56 Chapter 2 American Society in the Making
In 1769 several score Jesuits and a detachment of
Spanish soldiers established a presidioand mission in San
Diego. Other missions followed at Monterey, Santa
Barbara, and San Francisco; within several decades some
twenty missions had been established in California.
The Jesuits monitored Indian life closely. They seg-
regated all unmarried girls over the age of seven so as to
prevent them from indulging in freer Indian sexual
mores and to protect them from lustful European men.
The Jesuits also inculcated the discipline of work; the
digging of irrigation ditches; the cultivation of crops;
the tending of livestock; the manufacture of handicrafts;
and the construction of churches, forts, and homes.
The Indians received no wages, but instead were fed
and cared for by the priests, whose first obligation was
to God and the church. Because the California settle-
ments were distant from New Spain, the missions sur-
vived chiefly by provisioning Spanish military garrisons.
Whatever success the Jesuits had in establishing
the missions, however, was undone by disease. As had
happened throughout the Western Hemisphere, the
introduction of European pathogens among formerly
isolated Indian populations resulted in catastrophic
losses. European diseases hit all California Indians,
not just those in the missions. By the close of the
eighteenth century, Spain had failed in its effort to
establish a strong Hispanic colony in California.
The English Prevail on the Atlantic Seaboard
By the mid-eighteenth century, England had success-
fully addressed the chief problem that bedeviled the
French and Spanish colonial efforts: a dearth of
colonists. By then, European settlers, most of them
English, had taken possession of much of the
Atlantic seaboard. But this basic fact overlooks the
important differences among the colonies. Each of
the Middle Colonies had distinctive histories and set-
tlement patterns. Even the New England colonies,
though originally founded for similar religious pur-
poses, soon diverged.
The southern parts of English North America
comprised three regions: the Chesapeake Bay, con-
sisting of “tidewater” Virginia and Maryland; the
“low country” of the Carolinas (and eventually
Georgia); and the “back country,” a vast territory
that extended from the “fall line” in the foothills of
the Appalachians (where falls and rapids put an end
to navigation on the tidal rivers) to the farthest point
of western settlement. Not until well into the eigh-
teenth century would the emergence of common
features—export-oriented agricultural economies, a
labor force in which black slaves figured prominently,
and the absence of towns of any size—prompt people
to think of the “South” as a single region.
The Chesapeake Colonies
When the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
wrote in 1651 that human life tended to be “nasty,
brutish, and short,” he might well have had in mind
the royal colony of Virginia. Although the colony
grew from about 1,300 to nearly 5,000 in the decade
after the Crown took it over in 1624, the death rate
remained appalling. Since more than 9,000 immi-
grants had entered the colony, nearly half the popula-
tion died during that decade.
The climate was largely to blame. “Hot and
moist” is how Robert Beverly described the weather in
The History and Present State of Virginia (1705).
Almost without exception newcomers underwent
“seasoning,” a period of illness that in its mildest form
consisted of “two or three fits of a feaver and ague.”
Actually the relatively dry summers were the chief
cause of the high death rate. During the summer the
slower flow of the James River allowed relatively dense
salt water to penetrate inland. This blocked the flow of
polluted river water, which the colonists drank. The
result was dysentery, the “bloody flux.” If they sur-
vived the flux, and a great many did not, settlers still
ran the seasonal risk of contracting a particularly viru-
lent strain of malaria, which, though seldom fatal in
itself, could so debilitate its victims that they often
died of typhoid fever and other ailments.
Long after food shortages and Indian warfare had
ceased to be serious problems, life in the Chesapeake
colonies remained precarious. Well into the 1700s a
white male of twenty in Middlesex County, Virginia,
could look forward only to about twenty-five more years
of life. Across Chesapeake Bay, in Charles County,
Maryland, life expectancy was even lower. The high
death rate had important effects on family structure.
Because relatively few people lived beyond their forties,
more often than not children lost at least one of their
parents before they reached maturity and in many
instances both. Remarriage was a way of life. Apparently
this situation did not cause drastic emotional problems
for most people of the region. Men provided generously
for their families in their wills, despite knowing that their
wives would probably remarry quickly. Being brought
up entirely by stepparents was so common that children
tended to accept it almost as a matter of course.
Because of the persistent shortage of women in the
Chesapeake region (men outnumbered women by
three to two even in the early 1700s), widows easily
found new husbands. Many men spent their entire lives
alone or in the company of other men. Others married
Indian women and became part of Indian society.
All Chesapeake settlers felt the psychological
effects of their precarious and frustrating existence.
Random mayhem and calculated violence posed a
continuous threat. Life was coarse at best and often as
“brutish” as Hobbes had claimed, even allowing for