BiblioVault - Books about Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775

The Packhorseman

Charles Hudson

University of Alabama Press, 2009

In April 1735, twenty-year-old William MacGregor, possessing little more than a bottle of Scotch whiskey and a set of Shakespeare’s plays, arrives in Charles Town, South Carolina, to make his fortune in the New World. The Scottish Highlands, while dear to his heart, were in steep economic decline and hopelessly entangled in dangerous political intrigue. With an uncle in Carolina, the long ocean voyage seemed his best chance for a new start. He soon discovers that the Jacobite politics of Scotland extend to Carolina, and when his mouth gets him in trouble with the Charles Town locals, dimming his employment opportunities, he seizes the one option still open for him and takes a job as a frontier packhorseman.

Soon young MacGregor is on the Cherokee trail to Indian country, where he settles in as a novice in the deerskin trade. Along the way William learns not only the arts of managing a pack train and trading with the Indians, but of reading the land and negotiating cultural differences with the Cherokee—whose clan system is much different from the Scottish clans of his homeland. William also learns that the Scottish enlightenment he so admires has not made much headway in the Carolina backcountry, where the real challenges are to survive, day to day, during the tense times after the Yamasee War and to remember that while in Indian country . . . it is their country.

A scholar of the native Southeast, Charles Hudson has turned his hand to this work of historical fiction, bringing to life the packhorsemen, Indian traders, and southeastern Indians of the early 18th-century Carolina. With a comfortable and engaging style, Hudson peoples the Carolina frontier with believable characters, all caught up in a life and time that is historically well-documented but little-known to modern popular readers.

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Patriarchy in Peril

William Byrd II and Slavery in Early Virginia

Dennis Todd

University of Tennessee Press, 2023

William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres and employed laborers and enslaved Africans to work his land. His letters, diaries, and surveying documents have become key texts in the study of American history, and he is one of the most quoted and discussed figures of his era.

Byrd himself was perhaps the early colonial epitome of a patriarch, and typically, when historians examine Byrd and the prominence of patriarchal thought in colonial Virginia, they examine his relationships with his immediate family. In this book, however, Dennis Todd examines the patriarchal relations between Byrd and the workers on his plantations—his apprentices, his wageworkers, his overseers, his white servants, and especially his slaves. In doing so, this book illuminates a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia. Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither. Byrd was not the only Virginian to wrestle with the contradictions between patriarchal values and the realities of slavery, but few were as articulate.

In examining Byrd through the twin lens of slavery and patriarchy, Patriarchy in Peril makes an important contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in Virginia society as well as the contentious formation of early America.

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The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777

Joseph Seymour

Westholme Publishing, 2024

The First Complete History of the Military Force of Colonial Pennsylvania, a Volunteer Body Created as a Practical Response to the Ideal of Pacifism

Known at various times as the Military Association of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Association, or simply Associators, this long-neglected organization represented a new constituency in Pennsylvania politics and by extension, a new American response to arbitrary rule. Organized on December 7, 1747, at Philadelphia, the Military Association, an all-volunteer military establishment pledged to the defense of Pennsylvania, served as the de facto armed force for Pennsylvania, a colony whose leadership, a loose coalition of Quaker and German pacifists, land barons, and merchants, foreswore military preparedness on religious and ideological grounds. For the Associators, including their most noted supporter, Benjamin Franklin, a defenseless colony was no longer practical. During the War of Austrian Succession and again in the Seven Years’ War, Associators organized defense efforts in defiance of the Pennsylvania colonial leadership. Associators also helped defend American Indian refugees against the infamous Paxton Boys in 1764. By 1775, Associators found themselves as the colony’s only legitimate military leadership and, by capitalizing on electoral gains in the lead up to the American Revolution, Associators assumed offices vacated by former officials. During the critical battles of 1776, the Associators in their distinctive round hats and brown coats proved a decisive asset to the Continental Army.

In The Pennsylvania Associators, 1747–1777, historian Joseph Seymour has painstakingly researched primary source materials in order to write the first comprehensive history of this influential organization. Seymour demonstrates that while the Pennsylvania Associators contributed to success in the campaigns in which they fought, particularly the battles of Trenton and Princeton, a more fascinating and important investigation are the concerns that motivated these men. Associators considered military service in defense of their religious and civil liberties as a natural right. For three decades, Associators demonstrated that belief in and out of uniform. In a colony founded on religious exceptionalism, Associators saw themselves as faithful soldiers and active agents against leadership by entitlement, a principle guiding our government today.

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People of Prowess

Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America

Nancy L. Struna

University of Illinois Press, 1996

Americans have revered prowess in sports going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nancy L. Struna explores the significance, meaning, and structure of competitive matches and displays of physical prowess for both men and women in colonial culture. Engrossingly written for the general reader as well as sport and leisure historians, People of Prowess is a pioneering work that explores a rarely examined area of colonial history and society.

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Peoples of a Spacious Land

Families and Cultures in Colonial New England

Gloria L. Main

Harvard University Press, 2004

In this book about families--those of the various native peoples of southern New England and those of the English settlers and their descendants--Gloria Main compares the ways in which the two cultures went about solving common human problems. Using original sources--diaries, inventories, wills, court records--as well as the findings of demographers, ethnologists, and cultural anthropologists, she compares the family life of the English colonists with the lives of comparable groups remaining in England and of native Americans. She looks at social organization, patterns of work, gender relations, sexual practices, childbearing and childrearing, demographic changes, and ways of dealing with sickness and death.

Main finds that the transplanted English family system produced descendants who were unusually healthy for the times and spectacularly fecund. Large families and steady population growth led to the creation of new towns and the enlargement of old ones with inevitably adverse consequences for the native Americans in the area. Main follows the two cultures into the eighteenth century and makes clear how the promise of perpetual accessions of new land eventually extended Puritan family culture across much of the North American continent.

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Smith

Brandeis University Press, 2018

Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

S. Max Edelson

Harvard University Press, 2011

This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry.

European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation.

The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization.

With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.

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Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820

Trevor Burnard

University of Chicago Press, 2015

As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because—to speak bluntly—it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy.

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Poems and Meditations

Anne Bradstreet

Iter Press, 2019

This volume presents all the surviving writings of the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672): the poems published during her lifetime in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; or, Several Poems (London, 1650), poems added to the posthumous edition of Bradstreet’s Several Poems (Boston, 1678), and the material in her hand and that of her son preserved in a manuscript volume known as the Andover manuscript. Extensive footnotes illuminate Bradstreet’s broad reading in the medical, scientific, and historical literature of her day, as well as her interest in recent and current English history and politics.

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The Politics of Piracy

Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America

Douglas R. Burgess

University Press of New England, 2014

The seventeenth-century war on piracy is remembered as a triumph for the English state and her Atlantic colonies. Yet it was piracy and illicit trade that drove a wedge between them, imperiling the American enterprise and bringing the colonies to the verge of rebellion. In The Politics of Piracy, competing criminalities become a lens to examine England’s legal relationship with America. In contrast to the rough, unlettered stereotypes associated with them, pirates and illicit traders moved easily in colonial society, attaining respectability and even political office. The goods they provided became a cornerstone of colonial trade, transforming port cities from barren outposts into rich and extravagant capitals. This transformation reached the political sphere as well, as colonial governors furnished local mariners with privateering commissions, presided over prize courts that validated stolen wares, and fiercely defended their prerogatives as vice-admirals. By the end of the century, the social and political structures erected in the colonies to protect illicit trade came to represent a new and potent force: nothing less than an independent American legal system. Tensions between Crown and colonies presage, and may predestine, the ultimate dissolution of their relationship in 1776. Exhaustively researched and rich with anecdotes about the pirates and their pursuers, The Politics of Piracy will be a fascinating read for scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in the wild and tumultuous world of the Atlantic buccaneers.

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The Puritan Experiment

New England Society from Bradford to Edwards

Francis J. Bremer

University Press of New England, 1995

This revised and updated edition of an out-of-print classic once again makes the broad background of Puritanism accessible to students and general readers. Based on a chronology that begins with the Act of Supremacy in 1534 and ends with Jonathan Edwards's death in 1758, Francis J. Bremer's interpretive synthesis of the causes and contexts of the Puritan movement integrates analyses of the religious, political, sociological, economic, and cultural changes wrought by the movement in both Old and New England. From meeting house architecture to Salem witch trials, from relations with Native Americans to the founding of the nation's first colleges, he details with style and grace "a living system of faith" that not only had profound significance for tens of thousands of Englishmen and Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also affected the course of history in the New World.

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Puritans among the Indians

Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724

Alden T. Vaughan

Harvard University Press, 1981

These eight reports by white settlers held captive by Indians gripped the imagination not only of early settlers but also of American writers through our history. Puritans among the Indians presents, in modern spelling, the best of the New England narratives. These both delineate the social and ideological struggle between the captors and the settlers, and constitute a dramatic rendition of the Puritans’ spiritual struggle for redemption.

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