Early Puritan Massachusetts, believing that the success of its settlement would depend upon the fulfillment of its covenant with God, welcomed only those newcomers who accepted the stringent beliefs and practices of that theocratic community (it turned back sixty English Protestant passengers on the ship Handmaid because of insufficient testimony as to their character and godliness).3 Since the Puritan church was an exclusive fellowship restricted to those who convincingly said they had been redeemed by the saving grace of God and who demonstrated their experience in the ways of grace, not everyone who was permitted to settle was admitted to church membership, a prerequisite for participation in the political community.
The Massachusetts approach became influential in the development of a national ideology of Americanism, but it was too restrictive to form a dominant immigration and naturalization policy for the middle and northern colonies, which sought, not an ideal community (to say nothing of a Utopian one), but capital expansion. Since permanent settlers were valuable economic assets, exclusion of immigrants on the basis of religion seemed to make little economic sense. When local settlers or colonial governors tried to maintain religious exclusivity, investors sometimes countermanded them, as in New Netherlands, where Peter Stuyvesant wanted to bar Jews (and Lutherans) but was obliged to accept them by his sponsors. Maryland, with Catholics in power, excluded Jews from membership; but when a Jewish physician, Jacob Lambrozo, was tried for blasphemy in 1658, he was acquitted and permitted to remain in the colony because he was a useful settler.4 Later, after Protestants took control of Maryland and established the Church of England there, they decided it was practical to permit Catholic churches to remain open in order to obtain additional settlers.5
Boston, where the Puritan Edward Johnson warned in his pamphlet Wonder-Working Providence (1654) that immigrants would undermine the holy experiment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, tried to hold to a sectarian basis for civic membership for a long time, but eventually succumbed to the desire for settlers to the point of accepting Jews, after rigidly excluding them throughout the seventeenth century.6 In 1649, only twelve days after he arrived in Boston with a cargo, Solomon Franco was “warned out” of town and given six shillings a week for up to ten weeks for subsistence until he could get passage to Holland.7 The much more prominent Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and the Quaker Mary Dyer were among the dissenting Christians who were forced to leave the colony, and some, including Dyer, were executed for trying to stay.
Long after the hanging of heretics had stopped and Protestant dissenters were numerous, the Massachusetts idea of political membership based on religious affiliation continued to be influential. Before the Hebrew scholar Judah Monis was appointed to teach at Harvard College in 1722, he was compelled to convert publicly from Judaism to Congregationalism.8 Even as late as 1762, Isaac Moses was “warned out” of Boston, although he later became a well-known patriot and a leader in the New York City Chamber of Commerce. But in the same year, Aaron Lopez, a Jewish merchant who had been denied citizenship in Rhode Island on the ground that “no person who does not profess the Christian Religion can be admitted free of the Colony,” was given full citizenship in Boston and allowed to strike the phrase “upon the True Faith of a Christian” when signing his oath.9 Even Massachusetts began to back away from exclusionary principles to accept immigrants.
Only sixty years after Judah Monis converted in order to be accepted at Harvard, another Boston Jew found it quite easy to live proudly as both a Jew and a prominent citizen in the community. Moses Michael Hays, who helped to found the Boston Atheneum and the First National Bank of Boston and who supported the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, observed the Jewish Sabbath, held religious services in his home (there was no synagogue as yet), and obeyed the Jewish commandment to do justice by inviting the poor to his dinner table.10 Established churches would remain in New England for several years (in New Hampshire until 1817, in Connecticut until 1818, and in Massachusetts until 1833), and for a long time after, many Americans thought of the U.S. as a Protestant nation and many more thought of it as a Christian nation. But the idea that membership in the American polity should be based on belonging to a particular faith was overwhelmed by the desire for immigrants.
Planters in Virginia and Maryland began to recruit laborers to maximize tobacco profits early in the seventeenth century. Wanting workers and not visible saints, Virginians soon began to import indentured servants regardless of their religious backgrounds, laborers who would serve those who paid their transportation for a period of four to seven years after which they would become free. Emigration to the Chesapeake for one hundred years after 1607 was eight times as large as to New England.11 The idea of procuring servants to do the dirty jobs and be left outside the political community caught on everywhere. Indentured males outnumbered females six to one. Later, Virginia and all of the South, particularly, would build on the idea of importing workers as cheaply as possible by replacing white indentured servants with black slaves.
By paying for a servant’s transportation, Virginia planters became entitled to an additional fifty acres of land. The planters greedily took convicts, vagrants, and paupers from England, Scotland, and Ireland to augment their indentured-servant population. But servants could not be kept as servants forever. When they became free they preferred to work for themselves, taking advantage of the cheap public land available in Virginia and elsewhere. Planters tried to ensure a continuing supply of white indentured workers. Between 1658 and 1666, the Virginia Assembly revised the terms of indenture to give themselves and other masters a longer hold on their workers, essentially adding three additional years to the terms of most servants.12 For those who ran away and were caught the terms of service were increased by twice the length of time they had been gone, and minor misdemeanors were punished severely, often by adding years of service.13 Even so, efforts to import and control white servants proved more costly than slavery. One way to counter the restlessness and rebelliousness of freed poor whites was to buy black slaves and at the same time link the hopes of poor whites for a better life to a social, economic, and political system based largely on racism. By the early 1640s, Virginia courts recognized black men and women and their unborn progeny as property. By the 1660s, there were probably more than a thousand slaves in Virginia, at the bottom of a social system, above them a much larger body of white servants and a vast, growing population of freedmen who had finished their terms of service entitled to set up households. Slavery was also a more efficient way of controlling labor; planters “converted to slavery simply by buying slaves instead of servants.”14 Less than 8 percent of the Chesapeake population were black slaves in 1680, but by 1710 25 percent.15
The slave system grew everywhere in the colonies, less in Pennsylvania and New England than elsewhere, but especially in the South. A 1680 act in Virginia which called for thirty lashes on the bare back of any Negro or slave who lifted a hand in opposition against any Christian allowed white servants as well as masters and mistresses to bully slaves without fear of retaliation.16 In 1691, harsh punishment was prescribed for miscegenation between any white man or woman and a Negro, mulatto, or Indian.17 In 1705, a new law required masters to give servants ten bushels of Indian corn, thirty shillings of money, and a well-fixed musket at the conclusion of their term and, best of all, fifty acres of land.18
Pennsylvania, following the leadership of William Penn in 1681, had by the early eighteenth century established a policy of encouraging immigration of Europeans regardless of their religious background and of admitting them to membership in the civic life of the colony on roughly equal terms with native-born Pennsylvanians. As a result, Pennsylvania became home to Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Baptists and Presbyterians from Wales, and a variety of German Pietists. German immigrants, particularly, provided a linguistically and culturally diverse population. By the mid-eighteenth century considerable tension existed between Germans and English-speaking groups and between Germans and Scotch-Irish. The colony, in response, instructed its agents to sell no more land to Scotch-Irishmen in the predominantly German counties of Lancaster and York and to offer money to those who were already there if they would move to the Cumberland Valley.19