Life In Colonial America

12 Pages 2981 Words

ing for a better life. Only a few women and children made the journey from England. The brutal, frigid weather of the north forced many young men to live together and made it necessary for one to have some sort of companionship to survive. As stated in an early law of Plymouth Plantation, “Whereas great inconvenience hath arisen by single persons in the Colony being for themselves and not betaking themselves to live in well-governed families, it is enacted by the court that henceforth not single person be suffered to live of himself….”1 There was a formal law that was sometimes enforced, as in the case of John Littleale in which Littleale was found to be living by himself and was found to “lay in a house by himself contrary to the law of the country, whereby he is subject to much sin an iniquity, which ordinarily are the companions and consequences of a solitary life.”2 Eventually settlers began to set up farms in the North. Their farm households usually contained many people living together in one house. Some of those people might have been relatives, while others were not related. Contrary to the South, the northern farms were smaller, therefore only requiring a “labor force of the domestic economy [which] most commonly included one’s own children and those of neighbors, although the family could also traditionally contain one or another kind of servant…”3 The domestic families of the North were more focused on family life and the well-being of the family and the farm. That is what separated them from the families of the Middle region and the South.
The communities of New England often kept a close watch on the families that lived within them, which supported the “English system where governance, socialization, and social welfare and economic activities all fell within the purview of the domestic household.”4 “Town fathers” often kept a close watch on the families, especially in the case in which a...