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.He felt no hesitation combining his interests in naturaland moral philosophy to arrive at a liberal view of world progress and the necessityof liberty.Adams, more conservative and traditional in his religion than Franklin andJefferson, readily combined law, history, and philosophy to argue for separation ofpowers in government and against slavery.DeismAbout as far away as one could get from evangelical Protestantism, deism was an-other important Enlightenment influence on American thinkers.Never a simple orunified platform for religious reform, English deists instead formed a loose sup-portive intellectual circle.Their work was closer to a persuasion than a faith.Its pur-pose was an attempt to make religion logical.Thus deists like John Toland took aimat miracles, inconsistencies, follies, mysteries, rites, and revelations.Other deists ex-pressed skepticism about the existence of God and doubted that Jesus was the mes-siah.Most were furiously anticlerical, and all were controversialists.The English deists criticism of priestcraft gained a following in France.There,anticlericalism had become something of a religion itself, and intellectuals like Mon-tesquieu and Voltaire adopted deism.By 1760, Voltaire s deism was open, and hisconversations and published letters mixed the amused and sardonic condemnations COMMON PASTI MES AND ELI TE PURSUI TS 363of all churches.But deism in England and France lacked an affirmative object andcaptured neither the imagination of the ruling classes nor the hearts of the masses.In its American form, deism struck a more gentle and optimistic note.Instead ofan assault on established religion, deism in the colonies expressed a faith in a be-nign creator and the promise of universal salvation.In Virginia, for example, deismbegan to catch on among the more enlightened planters.Young men like ThomasJefferson and James Madison, avid readers of English deism, found the doctrine ofa natural religion congenial.Franklin owned a pew near the front of Christ Churchin Philadelphia, and wrote, before he died, that Christian morality was the best sys-tem he had ever uncovered, but quietly embraced deism.Natural religion was theclosest intellectual system to his own religion of nature.Anyone in America could be a deist.Anyone might join an evangelical prayer meet-ing.Anyone might attend a public exhibition of Franklin s static electricity or Rit-tenhouse s orrery.By the 1760s, American religion and science had created a kind ofcultural middle ground in which highbrow and lowbrow might mingle.Refine-ment of manners seeped down from the topmost layer of society into the homes ofthe middling sort, narrowing the gap between the classes.A number of intellectualsenvisioned a world of liberty and equality of the mind, but the real gap between thehaves and have-nots did not close.A multitude of signs from powdered wigs andgold-embroidered waistcoats to where one sat in church reminded people of theirplace. 12Mercantilism and MarketsI believe people increase In the previous chapter, we discovered how colonial culture both sep-faster by generation in arated and united elites and commoners.In similar fashion, mutualthese colonies, where alleconomic interest and shared business activities brought people fromcan have full employall classes together, while trends in economic development favoredand there is room andsome and hurt others.This chapter examines these interests and ac-business for millions yettivities at midcentury, beginning with the imperial economy, mer-unborn.cantilism, the Navigation Acts, and the patterns of transatlantic busi- Benjamin Franklin,ness.Next, we turn to regional economies and fit them into the largerPoor Richard s Almanackimperial pattern.Then we examine occupations, consumerism, and(1750)poverty.We conclude with the great depression of 1763.The economic approach to history focuses on continuities and dis-continuities.Did the colonial economy move at a more or less steadypace, jump through distinct stages, or make sudden, periodic leaps?There is evidence for all three explanatory models.On the one hand,colonial productivity seems to have grown in a linear fashion.Co-lonial consumption of imports, on the other hand, took suddenjumps.Regional economies like tobacco planting in the South passedthrough recognizable stages from infant industries on the frontier, toyouthful expansiveness, to stable maturity.Economic history, like economics, prefers the quantitative and an-alytical mode to the narrative and assumes the rationality of economic actors markets, demand, supply, costs, and prices.But one mustnot lose sight of individuals and groups motives and values.Fromthe standpoint of the imperial authorities, the root purpose of colo-nization was economic gain for the home country.The colonists wereto serve as producers and suppliers of staple crops and raw materials.For the colonists, economic growth was equally vital, but they lookedat it in terms of their own economic prospects and buying power.In-deed, one can characterize the economics of empire in these years asa struggle between adherents of a system that channeled wealth to-ward the home country and promoters of a system that rewarded itsproducers, in other words, between mercantilism and marketism
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