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Colonization
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European Colonization North of Mexico
Prior to the seventeenth century, all European attempts to plant permanent
colonies north of Mexico--with the exception of a Spanish fortress at St. Augustine in
Florida and a small Spanish settlement in New Mexico--failed. Unprepared for the
harsh and demanding environment, facing staunch resistance from the indigenous
population, and lacking adequate financing and supplies, sixteenth-century French
and English efforts to establish permanent North American settlements in
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the St. Lawrence Valley, Florida, and Roanoke Island off
the coast of North Carolina were short-lived failures.
During the early seventeenth century, however, national and religious rivalries
and the growth of a merchant class eager to invest in overseas expansion and
commerce encouraged renewed efforts at colonization. England established its first
enduring settlement in Jamestown in 1607; France in Quebec in 1608; the Dutch in
what would become Albany in 1614; and the Swedes a fur-trading colony in the
lower Delaware Valley in 1638. As early as 1625, nearly 10,000 Europeans had
migrated to the North American coast. But only about eighteen hundred were
actually living on the continent in that year, due mainly to the staggering number of
deaths from disease during the initial stages of settlement.
Seventeenth-century European settlement took sharply contrasting forms.
Perhaps the most obvious difference was demographic. The English migration was far
larger and more gender-balanced than that of the Dutch, the French, or the Spanish.
The explanation for the rapid growth of England's North American colonies lies in the
existence of a large "surplus" population. Early seventeenth-century England
contained a large number of migrant farmhands and unemployed and underemployed workers. Most English migrants to North America were recruited from the
lower working population--farm workers, urban laborers, and artisans--who were
suffering from economic distress, including sharply falling wages (which declined by
half between 1550 and 1650) and a series of failed harvests. Outside of New
England, most English immigrants--perhaps as many as 70 percent or more--were
indentured servants, who agreed to serve a term of service in exchange for
transportation across the Atlantic.
Religious persecution was a particularly powerful force motivating English
colonization. England allowed religious dissidents to migrate to the New World. Some
30,000 English Puritans migrated to New England, while Maryland became a refuge
for Roman Catholics and Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Rhode Island,
havens for Quakers. The refugees from religious persecution included Baptists,
Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a small number of Catholics, to say nothing of
religious minorities from continental Europe, including Huguenots and members of
the Dutch and German Reformed churches.
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Europe's North American settlements differed markedly in their economies. While
the Dutch, French, and Swedish settlements relied mainly on trade in fish and furs,
English settlement took a variety of forms. In New England, the economy was
organized largely around small family farms and urban communities engaged in
fishing, handicrafts, and Atlantic commerce, with most of the population living in
small compact towns. In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the
economy was structured largely around larger and much more isolated farms and
plantations raising tobacco, with an average of only about two dozen families living
in a twenty-five square mile area. In the Carolinas and the British West Indies,
economic life was organized around larger but less isolated plantations growing rice,
indigo, coffee, cotton, and sugar.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population in Britain's North
American colonies was growing at an unprecedented rate. At a time when Europe's
population was increasing just 1 percent a year, New England's growth rate was 2.6
or 2.7 percent annually. By the early eighteenth century, the population was also
growing extremely rapidly in the middle Atlantic and southern colonies, largely as a
result of a low death rate and a sex ratio that was more balanced than in Europe
itself.
By 1700, Britain's North American colonies offered an unprecedented degree of
social equality and political liberty for white men. The colonies differed from England
itself in the proportion of white men who owned property and were able to vote, as
well as in the population's ethnic and religious diversity. Yet by the beginning of the
eighteenth century, it was also clear that colonial expansion involved the
displacement of the indigenous population and that the colonial economy depended
heavily on various forms of unfree labor, of which the most rapidly growing form
consisted of black and sometimes Indian slaves, who could be found in every one of
Britain's North American colonies.
Spanish Colonization
Conflict with Indians and the failure to find major silver or gold deposits made it
difficult to persuade settlers to colonize the region. Spanish settlement was largely
confined to religious missions, a few small civilian towns, and military posts intended
to prevent encroachment by Russia, France, and England. It was not until 1749 that
Spain established the first civilian town in Texas, a town that eventually became
Laredo; and not before 1769 did Spain establish permanent settlements in California.
Fixated on religious conversion and military control, Spain inhibited economic
development. Following the dictates of an economic philosophy known as
mercantilism, aimed at protecting its own manufacturers, Spain restricted trade,
prohibited manufacturing, stifled local industry and handicrafts, impeded the growth
of towns, and prevented civilians from selling to soldiers. The government required
all trade to be conducted through Veracruz and levied high excise taxes that greatly
increased the cost of transportation. It exercised a monopoly over tobacco and
gunpowder and prohibited the capture of wild horses. Still, Spain left a lasting
imprint on the Southwest.
Such institutions as the rodeo and the cowboy (the vaquero) had their roots in
Spanish culture. Place names, too, bear witness to the region's Spanish heritage. Los
Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Tucson were all founded by the Spanish. To this
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day, the Spanish pattern of organizing towns around a central plaza bordered by
churches and official buildings is found throughout the region. Spanish architectural
styles--adobe walls, tile roofs, wooden beams, and intricate mosaics--continue to
characterize the Southwest.
By introducing European livestock and vegetation, Spanish colonists transformed
the Southwest's economy, environment, and physical appearance. The Spanish
introduced horses, cows, sheep, and goats, as well tomatoes, chilies, Kentucky
bluegrass, and a variety of weeds. As livestock devoured the region's tall native
grasses, a new and distinctly southwestern environment arose, one of cactus,
sagebrush, and mesquite. The Spanish also introduced temperate and tropical
diseases, which reduced the Indian population by fifty to ninety percent.
It is equally important that in attitudes toward class and race Spanish
possessions differed from the English colonies. Most colonists were of mixed racial
backgrounds and racial mixture continued throughout the Spanish colonial period. In
general, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry) and Indians were
concentrated in the lower levels of the social structure.
Even in the colonial period, the New Spain's northern frontier served as a beacon
of opportunity for poorer Mexicans. The earliest Hispanic settlers forged pathways
that would draw Mexican immigrants in the future.
English Colonization Begins
During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of
North America as a base for piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of
the century, the English began to think more seriously about North America as a
place to colonize: as a market for English goods and a source of raw materials and
commodities such as furs. English promoters claimed that New World colonization
offered England many advantages. Not only would it serve as a bulwark against
Catholic Spain, it would supply England with raw materials and provide a market for
finished products. America would also provide a place to send the English poor and
ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth.
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English poor
increased rapidly in number. As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands
(which were increasingly used to raise sheep), many common people were forced to
become wage laborers or else to support themselves hand-to-mouth or simply as
beggars.
After unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and at
Roanoke, the famous "Lost Colony," off the coast of present-day North Carolina,
England established its first permanent North American settlement, Jamestown, in
1607. Located in swampy marshlands along Virginia's James River, Jamestown's
residents suffered horrendous mortality rates during its first years. Immigrants had
just a fifty-fifty chance of surviving five years.
The Jamestown expedition was financed by the Virginia Company of London,
which believed that precious metals were to be found in the area. From the outset,
however, Jamestown suffered from disease and conflict with Indians. Approximately
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30,000 Algonquian Indians lived in the region, divided into about 40 tribes. About 30
tribes belonged to a confederacy led by Powhatan.
Food was an initial source of conflict. More interested in finding gold and silver
than in farming, Jamestown's residents (many of whom were either aristocrats or
their servants) were unable or unwilling to work. When the English began to seize
Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off supplies, forcing the colonists to subsist on
frogs, snakes, and even decaying corpses.
Captain John Smith (1580?-1631) was twenty-six years old when the first
expedition landed. A farmer's son, Smith had already led an adventurous life before
arriving in Virginia. He had fought with the Dutch army against the Spanish and in
eastern Europe against the Ottoman Turks, when he was taken captive and
enslaved. He later escaped to Russia before returning to England.
Smith, serving as president of the Jamestown colony from 1608 to 1609, required
the colonists to work and traded with the Indians for food. In 1609, after being
wounded in a gunpowder accident, Smith returned to England. After his departure,
conflict between the English and the Powhatan confederacy intensified, especially
after the colonists began to clear land in order to plant tobacco.
In a volume recounting the history of the English colony in Virginia, Smith
describes a famous incident in which Powhatan's 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas
(1595?-1617), saved him from execution. Although some have questioned whether
this incident took place (since Smith failed to mention it in his Historie's first edition),
it may well have been a "staged event," an elaborate adoption ceremony by which
Powhatan symbolically made Smith his vassal or servant. Through similar
ceremonies, the Powhatan people incorporated outsiders into their society.
Pocahontas reappears in the colonial records in 1613, when she was lured aboard an
English ship and held captive. Negotiations for her release failed, and in 1614, she
married John Rolfe, the colonist who introduced tobacco to Virginia. Whether this
marriage represented an attempt to forge an alliance between the English and the
Powhatan remains uncertain.
Life in Early Virginia
Early Virginia was a death trap. Of the first 3,000 immigrants, all but 600 were
dead within a few years of arrival. Virginia was a society in which life was short,
diseases ran rampant, and parentless children and multiple marriages were the
norm.
In sharp contrast to New England, which was settled mainly by families, most of
the settlers of Virginia and neighboring Maryland were single men bound in
servitude. Before the colonies turned decisively to slavery in the late seventeenth
century, planters relied on white indentured servants from England, Ireland, and
Scotland. They wanted men, not women. During the early and mid-seventeenth
century, as many as four men arrived for every woman.
Why did large numbers of people come to such an unhealthful region? To raise
tobacco, which had been introduced into England in the late sixteenth century. Like a
number of other consumer products introduced during the early modern era--like
tea, coffee, and chocolate--tobacco was related to the development of new work
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patterns and new forms of sociability. Tobacco appeared to relieve boredom and
stress and to enhance peoples' ability to concentrate over prolonged periods of time.
Tobacco production required a large labor force, which initially consisted primarily of
white indentured servants, who received transportation to Virginia in exchange for a
four to seven-year term of service.
Lacking valuable minerals or other products in high demand, it appeared that
Jamestown was an economic failure. After ten years, however, the colonists
discovered that Virginia was an ideal place to cultivate tobacco, which had been
recently introduced into Europe. Since tobacco production rapidly exhausted the soil
of nutrients, the English began to acquire new lands along the James River,
encroaching on Indian hunting grounds.
In 1622, Powhatan's successor, Opechcanough, tried to wipe out the English in a
surprise attack. Two Indian converts to Christianity warned the English; still, 347
settlers, or about a third of the English colonists, died in the attack. Warfare
persisted for ten years, followed by an uneasy peace. In 1644, Opechcanough
launched a last, desperate attack. After about two years of warfare, in which some
500 colonists were killed, Opechcanough was captured and shot and the survivors of
Powhatan's confederacy, now reduced to just 2,000, agreed to submit to English
rule.
Raising tobacco required a large labor force. At first, it was not clear that this
labor force would consist of enslaved Africans. Virginians experimented with a variety
of labor sources, including Indian slaves, penal slaves, and white indentured
servants. Convinced that England was overpopulated with vagabonds and paupers,
the colonists imported surplus Englishmen to raise tobacco and to produce dyestuffs,
potash, furs, and other goods that England had imported from other countries.
Typically, young men or women in their late teens or twenties would sign a contract
of indenture. In exchange for transportation to the New World, a servant would work
for several years (usually four to seven) without wages.
The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was not wholly
dissimilar from slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased. They could also be
physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Unlike slaves, however, they
were freed after their term of service expired, their children did not inherit their
status, and they received a small cash payment of "freedom dues."
The English writer Daniel Defoe (1661?-1731) set part of his novel Moll Flanders
(1683) in early Virginia. Defoe described the people who settled in Virginia in
distinctly unflattering terms: There were convicts, who had been found guilty of
felonies punishable by death, and there were those "brought over by masters of
ships to be sold as servants. Such as we call them, my dear, but they are more
properly called slaves."
George Alsop, an indentured servant in Maryland, echoed these sentiments in
1666. Servants "by hundreds of thousands" spent their lives "here and in Virginia,
and elsewhere in planting that vile tobacco, which all vanishes into smoke, and is for
the most part miserably abused." And, he went on, this "insatiable avarice must be
fed and sustained by the bloody sweat of these poor slaves."
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Slavery Takes Root in Colonial Virginia
Black slavery took root in the American colonies slowly. Historians now know that
small numbers of Africans lived in Virginia before 1619, the year a Dutch ship sold
some twenty blacks (probably from the West Indies) to the colonists. But it was not
until the 1680s that black slavery became the dominant labor system on plantations
there. As late as 1640, there were probably only 150 blacks in Virginia and in 1650,
300. But by 1680, the number had risen to 3,000 and by 1704, to 10,000.
Until the mid-1660s, the number of white indentured servants was sufficient to
meet the labor needs of Virginia and Maryland. Then, in the mid-1660s, the supply of
white servants fell sharply. Many factors contributed to the growing shortage of
servants. The English birth rate had begun to fall and with fewer workers competing
for jobs, wages in England rose. The great fire that burned much of London in 1666
created a great need for labor to rebuild the city. Meanwhile, Virginia and Maryland
became less attractive as land grew scarcer. Many preferred to migrate to
Pennsylvania or the Carolinas, where opportunities seemed greater. To replenish its
labor force, planters in the Chesapeake region increasingly turned to enslaved
Africans. In 1680, just seven percent of the population of Virginia and Maryland
consisted of slaves; twenty years later, the figure was 22 percent. Most of these
slaves did not come directly from Africa, but from Barbados and other Caribbean
colonies or from the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, which the English had
conquered in 1664 and renamed New York.
The status of blacks in seventeenth century Virginia was extremely complex.
Some were permanently unfree; others, like indentured servants, were allowed to
own property and marry and were freed after a term of service. Some were even
allowed to testify against whites in court and purchase white servants. In at least
one county, black slaves who could prove that they had been baptized successfully
sued for their freedom. There was even a surprising degree of tolerance of sexual
intermixture and marriages across racial lines.
As early as the late 1630s, however, English colonists began to distinguish
between the status of white servants and black slaves. In 1639, Maryland became
the first colony to specifically state that baptism as a Christian did not make a slave
a free person.
During the 1660s and 1670s, Maryland and Virginia adopted laws specifically
designed to denigrate blacks. These laws banned interracial marriages and sexual
relations and deprived blacks of property. Other laws prohibited blacks from bearing
arms or traveling without written permission. In 1669, Virginia became the first
colony to declare that it was not a crime to kill an unruly slave in the ordinary course
of punishment. That same year, Virginia also prohibited masters from freeing slaves
unless the freedmen were deported from the colony. Virginia also voted to banish
any white man or woman who married a black, mulatto, or Indian.
The imposition of a more rigid system of racial slavery was accompanied by
improved status for white servants. Unlike slaves, white servants and free workers
could not be stripped naked and whipped. As the historian Edmund S. Morgan has
suggested, a hardening of racial lines contributed to a growth in a commitment to
democracy, liberty, and equality among white men.
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In 1676, friction between backcountry farmers, landless former indentured
servants, and coastal planters in Virginia exploded in violence in an incident known
as Bacon’s Rebellion. Convinced that Virginia's colonial government had failed
adequately to protect them against Indians, backcountry rebels, led by Nathaniel
Bacon, a wealthy landowner, burned the capital at Jamestown, plundered their
enemy's plantations, and offered freedom to any indentured servants who joined
them. In the midst of the revolt, Bacon died of dysentery. Without his leadership, the
uprising collapsed, but fear of servant unrest encouraged planters to replace white
indentured servants with black slaves, set apart by a distinctive skin color. In 1660,
there were fewer than a thousand slaves in Virginia and Maryland. But during the
1680s, their number tripled, rising from about 4,500 to 12,000.
Founding New England
In sixteenth-century England, a religious
movement known as Puritanism arose which wanted
to purge the Church of England of all vestiges of
Roman Catholicism. The Puritans objected to
elaborate church hierarchies and to church
ceremonies and practices which lacked Biblical
sanction and elevated priests above their
congregation.
Late in the sixteenth century, some Puritans,
known as separatists, became convinced that the
Church of England was so corrupt that they withdrew
from it and set up their own congregations. In 1609,
a group of separatists (later known as Pilgrims) fled
from England to Holland, eager to escape the corrupting wickedness around them. In
his classic History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford (1588-1657), the Pilgrim
leader, explains why the Pilgrims decided to leave the Netherlands in 1619 and
establish a new community in the New World. In this selection, he also describes
how the Pilgrims were assisted by an Indian named Squanto.
Squanto's story illustrates the way that the entire Atlantic world became
integrated in wholly new ways during the seventeenth century and the impact this
transformation had upon real-life individuals and communities. A Patuxet Indian born
around 1585, Squanto had grown up in a village of 2,000 located near where the
Pilgrims settled in 1620. In 1614, Captain John Smith had passed through the
region, and one of his lieutenants kidnapped Squanto and some twenty other
Patuxets, planning to sell the Indians in the slave market of Malaga, Spain. After
escaping to England, where he learned to speak English, Squanto returned to New
England in 1619, only to discover that his village had been wiped out by a chicken
pox epidemic--one of many epidemics that killed about 90 percent of New England's
coastal Indian people between 1616 and 1618. Squanto then joined the Wampanoag
tribe.
After the Pilgrims arrived, Squanto served as an interpreter between the
Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, and the colonists and taught the English settlers how
to plant Indian corn. He also tried to use his position to challenge Massasoit's
leadership, informing neighboring tribes that the Pilgrims would infect them with
disease and make war on them unless they gave him gifts. Squanto's scheme to use
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his connections with the Pilgrims to wrest power from Massaoit failed. In 1622, two
years after the English settlers arrived, Squanto fell ill and died of an unknown
disease.
The Puritans
No group has played a more pivotal role in shaping American values than the
New England Puritans. The seventeenth-century Puritans contributed to our country's
sense of mission, its work ethic, and its moral sensibility. Today, eight million
Americans can trace their ancestry to the fifteen to twenty thousand Puritans who
migrated to New England between 1629 and 1640.
Few people, however, have been as frequently subjected to caricature and
ridicule. The journalist H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, might be happy." And particularly during the 1920s, the
Puritans came to symbolize every cultural characteristic that "modern" Americans
despised. The Puritans were often dismissed as drably-clothed religious zealots who
were hostile to the arts and were eager to impose their rigid "Puritanical" morality on
the world around them.
This stereotypical view is almost wholly incorrect. Contrary to much popular
thinking, the Puritans were not sexual prudes. Although they strongly condemned
sexual relations outside of marriage--levying fines or even whipping those who
fornicated, committed adultery or sodomy, or bore children outside of wedlock--they
attached a high value to the marital tie. Nor did Puritans abstain from alcohol; even
though they objected to drunkenness, they did not believe alcohol was sinful in itself.
They were not opposed to artistic beauty; although they were suspicious of the
theater and the visual arts, the Puritans valued poetry. Indeed, John Milton (16031674), one of England's greatest poets, was a Puritan. Even the association of the
Puritans with drab colors is wrong. They especially liked the colors red and blue.
Although the Puritans wanted to reform the world to conform to God's law, they
did not set up a church-run state. Even though they believed that the primary
purpose of government was to punish breaches of God's laws, few people were as
committed as the Puritans to the separation of church and state. Not only did they
reject the idea of establishing a system of church courts, they also forbade ministers
from holding public office.
Perhaps most strikingly, the Puritans in Massachusetts held annual elections and
extended the right to vote and hold office to all "freemen." Although this term was
originally restricted to church members, it meant that a much larger proportion of
the adult male population could vote in Massachusetts than in England itself (roughly
55 percent, compared to about 33 percent in England).
John Winthrop (1606-1676) was a well-off landowner who served as governor of
the Massachusetts Bay Colony for much of its early history. Unlike the Pilgrims,
Winthrop and the other Puritans who traveled to Massachusetts were not separatists.
Rather than trying to flee the corruptions of a wicked world, they hoped to establish
in New England a pure church that would offer a model for the churches in England.
The Puritan Idea of the Covenant
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A central element in Puritan social and theological life was the notion of the
covenant. All social relationships--between God and man, ministers and
congregations, magistrates and members of their community, and men and their
families--were envisioned in terms of a covenant or contract which rested on consent
and mutual responsibilities.
For example, seventeenth-century New England churches were formed by a
voluntary agreement among the members, who elected their own ministers.
Similarly, the governments in Plymouth Colony (before it merged with
Massachusetts) and in New Haven Colony (before it merged with Connecticut) were
based on covenants. In each seventeenth-century New England colony, government
itself rested on consent. Governors and legislative assemblies were elected, usually
annually, by the freemen of the colony. In contrast, England appointed Virginia's
governor, while in Maryland, the governor was appointed by the Calvert family,
which owned the colony. Even marriage itself was regarded as a covenant.
Connecticut granted nearly a thousand divorces between 1670 and 1799.
In this famous essay written aboard the Arabella during his passage to New
England in 1630, John Winthrop (1606-1676) proclaims that the Puritan had made a
covenant with God to establish a truly Christian community, in which the wealthy
were to show charity and avoid exploiting their neighbors while the poor were to
work diligently. If they abided by this covenant, God would make them an example
with the world--a "city upon a hill." But if they broke the covenant, the entire
community would feel God's wrath.
In his stress on the importance of a stable community and reciprocal obligations
between rich and poor, Winthrop was implicitly criticizing disruptive social and
economic changes that were rapidly transforming English society. As a result of the
enclosure of traditional common lands, which were increasingly used to raise sheep,
many rural laborers were thrown off the land, producing a vast floating population.
As many as half of all village residents left their community each decade. In his call
for tightly-knit communities and families, Winthrop was striving to recreate a social
ideal that was breaking down in England itself.
Regional Contrasts
There were significant demographic and economic
contrasts between the Chesapeake region and New
England. Because of its cold winters and low
population density, seventeenth-century New England
was perhaps the most healthful region in the world.
After an initial period of high mortality, life
expectancy quickly rose to levels comparable to our
own. Men and women, on average, lived about 65 to
70 years, 15 to 20 years longer than in England. One
result was that seventeenth-century New England
was the first society in history in which grandparents
were common.
Descended largely from families that arrived
during the 1630s, New England was a relatively stable society settled in compact
towns and villages. It never developed any staple crop for export of any
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consequence, and about 90 to 95 percent of the population was engaged in
subsistence farming.
The further south one looks, however, the higher the death rate and the more
unbalanced the sex ratio. In New England, men outnumbered women about 3 to 2 in
the first generation. But in New Netherlands there were two men for every woman
and the ratio was six to one in the Chesapeake. Where New England's population
became self-sustaining as early as the 1630s, New Jersey and Pennsylvania did not
achieve this until the 1660s to the 1680s, and Virginia until after 1700. Compared to
New England, Virginia was a much more mobile and unruly society.
Compared to the Southeast, it was much more difficult for native peoples of New
England to resist the encroaching English colonists. For one thing, the Northeast was
much less densely populated. Epidemic diseases introduced by European fishermen
and fur traders reduced the population of New England's coastal Indians about 90
percent by the early 1620s. Further, this area was fragmented politically into
autonomous villages with a long history of bitter tribal rivalries. Such factors allowed
the Puritans to expand rapidly across New England.
Some groups, notably the Massachusetts, whose number had fallen from about
20,000 to just 750 in 1631, allied with the Puritans and agreed to convert to
Christianity in exchange for military protection. But the migration of Puritan colonists
into western Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 1630s provoked bitter
warfare, especially with the Pequots, the area's most powerful people. In 1636,
English settlers accused a Pequot of attacking ships and murdering several sailors; in
revenge, they burned a Pequot settlement on what is now Block Island, Rhode
Island. Pequot raids left about 30 colonists dead. A combined force of Puritans and
Narragansett and Mohegan Indians retaliated by surrounding and setting fire to the
main Pequot village on the Mystic River.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford described the destruction
by fire of the Pequot's major village, in which at least 300 Indians were burned to
death: "Those that escaped from the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to
pieces, others run threw with their rapiers [swords]....It was a fearful sight to see
them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same." The
survivors were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean. Altogether about 800 of
3,500 Pequot were killed during the Pequot War. In his epic novel Moby Dick,
Herman Melville names his doomed whaling ship "The Pequod," a clear reference to
earlier events in New England.
Dimensions of Change in Colonial New England
Although most of New England's settlers were Puritans, these people did not
agree about religious doctrine. Some, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth, believed that the
Church of England should be renounced, while others, like Massachusetts Bay's
leaders, felt that the English church could be reformed. Other issues that divided
Puritans involved who could be admitted to church membership, who could be
baptized, and who could take communion.
Disagreements over religious beliefs led to the formation of a number of new
colonies. In 1636, Thomas Hooker (1586-1647), a Cambridge, Massachusetts
minister, established the first English settlement in Connecticut. Convinced that
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government should rest on free consent, he extended voting rights beyond church
members. Two years later, another Massachusetts group founded New Haven colony
in order to combat moral laxness by setting strict standards for church membership
and basing its laws on the Old Testament. This colony was incorporated by
Connecticut in 1662.
In 1635, Massachusetts Bay colony banished Roger Williams (1604-1683), a
Salem minister, for claiming that the civil government had no right to force people to
worship in a particular way. Williams had even rejected the ideal that civil authorities
could compel observance of the Sabbath. Equally troubling, he argued that
Massachusetts's royal charter did not justify taking Indian land. Instead, Williams
argued, the colonists had to negotiate fair treaties and pay for the land. Instead of
returning to England, Williams headed toward the Narragansett Bay, where he
founded Providence, which later became the capital of Rhode Island. From 1654 to
1657, Williams was president of Rhode Island colony. The New England Puritans, like
many Americans before the nineteenth century, rejected the idea that prices should
fluctuate freely according to the laws of supply and demand. Instead, they believed
that there was a just wage for every trade and a just price for every good. Charging
more than this just amount was "oppression," and authorities sought by law to
prevent prices or wages from rising above a customary level.
Yet within a few decades of settlement, the Puritan blueprint of an organic, closeknit community, a stable, self-sufficient economy, and a carefully calibrated social
hierarchy began to fray as New England became increasingly integrated into the
Atlantic economy. To try to maintain traditional social distinctions, Massachusetts
Bay colony in 1651 adopted a sumptuary law, which spelled out which persons could
wear certain articles of clothing and jewelry.
But as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, a growing number of
New Englanders were engaged in an intricate system of Atlantic commerce, selling
fish, furs, and timber not only in England but throughout Catholic Europe, investing
in shipbuilding, and transporting tobacco, wine, sugar, and slaves. Particularly
important was trade with the West Indies and the Atlantic islands off of northwestern
Africa. Such trade was highly competitive and risky, but over time it gradually
created distinct classes of merchants, tradesmen, and commercially-oriented
farmers.
For nearly half a century following the Pequot War, New England was free of
major Indian wars. During this period, the region's indigenous people declined
rapidly in numbers and suffered severe losses of land and cultural independence.
During the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, New England's indigenous
population fell from 140,000 to 10,000, while the English population grew to 50,000.
Meanwhile, the New England Puritans launched a concerted campaign to convert the
Indians to Protestantism. John Eliot, New England's leading missionary, convinced
about 2,000 to live in "praying towns," where they were expected to adopt white
customs. New England Indians were also forced to accept the legal authority of
colonial courts.
Faced with death, disease, and cultural disintegration, many of New England's
native peoples decided to strike back. In 1675, the chief of the Pokanokets,
Metacomet (whom the English called King Philip), forged a military alliance including
about two-thirds of the region's Indians. In 1675, he led an attack on Swansea,
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Massachusetts. Over the next year, both sides raided villages and killed hundreds of
victims. Twelve out of ninety New England towns were destroyed.
The last major Indian war in New England, King Philip's War, was the most
destructive conflict, relative to the size of the population in American history. Five
percent of New England's population was killed--a higher proportion than Germany,
Britain, or the United States lost during World War II. Indian casualties were far
higher; perhaps 40 percent of New England's Indian population was killed or fled the
region. When the war was over, the power of New England's Indians was broken.
The region's remaining Indians would live in small, scattered communities, serving
as the colonists' servants, slaves, and tenants.
The Salem Witch Scare
In 1691, a group of girls in Salem, Massachusetts, accused an Indian slave
named Tituba of witchcraft. Tituba's confession ignited a witchcraft scare which left
19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people
in prison awaiting trial.
For two decades, New England had been in the grip of severe social stresses. A
1675 conflict with the Indians known as King Philip's War had resulted in more
deaths relative to the size of the population than any other war in American history.
A decade later, in 1685, King James II's government revoked the Massachusetts
charter. A new governor, Sir Edmund Andros, sought to unite New England, New
York, and New Jersey into a single Dominion of New England. He also tried to abolish
elected colonial assemblies, restrict town meetings, and impose direct control over
militia appointments, and permitted the first public celebration of Christmas in
Massachusetts. After William III replaced James II as King of England in 1689,
Andros's government was overthrown, but Massachusetts was required to eliminate
religious qualifications for voting and to extend religious toleration to sects such as
the Quakers. The late seventeenth century also marked a sudden increase in the
number of black slaves in New England.
The 1637 Pequot War produced New England's first known slaves. While many
Indian men were transported into slavery in the West Indies, many Indian women
and children were used as household slaves in New England. The 1641
Massachusetts Body of Liberties recognized perpetual and hereditary servitude
(although in 1643, a Massachusetts court sent back to Africa some slaves who had
been kidnapped by New England sailors and brought to America). Tituba was one of
the growing number of slaves imported from the West Indies.
Probably an Arawak born in northeastern South America, Tituba had been
enslaved in Barbados before being brought to Massachusetts in 1680. Her master,
Samuel Parris, had been a credit agent for sugar planters in Barbados before
becoming a minister in Salem, Massachusetts. In late 1691, two girls in Parris's
household and two girls from nearby households began to exhibit strange physical
symptoms including convulsions and choking. To counteract these symptoms, Tituba
made a "witchcake" out of rye meal and urine. This attempt at counter-magic led to
Tituba's arrest for witchcraft. She and two other women--Sarah Good and Sarah
Osborne--were accused of bewitching the girls. Tituba confessed, but the other two
women protested their innocence. Good was executed; Osborne died in prison.
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As Elaine G. Breslaw has shown, Tituba's confession that she had consorted with
Satan and attended a witches' coven fueled fears of a diabolical plot to infiltrate and
destroy Salem's godly community. In her testimony, Tituba drew upon Indian and
African, as well as English, notions of the occult.
Tituba later recanted her confession, saying that she had given false testimony in
order to save her life. She claimed "that her Master did beat her and otherways
abused her, to make her confess and accuse...her Sister-Witches."
Slavery in the Colonial North
In colonial America, there was no sharp division between a slave South and a
free-labor North. New England was involved in the Atlantic slave trade from the mid1600s to the 1780s. In the years preceding the American Revolution, slavery could
be found in all the American colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves made
up almost 8 percent of the population in Pennsylvania, 40 percent in Virginia, and 70
percent in South Carolina. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a
fifth of Boston's families owned slaves; and in New York City in 1746, slaves
performed about a third of the city's manual labor.
In the North, slaves were used in both agricultural and non-agricultural
employment, especially in highly productive farming and stock-raising for the West
Indian market in southern Rhode Island, Long Island, and New Jersey. Slaves not
only served as household servants for an urban elite--cooking, doing laundry, and
cleaning stables--they also worked in rural industry, in salt works, iron works, and
tanneries. In general, slaves were not segregated into distinct racial ghettoes;
instead, they lived in back rooms, lofts, attics, and alley shacks. Many slaves
fraternized with lower-class whites. But in the mid-eighteenth century, racial
separation increased, as a growing proportion of the white working-class began to
express bitter resentment over competition from slave labor. The African American
response in the North to increased racial antagonism and discrimination was
apparent in a growing consciousness and awareness of Africa and the establishment
of separate African churches and benevolent societies.
Struggles for Power in Colonial America
Two parallel struggles for power took place in eastern North America during the
late seventeenth and early and mid-eighteenth centuries. One was an imperial
struggle between France and England. Four times between 1689 and 1763, France,
England, and their Indian allies engaged in struggles for dominance. The other was a
power struggle among Indian groups, pitting the Iroquois and various Algonquianspeaking peoples against one another.
These two struggles were closely interconnected. Both France and England were
dependent upon Indian peoples for furs and military support. The English
outnumbered the French by about 20 to 1 during this period, and therefore the
survival of French Canada depended on the support of Algonquian-speaking nations.
For Native Americans, alliances with England and France were a source of wealth,
providing presents, supplies, ammunition, and captives whom the Indians either
adopted or sold. Such alliances also kept white settlers from encroaching on Indian
lands.
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During times of peace, however, Indians found it much more difficult to play
England and France off against each other. It was during the period of peace in
Europe that followed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that England and France
destroyed the Natchez, the Fox, and the Yamasee nations.
Diversity in Colonial America
Period: 1600-1860
Even in the colonial era, the distinguishing characteristic of American society was
the diversity of its population. By European standards, America was extraordinarily
diverse ethnically, religiously, and regionally. The first federal census, conducted in
1790, found that a fifth of the entire population was African American. Among
whites, three-fifths were English in ancestry and another fifth was Scottish or Irish.
The remainder was of Dutch, French, German, Swedish, or some other background.
This astonishing diversity was in large part a product of the way that colonial
America was originally settled. During the early seventeenth century, the most
dynamic countries in Europe scrambled to establish overseas colonies and trading
posts. The Dutch set up outposts in Brazil, Curacao, New Netherlands, the
Pennsylvania region, and West Africa; the English in the Bahamas, Barbados,
Jamaica, and Nova Scotia, as well as along the mainland Atlantic coast; the French in
the Caribbean, Canada, Guadaloupe, St. Domingue, Louisiana, and Martinique. The
first phase of colonization was highly decentralized. The earliest settlements were
established not under the direction of government, but by commercial companies,
religious organizations, and individual entrepreneurs.
By the mid-seventeenth century, however, it became apparent that the colonies
could be an important source of national wealth for the parent nation. Mercantilist
thinkers saw colonies as a source of revenue and raw materials, a market for
manufactured goods, and a way to strengthen a nation's economic self-sufficiency.
The English government adopted a more systematic approach to colonization; it
moved aggressively to annex Jamaica, New Netherlands, and New Sweden and
began to grant territory to a specific person or persons called proprietors.
Although major goals of the new colonial system were to expand trade and assert
greater control over the colonies, many of the proprietors projected utopian fantasies
onto the lands they were granted. George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, established the
first proprietary colony. He envisioned Maryland as a haven for Roman Catholics and
as a place where he could recreate a feudal order. A group of eight nobles who
received a gift of land in the Carolinas envisioned a hierarchical manorial society with
a proprietary governor and a hereditary nobility. William Penn sought a refuge for
himself and other Quakers. A group of proprietors led by James Oglethorpe
envisioned Georgia as a haven for debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida.
In practice, it proved impossible to confine colonial development to a
predetermined design. To attract settlers, it proved necessary to guarantee religious
freedom, offer generous land grants, and self-government through a representative
assembly. But it was not merely schemes to set up feudal manors or to maintain
proprietary rule that failed. The proprietors of Georgia banned the importation of
hard liquor and outlawed slavery (not out of a moral concern about slavery, but an
anxiety that slavery would promote economic inequality and discourage industrious
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habits among white settlers). Yet within a few years, mounting opposition from
Georgians and migration out of the colony led the trustees to revoke the restrictions
on liquor and slaves.
The Middle Colonies: New York
In 1648, after an eighty-year struggle, the Dutch Republic won its independence
from Spanish rule. The seventeenth century was the Netherlands's golden age,
during which the Dutch produced some of the world's greatest painters, like
Rembrandt, great philosophers, like Spinoza, and great mathematicians and
astronomers, like Christian Huygens. During the golden age, the Netherlands also
developed a colonial empire with bases stretching from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and
Brazil to Aruba, the Antilles, and the southern tip of Africa. It was also the only
western country permitted to trade with Japan. A major sea power, the Dutch in
1650 owned 16,000 of the 20,000 ships engaged in European commerce.
In an effort to find a sea route around the Americas to Asia, the Dutch East India
Company sent Henry Hudson and a crew of 20 to search for a westward passage. On
his third voyage, in 1611, Hudson sailed into the harbor of present-day New York
City and journeyed up the river named after him as far as Albany, thereby
establishing Dutch claims to the region. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company
(which had been founded to trade in West Africa and the Americas) began to colonize
New Netherlands, which encompassed parts of present-day New York, Delaware,
New Jersey, and Connecticut.
From the outset, New Netherlands was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
Only about half the population was Dutch; the remainder included French, Germans,
and Scandinavians, as well as a small number of Jews from Brazil. The Dutch
considered New Netherlands a minor part of their colonial empire, valuable primarily
as a source of furs. But many merchants were attracted by the colony's promise of
freedom of worship, local self-government, and free land that would remain tax
exempt for ten years. But even before an English fleet captured New Amsterdam in
1664, many of the colony's residents had been alienated by corruption, trade
monopolies, and arbitrary taxation and on-going conflict with neighbor Indian
nations.
Between 1652 and 1674, the Dutch fought three naval wars with England. The
English had hoped to wrest control of shipping and trading from the Dutch but failed.
As a result of these conflicts, the Dutch won what is now Surinam from England,
while the English received New Netherlands from the Dutch. In 1664, the English
sent a fleet to seize New Netherlands, which surrendered without a fight. The English
renamed the colony New York, after James, the Duke of York, who had received a
charter to the territory from his brother King Charles II. The Dutch briefly recaptured
New Netherlands in 1673, but the colony was returned to the English the next year.
Under Dutch rule, New Netherlands had suffered from ethnic tension, political
instability, and protracted Indian warfare, which retarded immigration. Similar
problems persisted under English administration. One source of tension was the
Duke of York's refusal to permit a representative assembly, which was not
established until 1683.
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Another source of tension was the "patroon" system, which the Dutch West India
Company set up in 1629 to promote settlement. Patroons were given huge estates,
which they rented to tenant farmers. Patroons had the power to control such aspects
of settlers' lives as their right to move, establish businesses, and marry. The Duke of
York allowed Dutch landowners to retain these estates, and gave equally large tracts
of land to his supporters. By 1703, five families held approximately 1.75 million
acres of New York. By 1750, these families had become among colonial America's
wealthiest landed elite. Although these landowners lost their feudal privileges as a
result of the Revolution, they still owned about 1.8 million acres of land in the early
nineteenth century. Between 1839 and 1846, tenant farmers on these properties
staged "Anti-Rent Wars," demanding title to lands that they felt rightfully belonged
to them. In 1846, New York granted the tenants their farms.
Fear of Slave Revolts
In 1741, New York City executed 34 people for conspiring to burn down the city.
Thirteen African American men were burned at the stake and another 17 black men,
two white men, and two white women were hanged. An additional 70 blacks and
seven whites were banished from the city.
In 1741, New York's economy was depressed, and, as a result of a punishing
winter, the population suffered severe food shortages. The British Empire was at war
with France and Spain, and there were reports that the Spanish were threatening to
invade New York or organize acts of arson. There were also troubling news about the
Stono slave uprising in South Carolina. With one-fifth of Manhattan's population
consisting of black slaves, it was apparently easy to believe that they, perhaps
assisted by Irish Catholic immigrants, were conspiring to set the city ablaze. It
seems unlikely that there was an organized plan to set fire to the city and murder its
inhabitants, as the authorities alleged. There is, however, evidence of incidents of
arson and it appears that some slaves talked about retaliating against their enslavers
and winning their freedom.
While slave masters described their slave populations as faithful, docile, and
contented, slave owners always feared slave revolt. Probably the first slave revolt in
the New World erupted in Hispaniola in 1522. During the early eighteenth century
there were slave uprisings on Long Island in 1708 and in New York City in 1712.
Slaves in South Carolina staged several insurrections, culminating in the Stono
Rebellion of 1739, when they seized firearms, killed whites, and burned houses. In
1740, a slave conspiracy was uncovered in Charleston. During the late eighteenth
century, slave revolts took place in Guadeloupe, Grenada, Jamaica, Surinam, St.
Domingue (Haiti), Venezuela, and the Windward Islands. Many fugitive slaves,
known as maroons, fled to remote regions like Spanish Florida or Virginia's Great
Dismal Swamp.
The main result of slave insurrections, throughout the Americas, was the mass
execution of blacks. In 1712, when a group of enslaved Africans in New York set fire
to a building and ambushed and murdered about nine whites who arrived to put out
the fire, fourteen slaves were hanged, three were burnt at the stake, one was
starved to death, and another was broken on the wheel.
The Middle Colonies: William Penn’s Holy Commonwealth
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The Middle Colonies: William Penn’s Holy Commonwealth
The social upheaval ignited by the seventeenth-century English Civil War
spawned many radical, millennarian religious groups, including the Diggers, who
rejected private property; and the Ranters, who claimed to worship God through
drinking, smoking, and fornicating. Only one of the radical religious groups that
emerged during the tumultuous years of the 1640s and 1650s has survived until
now: the Society of Friends or the Quakers.
Today, the Quakers are often associated with austerity and self-discipline, but in
the sect's early days, members behaved in very rebellious ways. Some marched into
churches, where they denounced ministers as dumb dogs and hirelings. They also
refused to doff their hats before magistrates or to swear oaths. They opposed war
and gave women the right to speak at public meetings, holding that both sexes were
equal in their ability to expound God's teachings.
The Quakers rejected the orthodox Calvinist belief in predestination. Instead, the
Quakers insisted that salvation was available to all. It came, however, not through
an institutional church, but from within, by following the "inner light" of God's spirit.
It was because Friends seemed to shake when they felt religious enthusiasm that
they became known as Quakers.
In England as well as in a number of American colonies the Quakers faced violent
persecution. Some 15,000 Quakers were jailed in England between 1660 and 1685.
In 1660, Edward Burrough catalogued the maltreatment of Quakers in New England:
64 Quakers had been imprisoned; two Quakers lashed 139 times, leaving one "beat
like into a jelly"; another branded with the letter H, for heretic, after being whipped
with 39 stripes; and three Quakers had been executed.
Even in New York, which tolerated a wide variety of religious persuasions, the
Quakers faced hostility. After arriving in Long Island in 1657, some Quakers were
fined, jailed, and banished by the Dutch, who (like Puritan New Englanders) were
outraged by Quaker women proselytizing.
Over time, the Quakers found successful ways to channel their moral idealism
and religious enthusiasm. The sect established weekly and monthly meetings which
imposed structure and discipline on members, and beginning in the mid-eighteenth
century, directed their energies against a wide variety of social evils, including
slavery. By the early nineteenth century, Quakers were engaged in moral reform
movements in numbers wildly disproportionate to the sect's size. As many as a third
of all early nineteenth century feminists and antislavery activists were Quakers.
The Quakers had remarkable success in attracting a number of socially prominent
individuals to their cause. Among these, none was more important than William Penn
(1644-1718). The son of an English naval officer and a friend of James II, Penn
became a Quaker at the age of 22. He was imprisoned several times for writing and
preaching about Quakerism, including an eight-month confinement in the Tower of
London.
In 1680, Penn asked Charles II of England to repay an $80,000 debt owed to
Penn's father with wilderness land in America. The next year, he was granted a
charter. Penn viewed his new colony as a "Holy Experiment," which would provide
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colonists religious liberty and cheap land. He made a treaty of friendship with Indians
shortly after he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682, paying them for most of the land
that King Charles had given him.
Compared to many other colonies, Pennsylvania, from the outset, was a
remarkable success. It experienced no major Indian wars. Strong West Indian
demand for grain generated prosperity and made Philadelphia a major port.
Nevertheless, the colony did not live up to Penn's dream of a "peaceable kingdom."
In 1685 he pleaded with the colonial legislature: "For the love of God, me, and the
poor country, be not so governmentish; so noisy and open in your disaffection."
The Southernmost Colonies: The Carolinas and Georgia
South Carolina's proprietors envisioned establishing a feudal society in their land
grant. They kept huge landed estates for themselves, and, with the assistance of the
English philosopher John Locke, drew up a plan, known as the Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina, which would have given them the power of feudal lords.
The scheme called for a three-tiered hereditary nobility--consisting of "proprietors,"
"landgraves," and "caciques"--who would own forty percent of the colony's land and
serve as a Council of Lords and recommend all laws to a parliament elected by small
landowners. But like other feudal visions, this one failed. South Carolina's settlers
rejected virtually all of this plan and immigrants refused to move to the region until
it was replaced by a more democratic system of government.
Emigrants from Barbados played a decisive role in South Carolina's early
settlement in 1679 and 1680, and brought black slaves with them. Within a decade,
they had found a staple crop--rice--which they could raise with slave labor. The grain
itself had probably come from West Africa and African slaves were already familiar
with rice cultivation. The result was to transform South Carolina into the mainland
society that bore the closest resemblance to the Caribbean. As early as 1708, slaves
actually outnumbered whites and by 1730 there were twice as many slaves as whites
in the colony. About a third of South Carolina's slaves during the early eighteenth
century were Indians.
The rapid growth in the slave population raised the specter of slave revolt. In
1739, the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in colonial America, took place
about twenty miles from Charleston. Led by a slave named Jemmy, the rebels
burned seven plantations and killed approximately 20 whites as they headed for
refuge in Spanish Florida. Within a day, however, the Stono rebels were captured
and killed by the white militia.
North Carolina was also the scene of some of the most bitter Indian-white
warfare. In 1711, after incidents in which whites had encroached on their land and
kidnapped Indians as slaves, the Tuscaroras destroyed New Bern. Over the next two
years, the colonial militia, assisted by the Yamassees, killed or enslaved a fifth of the
Tuscaroras. Many survivors subsequently migrated to New York, where they became
the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, in 1715, the Yamassees, finding
themselves increasingly in debt to white traders and merchants, allied themselves
with the Creeks and attempted to destroy the colony. With help from the Cherokees,
the colonial militia successfully repelled the offensive, largely ending Indian
resistance to white expansion in the Carolinas.
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Prior to the American Revolution, only one colony, Georgia, temporarily sought to
prohibit slavery, because the founders did not want a workforce that would compete
with the debtors they planned to transport from England. Settlers, however, illegally
imported slaves into the colony, forcing the proprietors to abandon the idea of a
slave-free colony.
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