discoursed eloquently in a letter home of peaches, nectarines and mellons of all sorts extremely fine and in profusion, and their oranges exceed any I ever tasted from the West Indies or from Spain or Portugal.' There were many more, and better, vegetables than were available in England. German immigrants were particularly good at producing in quantity and for market, at low prices, apples, pears, quinces, chestnuts, and a wide range of strawberries, raspberries, huckleberries, and cherries for preserves. Ordinary people filled their stomachs with beef, pork, and mutton, as well asjonny cake' and hoe cake.' A contributor to the London Magazine in 1746 thought the American country peopleenjoy a Life much to be envied by Courts and
Cities.' And there were always new evidences of nature's bounty to those who looked hard
enough for it. Clever Miss Lucas, left in charge of a South Carolina plantation, took advantage of
a parliamentary bounty on indigo, raised to sixpence a pound in 1748, to experiment successfully
with a crop. Thanks to her, the Carolinas were exporting 1,150,662 pounds of it in 1775, and it
became the leading staple until displaced by cotton after the Revolution.
While the pioneers pushed inland, opening up new sources of wealth, and gradually creating the
demographic base from which America could take off into an advanced industrial economy, the
cities of the coast were coining money and spending it. The queen of the cities was Philadelphia,
which by mid-century had become the largest in the entire British Empire, after London. Its
Philosophical Society (1743) was already famous and its Academy (1751) burgeoned into the
great University of Pennsylvania. New York City was also growing fast and was already the
melting-pot in embryo. By 1700 the English and the Huguenots outnumbered the original Dutch
inhabitants: half a century later, many of the Dutch had become Anglicans and all were bilingual
or English-speaking. They had been joined by multitudes of Walloons and Flemings, Swedes,
Rhineland Protestants, Norwegians, and North Germans, as well as Scotch and English
Calvinists and Quakers, freed slaves, Irish, and more Dutch. By mid-century the Lower Hudson,
including East and West Jersey, joined as the royal colony of New Jersey in 1702, was a
collection of communities-Dutch in Harlem and Flatbush, lowland Scots in Perth Amboy, Baptist
settlers from New Hampshire in Piscataway, New England Quakers in Shrewsbury, Huguenots
in New Rochelle, Flemings in Bergen, New Haven Puritans in Newark and Elizabeth, and
pockets of Scotch, Irish, and Germans upriver, as well as many Dutch-Albany was a Dutch town
then, though English-speaking. It was already competing with French Montreal for the Indian
and wilderness trade in furs, with an offshoot at Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario.
The economic and political freedom enjoyed in English America, with its largely unrestricted
enterprise, self-government, and buccaneering ways, was already reflected in growth-rates which
made Canada, in which the French state had invested a huge effort but also a narrow system of
controls, seem almost static. By 1750 there were well over 100,000 in the Hudson Valley alone,
compared to only 60,000 in the vast St Lawrence basin, and New York City was four times the
size of Quebec. And unlike inward-looking and deadly quiet Quebec, New York and its politics
were already noisy, acrimonious, horribly factionridden, and undoubtedly democratic.
The venom of New York politics led to America's first trial for seditious libel in 1735, when
John Peter Zenger, who had founded New York's Weekly Journal two years earlier, was locked
up for criticizing the governor, William Cosby, and finally brought to trial after ten months
behind bars. Zenger was by no means America's first newspaper publisher. That honor goes to
the postmaster of Boston, William Campbell, who set up the News-Letter in 1704 to keep friends
scattered around the Bay Colony informed of what was going on in the great world. By mid-
century more than a score of newspapers had been started, including the Philadelphia American