Writing the American Past

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the author or editor of a dozen previous books including the award-winning Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (1997) and he has served or currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of American History, and The Senses and Society.

• Timeline viiAcknowledgments xiEditor’s Introduction: History, Handed Down 11 Old World Explores New: 7Settling and Securing Newfoundland in the Early 1600s2 The Chesapeake: 13Indenturing Labor, 16943 Life in Seventeenth-century New England: 19Massachusetts in the 1690s4 The Middle Colonies: 25A Philadelphia Furrier, 17385 The Lower South and Slave Society: 33Slave Resistance and Imperial Contests, 17396 Social Order in the Eighteenth-century South: 39Slavery and Virginia’s Gentry in the 1720s7 The Great Awakening: 45A Letter to George Whitefield, 17468 Empire and Native Americans: 51The Treaty of Lancaster, 17449 Imperial Crises and the Coming of Revolution: 57The Politicization of a Colonial Merchant, 176510 Fighting the Revolutionary War: 65AWoman on the Homefront, 177611 Crisis, Constitution, Nation: 71Probate Data and the Problem of Becoming American in the 1780s12 The New Republic: 77A Massachusetts Federalist in 180013 Jeffersonian America: 83On the Road in 181814 Revolutions in Time and Space: 89Tourism and Travel, 185015 The Age of Jackson: 95The View from Abroad in 182816 The Southern Master Class: 103An Elite Woman’s School Experience, 183817 Lives of the Enslaved: 111Urban Slavery in 186218 The Modernizing North: 119A Businessman’s Letter, 183619 The Age of Reform: 125On the Need for Temperance, 182420 Westward Expansion: 133Kansas and Free Labor in 185621 The Coming of the Civil War: 141Bleeding in Kansas, 185622 Secession: 149A South Carolinian Describes the Event, 186023 Americans in Civil War: 155A Canadian Soldier’s Experience, 186424 Emancipation: 161The Labor of Freedom, 1867