Volume 13 , Issue 15

America In 1745

For those of you family genealogists who have traced some of your ancestors to the Highland County of Virginia, this is what the History of Highland County Virginia, by Oren Frederic Morton, Chapter IV, it says the following about "America In 1745 - "Relation of the Colonies to one another - Their Small Population - Industries Institutions - Character of the Colonials."

If you think about what all we have today (21th century) with broadband internet, television, postal mail delivered most every day (except on Sundays), telephones (cells & land lines), automobiles, airplanes, trains, spaceships, public schools and colleges in every community and state, . . . it makes you wonder sometimes how our ancestors survived and educated themselves back in 1745. We have come along way from what our ancestors of the mid-eighteenth century lived through.

"It comprised thirteen colonies, all owning a certain degree of allegiance to the British crown. Two of these, Pennsylvania and Delaware, were under the authority of the same governor. With this partial exception, the thirteen colonies were with respect to one another thirteen independent, English-speaking nations. Nine-tenths of the white people were of British origin, and their laws and institutions were consequently much alike. Nevertheless, each colony was jealous of its own rights and more or less distrustful of its neighbors.

"Georgia, the youngest of the colonies, had been established only thirteen years. Virginia, the first founded, was not so old by thirty years as is the settlement of the Bullpasture Valley today. The occupied area of the colonies extended a thousand miles along the coast. On an average it reached inland scarcely more than a hundred miles.

"By the terms of their charters, some of the colonial grants extended clear across the continent. But west of the Alleghanies no settlement had yet been made. The entire Mississippi Valley was claimed by the French, and in a slight degree had been colonized by them. To all intents and purposes, what is now Highland County lay directly on the frontier of the British domain.

"In all the british colonies there were not one-third as many people as there are now in the two Virginias. The growth was everywhere rapid, both by natural increase and immigration, yet large portions of the settled area were thinly occupied. Towns were very few and very small, and even villages were scarce except in the New England section.

"Boston had 15,000 people, Philadelphia had 12,000, and New York only about 10,000, or substantially the same number as is found in Staunton today. The only other places of size were Salem, Newport, Norfolk, and Charleston. The negroes were scarcely one-fifth of the population, and not 20,000 of them were to be found north of Maryland. The estimated population in 1745 is as follows: New Hampshire 26,000; Pennsylvania and Delaware 125,000; Massachusetts 168,000; Rhode Island 29,000; Maryland 120,000; Connecticut 84,000; Virginia 237,000; New York 71,000; North Carolina 65,000; New Jersey 58,000; South Carolina 56,000; Georgia 6,000. ToTal 1,045,000.

"Roads being bad and bridges few, there was no journeying by land when it was possible to travel by rowboat or sailing vessel on the bays and rivers. The active commerce with England and the West Indies required several hundred of the small ships of that day. There was no intercourse with South America, Africa was known only along its coast, Australia was uncolonized, and the lands east of Russia or beyond our own Mississippi were little else than blank space on the map. The great Pacific was less known than is the Arctic today, and nearly every sea was infested with pirate vessels. The traveler was still suspected of being a liar and sometimes he was.

"In the cities and towns and along the navigable waters, the houses of people esteemed well-to-do were substantially built and quite roomy, yet within they would seem less cozily furnished than the better class of homes in any American village of the present century. Away from the coast, the log house was almost the only dwelling.

"Farming was the one great industry, and it was carried on in a crude, laborious, and wasteful way. The Middle and Southern colonies contributed the greater share of the agricultural exports. Tobacco, the leading staple of Maryland and Virginia, afforded a surplus of 70,000 hogsheads. 200 ships were engaged in this service, and the revenue it yielded to the British treasury was more than a million dollars yearly.

"By reason of their climate and soil, the New England colonies turned their very active attention to commerce and fishing. As for manufacture, this branch of industry was severely handicapped by British jealousy. England wished to use the colonial domain as a market for the products of its own workshops.

"In all America there were but three colleges: Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. Outside of New England there was no system of public schools, and illiteracy was common. Yet in every colony were not a few persons who were well versed in the higher education of that day. It was little else than a classical training, and it conduced to a style of discourse that was heavy, stilted, and full of Greek and Latin names and allusions.

"The men of best education were the ministers and lawyers. The daily newspaper was yet in the future. The very few weeklies were in size about like our Sunday School papers. The mails were few, slow, and irregular, and the frontier settlement did well if it received its letters once a month.

"Religion was free only in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Elsewhere a state church was supported by general taxation, and all people were expected to attend a certain number of times in the course of the year. In Virginia this church was the Episcopalian, known also as the Church of England.

"It was a very dark age with respect to medical knowledge. Hygiene was little understood or practiced. Quacks were numerous, and in the South physicians were held in low esteem. As to legal procedure, its methods are always conservative, and even yet they have undergone no radical change. With respect to society, it was colored by aristocratic ideas more than is the case at present. Even when the Federal Government went into operation in 1789, only one person in twenty-five was a qualified voter.

"Taverns were in every county, and they always kept liquor, the use of which was general. Southern taverns were poor, but the traveler was sure of free entertainment in the homes of the planters. The travelers visit was an appreciated break in the sameness of life in a sparsely settled county.

"The life of every community was very local in its spirit and sympathies and was comparatively sluggish in its movement. This was because of the slowness and difficulty of travel, the meager amount of general news in the journals of the day, and the prejudice shown toward the stranger. Each neighborhood was a little world in itself. It was interested in little else than its own petty affairs, and was rather content in its narrowness.The differences between the colonies were due in part to denominational options and in part to social and economic conditions. But as yet an immense majority of the people were of English derivation, and whether Cavalier, Puritan, Quaker, or Catholic, their English ancestors had lived side by side as actual neighbors.

"In all the colonies there was a considerable though unequal sprinkling of Irish, Welch, and French. The French were exclusively Huguenots, but unlike the Hollanders and Germans, and even unlike the French Catholics of Canada, they did not perpetuate their mother tongue. Neither were the few Swedes of Pennsylvania and Delaware very long in becoming amalgamated with their English neighbors. The same fact was far less true of the Hollanders of New York, a colony not founded by the English.

"In 1745 England was, therefore, in a very broad sense the mother-country of the colonies. Not only their language, but their laws and usages were derived fromEngland. And yet the causes which have made the American a very different person from the Englishman had begun to operate with the coming of the first immigrant ships.

So . . . let us compare our modern conveniences of today (21th century) with what our ancestors had (or did not have) back in 1745. As some might say, "We have come along, baby!" . . . From what our ancestors of the mid-eighteenth century lived with and without!   |  View or Add Comments (1 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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