The Americans

The population of America grew from a quarter of a million in the 1700s to two and a half million by 1775. By this time, the majority of Americans were of English descent. In the second half of the 17th century, emigration from England slowed down, and the children of local English-American parents made up the majority of the English population.

The population growth in the 18th century was increasingly due to non-English immigration. The new immigrants had little connection to English culture and resented the British political control over them. Poor peasants from the war-torn German states along the Rhine came to America. In the 1770s, 200,000 German farmers lived in the colonies. The Pennsylvania "Dutch" made up a third of the colony's population.

At the beginning of the 18th century, a larger wave of emigration began from Ulster, the six counties of Northern Ireland. These Scottish-origin Protestants, later known as Scots-Irish, were distinguished from the Roman Catholic population of the rest of Ireland. They increasingly resented English policies that hindered Irish industry and trade, rising rents, and religious discrimination. As a result, thousands crossed the ocean, possibly as many as a quarter of a million. They settled on the frontier as "pioneer" farmers and feared Indian warriors, and by the 1770s, they made up about one-tenth of the population. They hated British rule just as much as the Pennsylvania Germans did.

Smaller groups included the Dutch and French Huguenots. New Holland, when it fell into British hands, had 8,000 Dutch inhabitants, and their descendants made up a significant portion of New York's population. The Huguenots fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Few came to America, but those who did became successful and prominent entrepreneurs. Most settled in South Carolina, where they adopted Anglicanism and integrated into the merchant-planter elite.

The majority of European immigrants came from the lower or middle classes of their societies. More than half of the settlers in the middle colonies were indentured servants. Some were kidnapped by human traffickers and sold in America. Thousands of orphans, poor children, and convicts were sent by their governments. Many were saved from prison sentences or the gallows by emigration. In the first six decades of the 18th century, 40,000 English convicts were transported to America, and in Maryland, they made up the majority of the servants. Once their contracts expired, even the poorest had the opportunity to rise.

By 1775, one in five Americans was an African-born slave who had been brought forcibly to America, with no chance of rising in society. By the end of the 17th century, the growing wealth of European immigrants created a demand for cheap labor. New England (Yankee) and European ship captains took advantage of this demand, filling the holds of their ships with "black cargo" from West Africa and the West Indian islands, which they could sell in British North America. Slavery became entrenched in all the colonies, but the greatest demand was in the Southern states. There, the privileged plantation class relied on grueling slave labor on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations to build their wealth. By the 1770s, nearly 600,000 natives from the once-flourishing civilizations of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai lived in British North America. In South Carolina, two-thirds of the population was of African descent, nearly half in Virginia, and about one-sixth in New York.

The black population also contributed to the cultural and economic development of the emerging American society and, over time, transformed their own Afro-American subculture. They were the only ethnic group segregated by skin color, forced into humiliating slavery, and excluded from the privileges that were granted to others in the relatively open society of the New World.

Sellers-May-McMillen "Az Egyesült Államok története", Maecenas kiadó, 1996