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IT has become something of a cliche among early American historians that a preponderant share of scholarship has been devoted to New England and the South at the expense of the Middle Colonies. Indeed, this relative lack of interest in the Middle Colonies has been a curious phenomenon. Certainly, these settlements were not devoid of personalities. William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Lewis Morris, and William Livingston, to name but four, possessed qualities that have attracted the attention of historians. Nor were the Middle Colonies without their episodes of high drama. Leisler's Rebellion, the New York and NewJersey agrarian disturbances, and the march of the Paxton Boys, to say nothing of the crucial role of the Middle Colonies in the War for Independence, rival anything to be found in the history of provinces to the north or south. Yet New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania even now do not loom as large in the literature as do their neighbors, nor, it may be surmised, do they occupy a central place in courses on colonial history. In part, of course, this is because men from New England and Virginia acquired greater fame for their roles in the Revolution while contemporaries regarded the Middle Colonies as loyalist strongholdsand the biases of the generation of Adams and Jefferson continue to affect our understanding of the pre-Revolutionary era. In addition, the longer histories of the Southern and New England colonies, reaching almost to the beginning of the seventeenth century, have been at least partially responsible for their dominance in our bibliographies and syllabi. But most significant, the Middle Colonies have drawn-less notice because they were-and are-so much more difficult to grapple with than their neighbors. Among the southern settlements, the issues of slavery and aristocratic control inform much of what historians have written. These two themes run clearly through the literature and give it coherence. Moreover, since issues of class and race have been so central throughout American history, scholars have been naturally attracted to the southern colonies where, it is assumed, the colonial roots of these national problems may be found. In the case of
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