“can Britain show a more sovereign contempt for us than by emptying their
jails into our settlements; unless they would likewise empty their jakes on
our tables!”
This “sovereign contempt” was one of the things that infuriated
the already established Americans. Increasingly, they were asserting social
as well as cultural equality with Englishmen. After his satirical offer, in
1751, of shipments of American rattlesnakes in return for English felons,
Benjamin Franklin again entered the fray in a letter to the London Chron-
icleon May 9, 1759. Calling himself “A New Englandman,” he angrily
wrote:
We call Britainthemothercountry; but what good mother besides,
would introduce thieves and criminals into the company of children, to
corrupt and disgrace them?—And how cruel is it, to force, by the high
hand of power, a particular country of your subjects, who have not
deserv’d such usage, to receive your outcasts, repealing all the laws they
make to prevent their admission, and then reproach them with the mix-
ture you have made.”Whether or not it was merely a dumping ground, America had already
become a mixture by the time of the Revolution. No longer almost entirely
English, it had begun the process of becoming a multiracial, multicultural
society. In addition to the English, there were the Scots, both Highlanders
and “Scotch-Irish”; Germans; Dutch; Huguenot French; and Bohemians.
These linguistic and ethnic divisions were compounded by religious beliefs
sufficiently intense to have caused their adherents to emigrate from Europe.
In America they acquired new interests that separated them still further.
Widely scattered along the seafront of the vast new continent, they devel-
oped virulent local antagonisms to one another—Marylanders fought Vir-
ginians, New Yorkers fought Pennsylvanians, and so on. Quarrelsome and
opinionated, they flouted English regulations, and, when pressed, they
evaded government control by moving inland. Over the century scores of
thousands did just that.
On the eve of the Revolution, the overall population was about 2.5 mil-
lion, of whom roughly one in four was German or Scots, one in six was
The Growth of the Colonies 155