72 Chapter 2 American Society in the Making
Social arrangements differed more in degree
than in kind from those in other colonies. Unlike
New England settlers, who clustered together in
agricultural villages, families in the Hudson Valley of
New York and in southeastern Pennsylvania lived on
the land they cultivated, often as spatially dispersed as
the tobacco planters of the Chesapeake. In contrast
with Virginia and Maryland, however, substantial
numbers congregated in the seaport centers of New
York City and Philadelphia. They also settled interior
towns like Albany, an important center of the fur
trade on the upper Hudson, and Germantown, an
“urban village” northwest of Philadelphia where
many people were engaged in trades like weaving and
tailoring and flour milling.The Middle Colonies: An Intermingling of Peoples
The Middle Colonists also possessed traits that later
would be seen as distinctly “American.” Their ethnic
and religious heterogeneity is a case in point. In the
1640s, when New Amsterdam was only a village, one
visitor claimed to have heard eighteen languages
spoken there. Traveling through Pennsylvania a
century later, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm encoun-
tered “a very mixed company of different nations and
religions.” In addition to “Scots, English, Dutch,
Germans, and Irish,” he reported, “there were Roman
Catholics, Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Seventh
Day men, Moravians, Anabaptists, and one Jew.” In
New York City one embattled English resident com-
plained, “Our chiefest unhappiness here is too great a
mixture of nations, & English the least part.”of a distinctive institution, such as slavery or the town
meeting, explains part of this neglect.
Actually, both institutions existed there. Black
slaves made up about 10 percent of the population;
indeed, one New York county in the 1740s had
proportionally more blacks than large sections of
Virginia. And eastern Long Island was settled by peo-
ple from Connecticut who brought the town meeting
system with them.
This quality of “in-betweenness” extended to
other economic and social arrangements. Like
colonists elsewhere, most Middle Colonists became
farmers. But where northern farmers concentrated on
producing crops for local consumption and
Southerners for export, Middle Colony farmers did
both. In addition to raising foodstuffs and keeping
livestock, they grew wheat, which the thin soil and
shorter growing season of New England did not per-
mit but for which there existed an expanding market
in the densely settled Caribbean sugar islands.
This painting is presumably of Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of
New York and New Jersey in the early 1700s, in a dress. Why it was
painted and by whom is unknown. Some regard the painting as proof
that the eighteenth century tolerated a wide range of sexual behaviors.
InThe Lord Cornbury Scandal(1998), however, Patricia Bonomi views
the painting as part of a plot to unseat a brusque and high-handed
governor. Some of his enemies in the colonies dispatched letters to
officials in London complaining of Cornbury’s penchant for wearing
women’s clothing in public. Bonomi doubts that the charges were true.
Source:Portrait of an Unidentified Woman(Formely Edward Hyde, Viscount
Cornbury), 18th century. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.
Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was banished from Boston, a puritan colony;
she repeatedly returned to challenge the law. In 1660 she was
hanged in Boston Common.