The American History Podcast, Episode 12 Colonial Society, Part 1.

Welcome to the American History podcast.

Hosted by Sean Worswick.

All right, so hello and welcome to your new Patreon bonus series.

I know we've, I keep promising that I'm going to get into this and it keeps pushing back. But this is now an actual new episode for y'all, not just a remixed or revamped or improved old one.

Now last time we talked about the middle colonies, which wrapped up our overview of the 13 colonies.

So today we will begin a multi-part look at 18th century

society in the colonies. Okay, for this one, I'm going to leave off the song of the week, so let's

just get started. Now, I want to start by discussing the structure of colonial society. In general,

as we move through the 18th century, you get a more stratified

society. You got a small upper class followed by the rest of the population. And that upper

class was made up of the aristocratic plantation owners who dominated the South with their

wealth and influence. And they dominated it both economically and politically. In the

north, you had merchants, lawyers, government officials and clergymen instead of planters,

but they also dominated their succession of the society economically and politically.

Now the next group was the yeoman farmers. They comprised the majority of the population,

and they were characterized by the fact that they owned land. Next up were the small merchants,

the manual laborers, and the hired hands. Many of these folks did not actually own land,

unless perhaps they were a merchant. He also had the indentured servants and the jailbirds or the professional

criminal class. Now, most of your textbooks will act as if these folks had no influence on American

history, but I think that's incorrect. But we'll get more on that later. And then finally,

you had slaves. And again, they were about 20% of the population. In general, Americans had the highest

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