Practice questions: Colonial Society and Culture

Answer: (C) The spread of Enlightenment ideas that valued reason and observation

1. Whitefield's preaching belonged to the evangelical revival, but Franklin answered it with a measurement of sound, not with a conversion or a judgment about faith.
2. Dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson defied Puritan magistrates in 1630s Massachusetts; in 1739 Philadelphia Franklin was testing how far a voice carried, not defying any official.
3. Franklin tested a newspaper claim by pacing off a distance and calculating, the habit of judging claims by observation and reason that educated colonists took from the European Enlightenment.
4. Print did carry Whitefield's sermons through the colonies, but here Franklin checked a printed report by experiment instead of reading or reprinting it.

Answer: (A) Printed sermons and journals, and newspapers that copied each other's reports

1. Franklin and other printers sold Whitefield's sermons and journals, and colonial papers reprinted each other's revival news, so the Awakening reached readers far from any field sermon.
2. Tax-supported churches were older than the revival, and many established ministers resisted the traveling preachers instead of spreading their message.
3. Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) were founded long before the 1740s, and revival critics such as Charles Chauncy came from the college-trained clergy.
4. Anglican missionaries worked to build the Church of England, and Anglican officials in the colonies opposed Whitefield's open-air preaching.

Answer: (D) Revival preachers began bringing Black colonists into Protestant churches

1. Colonial laws, such as Virginia's act of 1667, said that baptism did not free an enslaved person, and the revival left those laws in place.
2. Independent Black denominations came later; the African Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in Philadelphia in 1816.
3. The earliest colonial protests against slavery came from Quakers, beginning at Germantown in 1688, and Whitefield later urged Georgia to allow slavery.
4. Whitefield and other itinerants preached to Black audiences in towns and on plantations, and the Awakening began bringing free and enslaved Africans into evangelical Christianity.

Answer: (B) Splits between New Lights and Old Lights and the rise of new congregations

1. Connecticut kept its tax-supported Congregational church until 1818, long after the revival.
2. By telling believers they could leave unconverted ministers, revivalists split Presbyterians and Congregationalists into New Lights and Old Lights and led many to found Separate and Baptist churches.
3. Massachusetts banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s, a century before Tennent's sermon.
4. Deism grew from Enlightenment reasoning about natural law; Tennent wanted converted, more fervent ministers, not a religion of reason.

Answer: (D) make listeners feel their danger so they would seek a personal conversion

1. That was the deists' view of God, which came from Enlightenment reasoning, not from revival preaching.
2. That was the Old Lights' complaint against the revival, voiced by critics such as Charles Chauncy; Edwards defended the revival.
3. New England ministers did preach for war against France during King George's War (1744–1748), but this 1741 sermon aimed at the sinner in the pew.
4. Revival preachers stressed sin and hell so that listeners would feel their need for God's grace and seek the new birth.

Answer: (A) Ordinary believers claimed religious authority once held by trained ministers

1. Revivalists taught that conversion, not a college degree, fitted a person to speak, so lay exhorters, including women and Black colonists, began to preach and ministers lost some authority.
2. Massachusetts and Connecticut kept tax support for their Congregational churches into the 1800s, until 1833 and 1818.
3. No Anglican bishop served in the colonies before independence, and plans for one stirred protest in the 1760s.
4. Connecticut's own assembly restricted itinerant preaching in 1742; Parliament passed no such law for the colonies.

Answer: (C) Neither colony taxed residents to pay for an established church

1. Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, like the other colonies, limited voting to men who met property requirements.
2. Neither colony set a college requirement; Quakers had no paid clergy, and many Baptist preachers had no formal schooling.
3. Rhode Island and Pennsylvania had no established church, while Connecticut taxed Separates to pay the parish minister they had left.
4. Connecticut passed a law against uninvited itinerants in 1742; Rhode Island and Pennsylvania left traveling preachers free to speak.

Answer: (D) They encouraged colonists to question established authorities

1. Many Anglican clergy shut their pulpits to Whitefield, and the Church of England sponsored neither movement.
2. Both spread through print, travel and voluntary meetings, not through the patronage of royal officials.
3. Before 1754 almost no colonists wanted independence; the colonies declared it in 1776.
4. Revivalists invited believers to judge their ministers, and Enlightenment reasoning invited readers to test claims and judge governments, so both weakened the habit of deference.

Answer: (B) Elected assemblies voting on the taxes that colonists would pay

1. An appointed governor drew his power from the Crown, not from the consent of the people he governed.
2. Colonists paid taxes that their own elected assemblies approved, which echoed Locke's idea that power rests on consent, though only men with property could vote.
3. Slave codes put people under others' power with no consent at all, the opposite of Locke's principle.
4. Making dissenters pay for a church they had rejected bound them to an authority they did not accept.

Answer: (C) A creator set the universe running by natural laws that reason could discover

1. That is predestination, a Calvinist teaching held by Puritans and by revivalists such as Jonathan Edwards.
2. The new birth was the revival's message; Franklin heard Whitefield preach it and never claimed it for himself.
3. Deists believed in a creator who made a universe that runs by natural laws, and many of them doubted miracles and revelation.
4. The inner light was a Quaker belief, held by the Friends who founded Pennsylvania.

Answer: (A) encouraged printers to criticize officials, though the libel law stayed the same

1. The acquittal showed that jurors might refuse to punish true criticism, and printers grew bolder, but the law of seditious libel itself did not change.
2. No colonial law guaranteed press freedom after the trial; written protections came later with state constitutions and the First Amendment (1791).
3. Cosby stayed in office until he died in 1736, and New York's governors remained royal appointees.
4. Cosby had removed Chief Justice Lewis Morris in 1733, and royal governors kept the power to appoint judges after the trial.

Answer: (C) The jurors were drawn from a list of men who owned freehold property

1. The reprints spread the verdict's influence, which supports the historian's argument rather than limiting it.
2. A public celebration shows popular support for the verdict and strengthens the argument.
3. Jurors, like most voters, had to be men who owned property, so women, enslaved people and poor men had no part in the verdict.
4. The judge's ruling shows how the jury defied a court tied to the governor, which supports the argument instead of narrowing it.

Answer: (B) Believers leaving unconverted ministers to worship in new congregations

1. Paying church taxes accepted the established order instead of challenging it.
2. In both cases ordinary colonists judged for themselves against an authority that expected deference: jurors against the governor's court, believers against their parish ministers.
3. Religious tests for office limited who could govern; they did not invite ordinary people to judge those in authority.
4. Formal credentials were the defense of established authority that revivalists challenged.

Answer: (D) Many condemned slaveholders' cruelty but did not call for an end to slavery

1. South Carolina did tax slave imports heavily after the Stono Rebellion of 1739, out of fear of revolt, not because of revival preaching.
2. Colonial laws said that baptism did not free an enslaved person, and revival preachers did not challenge those laws.
3. Revivalists such as Whitefield preached to Black audiences, and many Black colonists joined evangelical churches.
4. Whitefield rebuked cruel masters but declined to judge slavery itself, and he later pressed Georgia to allow it; few revivalists challenged the institution.

Answer: (A) Enslaved people were sold in northern port cities as well as in the South

1. Slavery was legal in northern and southern colonies alike, and ports such as Philadelphia and New York held significant enslaved minorities and markets for selling them.
2. Pennsylvania's gradual abolition law came in 1780, forty years after this advertisement.
3. Philadelphia Quakers began disciplining members for slave trading in 1758 and for slaveholding only in the 1770s.
4. Most enslaved people in British North America worked on southern plantations, and far more were sent to the West Indies.

Answer: (C) Native converts who became ministers still faced unequal treatment

1. Eleazar Wheelock and other missionaries did train Native students, Occom among them; the inequality lay in pay and standing.
2. Revival preaching reached Native communities such as the Mohegan, and some Native people joined churches in the 1740s.
3. Occom became a Christian teacher and preacher through the revival, yet his English sponsors paid him a fraction of what they paid a white missionary.
4. Converts such as Occom kept defending their nations' land rights, as the Mohegan did in a long legal case over their lands.

Answer: (B) Elected assemblies used their control of money to bargain with governors

1. Only Rhode Island and Connecticut elected their governors; the king or a proprietor appointed the rest, including Pennsylvania's.
2. Governors depended on assemblies to vote money, even for their own salaries, which gave the assemblies the leverage called the power of the purse.
3. Parliament did not vote colonial budgets; the colonial assemblies did, which is why governors had to bargain with them.
4. Assemblies could not dismiss a governor, since only the Crown or the proprietor could, so they used money as leverage instead.

Answer: (D) Colonial assemblies grew used to managing their own taxes and affairs

1. The Stamp Act came in 1765, after Britain gave up the loose enforcement Burke describes.
2. The Dominion of New England (1686–1689) was an attempt at tight royal control, the opposite of neglect, and it collapsed in 1689.
3. Lax enforcement let colonial merchants keep trading with the French West Indies despite the Molasses Act of 1733.
4. Loose enforcement of trade laws and royal instructions let assemblies take charge of local taxes and spending, a habit they later defended against Parliament.

Answer: (A) Pennsylvania Germans kept their own language, churches and newspapers

1. Pennsylvania's Germans kept their language, their Lutheran, Reformed and Mennonite churches and German-language papers while obeying colonial law, so pluralism grew alongside Anglicization.
2. Imported goods and London styles show Anglicization, which fits Franklin's English ideal instead of challenging it.
3. Assemblies built on English models show the colonies growing more English, not more diverse.
4. Reprinted London news tied colonists to British culture, which supports Anglicization rather than diversity.

Answer: (C) Evangelical and Enlightenment outlooks coexisted and exchanged ideas

1. Many educated colonists, Franklin among them, admired revival preachers without accepting the new birth.
2. Franklin, who doubted the revival's theology, printed and sold Whitefield's sermons and journals.
3. Franklin trusted reason and never had the new birth, yet he printed Whitefield's work and stayed his friend, an example of the intellectual exchange that colonial pluralism allowed.
4. Restrictions on itinerants, such as Connecticut's 1742 law, came from Old Light clergy and their allies, not from Enlightenment writers.

Answer: (B) Religious toleration that drew settlers of many faiths to the colony

1. Pennsylvania had no tax-supported church; that system belonged to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia.
2. Penn's colony had no established church and welcomed many faiths, which drew Quakers, German sects, Presbyterians and others and made it a center of pluralism.
3. Anglicans, Presbyterians and other non-Quakers sat in Pennsylvania's government; its religious tests shut out non-Christians, not other Protestants.
4. Maryland's assembly established the Church of England by laws of 1692 and 1702; Pennsylvania had no established church.

Answer: (A) The revivals of the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s

1. Camp meetings and revivals after 1800 again called individuals to an emotional conversion, and Baptist and Methodist churches grew fast.
2. Paine's The Age of Reason (1794) attacked revealed religion and relied on reason, not conversion.
3. Mann's school reform stressed civic education and moral training, not a personal conversion.
4. The Federalists' argument concerned the structure of government, not religious experience.

Answer: (D) Leaders of the Great Awakening could accept slavery and hold enslaved people

1. Georgia's trustees banned slavery in 1735 for their own reasons, and the colony allowed it from 1751 after pressure that included Whitefield's.
2. Whitefield funded the orphan house with collections taken at his sermons in Britain and the colonies, not with grants from Parliament.
3. Conversion did not free enslaved people under colonial law, and the will passes enslaved people on as property.
4. Whitefield preached spiritual equality, yet he pressed Georgia to allow slavery, owned enslaved workers and willed them as property, so the revival did not challenge slavery as an institution.

Answer: (C) Interest in English ideas about rights and limits on rulers' power

1. Colonists in the 1730s saw themselves as loyal Britons; organized calls for independence came in 1776.
2. The new birth was a religious concern of the 1740s revival, not a question about the people's political liberties.
3. Colonists read English writers such as John Locke and prided themselves on English liberties, so clubs like Franklin's watched for officials who overstepped.
4. The Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) came three decades after this 1732 question.

Answer: (B) Colonists' growing purchases of British goods, books and newspapers

1. German immigration made the colonies more diverse, and Franklin complained that it threatened their English character.
2. Imported British goods, London books and reprinted news made colonists more like Britons, the Anglicization that strengthened their sense of being English.
3. Scots-Irish settlers, many of whom left Ireland resenting British rule, added to the colonies' diversity rather than to their English identity.
4. New congregations grew out of revival disputes over conversion and church membership, not out of ties to England.