America in 1776: North Carolina and Kalm

Within the cultivated district a population usually, but probably erroneously, estimated at three millions were thinly scattered over a narrow strip of land. The number can scarcely be maintained. The New England colonies could have had not more than eight hundred thousand inhabitants; the middle colonies as many more; the Southern a little over a million. New York had a population of two hundred and forty-eight thousand, and was surpassed by Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, and was at least equalled, if not exceeded, by North Carolina. Its growth had been singularly slow. The small population of the Union was composed of different races and of almost hostile communities. There was a lasting feud between the Dutch at Albany and the people of New England. . The Germans settled in Pennsylvania retained their national customs and language, and were almost an alien race. Huguenot colonies existed in several portions of the country. The north of Ireland had poured forth a stream of emigrants. Swedish settlements attracted the notice of Kalm along the Delaware. In North Carolina a clan of Highlanders had brought to the New World an intense loyalty and an extreme ignorance. The divisions of race and language offered a strong obstacle to any perfect union of the different colonies. But a still more striking opposition existed in the political institutions of the various sections. In the South, royalty, aristocracy, and the worst form of human slavery had grown up together. In no part of the world were the distinctions of rank more closely observed, or mechanical and agricultural industry more perfectly contemned. In New England the institutions were democratic, and honest labor was thought no shame. In the South episcopacy was rigidly established by law; in New England a tolerant Puritanism had succeeded the persecuting spirit of Cotton Mather and Winthrop. .

In the course of a century, within their narrow fringe of country the colonists had transformed the wilderness into a fertile and productive territory. Agriculture was their favorite pursuit. Travellers from Europe were struck with the skill with which they cultivated the rich and abundant soil, the fine farm-houses that filled the landscape, the barns overflowing with harvests, the cattle, the sheep. The Northern and middle colonies were famous for sheep and corn. Pennsylvania was the granary of the nation. In New Jersey the fine farms that spread from Trenton to Elizabethtown excited the admiration of the scientific Kalm. Long Island was the garden of America, and all along the valleys opening upon the Hudson the Dutch and Huguenot colonists had acquired ease and opulence by a careful agriculture. The farm-houses, usually built of stone, with tall roofs and narrow windows, were scenes of intelligent industry. While the young men labored in the fields, the mothers and daughters spun wool and flax and prepared a large part of the clothing of the family. The farm-house was a manufactory for all the articles of daily use. Even nails were hammered out in the winter, and the farmer was his own mechanic. A school and a church were provided for almost every village. Few children were left untaught by the Dutch dominie, who was sometimes paid in wampum, or the New England student, who lived among his patrons, and was not always fed upon the daintiest fare. .

The progress of agriculture at the South was even more rapid and remarkable than at the North. The wilderness was swiftly converted into a productive region. The coast from St. Mary's to the Delaware, with its inland country, became within a century the most valuable portion of the earth. Its products were eagerly sought for in all the capitals of Europe, and one noxious plant of Virginia had supplied mankind with a new vice and a new pleasure. . Tobacco was in Virginia the life of trade and intercourse; prices were estimated in it; the salaries of the clergy were fixed at so many pounds of tobacco. All other products of the soil were neglected in order to raise the savage plant. Ships from England came over annually to gather in the great crops of the large planters, . . [and] Virginia grew enormously rich from the sudden rise of an artificial taste.

Other crops replaced tobacco farther south. In South Carolina the cultivation of rice, brought thither in 1694 from Madagascar, had become greatly developed. Indigo, sugar, molasses, tar, pitch, were other valuable Southern products, but cotton, which was destined to assume the place farther south which tobacco then held in Virginia, was as yet cultivated only in small quantities for the use of the farmers. The commercial restrictions imposed by England acted detrimentally upon American agriculture, yet it flourished in spite of them.