Family and social life for all Anglo-American colonists was colored by certain common conditions: a pre-industrial economy that put a premium on owning land, primitive knowledge of medicine by modern standards, and a social hierarchy shaped by the notion that God had ordained some to be rich and others poor. While these characteristics shaped life throughout the colonies, there were regional differences, especially between the two most ethnically English regions, the Chesapeake and New England.

The Chesapeake colonies were typically considered to have a more challenging environment, both physically and emotionally. Mortality rates in the Chesapeake were high, and most children had lost one or both parents before adolescence.

In the Chesapeake region, all white men and women were expected to marry. Women were expected to give birth, rear children, and manage the household. Respectively, it was the husband’s responsibility to participate in public life, including taking leadership roles in the church and government.

Many seventeenth-century men in the Chesapeake region found the expectation of marriage and family difficult to meet. Males outnumbered females, although this ratio became more balanced by the eighteenth century. Those who did marry entered into a permanent union; divorce was unimaginable and separations were rare. Chesapeake’s gentry, or upper-class men, married at an average age of 27, women at 22. Parents chose their children’s spouses, usually putting an emphasis on power and property. This emphasis eased somewhat during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and marriage for love became more common, particularly among the non-elite.

Throughout the colonies, wives suffered a “civil death,” the extinguishing of their property rights in marriage. Virtually alone among the eighteenth-century colonies, Virginia and Maryland continued the practice of granting a woman whose husband died without a will one-third of his personal property and life interest in one-third of his estate, but many husbands actually willed their wives far less.

Necessity and availability of materials dictated housing in the Chesapeake region. Homes in this area were generally built of wood. A typical eighteenth-century Chesapeake home was 16’ by 20’, one or one-and-a-half stories high, and with a steeply pitched roof. Homes on elite Southern plantations were larger, usually two stories, and made from brick. Although servants on small family farms would sleep in lofts under the homeowner’s roof, plantation slaves shared small wooden huts segregated from the planter’s home.

In the south, food was considered a pleasure rather than just a means of sustenance. Herbs and spices were used liberally, particularly among the elite. Fowl, meat, and game were standards, with the gentry occasionally enjoying shellfish as well. The southern climate was conducive to a variety of vegetables, and the residents of the Chesapeake region made these vegetables a staple of their diet. Slaves subsisted on a diet made primarily of corn, often served as a thick gruel.

Education was emphasized by the Chesapeake’s gentry. They were to a great extent self-educated, studying classical literature, history, philosophy, and science. They hired tutors for their children and sent their sons to England to learn dancing and other arts of gentility. For the rest of the Chesapeake population, schools were few and far between; some planters hired a schoolmaster to teach in the field, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts built charity schools. William and Mary, the only institution of higher learning in the colonial South, was chartered as a grammar school in 1693 and did not function fully as a college until the 1720s. It was designed primarily to develop ministers, but did offer non-theological subjects, too. Religious instruction was limited for younger students, with children learning primarily from catechisms.

Chesapeake families tended to live on isolated farmsteads or plantations, so the church was the primary outlet for socialization. Recreational activities, including dancing, card games and gambling, took place in people’s homes. Feasting was important, both as part of the church calendar and as a purely social affair. But the premier event was the horse race, which everyone could view, but on which only the gentry might bet.

Another major form of diversion for the Chesapeake settlers involved the pursuit, capture, and slaughter of wild animals. The gentry hunted deer and, less desirably, foxes. The middle-class southerners coursed, which is the act of hunting small game such as rabbits on foot. Farmers and laborers—the low end of the social ladder—engaged in ganderpulling (pulling off the neck of a goose hung from a tree while riding by it), cockshailing (throwing objects at a tethered fowl to torture or kill it), and “mizzling the sparrow” (placing a small bird’s wing in one’s mouth and trying to bite off the bird’s head without using one’s hands).

Life for New Englanders bore more differences than similarities to life in the Chesapeake region. The basic family structure was the same—adult men and women were expected to marry and reproduce. However, seventeenth-century New England offered a much lower mortality rate, with estimated life spans of nearly seventy for men and over sixty for women, with death in childbirth accounting for the gender difference. The average number of births in a family was eight, with six children surviving to adulthood.

Although the expectation of marriage existed in both the Chesapeake and New England, the reasons for marriage and the methods for attaining it were very different. New England’s Puritans considered marriage to be a civil covenant rather than a religious sacrament, and that love should occur prior to marriage, so arranged marriages were highly uncommon. Elite families in New England did still try to arrange marriage based on financial and political considerations, but most marriages required the consent of both parents, as well as the children. Unlike the Chesapeake, where divorce was unheard of, New England allowed divorce for such things as adultery, excessive cruelty, or desertion.

Believing that a companionate marriage was a woman’s best security, New Englanders frowned on trusts and other devices meant to secure a woman’s property in marriage. However, they did allow a jointure, or marriage settlement, in which the bride’s family contributed money or property to a dowry, and the groom’s family set aside an equivalent amount in real estate in the bride’s name.

Family connections were equally important among African slaves in New England. With slave owners living in closer proximity to one another than in the south, slaves could better maintain family and friendship bonds. The slave population in this area began to sustain itself as a higher number of female slaves resulted in a higher slave birth rate. This made America one of the few slave societies in history to grow by natural reproduction.

New Englanders typically made their houses of hardwoods, switching to softwoods in the eighteenth century as deforestation claimed oaks and cedars. Even the upper classes relied primarily on wood, facing their houses with brick only late in the eighteenth century. Two common designs for middle-class families were the “salt box”—two stories in front, one in back, with two large chambers on the first floor and smaller rooms on the second—and the “Cape Cod,” one and one-half stories with bedding areas above the first floor. Common New England houses were built to accommodate large, nuclear families without servants. They often contained a hall with the great fireplace, a parlor where husband, wife, and perhaps the new baby slept, and a full kitchen, placed in the rear under the slanted roof. New Englanders also had underground cellars for storage, salting, and dairying. Like people in the Chesapeake, eighteenth-century New Englanders could increasingly purchase utensils, furniture, and other such items from Britain.

Puritan tendencies toward minimalism carried over into food choices and preparation. The usual fare included fish, especially cod, porridge, baked beans, and brown bread. More than other colonists, New Englanders boiled their food, without spices, and including all the items within a single pot. Baked goods were quite important to the diet, and baking in general was a very common method of preparing food. New Englanders became famous for their pies. Because of the wheat blast (a fungus that affected crops after 1660), New Englanders used cornmeal and rye, reserving wheat for special occasions. They also consumed vegetables in season. The diet was quite nutritious but aesthetically very plain, and there was little difference among classes.

Education was particularly highly valued in New England, especially as a way to promote piety. New England made a greater commitment to public education and to the creation of colleges than any other region, a commitment reflected by the fact that New England had the highest literacy rates throughout the colonies.

In New England, as in the Chesapeake, learning took place first in the home, where children learned basic skills such as reading and writing. Learning also occurred in the church, where the sermon was the principal device for teaching religious lessons, though children were also catechized. In 1647, Massachusetts decreed that towns with 50 families had to support a petty school, where young girls and boys would learn reading and ciphering, and towns with 100 families a grammar school, which might teach Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew. Other New England colonies soon followed suit.

Massachusetts chartered Harvard College in 1636, just seven years after the colony itself was chartered, primarily to educate ministers, though by the end of the seventeenth century half of the graduates were taking other occupations. Connecticut chartered Yale in 1701 to fight off Harvard’s perceived theological liberalism. The late colonial period witnessed the founding of The College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown, and Dartmouth, which was originally an Indian school.

Recreation in New England differed greatly from recreation in the Chesapeake. Whereas the Chesapeake peoples loved competitions that demonstrated individual skills, New Englanders focused on team events. One, the “Boston game,” involved kicking a ball from one end of a town, field, or beach, to the other, preceding football. The other, the “New England game,” also known as bittle-battle, or town ball, involved players hitting a ball and running bases, the antecedent of baseball. Due to New England’s strict religious principles, Sunday sports were forbidden, and games of chance, racing, and activities involving drinking were strongly discouraged.

Certainly, New England’s piety affected every aspect of its population’s lives, prevailing in a kind of cultural austerity, while Chesapeake life took on a more festive, less inhibited cast. However, the festivity of the Chesapeake was tempered by the high mortality rates and expectations of loss, whereas New Englanders grew to expect a longer, healthier life.

Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education