Chapter 3
In This Chapter
● Looking to the New World for new hope
● Settling and colonizing: Different strokes for different folks
● Setting slavery in motion
● Regarding the Native Americans — some as friends, most as foes
With the defeat of the Spanish naval armada off the coast of England in 1588, Spain seemed to lose interest in expanding its empire in the New World. England, on the other hand, was eager to make up for lost time.
In this chapter, England establishes its colonies in the Americas and two very different — and very key — elements of America’s history are planted: slavery and the desire for independence from the Old World.
Seeing Potential in the New World
For most of the sixteenth century, England was too poor and too timid to do much about the opportunities presented by the opening of two new continents. By 1604, however, when England and Spain signed a tenuous peace treaty, the English had several good reasons to think about branching out to the new lands of the West. Here are the four main reasons:
● Wool: England’s woolen industry was booming in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Farms were turned into pastures for more and more sheep, and the tenant farmers on the former farms were forced off, with no particular place to go — except the New World.
● Overpopulation: Even though the entire population of about 4 million was less than half that of modern-day London, many Englishmen pined for a less-crowded land.
● Religious dissent: Protestantism, a rival Christian religion to the one led by the Pope in Rome, had developed in the sixteenth century and become firmly rooted in England. Even though the country’s own state church was Protestant, many English Protestants felt it wasn’t different enough from the Roman Catholic faith they had left. Religiously restless, they looked to America as a place to plant the seeds of their own version of Christianity.
● Economic incentive: A middle class of merchants, speculators, and entrepreneurs had formed. By pooling their resources in “joint-stock companies,” these capitalists could invest in schemes to make money in the New World by backing colonists who would produce goods England and the rest of Europe wanted. They could also harvest resources, such as timber, for which England had to depend on other Old World countries.
Settling in Jamestown
It’s pretty safe to say the first permanent English colony in America was put together about as well as a soup sandwich. Those who set out to establish the colony weren’t sure where they were going, nor were they sure what to do when they got there.
A group of investors known as the Virginia Company of London was given a charter by King James I to settle somewhere in the southern part of the New World area known as Virginia. After a voyage on which roughly 27 percent of the original 144 settlers died, three ships arrived at the mouth of a river they ingratiatingly named the James, after the king. On May 14, 1607, they began the settlement of Jamestown.
Early troubles
Some of the settlers were indentured servants who had traded seven years of their labor for passage to America. Others were upper-crust types who didn’t have a clue how to farm, hunt, or do anything remotely useful in the wilderness. As one historian put it, “It was a colony of people who wouldn’t work, or couldn’t.”
Worse, the site they had chosen for a settlement was in a malaria-ridden swamp, and the local inhabitants were both suspicious and unfriendly. In fact, the Native Americans launched their first attack against the newcomers within two weeks of their arrival. Within six months, half of the 105 settlers who had survived the trip were dead of disease or starvation.
Between a rock and a hard place
"Having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan; then as many as could lay hands on him [John Smith], dragged him to them and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king's dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death: whereat the emperor was contented he should live. ..."
— John Smith's third-person account of his rescue by Pocahontas, recounted in a 1524 history.
Making Native American friends
Those who survived did so largely because of a character named John Smith. An experienced and courageous adventurer, Smith was also a shameless self-promoter and a world-class liar, with a knack for getting into trouble. On the voyage over, for example, he was charged with mutiny, although he was eventually acquitted.
But whatever his faults, Smith was both gutsy and diplomatic. He managed to make friends with Powhatan, the chief of the local Native Americans, and the tribe provided the colonists with enough food to hold on. It’s questionable whether Smith’s dramatic story of how Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, saved Smith’s life actually happened (see the sidebar “Between a rock and a hard place”). But Smith provided much-needed leadership, declaring, “He that will not work neither shall he eat.” Without it, the colony might not have survived.
As it was, Jamestown came pretty close to disaster. In the winter of 1609, called “the starving time,” conditions got so bad colonists resorted to eating anything they could get — including each other. One man was executed after eating the body of his dead wife. In 1610, the survivors were actually on a ship and ready to head home when a military relief expedition showed up and took charge.
Finding a cash crop
One of the biggest problems the colony faced was that the New World had nothing anyone in England wanted, so there was no basis for a profitable economy. But that began to change in 1613, when a fellow named John Rolfe, who had married the Native American princess Pocahontas, came up with a variety of tobacco that was a huge hit in the mother country. Within a few years, Jamestown had a thriving cash crop.
In 1619, three things happened in the Virginia colony that had a large impact on the British in America. One was the arrival of 90 women, who became the brides of settlers who paid for their passage at a cost of 120 pounds of tobacco each.
The second was the meeting of the first legislative body of colonists on the continent. Known as the House of Burgesses, it met for about a week, passed laws against gambling and idleness, and decreed all colonists must attend two church services each Sunday — and bring their weapons with them. Then the legislators adjourned because it was too hot to keep meeting.
The third event — three weeks after the House of Burgesses had become a symbol of representative government in the New World — was the arrival of a Dutch ship. From its cargo, Jamestown settlers bought 20 human beings from Africa to work in the tobacco fields (see Figure 3-1).
Figure 3-1: The arrival of slaves in Jamestown: One of the key elements in America’s history.
Instituting Slavery
While it was a Dutch ship that brought the first slaves to Virginia, no European nation had a monopoly on the practice. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to raid the African coast for slaves, in the mid-fifteenth century. They were quickly followed by the Spanish, who used Africans to supplant the New World Indians who had either been killed or died of diseases. By the mid-sixteenth century, the English sea dog John Hawkins was operating a thriving slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean.
Most slaves were seized from tribes in the interior of the continent and sold from ports in West Africa to the New World. Some were hunted down by European and Arab slave traders. Many were sold by rival tribes after being captured in wars or on raids. And some were sold by their own tribes when they failed to make good on personal debts or got on the wrong side of their leaders.
Although the use of African slaves in the tobacco fields proved successful and more slaves were gradually imported, the practice of slavery was by no means a strictly Southern colony phenomenon. While the Northern colonies had less use for slaves as agricultural workers, they put Africans to work as domestic servants.
Not everyone in the colonies was enamored with slavery. In 1688, a radical Protestant group in Pennsylvania known as the Mennonites became the first American religious group to formally oppose the practice. In 1700, a New England judge named Samuel Sewall published a three-page tract called “The Selling of Joseph,” in which he compared slavery to what Joseph’s brothers did to him in the biblical story and called for the abolition of slavery in the colonies.
But voices such as Sewall’s were few and far between. Although the total population of slaves was relatively low through most of the 1600s, colonial governments took steps to institutionalize slavery. In 1662, Virginia passed a law that automatically made slaves of slaves’ children. In 1664, Maryland’s assembly declared that all black people in the colony were slaves for life, whether they converted to Christianity or not. And in 1684, New York’s legislators recognized slavery as a legitimate practice.
As the seventeenth century closed, it was clear that African slaves were a much better bargain, in terms of costs, than European servants, and the numbers of slaves began to swell. In 1670, Virginia had a population of about 2,000 slaves. By 1708, the number was 12,000. Slavery had not only taken root, it was sprouting.
Colonizing: Pilgrims and Puritans
While Virginia was being settled by gentlemen farmers, servants, slaves, and some people you wouldn’t trust with your car keys, a very different kind of people were putting together England’s second colony in America.
These people, who settled New England, came to America for wealth of another type. They were spurred by their deep religious beliefs and their zeal to find a haven for the freedom to practice their faith — although not necessarily for anyone else to practice theirs.
The Mayflower Compact — A Dutch pilgrimage
The Pilgrims (actually, they called themselves “the Saints” and everyone else “the Strangers,” and weren’t dubbed Pilgrims until much later by one of their leaders) were mostly lower-class farmers and craftsmen who had decided the Church of England was still too Catholic for their tastes. So they separated themselves from the Church, thus resulting in everyone else calling them “Separatists.” This did not please King James I, who suggested rather forcefully that they rejoin or separate themselves from England.
The Separatists we’re concerned with did just that, settling in Holland in 1608. But after a decade of watching their children become “Dutchified,” the English expatriates longed for someplace they could live as English subjects and still worship the way they wanted. The answer was America.
After going back to England and negotiating a charter to establish a colony, taking out a few loans, and forming a company, a group of 102 men, women, and children left England on Sept. 16, 1620, on a ship called the Mayflower.
(A second ship, the Speedwell, also started out, but sprang a leak and had to turn back.) The Mayflower was usually used for shipping wine between France and England. Its cargo for this trip was decidedly more varied than usual. Although the Pilgrims didn’t really pack any smarter than had the Jamestown colonists, they did show some imagination. Among the things they took to the wilderness of North America were musical instruments, all kinds of furniture, and even books on the history of Turkey (the country, not the bird). One guy even brought 139 pairs of shoes and boots.
Despite a rough crossing that took 65 days, only one passenger and four crewmen died, and one child was born. After some preliminary scouting, they dropped anchor in a broad, shallow bay we know as Plymouth. (No evidence exists to indicate they landed on any kind of rock.)
Squanto
His real name was Tisquantum, and he was a member of the Pawtuxet tribe. In 1605, Squanto was taken to England, possibly as a slave, by a passing explorer named George Weymouth. In 1613, he returned to the New World as a guide for Capt. John Smith and remained there. A short time later, however, Squanto was abducted by yet another English expedition and sold as a slave in Spain. This time he escaped. He made his way to England and eventually onto a 1619 expedition to New England, only to find his tribe had been exterminated by disease, most probably brought by the white newcomers.
So, when the Pilgrims arrived, Squanto spoke fluent English, a little Spanish, and was essentially rootless. He was also apparently extremely tolerant. Until he died a little more than a year after their arrival, Squanto stayed with the Pilgrims, acting as their interpreter and advisor. Talk about a good sport!
Two important things happened on the way over. One was that the Pilgrims missed their turnoff and failed to land within the borders laid out by their charter. That meant they were essentially squatters and did not fall under the direct governance of anyone in England. Secondly, concerned by mutterings from some members of the group that they should go home, the colony’s leaders drew up a compact, or set of rules, by which they all agreed to abide. This became known as the Mayflower Compact.
The Mayflower Compact was remarkable in that it was drawn up by people who were essentially equal to each other and were looking for a way to establish laws they could all live under. Although it certainly left out equal rights for women, slaves, Native Americans, and indentured servants, it was still a key early step in the colonists’ journey toward self-rule and independence from England.
Despite their planning, the Plymouth colony had a very rough first winter. Just like the Jamestown colonists, half the Plymouth settlers died in the first six months. But unlike many of the Jamestown colonists, the Pilgrims were hard workers. They had an extremely able leader in William Bradford, who was to be governor of the colony for more than 30 years, and an able, although diminutive, military leader in Miles Standish (his nickname was “Captain Shrimpe”). They were also extremely lucky because the local Native Americans proved not only to be great neighbors, but had one among them who spoke English.
The locals showed the newcomers some planting techniques and then traded the colonists’ furs for corn, which gave the Pilgrims something to send back to England. By the fall of 1622, the Plymouth colonists had much to be thankful for.
Thanks-a-drumstick
When the first Thanksgiving feast took place is uncertain, but it was probably between Sept. 21 and Nov. 9, 1621. Under a decree by Gov. William Bradford, Chief Massasoit and his Wampanoag tribe were invited to share a few days' worth of wild fowl, venison, leeks, watercress, plums, berries, eels, oysters, cord bread, and "popped" corn. It was such a good idea that only 242 years later, Pres. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday.
The Plymouth colony never got all that big, and by 1691 it was absorbed by the larger Massachusetts Bay colony. But the impact of its approach to government and its effect on the American psyche far outstripped its size or longevity. Ever since (greatly aided by countless elementary school Thanksgiving pageants), the Pilgrims have dominated most Americans’ images of the country’s earliest settlers.
The Massachusetts Bay colony: A pure haven
It’s easy to confuse the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Both groups were moved to journey to America for religious reasons. Both were remarkably intolerant of other people’s religious beliefs. And neither were much fun at parties.
But there were differences. The Puritans were less radical and less interested in leaving the Church of England than in “purifying” it. Their leader was a well-to-do lawyer named John Winthrop. He had a lot of the qualities that came to be part of the stereotypical New England Yankee. He was deeply religious, but a practical businessman. He advocated — and put into practice — such egalitarian principles as trial by jury, yet regarded democracy as “the meanest and worst” of all forms of government. He loved his fellow man, as long as his fellow man had exactly the same morals and beliefs as he did.
Armed with a charter that gave the colonists extraordinary independence in making their own rules, Winthrop led an impressive wave of about 500 Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay colony in New England in 1630, establishing the city of Boston later that year. An even larger group of Puritans had settled at Salem, in another part of the colony, the year before, and by 1642, as many as 20,000 Puritans had left England for America.
Which is witch?
Witch hunting in America started with three kids fooling around. It ended with 20 executions and a wave of hysteria that swept through New England. In early 1692, three young girls in Salem, Massachusetts, began to throw fits and claimed they had been bewitched by a West Indian slave and two other local women. The accusations begat more accusations as the girls and their friends basked in the attention they were getting. By the time they admitted they had made it up, however, no one was paying attention. Witchcraft accusations were used to settle all sorts of petty personal and political scores.
By the time Gov. William Phips (whose own wife was accused) had put an end to it, 150 people had been charged with consorting with Satan. Of that number, 28 were convicted: 5 confessed and were released; 2 escaped; 1 was pardoned; and 20 — 14 women and 6 men — were executed. All the women and five of the men were hanged. One man, who was particularly reluctant to speak at his trial, was pressed to death under heavy stones. Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, none of them were burned at the stake, the way witches were commonly dealt with in Europe. That may or may not have been some consolation to those who were executed.
The Puritans established fur, fishing, and shipbuilding industries. They set up a system of compulsory free education, institutions of higher learning, and a model for what would eventually become a typical two-house state government in America. They developed crafts such as silver-smithing and printed their own books.
They were also pretty puritanical. Religious dissidents, especially Quakers, were routinely banished and beaten, and sometimes hanged. “If they beat the gospel black and blue,” one Puritan minister said in explaining this treatment, “it is but just to beat them black and blue.” Adultery was punishable by death until 1632, when the penalty was reduced to a public whipping and the forced wearing of the letters “AD” sewed onto the clothing. The Puritans were also tough on suspected witches.
The impact of the Puritan society of New England was huge. In it were the roots of the modern corporate system, the representative form of state and federal government, the American legal system, and the moral conflict between wanting the freedom to think and act as we please and the authority to control how others think and act.
Bringing Religious Freedom: Dissidents, Catholics, and Quakers
The Massachusetts and Jamestown colonies were only the beginning. Throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, English settlers of all kinds moved to America. Some of those didn’t like where they landed — or the place they landed didn’t like them. But it was a big country, so they began the American tradition of moving on.
Some of the colonies — Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, North and South Carolina — were either privately founded or offshoots of the Massachusetts and Virginia colonies (see Figure 3-2). But three of them had very different beginnings.
Figure 3-2: The original 13 colonies and their dates of establishment.
Sneaking off to Rhode Island
Roger Williams was a unique minister. Smart and sociable, he became a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1633. He also became an expert in Native American languages and was troubled by the way his fellow settlers treated the natives. Williams argued that land should not be taken from the Native Americans unless it had been the subject of valid treaty negotiations. Even more troubling to his neighbors was Williams’s insistence that there had to be a separation between the institutions of church and state. So troubling was this latter idea to the governing Puritan leaders that they decided to ship the troublemaker back to England.
But Williams was tipped off to the plan by John Winthrop, and with the help of friendly Native Americans, Williams and his family slipped off in 1636 to an unsettled area. By 1644, it had become the colony of Rhode Island. Small and disliked by its neighbors, Rhode Island became a haven for those seeking religious freedom — or those who just plain didn’t like life in the rest of Puritan New England.
“No person in this country shall be molested or questioned for the matters of his conscience to God, so he be loyal and keep the civil peace,” Williams said. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”
Condoning only Christianity in Maryland
While the Puritans may have had some religious differences among themselves, they did agree on one thing: They didn’t like Roman Catholics. Undaunted, Catholics established a colony north of Virginia in 1634. Called Maryland, it was the result of a grant given by King James I to his former secretary, George Calvert, who had converted to Catholicism.
Anne Hutchinson
She was almost certainly not the first European woman to cause trouble in America, but she was probably the first famous one. Or infamous, according to Puritan officials.
The mother of 14 children, Anne Hutchinson had the temerity to believe women could interpret the will of God as well as men. This she did, preaching in both private and public. Unfortunately for her, Hutchinson's version — that people could be saved by just recognizing the good within them — was at odds with the version put out by Puritan leaders. So they banished her from the Massachusetts colony in 1638.
Hutchinson went to Rhode Island for awhile and then settled in New York. She and her family were killed by Indians in 1643. Puritan officials attributed it to divine providence.
The colony prospered as a tobacco exporter. But so many Protestants were allowed in that its Catholic founders were threatened with the prospect of being persecuted in their own colony. So they struck a compromise in 1649, which recognized all Christian religions — and decreed the death penalty for Jews and atheists.
Promoting tolerance in Pennsylvania
If Puritans didn’t like Catholics, they really didn’t like Quakers. Quakers were steadfast pacifists who had no paid clergy, refused to use titles or take oaths of allegiance, and were said to “quake” from deep religious emotion.
In 1681, a wealthy Quaker named William Penn got a charter to start a colony in America. He advertised it honestly and exhaustively, attracted a diverse group of settlers, and founded Pennsylvania. Penn treated the Native Americans fairly, set up a relatively liberal system of laws, and made it easy for just about anyone to settle in his colony. By 1700, Pennsylvania’s leading city, Philadelphia, was, after Boston, the colonies’ leading cultural center.
Penn died in poverty and in social and political disrepute. But more than any other colony, Pennsylvania was truly tolerant of differing religions, cultures, and national backgrounds.
Dealings of the Dutch
While the English, French, and Spanish were noisily tromping all over the New World, the Dutch were establishing themselves as the most successful maritime traders in the Old World. Intent on getting their share of the American trade, they formed the Dutch West Indies Company and in 1626 established a colony in the New World at the mouth of the Hudson River, calling it New Amsterdam. Three other settlements added up to a colony the Dutch called New Netherland.
New Amsterdam was different from the New England settlements in that it wasn’t founded for religious reasons. So its attitude was more relaxed when it came to activities like drinking and gambling. In addition, land for the colonists wasn’t an issue because New Amsterdam was basically a company town, run for the benefit of the Dutch West Indies stockholders.
After awhile, this began to chafe on the settlers. So in 1664, when English ships and troops showed up to attack the settlement, it surrendered without firing a shot. New Amsterdam became New York, named after its new owner, James, the Duke of York. The duke gave some of his new colony to a couple of friends, who thus began the colony of New Jersey. Despite its new English ownership, New York kept much of its Dutch flavor for decades.
Fair trade?
The chief purpose of the New Amsterdam colony was trade, and in one of the first such transactions, Dutch leader Peter Minuit gave the local Indians a couple of boxes containing stuff like hatchets and cooking pots, and in return took title to the island of
Manhattan, which the Indians didn't claim to own in the first place.
The goods have since been estimated to have been worth 60 Dutch guilders, the equivalent of 2,400 English pennies. Hence, the idea that Manhattan was sold for $24.
Coping with Native American Troubles
When it came to the Native Americans, English colonists had varying opinions. Some thought they should be treated as pets; others as pests. Some thought the Native Americans should be treated with respect. Others thought they should be exterminated, and still others thought they should be tricked out of their lands and then exterminated.
For their part, the Native Americans weren’t sure what to make of their uninvited guests. The newcomers had some pretty clever possessions, but they seemed awfully helpless at times. The English had a strange god, strange customs, and a fixation with other people’s things.
In the Southern colonies, trouble between the two groups started almost as soon as the English got off the ships. The first English attempt at a colony, at Roanoke, was probably wiped out by Native Americans, although its exact fate is unknown. What is known is that in 1642, Native Americans under Chief Opechencanough attacked settlers over a large area of the Virginia colony and killed about 350 of them. The settlers counterattacked a few months later and killed hundreds of Native Americans.
In New Netherland, the Dutch settlers treacherously murdered nearly 100 Native Americans in their sleep, cut off their heads, and kicked them around the streets of New Amsterdam. That launched a nasty war that ended when 150 Dutch soldiers killed about 700 Native Americans at a battle near present-day Stamford, Connecticut.
In New England, thanks in part to the good initial relations between the Pilgrims and local tribes, war was averted until 1634, when a rowdy pirate named John Stone and seven of his crew were murdered by Native Americans that the settlers decided were from a tribe called the Pequot. After an uneasy two-year truce, New Englanders went on the attack. In 1637, Puritan soldiers and their Native American allies attacked a Pequot fort near Mystic River,
Connecticut. In about an hour, they burned the village and slaughtered 600 men, women, and children.
In September 1638, the Pequots surrendered. As many as 2,000 of them were sold as slaves in the West Indies or given to rival tribes. The Pequots were all but exterminated, and the Native American wars in New England were over for nearly 40 years.
In 1675, a Native American chief named Metacom, but called King Philip by the settlers because he liked English customs and dress, decided it was time to push the white invaders out once and for all. The result was King Philip’s War.
This time, the Native Americans used guns and attacked everywhere. By the time the two-year war was over, half the settlements in New England had been destroyed, and the English were on the edge of being driven into the sea. Finally, however, the colonies united while the Native Americans did not, and the tide began to turn. King Philip was killed in August 1676, and the war finally ended. It would be 40 years before the area recovered enough to begin expanding its boundaries into the frontier again.