right?
 
They thought southerners were
snooty, aristocratic,
proud.
 
I once in a diary came across a
passage in which there's a
Pennsylvanian and he's sitting
at a dinner table with some
Virginians,
and in his diary of course he's
complaining about this because
he says all they did through the
entire dinner was talk about
gambling,
horse racing,
Virginia ham and drinking and
drinking and drinking and
drinking.
And apparently to this
Pennsylvanian I guess that's
what Virginia is,
gambling and drinking.
Virginia.
 
Now John Adams,
with a little bit of a dose of
Puritan guilt,
felt that New Englanders were
the best trained in the school
of popular government but that
they weren't really skilled in
personal relations.
As he put it,
"New Englanders are
awkward,
bashful, pert,
ostentatious and vain,
a mixture which excites
ridicule and gives
disgust."
Some part of me thinks he was
speaking about himself,
which he could have been.
 
"Southerners,"
he claims,
"were skilled at display
and gentlemanly manners"
but according to Adams
"they were habituated to
higher notions of themselves and
the distinction between them and
the common people than we
are."
So they're basically snootier
according to John Adams.
So comments like all of these
are reminders about how very
different these sort of
colony-countries were from each
other.
 
They did each have different
distinctive characters and,
maybe equally important,
they often distrusted one
another.
 
So in a sense,
colonies often had more of a
connection with the mother
country than with each other.
Now this is partly due to
pragmatic concerns like bad
roads,
like the fact that there
actually was not a huge bustling
amount of intercolonial trade
because colonies really did
focus their trading energies on
the mother country and not so
much with each other,
and then also there were a lot
of border conflicts between
colonies which caused distrust
and complications between
colonies and also helped to
discourage trade.
Now the colonies were hostile
to each other because they were
seeing to their own interests,
but also, as kind of reflected
in the comments that I opened
the lecture with,
there also was just basic
cultural distrust.
Now as I head into this,
it's worth noting that there
actually were three different
types of colonies.
There were three different ways
in which colonies were founded,
and these differences could
sometimes affect the structure
of the colony and its relations
with the mother country.
So this is going to be a very
quick and dirty version of these
three kinds of colonies.
 
Type of colony number one:
You had corporate colonies,
like Connecticut and Rhode
Island, incorporated by Puritans
who left Massachusetts.
 
And basically,
a corporate colony made its own
constitution,
and it was then ratified by the
King.
 
So these are independently
founded colonies.
They're clearly independent in
spirit, which makes them
potentially troublesome--not
potentially troublesome;
it just makes them troublesome.
 
So corporate colonies is type
of colony number one.
You also had proprietary
colonies, like Pennsylvania and
Maryland, where the King would
give ownership of the colony to
someone.
 
So for example,
William Penn is the proprietor
in Pennsylvania;
Lord Baltimore is the
proprietor in Maryland.
 
So you have corporate colonies,
you have proprietary colonies,
and the third kind of colony is
a royal colony,
which is owned by the King.
 
So royal colonies include New
York,
South Carolina,
North Carolina,
Georgia,
Massachusetts,
just the whole range of
colonies that I basically
haven't named in those earlier
colonies.
A lot of these colonies were
royal colonies;
they were owned by the King.
 
Now of the three,
in some ways corporate colonies
were the closest to what would
eventually become states,
because corporate colonies had
drawn up their own constitution;
they made their own charter.
 
And what that actually--and the
charter was made by the people
who lived in the colony.
 
And what that actually means,
is once independence is
declared and all of these
newly-created states need to
create a new constitution which
writes out royal authority,
Connecticut kind of had its own
little charter and Rhode Island
too, to begin with.
 
They kind of were already there
as little independent entities.
They were a little ahead of the
game.
They sort of had their own
constitution that needed a
little tweaking,
but really all these other
colonies were sort of starting
from scratch.
Okay.
 
So those are kind of basic
structural institutional
differences between these three
kinds of colonies.
But beyond their basic
structure, there are also things
about the social structure and
the culture of the different
regions of the colonies that
differentiated them and bred
some distrust.
 
So let's just look for just a
few minutes at the different
regions and let's start with New
England.
Now logically enough--this is
not a surprise--New England had
the most structured
institutional base of the
colonies because of its Puritan
roots.
So just think about the whole
idea of a New England town,
and that's what I'm talking
about here.
In general, New England
colonies were divided into
townships;
each township was oriented
around the church.
 
Traditionally speaking,
your church fathers were your
town fathers.
 
The church felt responsible not
only for your soul in church but
also for your soul as displayed
in your everyday life,
so there actually were church
officials who sometimes went
from home to home to be sure
that you were living properly,
abiding by godly standards of
living--
and that's a sort of really
strong institutional base of
settlement.
 
Now as commerce boomed in New
England,
the sort of pure
church-orientation of New
England society got a little bit
diluted,
but still, it had an enormous
impact on the tone of life in
the northern colonies.
 
Also, because of New England's
Puritan roots and the Puritan
respect for the word as
presented in the Bible --
and you needed to be able to
read and understand the Bible
for yourself--
literacy was particularly high
in the New England colonies.
 
And New England colleges,
Harvard and Yale,
were generally superior to most
of the other colleges at the
time,
although King's College in New
York,
which is now Columbia,
and the College of New Jersey,
which is now Princeton,
also ranked high.
 
William and Mary in Virginia
was kind of in a different
league and I'm going to come
back to that,
and also to UVA,
which is where I got my Ph.D.,
in a few minutes.
 
Now New England was mostly
composed of small farms
supported by family labor.
 
And there was some slave labor;
it was the least in all of the
colonies, and there were roughly
thirty-five white Europeans to
every one slave.
 
Because of its original Puritan
origins--
so, because of its original
focus on excluding all but the
like-minded who shared their
religious sense of purpose--
New England was not really
diverse religiously or
ethnically.
 
And it was this lack of
diversity,
the kind of insular nature of
New England society,
that made many people think of
New Englanders as kind of--
well, their word for it was
unmixed--
sort of stiff and awkward:
they're not used to being out
in the world,
they don't know how to have
conversations with people who
aren't like them,
they're sort of weird because
they only know other New
Englanders.
 
But, the same sort of relative
lack of diversity also allowed
New Englanders to unite quickly
and powerfully if they felt that
their rights were being impinged
upon,
as we'll see during the first
phases of the Revolution,
within the next week or so.
 
So that's New England.
 
The middle colonies in at least
one way were the precise
opposite of New England because
they were actually the most
diverse of all of the colonies.
 
The middle colonies were
flooded by immigrants from
Germany, from Ireland,
from Scotland,
to name just a few countries.
 
And as a matter of fact the
middle colonies were considered,
in a phrase used at the time,
"the best poor man's
country"
because there were ample
supplies of land and there
weren't harsh restrictions or
great intolerance of diversity.
 
And part of the reason why it
was so popular for immigrants is
because of the great tolerance
of the Quakers who founded the
colony.
 
Though Pennsylvania,
like Massachusetts,
was founded by basically a
group of religious dissenters,
the Quaker faith was quite
different from Puritanism.
And it was much more focused on
regulating society according to
your internal moral spirit
rather than through
institutional,
sort of church-oriented
structures.
 
So there were fewer external
rules and regulations
controlling Pennsylvania society
in the way there would have been
in New England,
and it was a lot easier for
people who arrived in the middle
colonies to adapt to living
there.
 
And tolerance was also integral
to the Quaker faith,
so again, it's easier for
immigrants to deal with arriving
to the middle colonies.
 
Also the middle colonies,
unlike New England and the
South, were kind of less of a
coherent region.
And particularly New York and
Pennsylvania,
although they're both lumped
into middle colony-ness,
they seemed to share fewer
similarities,
and it's why at the time you
don't really hear people
dividing the colonies into
thirds.
They do tend to break it into
halves and they do tend to talk
about northern or eastern
colonies and southern colonies
and they sort of shove
Pennsylvania north and shove
Maryland south,
obviously thinking generally
about slavery as a helpful
dividing line.
Now that said,
to people at the time New York
was particularly problematic,
and in some ways some people
actually considered New York to
be more southern than northern.
Jefferson actually said that at
the time.
He thought that New York was in
the wrong place--that somehow
geographically it ended up far
more north than it should have
been.
 
It should be a southern state.
 
And what he meant by that was:
unlike a lot of other states or
colonies actually,
not yet states,
colonies, it was organized
around great landowners who
owned vast expanses of land.
 
And although in all of the
colonies there were sort of
great families who controlled or
who certainly had a lot of
power,
in New York politics was really
largely organized around the
clash between a handful of great
families.
 
And the Livingstons are the
sort of largest and most
noteworthy political clan in New
York,
and I can vouch to you as a
historian of this time period
that when you're studying New
York politics there are a
million Livingstons and they're
all named Philip.
[laughs]
Trying to tell which Livingston
is which Livingston is really
hard.
There are a lot of Livingstons
and they all--a lot of them are
in power.
 
Other people commented not
necessarily that New York seemed
southern,
but that it had really
high-toned manners,
that the people were really
aristocratic,
that they were very interested
in fine living and display than
some of the surrounding more
northern colonies.
 
And some people considered New
Yorkers shifty,
self-interested and subtle.
 
There's one account I came
across in which this fellows
says--
basically he says he thinks New
Yorkers are all liars,
but the way he puts it is
something like:
New Yorkers are all guilty of
telling great thumpers,
[laughs]
and I guess a great thumper is
a big lie.
And actually that same
diary--Okay.
This really surprised me.
 
I suppose -- you know,
very often--this is true with
slang too--
you consider slang or other
things as being really,
really modern,
and then you discover it
actually isn't really modern;
it dates all the way back.
 
I found a letter once from this
time period in which someone
said,
"I wanted to give
So-and-So a good swift kick in
the can."
Right?
 
Okay.
 
I don't expect someone to say
that in 1799,
"a good swift kick in the
can."
The can?--they're saying
that--I don't know.
It's a little sort of more cas
than I thought they would be in
1799.
 
But so in this diary account
this person is talking about New
York.
 
He's a Pennsylvanian and he
says New Yorkers talk really
fast, walk really fast,
they do everything really fast
in New York.
 
They're sort of really
businesslike and abrupt.
It actually just doesn't sound
very different from what someone
today would say visiting New
York City for the first time.
But he also describes--and now
I'm going to embarrass myself
fully--
he also describes what he calls
the New York walk,
which in his mind--He thinks
all New Yorkers walk this way,
which I guess is kind of bent
over and walking very fast,
so in his--and he does a little
imitation of it.
 
Apparently, in his diary he
talks about it.
So he is looking at New York.
 
Basically his impression--you
almost could read someone today
making a very similar
observation about New York.
So New York,
Pennsylvania,
middle colonies:
a bit different.
Considering though,
these differences between New
York and Pennsylvania,
years later,
after the Constitution kicks
in,
they actually become an
enormous issue because they
begin to play into the question
of where the national capital
should be located.
 
Because the general belief at
the time was,
wherever the capital ended up
being located would determine
the manners of the national
office-holders and thus
determine the sort of manner and
character of the nation.
Right?
 
So, wherever you're living is
going to shape how you act--
so the national office holders
are going to act--
if they're in New York--kind of
snooty,
and then the American public's
going to look at these snooty
people and they're going to try
to act like the snooty people,
and thus all of America will
become aristocratic and corrupt
and that's the end of the
republican experiment in
government.
 
Darn.
 
Right?
 
So that was kind of the logic
at the time so people had a lot
of attitudes about whether the
capital should be in New York or
should be in Philadelphia,
actually in Pennsylvania.
The idea being that
Pennsylvania seemed more ideal
because it's sort of in the
middle,
it seems kind of balanced,
people said it seemed the most
small "r"
republican,
meaning sort of virtuous and
straightforward and uncorrupted.
So it's not as though these
issues die out when we get
states and a country.
 
But now southerners might
disagree and might say,
'No.
 
Pennsylvania is of course not
the most republican.
We in the South are the most
republican, the most virtuous of
all regions.'
 
Of course, other colonists from
other regions would have
disagreed and would have
claimed,
as many did,
that the South was aristocratic
in the extreme,
that they had a true haughty
aristocratic elite,
plantation owners and then a
glut of poor common folk.
 
Not surprisingly--this is not
going to be a surprise to
anyone--
southern society was structured
around widely-scattered
plantations which essentially
functioned like small villages
owned and controlled by southern
gentlemen.
 
And it was these gentlemen who
controlled and regulated
affairs,
who did things like take
responsibility for fixing roads
or tending to local affairs,
rather than having some kind of
formal institution tending to
those things,
as might have happened in a
place that was more structured--
institutionally
structured--like New England.
 
And these southern gentlemen
really did enjoy great display
in their homes,
in their clothing,
in their style of living.
 
They spent their leisure time
gambling, cock fighting,
horse racing and,
as that diarist suggests,
drinking.
 
Now generally speaking,
education was not as important
in the South as in the North,
which is not to say gentlemen
were expected to be educated.
 
They were in the South,
but going to school at William
and Mary was sometimes more
social training than
intellectual training.
 
I'm sorry, William and Mary.
 
I do not mean to insult you.
 
But for one,
Thomas Jefferson was really not
impressed with his education at
William and Mary,
and ultimately,
he created in his old age the
University of Virginia because
he wanted to create what he
considered to be a better
academic institution in the
state of Virginia where people
would be truly learning.
This will be a temple of
learning, the University of
Virginia.
 
Okay.
 
Things didn't work out the way
he planned initially at the
University of Virginia.
 
There was a lot of drinking,
a lot of gambling.
I think--I can't remember
whether Edgar Allan Poe was
thrown out for drinking or
gambling or both but he was
expelled from the University of
Virginia for doing one or both
of those two things.
 
Students really liked,
at UVA--I don't know if any of
you have been there,
but there is sort of this
beautiful lawn at the center of
campus--
students really liked to ride
up and down the lawn on their
horses and shoot guns off in the
air.
This was a popular hobby.
 
Things got really bad
apparently with the guns and the
horses,
so Thomas Jefferson in 1825
called a meeting of the faculty
and students so that he could
reprimand them.
 
This is the hobby and delight
of his old age,
his--what he's going to give to
his own colony or state of
Virginia,
and now just wacky people
riding around shooting guns and
not really going to class,
per se.
 
So he calls this meeting of
students and faculty and he
invites along James Monroe and
James Madison.
Okay.
 
So we've got three
ex-Presidents who are standing
over the Virginia student body
who are going to reprimand them
for shooting off their guns.
 
And supposedly--I always find
this sort of touching.
Right?
 
Supposedly, Thomas Jefferson
stood up to yell at the students
but he was so upset at what was
happening at the university that
he started to cry and he had to
sit down.
[laughter]
So okay, crying Founders.
So he was very upset and then
one of the Jameses--I don't know
if it was Madison or
Monroe--sort of had to take
over.
 
Now you would think that a
crying Founder might help the
student body at Virginia to kind
of shape up, but it did not.
And years later when faculty
told the still-rioting,
gun-shooting students that they
needed to actually give up their
guns now because they apparently
just didn't want to stop
shooting them,
there was some kind of a gun
riot, [laughter]
a riot,
like crashing windows and--I
don't know the details but it
was ugly,
and seventy students were
expelled.
 
Four years after the amazing
gun riot,
when students were celebrating
the anniversary of the gun riot,
[laughter]
which kind of tells you that
people being expelled really
didn't do a lot for--
[laughter]
This gets really unfortunate.
They were celebrating the
anniversary of the gun riot and
a professor was accidentally
shot and killed.
[laughter]
So, [laughter]
it's a problem.
 
It's UVA, the early years.
 
Right?
 
It's a problem--unfortunate
problem with the guns.
Okay.
 
[laughs]
Virginia education in the early
years.
 
So, as with the other regions,
southern
colonists--colonies--were
distinctive in many ways other
than crazy, gun-toting students.
 
Of course, slavery had an
enormous impact on the tone of
life in the South.
 
There were between 1.3 and 1.7
white Europeans to every slave
in the South and in some
colonies like South Carolina
there actually was a black
majority.
To Jefferson,
slavery corrupted the morals of
the South,
and once again,
he says this in Notes on the
State of Virginia to his
French audience,
so he certainly writes things
there that he would not have
said to a fellow Virginian.
And in this case this is what
he writes in Notes:
"There must doubtless be
an unhappy influence on the
manners of our people produced
by the existence of slavery
among us.
The whole commerce between
master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous
passions,
the most unremitting deposition
on the one part and degrading
submissions on the other.
 
Our children see this and learn
to imitate it for man is an
imitative animal.
 
The parent storms,
the child looks on,
puts on the same airs in the
circle of smaller slaves,
gives a loose to his worst of
passions,
and thus nursed,
educated and daily exercised in
tyranny cannot but be stamped by
it with odious peculiarities.
The man must be a prodigy who
can retain his manners and
morals undepraved by such
circumstances."
So that's Jefferson,
Notes on the State of
Virginia,
in a really strong passage
about the influence of slavery
on the morals and manners of
southerners.
 
So clearly the South is based
on the mastery,
literally and figuratively,
of a ruling elite.
And it's this spirit of
entitlement and independence and
mastery that would inspire some
of the emotional response in the
South to Britain's actions in
the 1760s and 1770s,
particularly in Virginia,
which was the colony that
really believed itself to be at
the top of the hierarchy of
southern colonies,
the leader of the South.
The response of Virginia to
what they perceived to be the
impingement of Britain upon
their rights was second in
intensity,
as we're going to see,
only to what took place in
Massachusetts and particularly
in Boston.
 
So you can now begin to see how
really diverse these different
regions and colonies were and
you can also begin to see why
when different men from
different regions came together
in something like ultimately a
continental congress they were
pretty quick to pick up on those
differences.
And New Englanders picked apart
the southerners as being
arrogant and wearing flashy
clothes and southerners thought
the New Englanders were strange
and awkward and everybody
distrusted the New Yorkers and
everybody smiled at the
Pennsylvanians,
but all of these [laughter]
things were pretty prominent in
any kind of a continental
organization.
 
So with all of these big
differences you can begin to see
how truly amazing and noteworthy
would have been any attempts at
colonial unity.
 
And what I'm going to do right
now is just talk very briefly
about these three attempts at
colonial unity that I mentioned
at the outset of the lecture.
 
Two of them,
as we'll see,
were inspired by the colonies
as a means of self-defense.
One of them was basically
created by the British,
not surprisingly as a means of
asserting British control.
But what's really most
important to note in these
examples that I'm going to offer
you here is: generally speaking,
when American colonists
considered colonial union on
their own it was for reasons of
self-defense.
It was for reasons of
self-interest and not because of
some greater ideological
calling;
it was really for basic
self-defense.
So let's look at the first
attempt at colonial union,
which took place in 1643.
 
Okay.
 
So in 1643, representatives of
the colonies of Massachusetts
Bay, Plymouth,
Connecticut,
and New Haven -- New Haven is
its own little settlement.
I--It happens several times in
this course that New Haven just
appears all by itself,
which I always kind of love
because you just don't expect it
to sort of sit there all by
itself having historical
prominence,
but here it is.
 
So Massachusetts Bay,
Plymouth, Connecticut,
and New Haven decided that they
wanted to form a confederation
to defend themselves against
Dutch expansion and hostile
Indian tribes,
and to create some kind of
forum for resolving
intercolonial disputes,
which happened all the time.
 
Rhode Island tried to join the
forum [laughs]
but it was excluded [laughter]
because nobody trusted Rhode
Island [laughter]
so they were not invited to
join.
 
The union, known as the United
Colonies of New England,
or the New England
Confederation,
didn't have any sanction in the
charters of its member colonies.
Instead it was just a kind of
joint advisory council and it
was made up of two members from
each participating colony,
so basically it had eight
people in it,
right?
 
And six of the eight had to
vote for something for it to
take effect.
 
So between 1643 and 1664,
the United Colonies of New
England,
or the New England
Confederation,
met--
between those years,
1643 and 1664--
until Connecticut annexed New
Haven and the number of members
decreased and went down to six
and this became a problem.
So after 1664,
when New Haven sort of merged
with Connecticut,
it didn't meet very often and
then ultimately in 1684 it kind
of drifted to an end,
the end of the United Colonies
of New England.
So that's amazing first attempt
at union.
It was an attempt.
 
The second union of a sort was
spurred by the British
government,
which in the 1680s became
worried that the New England
colonies were not sympathetic
and loyal to the British monarch
and we're--
basically we're creeping up
here on--
I'm not going to go into it in
any detail but--
on what comes to be known as
the Glorious Revolution,
when the monarchy falls,
so there's a reason why they're
wondering how loyal the New
Englanders are to the monarchy.
But British authorities wanted
to be sure that the New England
colonies were going to be loyal
to the British monarch.
So in 1686, the British
government formed what they
called the Dominion of New
England,
which to me sounds like sort of
Darth Vader,
"Star Wars"-- the
"Dominion."
So they formed the Dominion of
New England,
1686, which fused all of the
New England colonies plus New
York plus New Jersey into one
colony to be ruled by one royal
governor and an appointed
council.
That's a dramatic gesture.
 
The resulting mass that was
made by merging all of that into
one colony was larger in size
than England.
Okay.
 
That's a lot of land,
a lot of land.
The newly-installed royal
governor was named Edmund
Andros, A-n-d-r-o-s.
 
Andros ruled over the Dominion
without a legislature,
passing laws after they were
approved by a majority of his
councilors.
 
You can see how happy this is
going to make the New
Englanders.
 
Not surprisingly,
a lot of New Englanders
resented the dominion and the
way it just sort of supplanted
colonial legislatures.
 
Even more unfortunate,
Andros was not a very
diplomatic politician and he
really had no reason to be
diplomatic.
 
He was sent to New England on
royal authority,
his job was to assert royal
authority, so he really didn't
need to please anybody except
the King.
Even so, he somehow seemed
intent on really proving his
authority by flaunting it before
New Englanders.
So for example,
not long after he arrived,
Andros took over a Puritan
meeting house and converted it
into an Anglican church.
 
Right?
 
Nothing like a little 'ha,
you Puritans,
you think you control the
Dominion, but I control the
Dominion,' dramatic gesture.
 
He also put the colonial
militia under the direct control
of the governor himself.
 
And there were a number of
other highly unpopular things
that he did.
 
But in 1689 when the Stuart
monarchy fell in England because
of the Glorious Revolution,
American colonists also
revolted and they toppled the
Dominion government;
they jailed its officers
including Andros,
who supposedly tried to escape
in women's clothing.
[laughter]
Okay.
So that's somewhat humiliating.
 
Even more humiliating,
he was caught,
[laughs]
poor Andros,
and he is eventually freed and
not surprisingly fled right back
to England.
 
And soon after,
Britain just let the colonies
resume their former status so
end of the Dominion of New
England.
 
That's a really obviously
whopping big success.
The third and last attempt at
union is in 1754,
and like the first one,
it was largely because of a
threat.
 
And this time,
colonies were afraid of threats
coming from the French and from
Indians.
And here we have the not really
promising entry of George
Washington on to the colonial
military scene.
I'm going to draw a little
picture to you of George
Washington's moment of glory at
this moment in time.
Okay.
 
So in 1753,1754,
there were some skirmishes on
the Pennsylvania frontier
because French forces were
moving south from Quebec.
 
And Virginia militia under the
command of George Washington--
a young and,
as we will hear,
inexperienced officer--
he's sent out by the governor
of Virginia to investigate and
see what's happening with these
sort of French movements on the
frontier.
So Washington and his men
apparently tramp around the
frontier for a while and
ultimately they find a small
party of French soldiers in an
encampment and they open fire on
them and kill a lot of them,
and then discover unfortunately
after the fact that actually it
was a neutral ambassador holding
papers for a negotiation,
and his diplomatic escort.
Okay.
 
[laughter]
So Washington just killed a
bunch of diplomats and their
escort and the diplomat
literally died clutching papers
to negotiate Okay.
[laughter]
Thank you, George Washington.
So Washington,
after this glorious moment,
decides he's going to pull back
and he's going to encamp his
troops in a fort that he will
have built.
Right?
 
So he has troops build a fort
and he names it Fort Necessity,
which it really was.
 
Right?
 
He just killed people he
shouldn't have been killing;
now he'd better create a fort,
so he creates Fort Necessity,
but unfortunately for
Washington he built it
in--basically in a valley.
 
Okay, fort in valley,
just not good.
He didn't really think very
hard about the places up above
the fort where the French could
perch and fire down in to the
fort,
which of course they did. Right?
[laughter]
He also didn't think about the
fact that if it's in a valley if
it rains, it's really bad for
people in the valley.
 
So sure enough the French
attack, there is a big rain
storm,
the French are shooting down
from the heights,
and Washington and his little
troop are down in this sort of
soggy,
increasingly puddled fort in
which their powder is all
getting soaked in these huge
puddles as it continues to rain.
This did not end well for
Washington and basically he
ultimately had to surrender.
 
Not only did he have to
surrender,
but because of a document that
was really badly translated,
he signed his name to terms of
surrender which announced that
Washington had,
quote, "assassinated"
a French diplomat.
 
Yes, I assassinated a--This was
all bad.
[laughter]
This is just--This is George
Washington's entry.
 
Right?
 
Let's give the command to him.
 
This is not a good moment for
George.
And in addition to that,
supposedly in this moment,
Washington wrote a letter to
his brother.
He was still kind of cheery
about this whole thing,
throughout this whole thing.
 
He wrote a letter to his
brother and he said--
I have to quote it precisely
here--"I heard bullets
whistle and,
believe me, there was something
charming in the sound."
 
Right?
 
He's so excited about getting a
chance to fight.
It's like--the charming sound
of bullets.
Supposedly, that quote made its
way back to King George the
Second,
who thought it was a really
stupidly ridiculous thing for
anybody to say,
and I think what the king said
was something along the lines
of: 'He wouldn't think so if he
heard very many of those bullets
whistling.
 
They would not be charming
anymore.'
So, not a good moment for
George.
He's not helping matters,
but in addition to that the
British really were worried that
Indian relations generally
speaking were deteriorating
largely due to complications
between colonies that weren't
cooperating with each other.
So the governors of
Massachusetts and New York
persuade the British Lords of
Trade--
they're the guys who regulate
trade in the colonies--
to issue a call for a
conference to meet in Albany in
June of 1754 to negotiate with
the Six Nations,
with the Iroquois
Confederation,
and to talk about other ways of
coordinating defense for the
colonies.
 
So in 1754, there is this
meeting called to figure out a
way for the colonies to jointly
work things out with the Native
Americans, the Six Nations.
 
Invitations went to nine
colonies: Massachusetts,
New Hampshire,
New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia,
Rhode Island,
and Connecticut.
I'll repeat that one more time:
Massachusetts,
New Hampshire,
New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia,
Rhode Island,
and Connecticut.
North Carolina,
South Carolina,
and Georgia were not included
because they were probably just
too far away from where people
thought there was going to be
conflict.
 
New Jersey and Virginia
declined because it was too
expensive to go.
 
So even here when you--people
are afraid, there's an Indian
threat--some colonies just say,
'Oh, it costs too much.
I don't think I'm going to
bother.'
But this meeting--I'll end here
and I'll pick up with this
little end passage on Tuesday.
 
This meeting came to be known
as the Albany Congress--the
Albany Congress in 1754.
 
And I'll talk briefly on
Tuesday about the Albany
Congress and what it was and
what it did,
and then I'll segue from
that,--which also doesn't end
well--
in to the Stamp Act.
 
 
