black, and one in ten lived on the frontier. The population was not only
doubling each generation but becoming more diverse. An Anglican,
Reverend William Smith, who was an early leader in the attempt to per-
suade non-English immigrants to speak English, wrote, “We are a people,
thrown together from various quarters of the world, differing in all things—
language, manners and sentiments.” In 1767, a new ingredient was added
to the mixture when some 1,500 Greeks, Italians, and Minorcans arrived to
raise indigo and sugarcane at New Smyrna, on the Carolina coast. It would
be a long time before the concept of a “melting pot” was suggested; few of
the ingredients wanted to mix, and marriage records and genealogies show
that religious “like” married like. But at least some people wanted to create
a sort of unity. The first “cook” for America’s melting pot was certainly
Benjamin Franklin.
As Franklin well knew, bringing about some degree of unity would be a
Herculean task. Until the 1760s, people in the different colonies hardly
knew one another. A Harvard College alumnus demonstrated how little
information was exchanged, even between cities. Tom Bell, “the most trav-
eled, most notorious, and probably best-known of all the colonists either on
the continent or in the West Indies,” was a confidence man, robber, horse
thief, and counterfeiter—a jack-of-all-illegal-trades who parlayed his gentle-
manly airs, his Harvard education, and his wit into a colorful career.
Exposed in one colony, he moved effortlessly and rapidly to the next for a
decade between 1743 and 1752. Despite jail terms, escapes, and a death
sentence, he operated not only easily but in full public view, apparently
without any fear that his reputation would follow him. After he had
exhausted the possibilities in the colonial urban scene, his stories merged
into a shared legend; so, inadvertently, he did as much to foster a sense of
(outraged) unity among the colonies as any other man with the possible
exception of King George III.
The colonies were divided by obstacles then almost unbridgeable.
Movement between towns was slow and dangerous. Even a generation after
the Revolution, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson remarked that to get from
Monticello to the new capital at Washington, D.C., he had to ford five
rivers that had neither bridges nor ferries. Throughout the colonial period
and for years thereafter, any stream could be a formidable barrier in winter
156 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA