Cultural Divide Among Settlers in Colonial America

During the 17th Century, there was a major cultural divide between the rich white settlers in colonial America and the poor white settlers. Many of the poor whites were subjected to indentured servitude, which was in that time one small step away from being a slave. In fact, indentured servants united with slaves in a fight for land and wealth in what is now called Bacon’s Rebellion. There was also a major divide between settlers living in the rural “backcountry” and the city dwellers. The city dwellers were the ones who were involved in the colonial assemblies, and were therefore making decisions which affected the unrepresented backcountry men. Although geographic factors played a role in this cultural divide, the violent revolts (Paxton Boys, Regulator Movement) of the people of the backcountry against the rich upper class were fueled by the desire for wealth and political control; an idea that would be mirrored in the fight of America’s independence.

Paxton was a settlement in what is now western Pennsylvania, what was considered in the 17th century to be the frontier. The Paxton Boys asked the colonial legislature to provide guns and ammunition to the settlers in case of an Indian attack, which seemed certain to come eventually. When their request was denied, the Paxton men raided an Indian village, killing 6 Indians, and marched on the capital. The settlers in Paxton were quite poor. They had little property to protect. However, these settlers felt like their government was not enabling them to protect themselves against the Indians. If the Indians destroyed everything in the settlement, then there would be no way that the colonists could expand their economy, because there would be nothing left. The people o...

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... This thought process was similar to the one that was in the heads of many patriots only a few years later, as the prospect of war with England became certain.

However, the impact of geography on all these revolts cannot be understated. If it was not for the physical distance between rural settlements and the capitals of their colonies, there would not have been this sense of detachment. Without the existence of photographs, if the members of the assemblies were not in the back country, seeing with their own eyes the conditions that the unhappy colonists were complaining about, they had no way of fully assessing the gravity of a situation. It was easy for an assembly to write off a rural settlement’s complaints as trivial if they were not experiencing it for themselves. The geography of the settlements caused this divide among the rural and urban settlers.