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CHAPTER 2: The Invasion and Settlement of North America, 1550 – 1700

Indians are the rock, European peoples are the sea, and history seems a constant storm.

— Richard White, The Middle Ground(1991)

Establishing colonies in North America was not for the faint of heart. First came a long voyage over stormy, dangerous waters, where shipwrecks, spoiled food, and disease claimed many lives. Of 300 migrants to New France in 1663, seventy died en route. On arrival, the settlers had to build shelters, quickly plant crops, and survive an often dangerous climate. Two French Huguenots who migrated to Carolina in the 1670s protested they had “never before seen so miserable a country, nor an atmosphere so unhealthy. Fevers prevail all the year, from which those who are attacked seldom recover.” Many other migrants faced hostile Indian peoples. “We neither fear them nor trust them but rely on our musketeers,” declared Francis Higginson, a Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Still, despite great risks and uncertain rewards, thousands of English, French, and Spanish migrants crossed the Atlantic, driven from their homelands by wars, epidemics, and poverty. To escape the life that English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described in 1650 as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Europeans looked to America. There, an early explorer assured them, “every man may be master of his own labour and land … and by industry grow rich.”

For Native Americans, however, the intrusion of thousands of Europeans ended the world as they had long known it. Whether they came as settlers, fur traders, or missionaries, the Christian peoples and their African slaves brought new diseases and beliefs that threatened the Indians’ lives and cultures. “Our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, … and our coves were full of fish and fowl,” Narragansett chief Miantonomi recalled in 1642 of his peoples’ lands (in what is now Connecticut and Rhode Island), “but these English having gotten our land … their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.” Indeed, hogs brought to North America by the new arrivals and left to forage for their own food became a dynamic vehicle of English expansion, destroying traditional food sources such as corn fields as well as clam beds, and disrupting Indian communities. Miantonomi went to Long Island seeking other tribes to join together in a united resistance: “We [are] all Indians [and must] say brother to one another, … otherwise we shall all be gone shortly.” The chief’s fate — murdered in 1643 at the behest of officials of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—and his plea foretold the course of North American history: The European invaders would advance, enslaved Africans would endure, and Indian peoples would decline.

Rival Imperial Models: Spain, France, and Holland

In Mesoamerica and South America, the Spanish had seized the Indians’ lands, converted many Indians to Catholicism, and forced them to mine gold and farm large estates. In the sparsely populated eastern regions of North America, by contrast, the newly arrived French and Dutch merchants created fur-trading colonies, and the native peoples retained their lands and political autonomy (Figure 2.1). Whatever the Europeans’ colonial goals, Indian peoples diminished in numbers and those who remained soon sought to expel the invaders.

FIGURE 2.1: Chronology of European Colonies in the Americas

New Spain: Colonization and Conversion

In their ceaseless quest for gold, Spanish explorers penetrated deep into the present-day United States. In the 1540s, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado searched in vain for the legendary seven golden cities of Cibola; what he discovered was the Grand Canyon, the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, and the grasslands of Kansas. Meanwhile, Hernán de Soto and a force of 600 Spaniards were cutting a bloody swath across what is now northern Florida and Alabama, battling the Apalachee and the Coosa peoples but finding no gold (Map 2.1).

MAP 2.1: New Spain Looks North, 1513–1610

The search for gold drew Spanish explorers first to the Florida peninsula and then deep into the present-day United States. When the wide-ranging expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado failed to find gold or flourishing Indian civilizations, authorities in New Spain limited settlements in the northern territories to St. Augustine in Florida (to protect the treasure fleet) and Santa Fe in the upper Rio Grande Valley.

By the 1560s, Spanish officials had given up the search for gold and now began to focus on defending their empire. Roving English “sea dogs” were plundering Spanish treasure ships, and French Protestants were settling Florida. Following King Philip II’s order to cast out the Frenchmen “by the best means,” Spanish troops massacred 300 members of the “evil Lutheran sect” near the St. Johns River. To safeguard the route of its treasure fleet, Spain established a fort at St. Augustine in 1565, making it the first permanent European settlement in the future United States. However, raids by the Calusas and Timucuas wiped out a dozen other Spanish military outposts in Florida, and Algonquians destroyed Jesuit religious missions further north along the Atlantic coast, including one near the Chesapeake Bay.

Franciscan Missions and Indian Revolts

These military setbacks and the urgings of Franciscan friars prompted Spanish leaders to adopt a new policy of Christianizing the Indian peoples. The Comprehensive Orders for New Discoveries (1573) placed the task of pacification primarily in the hands of missionaries, not conquistadors. Over the next century, Franciscan friars set up missions among the Apalachees in Florida and the Pueblo peoples in the lands the Spanish named Nuevo México. The friars often learned Indian languages, but they also systematically attacked the natives’ culture. And their methods were anything but peaceful. Protected by Spanish soldiers, missionaries whipped Indians who continued to practice polygamy , smashed the Indians’ religious idols, and punished those who worshipped traditional gods. On one occasion, forty-seven “sorcerers” in Nuevo México were sold into slavery.

Religious conversion, cultural assimilation, and forced labor went hand in hand. The Franciscans encouraged the Indians to talk, cook, and dress like Spaniards. They ignored laws that protected the native peoples and allowed privileged Spanish land-owners (encomenderos) to extract goods and forced labor. The missions themselves depended on Indian workers to grow crops and carry them to market.

(A. 36-39)

A., Native Americans initially tolerated the Franciscans because they feared military reprisals and hoped to learn the friars’ spiritual secrets. But when Christian prayers failed to protect their communities from European diseases, droughts, and raids by nomadic Apaches and Pawnees, many Pueblos returned to their ancestral gods. As an Indian explained, the people of the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh refused to become “wet-heads” (as they called baptized Christians) “because with the water of baptism they would have to die.” In 1598, the tense relations between Indians and Spaniards exploded into open warfare. An expedition of 500 Spanish soldiers and settlers led by Juan de Oñate seized corn and clothing from the Pueblo peoples and murdered or raped those who resisted. When Indians of the Acoma pueblo retaliated by killing 11 soldiers, the Spanish troops destroyed the pueblo and murdered 800 men, women, and children. Now faced with bitterly hostile native peoples, most settlers left New Mexico. In 1610, the Spanish returned, founded the town of Santa Fe, and reestablished the missions and forced-labor system. Over the next two generations, European diseases, forced tribute, and raids by nomadic Indians from the Great Plains reduced the Pueblos’ population from 60,000 to just 17,000.

Popé and the Uprising of1680

In 1680, in a carefully coordinated rebellion, the Indian shaan Popé and his followers killed more than 400 Spaniards and forced 1,500 colonists (along with 500 Pueblo and Apache slaves) to flee 300 miles to El Paso. At Popé’s behest, the Pueblo peoples burned “the seeds which the Spaniards sowed” and planted “only maize and beans, which were the crops of their ancestors.” Repudiating Christianity, they desecrated churches and rebuilt the sacred kivas, the round stone structures in which they had long worshipped. Like many later Native American rebels, Popé marched forward while looking backward, seeking to restore the traditional way of life.

Madonna on Buffalo Hide, c. 1675

Even as the shaman Popé was successfully urging the Pueblo peoples to rebel against Spanish rule and revive traditional religious rituals, some Indians were embracing Christianity. A native artist painted the image of Christ’s mother on tanned bison hide and, in a sign of religious syncretism, gave the Virgin Mary the facial features of a Pueblo woman. Elisabeth Waldo-Denzel Art Collection.

It was not to be. A decade later, Spain reasserted control over most of the Pueblo peoples. The oppressed natives rebelled again in 1696 and were again subdued. Exhausted by a generation of warfare, the Pueblos agreed to a compromise that reduced the amount of forced labor. In return, they spoke Spanish, accepted a patrilineal kinship system, and helped defend Nuevo México against nomadic Apaches and Comanches. Some Pueblo women married Spaniards, and their offspring formed a bicultural mestizo population. But most Pueblos continued to practice the old ways, worshipping the Corn Mother as well as Jesus. As a Franciscan friar admitted, “They are still drawn more by their idolatry and infidelity than by the Christian doctrine.” Spain had maintained its northern empire, but had done so without assimilating the Indian peoples.

Spain experienced similar disappointment in Florida. In the early 1700s, English raiders from Carolina destroyed most of the Franciscan missions and killed or enslaved most Catholic converts. These setbacks persuaded imperial officials not to settle the distant northern province of California. Santa Fe and St. Augustine stood alone as the northern outposts of Spain’s American empire.

New France: Fur Traders and Missionaries

Far to the northeast, the French were confronting the 250,000 native peoples of eastern Canada — Cree-speaking Montagnais; Algonquian-speaking Micmacs, Ottawas, and Ojibwas; and Iroquois-speaking Hurons. In the 1530s, Jacques Cartier had claimed the lands bordering the Gulf of St. Lawrence for France. The first permanent settlement came in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain founded the fur-trading post of Quebec. But the colony languished until 1662, when King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1714) turned New France into a royal colony and subsidized the migration of indentured servants. French servants labored under contract for three years, received a salary, and could eventually lease a farm — far more generous terms than those for indentured servants in the English colonies.

Nonetheless, few people moved to New France, a cold and forbidding country “at the end of the world,” as one migrant put it. Also, state policies discouraged migration. More intent on expanding Frances boundaries in Europe than on encouraging overseas settlements, Louis XIV drafted tens of thousands of men into military service. The Catholic monarch also barred Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) from migrating to New France, fearing they might win converts and take control of the colony. Moreover, the French legal system gave peasants strong rights to their village lands, whereas migrants to New France faced an oppressive, aristocracy-and church-dominated feudal system. In the village of Saint Ours in Quebec’s fertile Richelieu Valley, for example, peasants paid 45 percent of their wheat crop to nobles and the Catholic Church. By 1698, only 15,200 Europeans lived in New France, compared to 100,000 in England’s North American colonies.

Lacking settlers to farm the land, New France developed as a vast enterprise for acquiring furs. Furs — mink, otter, and beaver — were in great demand in Europe to make felt hats and fur garments. To secure plush beaver pelts from the Hurons, who controlled trade north of the Great Lakes, Champlain provided them with manufactures (see Voices from Abroad, p. 41). Selling pelts, an Indian told a French priest, “makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread.” It also made guns, which Champlain sold to the Hurons to fight the expansionist-minded Five Nations of New York. Searching for more furs, explorer Jacques Marquette reached the Mississippi River in present-day Wisconsin in 1673 and floated south on the river as far as Arkansas. Then, in 1681, Robert de La Salle traveled down the majestic river to the Gulf of Mexico, trading as he went. As a French priest noted with disgust, La Salle and his associates hoped “to buy all the Furs and Skins of the remotest Savages, who, as they thought, did not know their Value; and so enrich themselves in one single voyage.” To honor Louis XIV, La Salle named the region Louisiana; by 1718, French merchants had founded the port of New Orleans where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

(A. 39-41)

A., VOICES FROM ABROAD: Going to War with the Hurons

samuel de champlain

Samuel de Champlain is best known as the founder of Quebec, but he was primarily a soldier and an adventurer. After fighting in the religious wars within France, Champlain joined the Company of New France. To ensure French access to the fur trade, he joined the Hurons in a raid against the Iroquois in 1609, which he later described in a book of his American adventures.

Pursuing our route, I met some two or three hundred savages, who were … called Ochasteguins [Hurons] and Algonquins, on their way to Quebec to assist us in exploring the territory of the Iroquois, with whom they are in deadly hostility…. [Together we] went to the mouth of the River of the Iroquois [the Richelieu, where it joins the Saint Lawrence River], where we stayed two days, refreshing ourselves with good venison, birds, and fish, which the savages gave us.

In all their encampments, they have their Pilotois, or Ostemoy, a class of persons who play the part of soothsayers, in whom these people have faith. One of these builds a cabin, surrounds it with small pieces of wood and covers it with his robe: after it is built, he places himself inside, so as not to be seen at all, when he seizes and shakes one of the posts of his cabin, muttering some words between his teeth, by which he says he invokes the devil, who appears to him in the form of a stone, and tells them whether they will meet their enemies and kill many of them …. They frequently told me that the shaking of the cabin, which I saw, proceeded from the devil, who made it move, and not the man inside, although I could see the contrary ….

Now, as we began to approach within two or three days’ journey of the abode of our enemies, we advanced only at night…. By day, they withdraw into the interior of the woods, where they rest, without straying off, neither making any noise [or fire], even for the sake of cooking, so as not to be noticed in case their enemies should by accident pass by ….

In order to ascertain what was to be the result of their undertaking, they often asked me if I had had a dream, and seen their enemies, to which I replied in the negative…. [Then one night] while sleeping, I dreamed that I saw our enemies, the Iroquois, drowning near a mountain, within sight. When I expressed a wish to help them, our allies, the savages, told me we must let them all die …. This, upon being related [to our allies], gave them so much confidence that they did not doubt any longer that good was to happen to them ….

[After our victory] they took one of the prisoners …. They commanded him to sing, if he had courage, which he did; but it was a very sad song.

Meanwhile, our men kindled a fire; and, when it was well burning, they brand, and burned this poor creature gradually, so as to make him suffer greater torment. Sometimes they stopped, and threw water on his back. Then they tore out his nails, and applied fire to the extremities of his fingers and private member. Afterwards, they flayed the top of his head, and had a kind of gum poured all hot upon it.

SOURCE: Samuel de Champlain, Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1618, ed. W. L. Grant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 79–86.

The Rise of the Iroquois

Despite their small numbers, the French settlers had a disastrous impact. Unwittingly introducing European diseases, they triggered epidemics that killed from 25 to 90 percent of many Indian peoples. Moreover, by bartering guns for furs, the French (and Dutch) sparked a series of deadly wars. The Five Nations of the Iroquois were the prime aggressors. From their strategic location in central New York, the Iroquois obtained guns and goods from Dutch merchants at Albany and attacked other Indian peoples. Iroquois warriors moved east along the Mohawk River as far as New England and south along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers as far as the Carolinas. They traveled north via Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River to Quebec. And they journeyed west via the Great Lakes to exploit the rich fur-bearing lands of the upper Mississippi River Valley.

The rise of the Iroquois was breathtakingly rapid. In 1600, the Iroquois numbered about 30,000 and lived in large towns of 500 to 2,000 inhabitants. Over the next two decades, they organized themselves into a confederation of five nations: Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. Partly in response to a virulent smallpox epidemic in 1633, which cut their number by one-third, the Iroquois waged a series of devastating wars against the Hurons (1649), Neutrals (1651), Eries (1657), and Susquehannocks (1660) — all Iroquoian-speaking peoples. They razed villages and killed most of the men, cooking and eating their flesh to gain access to their spiritual powers. They took thousands of women and children captive and ritually adopted them into Iroquois lineages. The conquered Hurons simply ceased to exist as a distinct people; survivors trekked westward with displaced Algonquian peoples and formed a new tribe, the Wyandots.

The Jesuit Missions

Between 1625 and 1763, hundreds of French priests lived among the Huron, Iroquois, and other Great Lakes peoples. Most were members of the Society of Jesus (or Jesuits), a Catholic religious order founded to combat the Protestant Reformation. The Jesuits — unlike the Spanish Franciscan monks — came to understand and respect the Indians’ values. One priest noted the Hurons’ belief that “our souls have desires which are inborn and concealed, yet are made known by means of dreams.” Many Indian peoples initially welcomed the French “Black Robes” as powerful spiritual beings with magical secrets, including the ability to forge iron. But when prayers to the Christian god did not protect them from disease, the Indians grew skeptical. A Peoria chief charged that a priest’s “fables are good only in his own country; we have our own [beliefs], which do not make us die as his do.” When a drought struck, Indians blamed the missionaries. “If you cannot make rain, they speak of nothing less than making away with you,” lamented one Jesuit.

Whatever the limits of their powers, the French Jesuits did not exploit Indian labor. Moreover, they tried to keep brandy, which wreaked havoc among the natives, from becoming a bargaining chip in the French fur trade. And the Jesuits won converts by adapting Christian beliefs to the Indians’ needs. In the 1690s, for example, the Jesuits introduced the cult of the Virgin Mary to the young women of the Illinois people. Its emphasis on chastity reinforced the existing Illinois belief that unmarried women were “masters of their own body.”

Despite the Jesuits’ efforts, however, the French fur trade brought cultural devastation. Epidemics killed tens of thousands of Indians, and pelt-hungry Iroquois warriors murdered thousands more. Nor did the Iroquois escape unscathed. Although they forged an alliance — the so-called Covenant Chain — with the English in New York in the 1670s, the French and their Algonquian allies invaded Iroquois lands in the 1690s, burned villages and cornfields, and killed many warriors. “Everywhere there was peril and everywhere mourning,” recalled an oral Iroquois legend.

New Netherland: Commerce

By every measure — wealth, trade, art, scholarship, naval prowess — the Dutch Republic was a powerhouse of seventeenth-century Europe. No small nation ever cast a bigger shadow. By 1600, Amsterdam had become the financial and commercial hub of northern Europe. Strategically located near the Baltic Sea and the mouth of the great Rhine River, the city boasted an enterprising class of merchants and entrepreneurs. Dutch financiers dominated the European banking, insurance, and textile industries; Dutch merchants owned more ships and employed more sailors than did the combined fleets of England, France, and Spain. Indeed, the Dutch managed much of the world’s commerce. During their struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal (ruled by Spanish monarchs, 1580–1640), the Dutch seized Portuguese forts in Africa and Indonesia and sugar plantations in Brazil. These conquests gave the Dutch control of the Atlantic trade in slaves and sugar and the Indian Ocean commerce in East Indian spices and Chinese silks and ceramics.

In 1609, Dutch merchants dispatched the English mariner Henry Hudson to locate a navigable route to the riches of the East Indies. What he found as he probed the rivers of northeast America was a fur bonanza. Following Hudson’s exploration of the river that now bears his name, the merchants built Fort Orange (Albany) in 1614 to trade for furs with the Munsee and Iroquois Indians. Then, in 1621, the Dutch government chartered the West India Company, which founded the colony of New Netherland, set up New Amsterdam (on Manhattan Island) as its capital, and brought in farmers and artisans to make the enterprise self-sustaining. The new colony did not thrive. The population of the Dutch Republic was too small to support much emigration—just 1.5 million people, compared to 5 million in Britain and 20 million in France — and its migrants sought riches in Southeast Asia rather than fur-trading profits in America. To protect its colony from rival European nations, the West India Company granted huge estates along the Hudson River to wealthy Dutchmen who promised to populate them. But by 1664, New Netherland had only 5,000 residents, and fewer than half of them were Dutch.

Like New France, New Netherland flourished as a fur-trading enterprise. Trade with the powerful Iroquois, though rocky at first, rose by 1635 to 16,300 pelts, a tidy business at 8 guilders a pelt in Amsterdam. Dutch settlers had less respect for their Algonquian-speaking neighbors. They seized prime farming land from the Algonquian peoples and took over their trading network, which exchanged corn and wampum from Long Island for furs from Maine. In response, in 1643 the Algonquians launched attacks that nearly destroyed the colony. “Almost every place is abandoned,” a settler lamented, “whilst the Indians daily threaten to overwhelm us.” To defeat the Algonquians, the Dutch waged vicious warfare — maiming, burning, and killing hundreds of men, women, and children — and formed an alliance with the Mohawks, who were no less brutal. The grim progression of Euro-Indian relations — an uneasy welcome, followed by rising tensions and war— afflicted even the Dutch, who had few designs on Indian lands or on their “unregenerate” souls and were only looking to do business.

(A. 41-44)

A., After the crippling Indian war, the West India Company ignored New Netherland, and expanded its profitable trade in African slaves and Brazilian sugar. In New Amsterdam, Governor Peter Stuyvesant ruled in an authoritarian fashion. He rejected the desmands of English Puritans on Long Island for a representative system of government and alienated the colony’s diverse Dutch, English, and Swedish residents. Consequently, the residents of New Netherland offered little resistance when England invaded the colony in 1664.

The Duke of York, the overlord of the new English colony of New York, initially ruled with a mild hand, allowing the Dutch residents to retain their property, legal system, and religious institutions. However, after the Dutch briefly recaptured the colony in 1673, the duke’s governor, Edmund Andros, shut down the Dutch courts, imposed English law, and demanded an oath of allegiance. Thereafter, Dutch residents largely avoided the English courts and resisted cultural assimilation: They spoke Dutch, married among themselves, and worshipped at the Dutch Reformed Church. Once dominant over the Algonquians, the Dutch had themselves become a subject people. As an English resident noted in 1699, New York “seemed rather like a conquered Foreign Province held by the terror of a Garrison, than an English colony.”

What were the colonial goals of the Spanish, French, and Dutch? How successful were they in achieving those goals?

What happened to the Five Nations of the Iroquois between 1600 and 1700? Were the Iroquois better off at the beginning of the period or at the end? Why?

The English Arrive in the Chesapeake

Unlike the Dutch and the French, the English founded colonies in North America that attracted thousands of settlers. But that was not the plan of the London investors who financed an expedition to Virginia in 1607. They expected to establish a trading outpost, like those recently set up in India, Sierra Leone, and Morocco, to buy gold or other valuable goods from the native peoples. Not finding such goods, the adventurers gradually created a tobacco-growing economy based on the labor of indentured English servants and enslaved Africans.

Settling the Tobacco Colonies

The first English ventures in North America were private enterprises, organized by minor nobles, merchants, and religious dissidents. Although the English monarch and ministry approved these ventures, they did not control them. Consequently, the English settlements, unlike the state-supervised Spanish and French colonies, enjoyed considerable autonomy and developed in markedly different ways.

The private ventures organized by the nobles were abject failures. In the 1580s, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s settlement in Newfoundland collapsed for lack of financing, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s colony along the coast of Maine floundered in the harsh climate. Sir Walter Raleigh’s three expeditions to North Carolina likewise ended in disaster when 117 settlers on Roanoke Island vanished without a trace. (Roanoke is still known as the “lost colony”)

The Jamestown Settlement

Merchants then took charge of English expansion. In 1606, King James I (r. 1603–1625) granted to the Virginia Company of London all the lands stretching from present-day North Carolina to southern New York. To honor the memory of Elizabeth I, the never-married “Virgin Queen,” the company’s directors named the region Virginia. For the Virginia Company, trade with the native population was the primary goal. So in 1607, it dispatched a group of male traders — no women, farmers, or ministers — who were employees of the company. They were to procure their own food and to ship gold, exotic crops, and Indian goods to England. Some traders were young gentlemen with personal ties to the company’s shareholders: a bunch of “unruly Sparks, packed off by their Friends to escape worse Destinies at home.” Others were cynical men looking for a quick profit: All they wanted, one of them said, was to “dig gold, refine gold, load gold.”

But there was no gold, and the traders fared poorly in their new environment. Arriving in Virginia after an exhausting four-month voyage, they settled on a swampy peninsula, which they named Jamestown to honor the king. There the adventurers lacked access to fresh water, refused to plant crops, and quickly died off; only 38 of the 120 men were alive nine months later. Death rates remained high: By 1611, the Virginia Company had dispatched 1,200 settlers to Jamestown, but fewer than half remained alive. “Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Fluxes, Burning Fevers, and by warres,” reported one of the settlement’s leaders, “but for the most part they died of meere famine.”

Powhatan, the paramount chief of the thirty tribal chiefdoms between the James and Potomac rivers, treated the English traders as potential allies and a source of valuable goods. The Powhatan chief spared the life of Captain John Smith, who had been taken captive by his brother Opechancanough, and provided the hungry English adventurers with corn. In return, he demanded that the English offer him tribute of “hatchets … bells, beads, and copper” as well as “two great guns” and become a dependent community within his chiefdom of Tsenacommacah. Subsequently, Powhatan arranged a marriage between his daughter Pocahontas and John Rolfe, an English colonist. But these tactics failed. Rolfe had imported tobacco seed from the West Indies and produced a crop of “pleasant, sweet, and strong Tobacco,” which fetched a high price in England and spurred the migration of thousands of English settlers. Now Powhatan accused the English of coming “not to trade but to invade my people and possess my country.”

To foster the flow of migrants, the Virginia Company allowed individual settlers to own land, granting 100 acres to every freeman and more to those who imported servants. The company also issued a “greate Charter” that created a system of representative government: The House of Burgesses, first convened in 1619, could make laws and levy taxes, although the governor and the company council in England could veto its acts. By 1622, land ownership, self-government, and a judicial system based on “the lawes of the realme of England” had attracted some 4,500 new recruits. To encourage a transition to a settler colony, the Virginia Company recruited dozens of “Maides young and uncorrupt to make wifes to the Inhabitants.”

The Indian War of 1622

The influx of land-hungry migrants and conversion-minded ministers into Virginia sparked an all-out conflict with the Indian peoples. The struggle began with an assault led by Opechancanough [O-pee-chan-KA-no], Powhatan’s younger brother and successor. In 1607, Opechancanough had attacked some of the first English invaders, killing many of them and capturing Captain John Smith. Subsequently, the Indian chief “stood aloof” from the English settlers and “would not be drawn to any Treaty.” In particular, he resisted English proposals to place Indian children in schools to be “brought upp in Christianytie.” Upon becoming the main chief in 1621, Opechancanough told the leader of the Potomacks: “Before the end of two moons, there should not be an Englishman in all their Countries.”

Opechancanough almost succeeded. In 1622, he coordinated a surprise attack by twelve Indian chiefdoms that killed 347 English settlers, nearly one-third of the white population. The English fought back by seizing the fields and food of those they now called “naked, tanned, deformed Savages,” and declared “a perpetual war without peace or truce” that lasted for a decade. They sold captured warriors into slavery, “destroy [ing] them who sought to destroy us” and taking control of “their cultivated places.”

Shocked by the Indian uprising, James I revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and, in 1624, made Virginia a royal colony. Now the king and his ministers appointed the governor and a small advisory council, retaining the House of Burgesses but stipulating that the king’s Privy Council (a committee of political advisors) must ratify all legislation. The king also decreed the legal establishment of the Church of England in the colony, which meant that residents had to pay taxes to support its clergy. These institutions — an appointed governor, an elected assembly, a formal legal system, and an established Anglican church — became the model for royal colonies throughout English America.

(A. 44-46)

A., Lord Baltimore Settles Catholics in Maryland

A second tobacco-growing colony, with a very different set of institutions, developed in neighboring Maryland. King Charles I (r. 1625–1649), James’s successor, was secretly sympathetic toward Catholicism. So in 1632, he granted the lands bordering the vast Chesapeake Bay to Catholic aristocrat Cecilius Calvert, who carried the title Lord Baltimore. As the territorial lord (or proprietor) of Maryland, Baltimore could sell, lease, or give away the land as he pleased. He also had the authority to appoint public officials and to found churches.

Lord Baltimore wanted Maryland to become a refuge for Catholics, who were subsject to persecution in England. In 1634, twenty gentlemen, mostly Catholics, and 200 artisans and laborers, mostly Protestants, established St. Mary’s City at the point where the Potomac River flows into Chesapeake Bay. To minimize religious confrontations, the proprietor instructed the governor (his brother, Leonard Calvert) to allow “no scan-dall nor offence to be given to any of the Protestants” and to “cause All Acts of Romane Catholicque Religion to be done as privately as may be.”

Maryland’s population grew quickly because the Calverts imported many artisans and offered ample lands to wealthy migrants. But political conflict threatened the colony’s stability. Disputing Baltimore’s lordly powers, settlers demanded that he govern in accordance with the “Advice, Assent, and Approbation” of the freemen. They elected a representative assembly and insisted on the right to initiate legislation, which Baltimore grudgingly granted. Anti-Catholic agitation by Protestants also threatened the Calverts’ religious goals. To protect his coreligionists, who remained a minority, Lord Baltimore persuaded the assembly to enact the Toleration Act (1649), which granted all Christians the right to follow their beliefs and hold church services.

In Maryland, as in Virginia, tobacco quickly became the main crop. Indians had long used tobacco as a medicine and a stimulant, and the English came to crave the nicotine it contained. By the 1620s, they were smoking, chewing, and snorting tobacco with abandon. James I initially condemned the plant as a “vile Weed” whose “black stinking fumes” were “baleful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.” But the king’s attitude changed as taxes on imported tobacco bolstered the royal treasury.

European demand for tobacco set off a forty-year economic boom in the Chesapeake region. “All our riches for the present do consist in tobacco” a planter remarked in 1630. Exports rose from 3 million pounds in 1640 to 10 million pounds in 1660. Initially most plantations were small freeholds , owned and farmed by families or male partners. But after 1650, wealthy migrants from gentry or noble families established large estates along the coastal rivers. Coming primarily from southern England, where tenants and wage laborers farmed large manors, they copied that hierarchical system by buying English indentured servants and enslaved Africans to work their lands.

For rich and poor alike, life in the Chesapeake was harsh. The scarcity of towns deprived settlers of community (Map 2.2 and Figure 2.2). Families were equally scarce because there were few women, and marriages often ended with the early death of a spouse. Pregnant women were especially vulnerable to malaria, which was spread by the mosquitoes that flourished in the warm climate. Many mothers died after bearing a first or second child, so orphaned children (along with unmarried young men) formed a large segment of the society. Sixty percent of the children born in Middlesex County, Virginia, before 1680 lost one or both parents before they were thirteen. Death was pervasive. Although 15,000 English migrants arrived in Virginia between 1622 and 1640, the colony’s population rose only from 2,000 to 8,000.

MAP 2.2: River Plantations in Virginia, c. 1640

The first migrants settled in widely dispersed plantations along the James River, a settlement pattern promoted by the tobacco economy. From their riverfront plantations wealthy planter-merchants could easily load heavy hogsheads of tobacco onto oceangoing ships, and offload supplies that they then sold to smallholding planters. Consequently, few substantial towns or trading centers developed in the Chesapeake region.

FIGURE 2.2: Environment and Death in Virginia, 1618–1624

Virginia was a deadly place for the English during the settlement’s first decades. About 28 percent of the residents died each year; the colony grew only because of a constant stream of migrants. Most settlers lived along the James River estuary and, as Map 2.2 and this figure show, their location along the river determined their chances of survival. Those who lived in the zone with a mix of freshwater and saltwater had the highest death rates by far. The inflow of salt water during the dry summer months (when the river’s freshwater volume decreased) trapped human and animal waste from upriver. That fecal matter contaminated the water and its fish, oysters, and crabs, leading to epidemics of typhoid and dysentery (which residents called “the bloody flux”).

(A. 46-49)

A.,

Masters, Servants, and Slaves

Still, the prospect of owning land continued to lure settlers. By 1700, more than 100,000 English migrants had come to Virginia and Maryland, mostly as indentured servants. Shipping registers from the English port of Bristol reveal the backgrounds of 5,000 embarking servants. Three-quarters were young men, many of them displaced by the enclosure of their village lands (see Chapter 1). They came to Bristol searching for work; once there, merchants persuaded them to sign contracts to labor in America. The indenture contracts bound the men — and the quarter who were women — to work for a master for four or five years, after which they would be free to marry and work for themselves.

Indentured Servitude

For merchants, servants were valuable cargo: Their contracts fetched high prices from Chesapeake (and West Indian) planters. For the plantation owners, indentured servants were an incredible bargain. During the tobacco boom, a male servant could produce five times his purchase price in a single year. To maximize their gains, most masters ruthlessly exploited servants, forcing them to work long hours, beating them without cause, and withholding permission to marry. If servants ran away or became pregnant, masters went to court to increase the term of their service. Female servants were especially vulnerable to abuse. A Virginia law of 1692 stated that “dissolute masters have gotten their maids with child; and yet claim the benefit of their service.” Planters got rid of uncooperative servants by selling their contracts. In Virginia, an Englishman remarked in disgust that “servants were sold up and down like horses.”

Most indentured servants in the Chesapeake colonies did not escape poverty. Half the men died before completing the term of their contract, and another quarter remained landless. Only one-quarter achieved their quest for property and respectability. Female servants generally fared better. Men had grown “very sensible of the Misfortune of Wanting Wives,” so many propertied planters married female servants. Thus, by migrating to the Chesapeake, a few—very fortunate — men and women escaped a life of landless poverty.

African Laborers

The first African workers in North America faced even worse prospects than indentured servants did. In 1619, John Rolfe noted that “a Dutch man of warre … sold us twenty Negars”— slaves originally shipped by the Portuguese from the port of Luanda in Angola. For a generation, the number of Africans remained small. About 400 Africans lived in the Chesapeake colonies in 1649, just 2 percent of the population. By 1670, that figure had reached 5 percent and, significantly, the growing numbers of Africans labored primarily for powerful men: members of the Virginia council and wealthy officers of county governments. Although most of these early African workers served their English masters for life, they were not legally enslaved. English common law did not acknowledge chattel slavery , the ownership of a human being as property. Also, some of these Africans came from the Kingdom of Kongo, where Portuguese missionaries had converted the king and some of his subjects to Christianity. Knowing the customs of Europeans, a few of these workers found ways to escape their bondage. Once free, some ambitious Africans even purchased slaves, bought the labor contracts of English servants, or married Englishwomen.

Social mobility for Africans ended in the 1660s with the collapse of the tobacco boom and the increasing political power of the gentry. Tobacco had once sold for 30 pence a pound; now it fetched less than one-tenth of that. The “low price of Tobacco requires it should bee made as cheap as possible” declared Virginia planter-politician Nicholas Spencer, and “blacks can make it cheaper than whites.” As they imported more African workers, the English-born political elite grew more race-conscious. Increasingly, Spencer and other leading legislators distinguished English from African residents by color (white-black) rather than by religion (Christian-pagan). By 1671, the Virginia House of Burgesses had forbidden Africans to own guns or join the militia. It also barred them —“tho baptized and enjoying their own Freedom”— from owning English servants. Being black was increasingly a mark of inferior legal status, and slavery was fast becoming a permanent and hereditary condition. As an English clergyman observed, “These two words, Negro and Slave had by custom grown Homogeneous and convertible.”

Bacon’s Rebellion

As the tobacco boom went bust, long-standing social conflicts flared into political turmoil. Falling tobacco prices signaled an imbalanced market; exports doubled between 1670 and 1700, outstripping European demand. But the falling prices also reflected Parliament’s passage of Acts of Trade and Navigation in 1651, 1660, and 1663. The Navigation Acts allowed only English or colonial-owned ships to enter American ports, thereby excluding Dutch merchants, who paid the highest prices for tobacco, sold the best goods, and provided the cheapest shipping services. The legislation also required colonists to ship tobacco, sugar, and other “enumerated articles” only to England, where monarchs continually raised import duties, stifling market demand. By the 1670s, tobacco planters were getting just a penny a pound for their crop; one Virginian grumbled that the planters had become mere “beneficial Slaves” to England’s merchants and monarch.

The Seeds of Social Revolt

Despite the low prices, Virginians continued to plant tobacco because there was no other cash crop. To preserve soil fertility without costly manuring, yeomen adopted a long-fallow system (rotating fields over a twenty-year cycle) and pocketed just enough income to scrape by. Worse off were newly freed indentured servants, who could not earn enough to buy tools and seed or to pay the fees required to exercise their right to 50 acres of land. Many ex-servants had to sell their labor again, either signing new indentures or becoming wage workers or tenant farmers.

Consequently, after 1670, a planter-merchant elite dominated the Chesapeake colonies. By securing grants from royal governors, they owned nearly half of all settled land in Virginia. Like the English gentry, the planter-merchants leased these large estates to the ever-more-numerous group of former servants. Other well-to-do planters became commercial middlemen and moneylenders, setting up stores that sold imported goods and charging commissions for shipping tobacco grown by smallholding farmers. In Maryland, well-connected Catholic planters were equally powerful; by 1720, one of those planters, Charles Carroll, owned 47,000 acres of land, which was farmed by scores of tenants, indentured servants, and slaves.

William Berkeley, governor of Virginia between 1642 and 1652 and again after 1660, set the stage for conflict. A corrupt man with equally corrupt allies, Berkeley bestowed large land grants on members of his council. The councilors promptly exempted these lands from taxation and appointed friends as local justices of the peace and county judges. To win support in the House of Burgesses, Berkeley bought off legislators with land grants and lucrative appointments as sheriffs and tax collectors. But social unrest erupted when the Burgesses took the vote away from landless freemen, who by now constituted half the adult white men. Property-holding yeomen retained their voting rights, but were angered by falling tobacco prices, political corruption, and “grievous taxations” that threatened the “utter ruin of us the poor commonalty.” Berkeley and his gentry allies were living on borrowed time.

Indians and Frontiersmen

As the aggressive planter-entrepreneurs of Virginia confronted a multitude of free, young, and landless laborers, armed political conflict broke out during the 1670s. This struggle would leave a complex legacy: a decrease in class conflict among whites, violent campaigns against neighboring Indians, and increasing racial divisions because of massive imports of enslaved Africans.

An Indian conflict ignited the flame of social rebellion. In 1607, when the English intruded, 30,000 Native Americans resided in Virginia; by 1675, the native population had dwindled to only 3,500. By then, Europeans numbered some 38,000 and Africans another 2,500. Most Indians lived on treaty-guaranteed territory along the frontier, where poor freeholders and landless former servants now wanted to settle. They demanded that the natives be expelled or exterminated. Opposition to expansion came from wealthy river-valley planters, who wanted a ready supply of tenant farmers and wage laborers, and from Governor Berkeley and the planter-merchants, who traded with the Occaneechee Indians for beaver pelts and deerskins.

Fighting broke out late in 1675, when a vigilante band of Virginia militiamen murdered 30 Indians. Defying Berkeley’s orders, a larger force of 1,000 militiamen then surrounded a fortified Susquehannock village and killed five chiefs who came out to negotiate. The Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks, recent migrants to the Chesapeake region from Pennsylvania, retaliated by attacking outlying plantations and killing 300 whites. In response, Berkeley proposed a defensive military strategy: a series of frontier forts to deter Indian intrusions. The settlers dismissed this scheme as a militarily useless plot by planter-merchants to impose high taxes and take “all our tobacco into their own hands.”

Nathaniel Bacon, Rebel Leader

Nathaniel Bacon, a young, well-connected migrant from England, emerged as the leader of the rebels. Bacon held a position on the governors council, but as the owner of a frontier estate, he differed with Berkeley on Indian policy. When the governor refused to grant him a military commission, Bacon mobilized his neighbors and attacked any Indians he could find. Condemning the frontiersmen as “rebels and mutineers,” Berkeley expelled Bacon from the council and had him arrested. But Bacons army forced the governor to release their leader and to hold legislative elections. The newly elected House of Burgesses enacted far-reaching political reforms that not only curbed the powers of the governor and council but also restored voting rights to landless freemen.

These much-needed reforms came too late. Bacon remained bitter toward Berkeley, and poor farmers and servants resented years of exploitation by wealthy planters, arrogant justices of the peace, and “wicked & pernicious Counsellors.” As one yeoman rebel complained, “A poor man who has only his labour to maintain himself and his family pays as much [in taxes] as a man who has 20,000 acres.” Backed by 400 armed men, Bacon issued a “Manifesto and Declaration of the People” that demanded the death or removal of the Indians and an end to the rule of wealthy “parasites.” “All the power and sway is got into the hands of the rich,” Bacon proclaimed as his army burned Jamestown to the ground and plundered the plantations of Berkeley’s allies. When Bacon died suddenly of dysentery in October 1676, the governor took revenge, dispersing the rebel army, seizing the estates of well-to-do rebels, and hanging 23 men.

(A. 49-52)

A.,

Nathaniel Bacon

Condemned as a rebel and a traitor in his own time, Nathaniel Bacon emerged in the late nineteenth century as a Southern hero, a harbinger of the Confederate rebels of 1860–1865. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, founded in 1888, commissioned this stained-glass window depicting Bacon in dual guises of a well-dressed gentleman and a rebel in body armor. Installing Bacon’s portrait in a window of the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg (built by Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1715) explained a leading member of the association, would connect “present Virginia with her great and noble past” and commemorate those who shed their “blood for Virginia and the South.” The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

What were the various systems of bound labor that took hold in the Chesapeake colonies? What accounts for their appearance?

Compare the Indian uprising in Virginia in 1622 with Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675. What were the consequences of each for Virginia’s development?

Bacons Rebellion was a pivotal event in the history of the Chesapeake colonies. Thereafter, landed planters retained their dominance by curbing corruption and appointing ambitious yeomen to public office. They appeased yeomen and tenants by cutting taxes and expelling the Susquehannocks, Piscataways, and other Indian peoples from the region. Most important, planters forestalled another rebellion by poor whites by cutting the use of indentured servants and instead importing thousands of African laborers; the Burgesses explicitly legalized chattel slavery in 1705. Those fateful decisions committed subsequent generations of Americans to a social system based on racial exploitation.

Puritan New England

As people scrambled for wealth in the Chesapeake, Puritans created colonies in New England that had strong spiritual goals. Between 1620 and 1640, thousands of Puritans fled to America seeking land and religious freedom. By distributing land broadly, they built a society of independent farm families. And by establishing a “holy commonwealth,” Puritans tried to preserve a “pure” Christian faith. Their “errand into the wilderness” gave a moral dimension to American history that survives today.

The Puritan Migration

New England differed from other European colonies. Unruly male adventurers founded New Spain and Jamestown, and male traders dominated life in New France and New Netherland. By contrast, the leaders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were pious Protestants, and the settlers included women and children as well as men (Map 2.3).

MAP 2.3: The Puritan Migration to America, 1620–1640

Forty-five thousand Puritans left England for America and the West Indies between 1620 and 1640, but they created religion-based colonies only in New England — at Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut. Migrants from the three major centers of Puritanism in England —Yorkshire, East Anglia, and the West Country—commonly settled among those from their own region. Often they named American communities after their English towns of origin and tried to live as they had in Old England. For example, settlers from Rowley in Yorkshire transplanted their customary system of open-field agriculture to Rowley in Massachusetts Bay.

The Pilgrims

The Pilgrims were religious separatists — Puritans who had left the Church of England. When King James I threatened to drive Puritans “out of the land, or else do worse,” some Puritans chose to live among Dutch Calvinists in Holland. Subsequently, 35 of these exiles resolved to maintain their English identity by moving to America. Led by William Bradford and joined by 67 migrants from England, the Pilgrims sailed to America in 1620 aboard the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth, near Cape Cod in southeastern Massachusetts. Because they lacked a royal charter, their leader explained, we “combine [d] ourselves together into a civill body politick” This Mayflower Compact used the Puritans’ self-governing religious congregation as the model for their political structure.

The first winter in Plymouth tested the Pilgrims. Of the 102 migrants who arrived in November, only half survived until spring. Thereafter Plymouth became a healthy and thriving community, as the cold climate inhibited the spread of mosquito-borne disease, and the Pilgrims’ religious discipline encouraged a strong work ethic. Moreover, a smallpox epidemic in 1618 had killed most of the local Wampanoag people, so the migrants faced few external threats. The Pilgrims built solid houses and planted ample crops, and their numbers grew rapidly. By 1640, there were 3,000 settlers in Plymouth. To ensure political stability, they issued a written legal code that provided for representative self-government, broad political rights, property ownership, and religious freedom of conscience.

Meanwhile, England plunged deeper into religious turmoil. When King Charles I repudiated certain Protestant doctrines, including the role of grace in salvation, English Puritans, now powerful in Parliament, accused the king of “popery”— of holding Catholic beliefs. In 1629, Charles dissolved Parliament, claimed the authority to rule by “divine right,” and raised money through royal edicts and the sale of monopolies. When Archbishop William Laud, whom Charles chose to head the Church of England, dismissed hundreds of dissident ministers, thousands of Puritan families fled to America.

John Winthrop and Massachusetts Bay

The Puritan exodus began in 1630 with the departure of 900 migrants led by John Winthrop, a well-educated country squire who became the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Calling England morally corrupt and “overburdened with people,” Winthrop sought land for his children and a place in Christian history for his people. “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill” Winthrop told the migrants. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans envisioned a reformed Christian society with “authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity in the church,” as minister John Cotton put it. By creating a genuinely “New” England, they hoped to inspire religious reform throughout Christendom.

(A. 52-55)

A., Winthrop and his associates governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony from the town of Boston. They transformed their joint-stock corporation , the General Court of shareholders, into a representative political system with a governor, council, and assembly. To ensure rule by the godly, the Puritans limited the right to vote and hold office to men who were church members. Rejecting the Plymouth Colony’s policy of religious tolerance, the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Puritanism as the state-supported religion, barred other faiths from conducting services, and used the Bible as a legal guide. “Where there is no Law,” they said, magistrates should rule “as near the law of God as they can.” Over the next decade, about 10,000 Puritans migrated to the colony, along with 10,000 others fleeing hard times in England.

The New England Puritans sought to emulate the simplicity of the first Christians. Seeing bishops as “traitours unto God,” they placed power in the congregation of members — hence the name Congregationalist for their churches. Inspired by John Calvin, many Puritans embraced predestination, the doctrine that God chose (before their birth) only a few men and women for salvation. Church members often lived in great anxiety, worried that God had not placed them among these “elect.” Some hoped for a conversion experience, the intense sensation of receiving God’s grace and being “born again.” Other Puritans relied on “preparation,” the confidence in salvation that came from spiritual guidance by their ministers. Still others believed that they were God’s chosen people, the new Israelites, and would be saved if they obeyed his laws.

Roger Williams and Rhode Island

To maintain God’s favor, the Massachusetts Bay magistrates purged their society of religious dissidents. One target was Roger Williams, the Puritan minister in Salem, a coastal town north of Boston. Williams opposed the decision to establish Congregationalism as the official religion and praised the Pilgrims’ separation of church and state. He advocated toleration, arguing that political magistrates had authority over only the “bodies, goods, and outward estates of men,” not their spiritual lives. Williams also questioned the Puritans’ seizure of Indian lands. The magistrates banished him from the colony in 1636.

Williams and his followers settled 50 miles south of Boston, founding the town of Providence on land purchased from the Narragansett Indians. Other religious dissidents settled nearby at Portsmouth and Newport. In 1644, these settlers obtained a corporate charter from Parliament for a new colony — Rhode Island — with full authority to rule themselves. In Rhode Island, as in Plymouth, there was no legally established church, and individuals could worship God as they pleased.

Anne Hutchinson

The Massachusetts Bay magistrates saw a second threat to their authority in Anne Hutchinson. The wife of a merchant and mother of seven, Hutchinson held weekly prayer meetings for women and accused various Boston clergymen of placing undue emphasis on good behavior. Like Martin Luther, Hutchinson denied that salvation could be earned through good deeds: There was no “covenant of works”; God bestowed salvation only through the “covenant of grace.” Hutchinson likewise declared that God “revealed” divine truth directly to individual believers, a controversial doctrine that the Puritan magistrates denounced as heretical.

The magistrates also resented Hutchinson because of her sex. Like other Christians, Puritans believed that both men and women could be saved. But gender equality stopped there. Women were inferior to men in earthly affairs, said leading Puritan divines, who told married women: “Thy desires shall bee subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Puritan women could not be ministers or lay preachers, nor could they vote in church affairs. As Pilgrim minister John Robinson put it, women “are debarred by their sex from ordinary prophesying, and from any other dealing in the church wherein they take authority over the man.” In 1637, the magistrates accused Hutchinson of teaching that inward grace freed an individual from the rules of the church and found her guilty of holding heretical views. Banished, she followed Roger Williams into exile in Rhode Island.

Such coercive policies and a quest for better farming land prompted some Puritans to move to the Connecticut River Valley. In 1636, pastor Thomas Hooker and his congregation established the town of Hartford, and other Puritans settled along the river at Wethersfield and Windsor. In 1660, they secured a charter from King Charles II (r. 1660–1685) for the self-governing colony of Connecticut. Like Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut had a legally established church and an elected governor and assembly; however, it granted voting rights to most property-owning men, not just to church members as in the original Puritan colony.

The Puritan Revolution in England

Meanwhile, a religious civil war had engulfed England. Archbishop Laud had imposed the Church of England prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637; five years later, a rebel Scottish army invaded England. Thousands of English Puritans (and hundreds of American Puritans) joined the Scots, demanding religious reform and parliamentary power. After years of civil war, parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell emerged victorious. In 1649, Parliament executed King Charles I, proclaimed a republican commonwealth, and banished bishops and elaborate rituals from the Church of England.

The Puritan triumph in England was short-lived. Popular support for the Commonwealth ebbed after Cromwell took dictatorial control in 1653. Following his death in 1658, moderate Protestants and a resurgent aristocracy restored the monarchy and the hierarchy of bishops. For many Puritans, Charles II’s accession to the throne in 1660 represented the coming of Antichrist, the false prophesying “beast” described in the biblical Book of Revelation.

For the Puritans in America, the restoration of the monarchy began a new phase of their “errand into the wilderness.” They had come to New England to preserve the “pure” Christian church, expecting to return to Europe in triumph. When the failure of the English Revolution dashed that sacred mission, ministers exhorted congregations to create a godly republican society in America. The Puritan colonies now stood as outposts of Calvinism and the Atlantic republican tradition.

Puritanism and Witchcraft

Like Native Americans, Puritans believed that the physical world was full of supernatural forces. Devout Christians saw signs of God’s (or Satan’s) power in blazing stars, birth defects, and other unusual events. Noting after a storm that the houses of many ministers “had been smitten with Lightning,” Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan theologian, wondered “what the meaning of God should be in it.”

Belief in “forces” and “spirits” stemmed in part from Christian teachings — the Catholic belief in miracles, for example, and the Protestant faith in grace. It also reflected pagan influence. Samuel Sewall, a well-educated Puritan merchant and judge, fended off evil spirits by driving a metal pin into his new house. And thousands of farmers — Puritan saints as well as non-church members — followed pagan astrological charts printed in almanacs to determine the best times to plant crops, marry off their children, and take other important actions.

Zealous Puritan ministers and laypeople attacked these practices as “superstition” and condemned “cunning” individuals who claimed powers as healers or prophets. Indeed, many believed such conjurers were Satan’s “wizards” or “witches.” People in the town of Andover “were much addicted to sorcery,” claimed one observer, and “there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as well as any astrologer.” Between 1647 and 1662, civil authorities in New England hanged 14 people for witchcraft, most of them older women accused of being “double-tongued” or of having “an unruly spirit.”

The most dramatic episode of witch-hunting occurred in Salem in 1692. Several girls who had experienced strange seizures accused neighbors of bewitching them. When judges at the accused witches’ trials allowed the use of “spectral” evidence—visions of evil beings and marks seen only by the girls — the accusations spun out of control. Eventually, Massachusetts Bay authorities tried 175 people for witchcraft and executed 19 of them. The causes of this mass hysteria were complex and are still debated. Some historians point to group rivalries: Many accusers were the daughters or servants of poor farmers, whereas many of the alleged witches were wealthier church members or their friends. Because 18 of those put to death were women, other historians see the episode as part of a broader Puritan effort to subordinate women. Still others focus on political instability in Massachusetts Bay in the early 1690s and on fears raised by recent Indian attacks in nearby Maine, which had killed the parents of some of the young accusers. It is likely that all of these causes played some role in the executions.

(A. 55-57)

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The Protestant Almanack, 1700

The conflict between Protestants and Catholics took many forms. To reinforce the religious identity of English Protestants, a writer using the pseudonym “Philopretes” published this almanac that charted not only the passage of the seasons (and the influence of the pagan signs of the “Zodiack”) but also the “Pernicious Revolutions of the Papacy against the Lord and his Anointed.” By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Whatever the cause, the Salem episode marked a major turning point. Shaken by the number of deaths, government officials now discouraged legal prosecutions for witchcraft. Moreover, many influential people embraced the outlook of the European Enlightenment, a major intellectual movement that began around 1675 and promoted a rational, scientific view of the world. Increasingly, educated men and women explained strange happenings and sudden deaths by reference to “natural causes,” not witchcraft. Unlike Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who believed that lightning was a supernatural sign, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and other well-read men of his generation would investigate it as a natural phenomenon.

A Yeoman Society, 1630–1700

In building their communities, New England Puritans consciously rejected the feudal practices of English society. Many Puritans came from middling families in East Anglia, a region of pasture lands and few manors, and had no desire to live as tenants of wealthy aristocrats or submit to oppressive taxation by a distant government. They had “escaped out of the pollutions of the world,” the settlers of Watertown in Massachusetts Bay declared, and vowed to live “close togither” in self-governing communities. Accordingly, the General Courts of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut bestowed land on groups of settlers, or proprietors , who then distributed it among the male heads of families.

Widespread ownership of land did not mean equality of wealth or status. “God had Ordained different degrees and orders of men,” proclaimed Boston merchant John Saffin, “some to be Masters and Commanders, others to be Subjects, and to be commanded.” Town proprietors normally awarded the largest plots to men of high social status who often became selectmen and justices of the peace. However, all families received some land, and most adult men had a vote in the town meeting , the main institution of local government.

In this society of independent households and self-governing communities, ordinary farmers had much more political power than Chesapeake yeomen and European peasants did. Although Nathaniel Fish was one of the poorest men in the town of Barnstable — he owned just a two-room cottage, 8 acres of land, an ox, and a cow —he was a voting member of the town meeting. Each year, Fish and other Barnstable farmers levied taxes; enacted ordinances governing fencing, road building, and the use of common fields; and chose the selectmen who managed town affairs. The farmers also selected the town’s representatives to the General Court, which gradually displaced the governor as the center of political authority. For Fish and thousands of other ordinary settlers, New England had proved to be a new world of opportunity.

Why did the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay create an established church and persecute dissenters when they had fled England to escape those things?

What was the social and political structure of the New England colonies? Why did they develop in that fashion?

The Eastern Indians’ New World

Native Americans also lived in a new world, but for them, it was a bleak and dangerous place. In New England, an observer reported, so many Indians were stricken in a smallpox epidemic that they were “not able to help one another, no not to make a fire nor fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead.” Those Indians who survived lacked the numbers to retain their ancestral lands. However, some Indian peoples, most prominently the Iroquois, used European weapons to resist the intruders and dominate other tribes. Other native peoples retreated into the mountains or moved westward to preserve their traditional cultures.

Puritans and Pequots

As the Puritans embarked for New England, they pondered the morality of acquiring Native American lands. “By what right or warrant can we enter into the land of the Savages?” they asked themselves. Responding to such concerns, John Winthrop detected God’s hand in a recent smallpox epidemic: “If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts,” he asked, “why doth he still make roome for us by diminishing them as we increase?” Citing the Book of Genesis, the Massachusetts Bay magistrates argued that the Indians had not “subdued” their land and thereofre had no “just right” to it. Decades later, political philosopher John Locke would offer the same justification.

Believing they were God’s chosen people, the Puritans often treated Native Americans with a brutality equal to that of the Spanish conquistadors and Nathaniel Bacons frontiersmen. When Pequot warriors resisted English encroachment onto their Connecticut River Valley lands in 1636, a Puritan militia attacked a Pequot village and massacred some 500 men, women, and children. “God laughed at the Enemies of his People,” one soldier boasted, “filling the Place with Dead Bodies.”

English Puritans saw the Indians as “savages” who were culturally, though not racially, inferior. To their minds, Europeans and Native Americans were genetically the same; sin, not race, accounted for their degeneracy. “Probably the devil” delivered these “miserable savages” to America, Cotton Mather suggested, “in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here.” To convert Indians to Christianity, Puritan minister John Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian. Only a few Native Americans became full members of Puritan congregations, because of the rigorous admission standards. However, Eliot and other ministers turned fourteen Indian villages, such as Natick (Massachusetts) and Maanexit (Connecticut), into praying towns . Like the Franciscan missions in New Mexico, these towns were intended as intensely Christian communities. By 1670, more than 1,000 Indians lived in these settlements, losing their independence and traditional culture but, by infusing their churches with traditional spiritual beliefs, creating new native forms of Christianity.

Metacom’s War of 1675–1676

By the 1670s, Europeans in New England outnumbered Indians by three to one. The English population had multiplied to 55,000, while native peoples had diminished — from an estimated 120,000 in 1570 to 70,000 in 1620, to barely 16,000. To the Wampanoag leader Metacom (also known as King Philip) the prospects for coexistence looked dim. When his people copied English ways by raising hogs and selling pork in Boston, Puritan officials accused them of selling at “an under rate” and restricted their trade. When Indians killed wandering hogs that devastated their cornfields, authorities prosecuted them for violating English property rights.

(A. 57-60)

A., Metacom (King Philip), Chief of the Wampanoags

The Indian War of 1675–1676 left an indelible mark on the history of New England. This painting from the 1850s, done on semitransparent cloth and lit from behind for effect, was used by traveling performers to tell the story of King Philip’s War. Notice that Metacom is pictured not as a savage but as a dignified man. No longer in danger of Indian attack, nineteenth-century whites in New England adopted a romanticized version of their region’s often brutal history. © Shelburne Museum, Shelburne Vermont.

Like Opechancanough in Virginia and Popé in New Mexico, Metacom concluded that the Europeans had to be expelled. In 1675, the Wampanoags’ leader forged a military alliance with the Narragansetts and Nipmucks and attacked white settlements throughout New England. Almost every day, settler William Harris fearfully reported, he heard new reports of the Indians’ “burneing houses, takeing cattell, killing men & women & Children: & carrying others captive” (see American Voices, p. 61). Bitter fighting continued into 1676, as the Indians exploited their strategic control of large tracts of territory and most of the rivers. It ended only when the Indian warriors ran short of gunpowder and the Massachusetts Bay government hired Mohegan and Mohawk warriors, who killed Metacom.

Metacom’s War of 1675–1676 (which English settlers also called King Philip’s War) was a deadly affair. Indians destroyed one-fifth of the English towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and killed 1,000 settlers, nearly 5 percent of the adult population. The Puritan experiment hung in the balance. Had “the Indeans not been divided,” remarked one settler, “they might have forced us [to evacuate] to Som Islands: & there to have planted a little Corne, & fished for our liveings.” But the natives’ losses — from famine and disease, death in battle, and sale into slavery—were much larger: About 4,500 Indians died, one-quarter of an already-diminished population. Many of the surviving Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck peoples migrated into the backcountry, where they intermarried with Algonquian tribes allied to the French. Over the next century, these displaced Indian peoples would take their revenge, joining with French Catholics to attack their Puritan enemies.

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AMERICAN VOICES: A Captivity Narrative

mary rowlandson

Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife in Lancaster, Massachusetts, was one of many settlers taken captive during Metacom’s War. She spent twelve weeks in captivity before being ransomed by her family for the considerable sum of £20. Her account of this ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), was written in part to assert her moral purity (that she had not been sexually exploited) so that she could again live as a respectable Puritan woman. But Rowlandson’s dramatic and literary skills made her short book one of the most popular prose works of its time.

On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: their first coming was about sunrising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven…. [T]he Indians laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and the children another, and said, “Come go along with us”; I told them they would kill me: they answered, if I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me ….

The first week of my being among them I hardly ate any thing; the second week I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash; but the third week … they were sweet and savory to my taste. I was at this time knitting a pair of white cotton stockings for my [Indian] mistress; and had not yet wrought upon a sabbath day. When the sabbath came they bade me go to work. I told them it was the sabbath-day, and desired them to let me rest, and told them I would do as much more tomorrow; to which they answered me they would break my face ….

During my abode in this place, Philip [Metacom] spake to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling. I offered the money to my master, but he bade me keep it; and with it I bought a piece of horse flesh. Afterwards he asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner. I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big as two fingers. It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life ….

My master had three squaws, living sometimes with one, and sometimes with another one …. [It] was Weetamoo with whom I had lived and served all this while. A severe and proud dame she was, bestowing every day in dressing herself near as much time as any of the gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands. When she had dressed herself, her work was to make girdles of wampom and beads ….

On Tuesday morning they called their general court (as they call it) to consult and determine, whether I should go home or no. And they all as one man did seemingly consent to it, that I should go home.

SOURCE: C. H. Lincoln, ed., Original Narratives of Early American History: Narratives of Indian Wars, 1675–1699 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952), 14: 139–141.

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The Hurons’ Feast of the Dead

Hurons buried their dead in temporary raised tombs so they could easily care for their spirits. When they moved their villages in search of fertile soil and better hunting, the Hurons held a Feast of the Dead and reburied the bones of their own deceased and often bones from other villages in a common pit lined with beaver robes. This solemn ceremony united living as well as dead clan members, strengthening the bonds of the Huron Confederacy. It also was believed to release the spirits of the dead, allowing them to travel to the land where the first Huron, Aataentsic, fell from the sky, “made earth and man,” and lived with her son and assistant, louskeha. Library of Congress.

The Destructive Impact of the Fur Trade

As English towns filled the river valleys along the Atlantic coast, the Indians in the great forested areas beyond the Appalachian Mountains remained independent. Yet the distant Indian peoples — the Iroquois, Ottawas, Crees, Illinois, and many others — felt the European presence through the fur trade. As they bargained for woolen blankets, iron cookware, knives, and guns, Indians avoided the French at Montreal, who demanded two beaver skins for a woolen blanket. Instead, they dealt with the Dutch and English merchants at Albany, who asked for only one pelt and could be played off against one another. “They are marvailous subtle in their bargains to save a penny,” an English trader complained. “They will beate all markets and try all places … to save six pence.” Still, because the Indians did not know the value of their pelts in Europe, they rarely secured the highest possible price.

Nor could they stop European diseases, guns, and rum from sapping the vitality of their society. In South Carolina, a smallpox epidemic killed nearly half of the Catawbas, and “strong spirits” took a toll among the survivors: “Many of our people has Lately Died by the Effects of that Strong Drink,” a Catawba lamented. Most native societies also lost their economic independence. As they exchanged furs for European-made iron utensils and woolen blankets, Indians neglected their traditional artisan skills, making fewer flint hoes, clay pots, and skin garments. “Every necessity of life we must have from the white people,” a Cherokee chief complained. Religious autonomy vanished as well. When French missionaries won converts among the Hurons, Iroquois, and Illinois, they divided Indian communities into hostile religious factions.

Likewise, constant warfare for furs altered the dynamics of tribal politics by shifting power from cautious elders to headstrong young warriors. The sachems (chiefs), a group of young Seneca warriors said scornfully, “were a parcell of Old People who say much but who Mean or Act very little.” The status of Indian women changed in especially complex ways. Traditionally, eastern woodland women had a voice in political councils because they were the chief providers of food and handcrafted goods. As a French Jesuit noted of the Iroquois, “The women are always the first to deliberate …. They hold their councils apart and … advise the chiefs … so that the latter may deliberate on them in their turn.” The disruption of farming by warfare and the influx of European goods undermined women’s economic power. Yet, paradoxically, among victorious warring tribes such as the Iroquois, the influence of women probably increased in other respects, because they managed the cultural assimilation of hundreds of captives.

There is no doubt that the sheer extent of the fur industry—the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of beaver, deer, otter, and other animals — profoundly altered the environment. As early as the 1630s, a French Jesuit worried that the Montagnais people, who lived north of the St. Lawrence, were killing so many beaver that they would “exterminate the species in this Region, as has happened among the Hurons.” As the animal populations died off, streams ran faster (there were fewer beaver dams) and the underbrush grew denser (there were fewer deer to trim the vegetation). The native environment, as well as its animals and peoples, were now part of a new American world of relentless exploitation and little civility.

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A., Compare the causes of the uprisings led by Popé in New Mexico and Metacom in New England. Which rebellion was more successful? Why?

What were the major social and environmental changes that made America a new world for Indians?

SUMMARY

We have seen that Spain created a permanent settlement in North America in 1565 and that England, France, and the Dutch Republic did likewise between 1607 and 1614. All of these European incursions inadvertently spread devastating diseases among the native residents and reduced some Indians to subject peoples. But there were important differences among the groups of settlers. The French and the Dutch established fur-trading colonies, while the Spanish and the English created settler colonies. Spanish settlers frequently intermarried with the Indians, but the English did not. Alone among the colonizers, the Dutch did not seek to convert the Indians to Christianity.

We also saw major differences between England’s Chesapeake colonies, in which bound laborers raised tobacco for export to Europe, and those in New England, where pious Puritan yeomen lived in self-governing farming communities. Still, both regions boasted representative political institutions. Both experienced Indian wars in the first decades of settlement (1622 in Virginia and 1636 in New England) and again in 1675–1676. Indeed, the simultaneous eruption of Bacons Rebellion and Metacom’s War suggests that the histories of the two English regions had begun to converge.

For additional primary sources from this period, see Documents for America’s History, Seventh Edition.

For Web sites, images, and documents related to topics and places in this chapter, visit Make History at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.

For Further Exploration

A fine narrative of Spanish activities north of the Rio Grande is David Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992). Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (2001), sets English settlement in context. In American Slavery American Freedom (1975), Edmund Morgan offers a compelling portrait of white servitude and black slavery in early Virginia. Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (1997), is abroad overview, while John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994), relates the gripping tale of Eunice Williams, a captured Puritan girl who lived her life among the Mohawks. Three recent books are Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop America’s Forgotten Founding Father (2003); James D. Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country (2009); and Virginia Dejohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004).

Two fine Web sites focus on the Pilgrims at Plymouth: “Caleb Johnsons Mayflower History” (www.mayflowerhistory.com) and “The Plymouth Colony Archive Project” (www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/index.html). For insight into early New England life, see the excellent eight-part PBS series Colonial House and its Web site (www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse). Extensive materials on the Salem witchcraft trials can be viewed at etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft .

Test Your Knowledge

For practice quizzes, activities, and other study tools, visit the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.

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TIMELINE

1539–1543

Coronado and de Soto lead gold-seeking expeditions

1565

Spain establishes fort at St. Augustine

1598

Acomas rebel in New Mexico

1603–1625

Reign of James 1, king of England

1607

English traders settle Jamestown (Virginia)

1608

Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec

1613

Dutch set up fur-trading post on Manhattan Island

1619

First Africans arrive in Chesapeake region

House of Burgesses convenes in Virginia

1620

Pilgrims found Plymouth Colony

1620–1660

Chesapeake colonies enjoy tobacco boom

1621

Dutch West India Company chartered

1622

Opechancanough’s uprising

1624

Virginia becomes royal colony

1625–1649

Reign of Charles 1, king of England

1630

Puritans found Massachusetts Bay Colony

1634

Settlers arrive in Maryland

1636

Puritan-PequotWar

Roger Williams founds Providence

1637

Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts Bay

1640s

Iroquois initiate wars over fur trade

1642–1659

Puritan Revolution in England

1651

First Navigation Act

1660

Restoration of English monarchy

Tobacco prices fall and remain low

1664

English conquer New Netherland

1675

Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

1675–1676

Metacom’s Warin New England

1680

Pope’s rebellion in New Mexico

1692

Salem witchcraft trials

1705

Virginia enacts law defining slavery

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A., Henretta, J., Edwards, Rebecca, Self, O.. America: A Concise History, Volume One: To 1877, 5th Edition. Bedford/St. Martin's, 01/2012. VitalBook file.