American Yamp Part 1

The American Yawp

Introduction

Civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. Via Library of Congress.

 We are the heirs of our history. Our communities, our politics, our culture: it is all a product of the past. As William Faulkner
wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 To understand who we are, we must therefore understand our history.
But what is history? What does it mean to study the past? History can never be the simple memorizing of names and dates (how would
we even know what names and dates are worth studying?). It is too complex a task and too dynamic a process to be reduced to that. It
has to be something more because, in a sense, it is we who give life to the past. Historians ask historical questions, weigh evidence from
primary sources (material produced in the era under study), grapple with rival interpretations, and argue for their conclusions. History,
then, is our ongoing conversation about the past.
Every generation must write its own history. Old conclusions—say, about the motives of European explorers or the realities of life on
slave plantations—fall before new evidence and new outlooks. Names of certain leaders and dates of certain events may not change, but
the weight we give them and the context with which we frame them must invariably evolve. History is a conversation between the past
and the present. To understand a global society, we must explore a history of transnational forces. To appreciate the civil rights
movement, we must look back at earlier, darker assumptions about American history. To contextualize equal rights, we must hear
women’s historical voices.
But why study history in the rst place? History can cultivate essential and relevant—or, in more utilitarian terms, “marketable”—skills:
careful reading, creative thinking, and clear communication. Many are familiar with a famous quote of philosopher George Santayana:
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”2 The role of history in shaping current events is more complicated than

this quote implies, but Santayana was right in arguing that history o ers important lessons. The historical sensibility yields perspective
and context and broader awareness. It liberates us from our narrow experiences and pulls us into, in the words of historian Peter Stearns,
“the laboratory of human experience.”3 Perhaps a better way to articulate the importance of studying history would be, “Those who fail
to understand their history will fail to understand themselves.”

Historical interpretation is never wholly subjective: it requires method, rigor, and perspective. The open nature of historical discourse
does not mean that all arguments—and certainly not all “opinions”—about the past are equally valid. Some are simply wrong. And yet
good historical questions will not always have easy answers. Asking, “When did Christopher Columbus rst sail across the Atlantic?”
will tell us far less than, “What inspired Columbus to attempt his voyage?” or, “How did Native Americans interpret the arrival of
Europeans?” Crafting answers to these questions reveals far greater insights into our history.

We have produced The American Yawp to help guide students in their encounter with American history. Unchecked by pro t motives
or business models, and free from for-pro t educational organizations, The American Yawp is a free and online, collaboratively built,
open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three-hundred academic historians
—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the
American past for twenty- rst century readers. The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to use it, download it,
distribute it, and modify it as you see t. The project is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the standards of a “Free Cultural Work.” We are happy to share it and we
hope you do the same.

But how can any textbook encapsulate American history? Should it organize around certain themes or surrender to the impossibility of
synthesis and retreat toward generality? In the oft-cited lines of the American poet Walt Whitman, we found as good an organizing
principle as any other: “I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable,” he wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the
world.”4 Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many
individual voices. Here we nd both, chorus and cacophony, together, as one. This textbook therefore o ers the story of that barbaric,
untranslatable American yawp by constructing a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship.
Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of
resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets,
congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s
America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that can strangle narratives of American history.

By balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp o ers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American
past. But if history is a conversation, then that conversation continues. We therefore hope you will join us in exploring, questioning, and
interrogating the American past.

Joseph Locke & Ben Wright

 

1. William Faulker, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1954), 73. [↩]
2. George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Or the Phases of Human Progress, Volume I (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 284. [↩]
3. Peter N. Stearns, “Why Study History,” American Historical Association (July 11, 2008), https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-

history-and-archives/archives/why-study-history-(1998). [↩]
4. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: 1855), 55. [↩]

The American Yawp

1. The New World

Cahokia, as it may have appeared around 1150 CE. Painting by Michael Hampshire for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*
I.  Introduction | II. The First Americans | III.  European Expansion | IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest | V.  Conclusion | VI. Primary Sources | VII.

Reference Material

I.  Introduction

Europeans called the Americas “The New World.” But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but. Humans have lived
here for over ten thousand years. Dynamic and diverse, they spoke hundreds of languages and created thousands of distinct cultures. Native Americans
built settled communities and followed seasonal migration patterns, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and
developed self-su cient economies and maintained vast trade networks. Native Americans cultivated distinct art forms and spiritual values. Kinship ties
knit their communities together. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes—what
scholars benignly call the Columbian Exchange—bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation, inaugurated centuries of violence,
unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world. It began one of the most consequential
developments in all of human history and the rst chapter in the long American yawp. 
 

II. The First Americans

American history begins with the rst Americans. But where do their stories start? Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that
tell of their creation and reveal the contours of indigenous belief. The Salinan people of present-day California, for example, tell of a bald eagle that
formed the rst man out of clay and the rst woman out of a feather.1 According to a Lenape tradition, the earth was made when Sky Woman fell into a
watery world and, with the help of muskrat and beaver, landed safely on a turtle’s back, thus creating Turtle Island, or North America. A Choctaw
tradition locates southeastern peoples’ beginnings inside the great Mother Mound earthwork, Nunih Waya, in the lower Mississippi Valley.2 Nahua

people trace their beginnings to the place of the Seven Caves, from which their ancestors emerged before they migrated to what is now Central Mexico.3
America’s indigenous peoples have passed down many accounts of their origins, written and oral, which share creation and migration histories.

Archaeologists and anthropologists, meanwhile, focus on migration histories. Studying artifacts, bones, and genetic signatures, these scholars have
pieced together a narrative that claims that the Americas were once a “new world” for Native Americans as well.

The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick,
extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois. With so much of the world’s water captured in these massive ice sheets, global sea
levels were much lower, and a land bridge connected Asia and North America across the Bering Strait. Between twelve and twenty thousand years ago,
Native ancestors crossed the ice, waters, and exposed lands between the continents of Asia and America. These mobile hunter-gatherers traveled in small
bands, exploiting vegetable, animal, and marine resources into the Beringian tundra at the northwestern edge of North America. DNA evidence
suggests that these ancestors paused—for perhaps 15,000 years—in the expansive region between Asia and America.4 Other ancestors crossed the seas
and voyaged along the Paci c coast, traveling along riverways and settling where local ecosystems permitted.5 Glacial sheets receded around fourteen
thousand years ago, opening a corridor to warmer climates and new resources. Some ancestral communities migrated south and eastward.
Evidence found at Monte Verde, a site in modern-day Chile, suggests human activity began there at least 14,500 years ago. Similar evidence hints at
human settlement in the Florida panhandle at the same time6 On many points, archaeological and traditional knowledge sources converge: the dental,
archaeological, linguistic, oral, ecological and genetic evidence illustrates a great deal of diversity, with numerous di erent groups settling and migrating
over thousands of years, potentially from many di erent points of origin.7 Whether emerging from the earth, water, or sky, being made by a creator, or
migrating to their homelands, modern Native American communities recount histories in America that date long before human memory.

In the Northwest, Native groups exploited the great salmon- lled rivers. On the plains and prairie lands, hunting communities followed bison herds
and moved according to seasonal patterns. In mountains, prairies, deserts, and forests, the cultures and ways of life of paleo-era ancestors were as varied
as the geography. These groups spoke hundreds of languages and adopted distinct cultural practices. Rich and diverse diets fueled massive population
growth across the continent.

Agriculture arose sometime between nine- and ve-thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.
Mesoamericans in modern-day Mexico and Central America relied upon domesticated maize (corn) to develop the hemisphere’s rst settled population
around 1,200 BCE.8 Corn was high in caloric content, easily dried and stored, and, in Mesoamerica’s warm and fertile Gulf Coast, could sometimes be
harvested twice in a year. Corn—as well as other Mesoamerican crops—spread across North America and continues to hold an important spiritual and
cultural place in many Native communities.

Prehistoric Settlement in Warren County, Mississippi. Mural by Robert Da ord, depicting the Kings Crossing archaeological site as it may have appeared in 1000 CE. Vicksburg Riverfront
Murals.

Agriculture  ourished in the fertile river valleys between the Mississippi River and Atlantic Ocean, an area known as the Eastern Woodlands. There,
three crops in particular–corn, beans, and squash, known as the “Three Sisters”–provided nutritional needs necessary to sustain cities and civilizations.
In Woodlands areas from the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, Native communities managed their forest resources by burning
underbrush to create vast park-like hunting grounds and to clear the ground for planting the “Three Sisters.” Many groups used shifting cultivation
where farmers cut the forest, burned the undergrowth and then planted seeds in the nutrient rich ashes. When crop yields began to decline, farmers
would move to another eld and allow the land to recover and the forest to regrow before again cutting the forest, burning the undergrowth, and
restarting the cycle. This technique was particularly useful in areas with di cult soil. But in the fertile regions of the Eastern Woodlands, Native
American farmers engaged in permanent, intensive agriculture, using hand tools rather than European-style plows. The rich soil and use of hand-tools
enabled e ective and sustainable farming practices, producing high yields without overburdening the soil.9 Typically in Woodland communities,
women practiced agriculture while men hunted and shed.

Agriculture allowed for dramatic social change, but for some, it also may have accompanied a decline in health. Analysis of remains reveals that societies
transitioning to agriculture often experienced weaker bones and teeth.10 But despite these possible declines, agriculture brought important bene ts.
Farmers could produce more food than hunters, enabling some members of the community to pursue other skills. Religious leaders, skilled soldiers,
and artists could devote their energy to activities other than food production.

North America’s indigenous peoples shared some broad traits. Spiritual practices, understandings of property, and kinship networks di ered markedly
from European arrangements. Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated
their world and was both tangible and accessible. It could be appealed to and harnessed. Kinship bound most Native North American people together.
Most peoples lived in small communities tied by kinship networks. Many Native cultures understood ancestry as matrilineal: family and clan identity
proceeded along the female line, through mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and sons. Fathers, for instance, would often join mothers’ extended
families and sometimes even a mother’s brothers would take a more direct role in child-raising than biological fathers. Mothers could
therefore often wield enormous in uence at local levels and men’s identities and in uence often depended on their relationships to women. Native
American culture meanwhile generally a orded greater sexual and marital freedom than European cultures did. Women often chose their husbands,

and divorce often was a relatively simple and straightforward process. Moreover, most Native peoples’ notions of property rights di ered markedly from
Europeans’ notions of property. Native Americans generally felt a personal ownership of tools, weapons, or other items that were actively used, and this
same rule applied to land and crops. Groups and individuals exploited particular pieces of land, and used violence or negotiation to exclude others. But
the right to the use of land did not imply the right to its permanent possession.

Native Americans had many ways of communicating, including graphic ones, and some of these artistic and communicative technologies are still used
today. For example, Algonkian-speaking Ojibwes, used birch-bark scrolls to record medical treatments, recipes, songs, stories, and more. Other Eastern
Woodland peoples wove plant bers, embroidered skins with porcupine quills, and modeled the earth to make sites of complex ceremonial meaning.
On the Plains, artisans wove bu alo hair and painted on bu alo skins; in the Paci c Northwest weavers wove goat hair into soft textiles with particular
patterns. Maya, Zapotec, and Nahua ancestors in Mesoamerica painted their histories on plant-derived textiles and carved them into stone. In the
Andes, Inka recorders noted information in the form of knotted strings, or Khipu.11 

Two thousand years ago, some of the largest culture groups in North America were the Puebloan groups, centered in the current-day Greater
Southwest (the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico), the Mississippian groups located along the Great River and its Woodland tributaries, and
the Mesoamerican groups of the areas now known as central Mexico and the Yucatan. Previous developments in agricultural technology enabled the
explosive growth of the large early societies, such as that at Tenochtitlan in the Central Mexican Valley, Cahokia along the Mississippi River, and in the
desert oasis areas of the Greater Southwest.

Andreas F. Borchert, “Mesa Verde National Park Cli Palace” via Wikimedia. Native peoples in the Southwest began constructing these highly defensible cli dwellings in 1190 CE and
continued expanding and refurbishing them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE.

Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was home to ancestral Puebloan people between 900 and 1300 CE. As many as 15,000 people lived in the
Chaco Canyon complex in present-day New Mexico.12 Sophisticated agricultural practices, extensive trading networks, and even the domestication of
animals like turkeys allowed the population to swell. Massive residential structures, built from sandstone blocks and lumber carried across great
distances, housed hundreds of Puebloan people. One single building, Pueblo Bonito, stretched over two acres and rose ve stories. Its 600 rooms were
decorated with copper bells, turquoise decorations, and bright macaws.13 Homes like those at Pueblo Bonito included a small, dugout room, called
a kiva, which played an important role in a variety of ceremonies and served as an important center for Puebloan life and culture. Puebloan spirituality
was tied both to the earth and to the heavens, as generations carefully charted the stars and designed homes in-line with the path of the sun and moon.14

The Puebloan people of Chaco Canyon faced several ecological challenges, including deforestation and over-irrigation, which ultimately caused this
community to collapse and its people to disperse to smaller settlements. An extreme fty-year drought began in 1130. Shortly thereafter, Chaco
Canyon was deserted. New groups lled this land, including the Apache and Navajo, both of whom adopted several Puebloan customs. The same
drought that plagued the Pueblo also likely a ected the Mississippian peoples of the American Midwest and South. The Mississippians developed one
of the largest civilizations north of modern-day Mexico. Roughly one-thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just
east of modern-day St. Louis, peaked at a population of between 10,000-30,000. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. No American city, in
fact, would match Cahokia’s peak population levels until after the American Revolution. The city itself spanned 2,000 acres and centered around
Monks Mound, a large earthen hill that rose ten-stories and was larger at its base than the great pyramids of Egypt. As with many of the peoples who

lived in the Woodlands, life and death in Cahokia were linked to the movement of the stars, sun, and moon, and their ceremonial earthwork structures
re ect these important structuring forces.
Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms, a hierarchical, clan-based system that gave leaders both secular and sacred authority. The size of
the city and the extent of its in uence suggests that the city relied on a number of lesser chiefdoms under the authority of a paramount leader. Social
strati cation was partly preserved through frequent warfare. War captives would be enslaved, and these captives formed an important part of the
economy in the North American southeast. Native American slavery was not based on holding people as property. Instead, Native Americans
understood slaves as people who lacked kinship networks. Slavery, then, was not always a permanent condition. Very often, a former slave could become
a fully integrated member of the community. Adoption or marriage could enable a slave to enter a kinship network and join the community. Slavery
and captive trading became an important way that many Native communities regrew and gained or maintained power.

An artist rendering of Cahokia as it may have appeared in 1150 CE. Painting by William R. Iseminger, courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. 

Around the year 1050, Cahokia experienced what one archeologist has called a “big bang,” which included “a virtually instantaneous and pervasive shift
in all things political, social, and ideological.”15 The population grew almost 500 percent in only one generation, and new people groups were absorbed
into the city and its supporting communities.16 By 1300, the once powerful city had undergone a series of strains that led to collapse. Scholars
previously pointed to ecological disaster or slow depopulation through emigration, but new research instead emphasizes mounting warfare, or internal
political tensions. Environmental explanations suggest that population growth placed too great a burden on the arable land. Others suggest the demand
for fuel and building materials led to deforestation, erosion, and or an extended drought. Recent evidence, including defensive stockades, suggests that
political turmoil among the ruling elite and threats from external enemies may explain the end of the once great civilization.17
North American communities were connected by kin, politics, and culture and sustained by long distance trading routes. The Mississippi River served
as a particularly important trade artery, but all of the continent’s waterways were vital to transportation and communication.Cahokia became a key
trading center partly due to its position near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great
Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeologists can identify materials, like seashells, that traveled over a thousand miles to reach the center of this
civilization. At least 3,500 years ago, the community at what is now Poverty Point, Louisiana, had access to copper from present-day Canada and int

from modern-day Indiana. Sheets of Mica found at the sacred Woodland Serpent Mound site near the Ohio River came from the Allegheny
Mountains, and obsidian from nearby earthworks came from Mexico. Turquoise from the Greater Southwest was used at Teotihuacan 1200 years ago.

In the Eastern Woodlands, many Native American societies lived in smaller dispersed communities in order to take advantage of the rich soils and
abundant rivers and streams. The Lenapes, also known as Delawares, farmed the bottom lands throughout the Hudson and Delaware River watersheds
in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Their hundreds of settlements, stretching from southern Massachusetts through Delaware,
were loosely bound together by political, social, and spiritual connections.

Dispersed and relatively independent, Lenape communities were bound together by oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensus-based political
organization, kinship networks, and a shared clan system. Kinship tied the various Lenape communities and clans together and society was organized
along matrilineal lines. Marriage occurred between clans, and a married man would join the clan of his wife. Lenape women wielded authority over
marriages, households, agricultural production, and even may have played a signi cant part in determining the selection of leaders, called sachems.
Dispersed authority, small settlements, and kin-based organization contributed to the long-lasting stability and resilience of Lenape communities.18
One or more sachems governed Lenape communities by the consent of their people. Lenape sachems acquired their authority by demonstrating
wisdom and experience. This di ered from the hierarchical organization of many Mississippian cultures. Large gatherings did exist however, as
dispersed communities and their leaders gathered together for ceremonial purposes or to make big decisions. Sachems spoke for their people in larger
councils that included men, women, and elders. The Lenape experienced occasional tensions with other indigenous groups like the Iroquois to the
north or Susquehannock to the south, but the lack of defensive forti cations near Lenape communities leads archeologists to believe that the Lenapes
avoided large-scale warfare. 

The continued longevity of Lenape societies, which began centuries before European contact, was also due to their skills as farmers and shers. Along
with the “Three Sisters,” Lenape women planted tobacco, sun owers, and gourds. They harvested fruits and nuts from trees and also cultivated
numerous medicinal plants which they used with great pro ciency. The Lenapes organized their communities to take advantage of growing seasons and
also the migration patterns of animals and fowl that were a part of their diet. During planting and harvesting seasons, Lenapes gathered together in
larger groups to coordinate their labor and take advantage of local abundance. As pro cient shers, they organized seasonal sh camps to net shell sh
and catch shad. Lenapes wove nets, baskets, mats, and a variety of household materials from the readily available rushes found along the streams, rivers,
and coasts. They made their homes in some of the most fertile and abundant lands in the Eastern Woodlands and used their skills to create a stable and
prosperous civilization. The rst Dutch and Swedish settlers who encountered the Lenapes in the seventeenth century recognized Lenape prosperity
and quickly sought their friendship. Their lives came to depend on it.

In the Paci c Northwest, the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingits, Haidas, and hundreds of other peoples, speaking dozens of languages, thrived due to the
moderate climate, lush forests and many rivers. The peoples of this region depended upon salmon for survival and valued it accordingly. Images of
salmon decorated totem poles, baskets, canoes, oars, and other tools. The sh was treated with spiritual respect and its image represented prosperity, life,
and renewal. Sustainable harvesting practices ensured the survival of salmon populations. The Coast Salish people and several others celebrated the First
Salmon Ceremony when the rst migrating salmon was spotted each season. Elders closely observed the size of the salmon run and would delay
harvesting to ensure that a su cient number survived to spawn and return in the future.19 Men commonly used nets, hooks, and other small tools to
capture salmon as they migrated upriver to spawn. Massive cedar canoes, as long as 50 feet and carrying as many as 20 men, also enabled extensive shing
expeditions in the Paci c Ocean, where skilled shermen caught halibut, sturgeon, and other sh, sometimes hauling thousands of pounds in a single
canoe.20 

Food surpluses enabled signi cant population growth, and the Paci c Northwest became one of the most densely populated regions of North America.
The combination of population density and food surplus created a unique social organization centered around elaborate feasts, called potlatches. These
potlatches celebrated births and weddings as well as determined social status. A party would last for days and the host would demonstrate his wealth
and power by feeding and entertaining guests with food, artwork, and performances. The more the host gave away, the more prestige and power they
had within the group. Some men saved for decades to host an extravagant potlach that would in turn give him greater respect and power within the
community.

Intricately carved masks, like the Crooked Beak of Heaven Mask, used natural elements like animals to represent supernatural forces during ceremonial dances and festivals. 19th century
brooked beak of heaven mask from the Kwakwaka’wakw (Paci c NW). Wikimedia,

Many peoples of the Paci c Northwest built elaborate plank houses out of the region’s abundant cedar trees. The 500-foot-long Suquamish Oleman
House (or Old Man House), for instance, rested on the banks of Puget Sound.21 Giant cedar trees were also carved and painted in the shape of animals
or other gures to tell stories and express identities. These totem poles became the most recognizable artistic form of the Paci c Northwest, but peoples
also carved masks, and other wooden items, such as hand drums and rattles, out of the great trees of the region.

Despite commonalities, Native cultures varied greatly. The New World was marked by diversity and contrast. By the time Europeans were poised to
cross the Atlantic, Native Americans spoke hundreds of languages and lived in keeping with the hemisphere’s many climates. Some lived in cities, others
in small bands. Some migrated seasonally, others settled permanently. All Native peoples had long histories and well-formed, unique cultures that
developed over millennia. But the arrival of Europeans changed everything.

 

III.  European Expansion

Scandinavian seafarers reached the New World centuries before Columbus. At their peak they sailed as far east as Constantinople and raided settlements
as far south as North Africa. They established limited colonies in Iceland and Greenland and, around the year 1000, Leif Erikson reached
Newfoundland in present-day Canada. But the Norse colony failed. Culturally and geographically isolated, some combination of limited resources,
inhospitable weather, food shortages, and Native resistance drove the Norse back into the sea.

Then, hundreds of years before Columbus, the Crusades linked Europe with the wealth, power, and knowledge of Asia. Europeans rediscovered or
adopted Greek, Roman, and Muslim knowledge. The hemispheric dissemination of goods and knowledge not only sparked the Renaissance but fueled
long-term European expansion. Asian goods ooded European markets, creating a demand for new commodities. This trade created vast new wealth,
and Europeans battled one another for trade supremacy.

European nation-states consolidated under the authority of powerful kings. A series of military con icts between England and France–the Hundred
Years War–accelerated nationalism and cultivated the nancial and military administration necessary to maintain nation-states. In Spain, the marriage of
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille consolidated the two most powerful kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. The Crusades had never ended in
Iberia: the Spanish crown concluded centuries of intermittent warfare–the Reconquista–by expelling Muslim Moors from the Iberian peninsula in
1492, just as Columbus sailed west. With new power, these new nations–and their newly empowered monarchs–yearned to access the wealth of Asia.

Seafaring Italian traders commanded the Mediterranean and controlled trade with Asia. Spain and Portugal, at the edges of Europe, relied upon
middlemen and paid higher prices for Asian goods. They sought a more direct route. And so they looked to the Atlantic. Portugal invested heavily in
exploration. From his estate on the Sagres Peninsula of Portugal, a rich sailing port, Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante Henry, Duke of Viseu)
invested in research and technology and underwrote many technological breakthroughs. His investments bore fruit. In the fteenth century Portuguese
sailors innovated the astrolabe, a tool to calculate latitude, and the caravel, a ship well-suited for ocean exploration. Both were technological
breakthroughs. The astrolabe allowed for precise navigation and the caravel, unlike more common vessels designed for trading on the relatively placid
Mediterranean, was a rugged ship with a deep draft capable of making lengthy voyages on the open ocean and, equally important, carrying large
amounts of cargo while doing so.

Engraving of sixteenth century Lisbon from Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, “The Cities of the World,” ed. Georg Braun (Cologne: 1572) via Wikimedia. 

Blending economic and religious motivations, the Portuguese established forts along the Atlantic coast of Africa during the fteenth century,
inaugurating centuries of European colonization there. Portuguese trading posts generated new pro ts that funded further trade and further
colonization. Trading posts spread across the vast coastline of Africa and by the end of the fteenth century Vasco de Gama leapfrogged his way around
the coasts of Africa to reach India and lucrative Asian markets.

The vagaries of ocean currents and the limits of contemporary technology forced Iberian sailors to sail west into the open sea before cutting back east to
Africa. So doing, the Spanish and Portuguese stumbled upon several islands o the coast of Europe and Africa, including the Azores, the Canary
Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. They became training grounds for the later colonization of the America, including the cultivation of sugar

Sugar was originally grown in Asia but became a popular, widely pro table luxury item consumed by the wealthy nobility of Europe. The Portuguese
began growing sugar cane along the Mediterranean, but sugar was a di cult crop. It required tropical temperatures, daily rainfall, unique soil
conditions, and a fourteen-month growing season. But with the Atlantic Islands, the Portuguese had found new land to support sugar production.
New patterns of human and ecological destruction followed. Isolated from the mainlands of Europe and Africa for millennia, island natives—known as
the Guanches—were enslaved or perished soon after Europeans arrived. Portugal’s would-be planters needed laborers to cultivate the di cult, labor-

intensive crop. Portuguese merchants, who had recently established good relations with powerful African kingdoms such as Kongo, Ndongo, and
Songhai, looked then to African slaves. Slavery had long existed among African societies. African leaders traded war captives—who by custom forfeited
their freedom in battle—for Portuguese guns, iron, and manufactured goods. From bases along the Atlantic coast, the largest in modern-day Nigeria,
the Portuguese began purchasing slaves for export to the Atlantic islands. Slaves would work the sugar elds. Thus were born the rst great Atlantic
plantations.

By the fteenth century, the Portuguese had established forts and colonies on islands and along the rim of the Atlantic Ocean; other major Europeans countries soon followed in step. An
anonymous cartographer created this map known as the Cantino Map, the earliest known map of European exploration in the New World, to depict these holdings and argue for the greatness
of his native Portugal. “Cantino planisphere” (1502), Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy. Wikimedia.

Spain, too, stood on the cutting edge of maritime technology. Spanish sailors had become masters of the caravels. As Portugal consolidated control over
African trading networks and the circuitous eastbound sea route to Asia, Spain yearned for its own path to empire. Christopher Columbus, a skilled
Italian-born sailor who studied under Portuguese navigators, promised just that opportunity.
Educated Asians and Europeans of the fteenth century knew the world was round. They also knew that while it was therefore technically possible to
reach Asia by sailing west from Europe–thereby avoiding Italian or Portuguese middlemen–the Earth’s vast size would doom even the greatest caravels
to starvation and thirst long before they ever reached their destination. But Columbus underestimated the size of the globe by a full two-thirds and
therefore believed it was possible. After unsuccessfully shopping his proposed expedition in several European courts, he convinced Queen Isabella and
King Ferdinand of Spain to provide him three small ships, which set sail in 1492. Columbus was both confoundingly wrong about the size of the Earth
and spectacularly lucky that two large continents lurked in his path. On October 12, 1492, after two months at sea, the Nina, Pinta, and Santa
Maria and their ninety men landed in the modern-day Bahamas.
The indigenous Arawaks, or Taino, populated the Caribbean islands. They shed and grew corn, yams, and cassava. Columbus described them as
innocents. “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor the sins of murder or theft,” he reported to the Spanish crown. “Your
highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people … They love their neighbors as themselves, and their speech is the sweetest and
gentlest in the world, and always with a smile.” But Columbus had come for wealth and he could nd little. The Arawaks, however, wore small gold
ornaments. Columbus left thirty-nine Spaniards at a military fort on Hispaniola to nd and secure the source of the gold while he returned to
Spain, with a dozen captured and branded Arawaks. Columbus arrived to great acclaim and quickly worked to out t a return voyage. Spain’s New
World motives were clear from the beginning. If out tted for a return voyage, Columbus promised the Spanish crown gold and slaves. Columbus
reported, “with fty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.” It was God’s will, he said.22
Columbus was out tted with seventeen ships and over 1,000 men to return to the West Indies (Columbus made four total voyages to the New World).
Still believing he had landed in the East Indies, he promised to reward Isabella and Ferdinand’s investment. But when material wealth proved slow in
coming, the Spanish embarked upon a vicious campaign to extract every possible ounce of wealth from the Caribbean. The Spanish decimated the
Arawaks. Bartolome de las Casas traveled to the New World in 1502 and would later write that “I saw with these Eyes of mine the Spaniards for no

other reason, but only to gratify their bloody mindedness, cut o the Hands, Noses, and Ears, both of Indians and Indianesses.”23 When the enslaved
Indians exhausted the islands’ meager gold reserves, the Spaniards forced them to labor on their huge new estates, the encomiendas. Las Casas described
European barbarities in cruel detail. By presuming the natives had no humanity, the Spaniards utterly abandoned theirs. Casual violence and
dehumanizing exploitation ravaged the Arawaks. The Indian population collapsed. Within a few generations the whole island of Hispaniola had been
depopulated and a whole people exterminated. Historians’ estimates range from fewer than 1 million to as many as 8 million (las Casas estimated the
pre-contact population of the island at 3 million). In a few short years, they were gone. “Who in future generations will believe this?” Las Casas
wondered. “I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it.”

Despite the diversity of Native populations and the existence of several strong empires, Native Americans were wholly unprepared for the arrival of
Europeans. Biology magni ed European cruelties. Cut o from the Old World and its domesticated animals and its immunological history, Native
Americans lived free from the terrible diseases that ravaged populations in Asia, Europe and Africa. But their blessing now became a curse. Native
Americans lacked the immunities that Europeans and Africans had developed over centuries of deadly epidemics, and so when Europeans arrived,
carrying smallpox, typhus, in uenza, diphtheria, measles, and hepatitis, plagues decimated Native communities. Death rates tended to be highest near
European communities who traveled with children, as children tended to carry the deadliest diseases.24 Many died in war and slavery, but millions died
in epidemics. All told, in fact, some scholars estimate that as much as 90 percent of the population of the Americas perished within the rst century and
a half of European contact.25

Though ravaged by disease and warfare, Native Americans forged middle grounds, resisted with violence, accommodated and adapted to the challenges
of colonialism, and continued to shape the patterns of life throughout the New World for hundreds of years. But the Europeans kept coming.

 

IV. Spanish Exploration and Conquest

As news of the Spanish conquest spread, wealth-hungry Spaniards poured into the New World seeking land and gold and titles. A New World empire
spread from Spain’s Caribbean foothold. Motives were plain: said one soldier, “we came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.”26
Mercenaries joined the conquest and raced to capture the human and material wealth of the New World.

The Spanish managed labor relations through a legal system known as the encomienda, an exploitive feudal arrangement in which Spain tied Indian
laborers to vast estates. In the encomienda, the Spanish crown granted a person not only land but a speci ed number of natives as
well. Encomenderos brutalized their laborers. After Bartolome de Las Casas published his incendiary account of Spanish abuses (The Destruction of
the Indies), Spanish authorities abolished the encomienda in 1542 and replaced it with the repartimiento. Intended as a milder system, the
repartimiento nevertheless replicated many of the abuses of the older system and the rapacious exploitation of the Native population continued as Spain
spread its empire over the Americas.

El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulcán) in Chichén Itzá, photograph by Daniel Schwen, via Wikimedia Commons

As Spain’s New World empire expanded, Spanish conquerors met the massive empires of Central and South America, civilizations that dwarfed
anything found in North America. In Central America the Maya built massive temples, sustained large populations, and constructed a complex and
long-lasting civilization with a written language, advanced mathematics, and stunningly accurate calendars. But Maya civilization, although it had not
disappeared, nevertheless collapsed before European arrival, likely due to droughts and unsustainable agricultural practices. But the eclipse of the Maya
only heralded the later rise of the most powerful Native civilization ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: the Aztecs.

Militaristic migrants from northern Mexico, the Aztecs moved south into the Valley of Mexico, conquered their way to dominance, and built the largest
empire in the New World. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they found a sprawling civilization centered around Tenochtitlan, an awe-inspiring
city built on a series of natural and man-made islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, located today within modern-day Mexico City. Tenochtitlan,
founded in 1325, rivaled the world’s largest cities in size and grandeur. Much of the city was built on large arti cial islands called chinampas which the
Aztecs constructed by dredging mud and rich sediment from the bottom of the lake and depositing it over time to form new landscapes. A massive
pyramid temple, the Templo Mayor, was located at the city center (its ruins can still be found in the center of Mexico City). When the Spaniards arrived
they could scarcely believe what they saw: 70,000 buildings, housing perhaps 200,000-250,000 people, all built on a lake and connected by causeways
and canals. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortez’s soldiers, later recalled, “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great
towns on dry land, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments … Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were
not a dream? … I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”27

From their island city the Aztecs dominated an enormous swath of central and southern Mesoamerica. They ruled their empire through a decentralized
network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute–including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstu s, to
luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold–and provided troops for the empire. But unrest festered beneath the Aztec’s imperial power, and European
conquerors lusted after its vast wealth.

This sixteenth-century map of Tenochtitlan shows the aesthetic beauty and advanced infrastructure of this great Aztec city. Map, c. 1524, Wikimedia.

Hernan Cortes, an ambitious, thirty-four year old Spaniard who had won riches in the conquest of Cuba, organized an invasion of Mexico in 1519.
Sailing with 600 men, horses, and cannon, he landed on the coast of Mexico. Relying on a Native translator, whom he called Doña Marina, and whom
Mexican folklore denounces as La Malinche, Cortes gathered information and allies in preparation for conquest. Through intrigue, brutality, and the
exploitation of endemic political divisions, he enlisted the aid of thousands of Native allies, defeated Spanish rivals, and marched on Tenochtitlan.

Aztec dominance rested upon fragile foundations and many of the region’s semi-independent city-states yearned to break from Aztec rule. Nearby
kingdoms, including Tarascans to the north, and the remains of Maya city-states on the Yucatán peninsula, chafed at Aztec power.

Through persuasion, and maybe because some Aztecs thought Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl, the Spaniards entered Tenochtitlán peacefully. Cortes
then captured the emperor Montezuma and used him to gain control of the Aztecs’ gold and silver reserves and its network of mines. Eventually, the
Aztecs revolted. Montezuma was branded a traitor and uprising ignited the city. Montezuma was killed along with a third of Cortes’s men in la noche
triste, the “night of sorrows.” The Spanish fought through thousands of indigenous insurgents and across canals to ee the city, where they regrouped,
enlisted more Native allies, captured Spanish reinforcements, and, in 1521, besieged the island city. The Spaniard’s eighty- ve day siege cut o food and
fresh water. Smallpox ravaged the city. One Spanish observer said it “spread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their
faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it … They could not move; they could not stir.”28 Cortes, the
Spaniards, and their Native allies then sacked the city. The temples were sacked and 15,000 died. After two years of con ict, a million-person strong
empire was toppled by disease, dissension, and a thousand European conquerors.

The Spanish relied on indigenous allies to defeat the Aztecs. The Tlaxcala were among the most important Spanish allies in their conquest. This nineteenth-century recreation of a sixteenth
century drawing depicts Tlaxcalan warriors ghting alongside Spanish soldiers against the Aztec. Via Wikimedia.

Further south, along the Andes Mountains in South America, the Quechuas, or Incas, managed a vast mountain empire. From their capital of Cuzco in
the Andean highlands, through conquest and negotiation, the Inca built an empire that stretched around the western half of the South American
continent from present day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina. They cut terraces into the sides of mountains to farm fertile soil and by the 1400s
they managed a thousand miles of Andean roads that tied together perhaps twelve million people. But like the Aztecs, unrest between the Incas and
conquered groups created tensions and left the empire vulnerable to invaders. Smallpox spread in advance of Spanish conquerors and hit the Incan
empire in 1525. Epidemics ravaged the population, cutting the empire’s population in half, killing the Incan emperor Huayna Capac and many
members of his family. A bloody war of succession ensued. Inspired by Cortes’s conquest of Mexico, Francisco Pizzaro moved South and found an
empire torn by chaos. With 168 men, he deceived Incan rulers and took control of the empire and seized the capital city, Cuzco, in 1533. Disease,
conquest, and slavery ravaged the remnants of the Incan empire.

After the conquests of Mexico and Peru, Spain settled into their new empire. A vast administrative hierarchy governed the new holdings: royal
appointees oversaw an enormous territory of landed estates and Indian laborers and administrators regulated the extraction of gold and silver and
oversaw their transport across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons. Meanwhile Spanish migrants poured into the New World. During the sixteenth century
alone,225,000 migrated, and 750,000 came during the entire three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Spaniards, often single, young, and male,
emigrated for the various promises of land, wealth, and social advancement. Laborers, craftsmen, soldiers, clerks, and priests all crossed the Atlantic in
large numbers. Indians, however, always outnumbered the Spanish and the Spaniards, by both necessity and design, incorporated Native Americans
into colonial life. This incorporation did not mean equality, however. 

An elaborate racial hierarchy marked Spanish life in the New World. Regularized in the mid-1600s but rooted in medieval practices, the Sistema de
Castas organized individuals into various racial groups based upon their supposed “purity of blood.” Elaborate classi cations became almost
prerequisites for social and political advancement in Spanish colonial society. Peninsulares—Iberian-born Spaniards, or Españoles–occupied the highest
levels of administration and acquired the greatest estates. Their descendants, New World-born Spaniards, or criollos, occupied the next rung and rivaled
the peninsulares for wealth and opportunity. Mestizos–a term used to describe those of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage–followed.

Unknown artist, “Las Castas,” Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlan, Mexico, via Wikimedia. Casta paintings illustrated the varying degrees of intermixture between colonial subjects,
de ning them for Spanish o cials.

Like the French later in North America, the Spanish tolerated and sometimes even supported interracial marriage. There were simply too few Spanish
women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed interracial marriage as a moral
bulwark against bastardy and rape. By 1600, mestizos made up a large portion of the colonial population.29 By the early 1700s, more than one-third of
all marriages bridged the Spanish-Indian divide. Separated by wealth and in uence from the peninsulares and criollos, mestizos typically occupied a
middling social position in Spanish New World society. They were not quite Indios, or Indians, but their lack of limpieza de sangre, or “pure blood,”
removed them from the privileges of full-blooded Spaniards. Spanish fathers of su cient wealth and in uence might shield their mestizo children from
racial prejudice, and a number of wealthy mestizos married Españoles to “whiten” their family lines, but more often mestizos were con ned to a middle-
station in the Spanish New World.

Slaves and Indians occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder. After Bartolome de las Casas and other reformers shamed the Spanish for their harsh
Indian policies in the 1530s, the Spanish outlawed Indian slavery. In the 1550s, the encomienda system of land-based forced-labor gave way to
the repartimiento, an exploitative but slightly softer form of forced wage-labor. Slaves labored especially on Spain’s Caribbean plantation islands.

Many manipulated the Casta System to gain advantages for themselves and their children. Mestizo mothers, for instance, might insist that their mestizo
daughters were actually castizas, or quarter-Indians, who, if they married a Spaniard, could, in the eyes of the law, produce “pure” criollo children
entitled to the full rights and opportunities of Spanish citizens. But “passing” was an option for the few. Instead, the massive Native populations within
Spain’s New World Empire ensured a level of cultural and racial mixture–or Mestizaje–unparalleled in British North America. Spanish North America
wrought a hybrid culture that was neither fully Spanish nor fully Indian. The Spanish not only built Mexico City atop Tenochtitlán, but food,
language, and families were also constructed upon indigenous foundations. In 1531, a poor Indian named Juan Diego reported that he was visited by
the Virgin Mary, who came as a dark-skinned Nahuatl-speaking Indian.30 Reports of miracles spread across Mexico and the Virgen de
Guadalupe became a national icon for a new mestizo society.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is perhaps the most culturally important and extensively reproduced Mexican-Catholic image. In the iconic depiction, Mary stands atop the tilma (peasant cloak) of
Juan Diego, on which according to his story appeared the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Throughout Mexican history, the story and image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been a unifying
national symbol. Mexican retablo of “Our Lady of Guadalupe,” 19th century, in El Paso Museum of Art. Wikimedia.

From Mexico, Spain expanded northward. Lured by the promises of gold and another Tenochtitlán, Spanish expeditions scoured North America for
another wealthy Indian empire. Huge expeditions, resembling vast moving communities, composed of hundreds of soldiers, settlers, priests, and slaves,
with enormous numbers of livestock, moved across the continent. Juan Ponce de Leon, the conqueror of Puerto Rico, landed in Florida in 1513 in
search of wealth and slaves. Cabeza de Vaca joined the Narvaez expedition to Florida a decade later but was shipwrecked and forced to embark upon a
remarkable multi-year odyssey across the Gulf of Mexico and Texas into Mexico. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565,
and it remains the oldest, continuously occupied European settlement in the present-day United States.

But without the rich gold and silver mines of Mexico, the plantation-friendly climate of the Caribbean, or the exploitive potential of large Indian
empires, North America o ered little incentive for Spanish o cials. Still, Spanish expeditions combed North America. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado
pillaged his way across the Southwest. Hernando De Soto tortured and raped and enslaved his way across the Southeast. Soon Spain had footholds–
however tenuous–across much of the continent.

 

V.  Conclusion

The “discovery” of America unleashed horrors. Europeans embarked upon a debauching path of death and destructive exploitation that unleashed
murder and greed and slavery. But disease was deadlier than any weapon in the European arsenal. It unleashed death on a scale never before seen in
human history. Estimates of the population of pre-Columbian America range wildly. Some argue for as much as 100 million, some as low as 2 million.
In 1983, Henry Dobyns put the number at 18 million. Whatever the precise estimates, nearly all scholars tell of the utter devastation wrought by
European disease. Dobyns estimated that in the rst 130 years following European contact, 95 percent of Native Americans perished.31 (At its worst,
Europe’s Black Death peaked at death rates of 25% to 33%. Nothing else in history rivals the American demographic disaster.) A 10,000 year history of
disease crashed upon the New World in an instant. Smallpox, typhus, the bubonic plague, in uenza, mumps, measles: pandemics ravaged populations
up and down the continents. Wave after wave of disease crashed relentlessly. Disease ung whole communities into chaos. Others it destroyed
completely.

Disease was only the most terrible in a cross-hemispheric exchange of violence, culture, trade, and peoples–the so-called “Columbian Exchange”–that
followed in Columbus’s wake. Global diets, for instance, were transformed. The America’s calorie-rich crops revolutionized Old World agriculture and

spawned a worldwide population boom. Many modern associations between food and geography are but products of the Columbian Exchange:
potatoes in Ireland, tomatoes in Italy, chocolate in Switzerland, peppers in Thailand, and oranges in Florida are all manifestations of the new global
exchange. Europeans, for their part, introduced their domesticated animals to the New World. Pigs ran rampant through the Americas, transforming
the landscape as they spread throughout both continents. Horses spread as well, transforming the Native American cultures who adapted to the newly
introduced animal. Partly from trade, partly from the remnants of failed European expeditions, and partly from theft, Indians acquired horses and
transformed Native American life in the vast North American plains.

The Europeans’ arrival bridged two worlds and ten-thousand years of history largely separated from each other since the closing of the Bering Strait.
Both sides of the world had been transformed. And neither would ever again be the same.

 

VI. Primary Sources

Native American creation stories

These two Native American creation stories are among thousands of accounts for the origins of the world. The Salinian and Cherokee, from what
we now call California and the American southeast respectively, both exhibit the common Native American tendency to locate spiritual power in
the natural world. For both Native Americans and Europeans, the collision of two continents challenged old ideas and created new ones as well. 

Journal of Christopher Columbus, 1492

First encounters between Europeans and Native Americans were dramatic events. In this account we see the assumptions and intentions of
Christopher Columbus, as he immediately began assessing the potential of these people to serve European economic interests. He also predicted
easy success for missionaries seeking to convert these people to Christianity.

Bartolomé de las Casas describes the exploitation of indigenous people, 1542

Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican priest, wrote directly to the King of Spain hoping for new laws to prevent the brutal exploitation of
Native Americans. Las Casas’s writings quickly spread around Europe and were used as humanitarian justi cation for other European nations to
challenge Spain’s colonial empire with their own schemes of conquest and colonization. 

Thomas Morton re ects on Indians in New England, 1637

Thomas Morton both admired and condemned aspects of Native American culture. In his descriptions, we can nd not only information about
the people he is describing but also a window into the concerns of Englishmen like Morton who could use descriptions of Native Americans as a
means of criticizing English culture.

Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca travels through North America, 1542

Spanish explorer, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, traveled across the Gulf South, from Florida to Mexico. As he traveled, Cabeza de Vaca developed a
reputation as a faith healer. In his account he claimed several instances of performing miracles, illustrating his spiritual beliefs as well as o ering a
rare, if perhaps unreliable, glimpse at the life of Native Americans in the area. 

Photograph of Cli Palace

Native peoples in the Southwest began constructing these highly defensible cli dwellings in 1190 CE and continued expanding and refurbishing
them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE. Changing climatic conditions resulted in an increased competition for resources
that led some groups to ally with their neighbors for both protection and subsistence. The circular rooms in the foreground were called kivas and
had ceremonial and religious importance for the inhabitants. Cli Palace had 23 kivas and 150 rooms housing a population of approximately 100

people; the number of rooms and large population has led scholars to believe that this complex may have been the center of a larger polity that
included surrounding communities.

Casta painting 

The elaborate Sistema de Castas revealed one of the less-discussed e ects of Spanish conquest: sexual liaisons and their progeny. Casta paintings
illustrated the varying degrees of intermixture between colonial subjects, de ning them for Spanish o cials. Race was less xed in the Spanish
colonies, as some individuals, through legal action or colonial service, “changed” their race in the colonial records. Though this particular image
does not, some casta paintings attributed particular behaviors to di erent groups, demonstrating how class and race were intertwined.

 

 

VII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, with content contributions by L.D. Burnett, Michelle Cassidy, D. Andrew Johnson, Joseph
Locke, Dawn Marsh, Christen Mucher, Cameron Shriver, Ben Wright, and Garrett Wright.

Recommended citation: L.D. Burnett et al., “The New World,” Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., in The American Yawp, Joseph Locke and Ben
Wright, eds., last modi ed August 1, 2017, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

 

Recommended Reading

Alt, Susan, ed. Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010.
Bruhns, Karen Olsen. Ancient South America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Claasen, Cheryl, and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds. Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. New York: Praeger, 2003.
Dewar, Elaine, Bones (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001).
Dye, David. War Paths, Peace Paths: An Archaeology of Cooperation and Con ict in Native Eastern North America. Lanham, MD:
AltaMira Press, 2009.
Fenn. Elizabeth A. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. New York: Hill and Wang, 2014.
Jablonski, Nina G. The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.
John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-
1795, second edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975/1996.
Kehoe, Alice Beck America Before the European Invasions. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Books, 1992.
Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Meltzer, David J. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Mt. Pleasant, Jane. “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America.” Early American Studies 13:2 (Spring 2015): 374-
412.
Oswalt, Wendell H. This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native North Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Pringle, Heather. In Search of Ancient North America: An Archaeological Journey to Forgotten Cultures. New York: Wiley, 1996.
Reséndez, Andrés. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Scarry, C. Margaret. Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands: Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.
Schwartz, Stuart B. Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico. New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2000.
Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2006.
Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World. New York: Random House, 1988.

 

Notes

1. A. L. Kroeber, ed. University of California Publications: American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol 10 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1911-1914), 191-192. [↩]
2. James F. Barnett Jr., Mississippi’s American Indians (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 90. [↩]
3. Edward W. Osowski, Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 25. [↩]
4. David J. Meltzer, First Peoples in a New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 170. [↩]
5. Knut R. Fladmark, “Routes: Alternate Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America” American Antiquity 44, no. 1 (1979): 55-69. [↩]
6. Jessi J. Halligan, et al. “Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the people of the Americas, Science Advances, Vol 2. No 5 (May 13, 2016).

[↩]
7. Tom D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2000). [↩]
8. Richard A. Diehl, The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 25 [↩]
9. Jane Mt. Pleasant, “A New Paradigm for Pre-Columbian Agriculture in North America,” Early American Studies, 13:2 (Spring 2015): 374-412. [↩]
10. Richard H. Steckel, “Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America: The Skeletal Evidence,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer, 2005), 19-21.

[↩]
11. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, eds. Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

[↩]
12. Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987/1992), 217. [↩]
13. H. Wolcott Toll, “Making and Breaking Pots in the Chaco World,” American Antiquity, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), 65. [↩]
14. Anna Sofaer, “The Primary Architecture of the Chacoan Culture: A Cosmological Expression” in Baker H. Morrow and V. B. Price, eds. Anasazi Architecture and American

Design (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). [↩]
15. Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, eds., Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 31. [↩]
16. Thomas E. Emerson, “An Introduction to Cahokia 2002: Diversity, Complexity, and History,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 27: No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 137-139.

[↩]
17. Thomas E. Emerson, “An Introduction to Cahokia 2002: Diversity, Complexity, and History,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 27: No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 137-139.

[↩]
18. Amy Schutt. Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7-30. [↩]
19. Erna Gunther, “An Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony, American Anthropologist, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1926), pp. 605-617. [↩]
20. Gary E. Moulton, ed. The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Volume 6 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Available online through the Library of

Congress at https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/transcript68.html. [↩]
21. Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, Second Edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 126. [↩]
22. The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage), and Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real, Clements R. Markham, ed.

and trans. (London: 1893), 73; 135, 41. [↩]
23. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies… (Project Gutenberg EBook: 2007), 147. [↩]
24. Dean R. Snow, “Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of Pre-Columbian North American Indian Populations,” Science, Vol. 268, No. 5217 (Jun.

16, 1995), 1601. [↩]
25. Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Random House, 1988), 195. [↩]
26. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: 1963), 53. [↩]
27. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, A. P. Maudslay, trans. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517-1521 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 190-191. [↩]
28. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (New York: 1955). [↩]
29. Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 27. [↩]
30. Sta ord Poole, C. M., Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995. [↩]
31. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983). [↩]

The American Yawp

2. Colliding Cultures

Theodor de Bry, “Negotiating Peace With the Indians,” 1634, Virginia Historical Society.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*
I. Introduction | II. Spanish America | III. Spain’s Rivals Emerge | IV. English Colonization | V. Jamestown | VI. New England | VII.

Conclusion | VIII. Primary Sources | IX. Reference Materials

I. Introduction

The Columbian Exchange transformed both sides of the Atlantic, but with dramatically disparate outcomes. New diseases wiped out entire
civilizations in the Americas, while newly imported nutrient-rich foodstu s enabled a European population boom. Spain bene ted most
immediately as the wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened the Spanish monarchy. Spain used its new riches to gain an
advantage over other European nations, but this advantage was soon contested.
Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England all raced to the New World, eager to match the gains of the Spanish. Native peoples greeted
the new visitors with responses ranging from welcoming cooperation to aggressive violence, but the ravages of disease and the possibility of
new trading relationships enabled Europeans to create settlements all along the western rim of the Atlantic world. New empires would
emerge from these tenuous beginnings, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain would lose its privileged position to its rivals. An
age of colonization had begun and, with it, a great collision of cultures commenced.

 

II. Spanish America

Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the bene ts of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Expeditions
slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and
economic dominance in a new territory.
Juan Ponce de Leon arrived in the area named “La Florida” in 1513. He found between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans. But then
two-and-a-half centuries of contact with European and African peoples–whether through war, slave raids, or, most dramatically, foreign
disease–decimated Florida’s indigenous population. European explorers, meanwhile, had hoped to nd great wealth in Florida, but reality
never aligned with their imaginations.

1513 Atlantic map from cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. Via Wikimedia.

In the rst half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers fought frequently with Florida’s native peoples as well as with other Europeans.
In the 1560s Spain expelled French Protestants, called Huguenots, from the area near modern-day Jacksonville in northeast Florida. In 1586
English privateer Sir Francis Drake burned the wooden settlement of St. Augustine. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Spain’s reach in
Florida extended from the mouth of the St. Johns River south to the environs of St. Augustine—an area of roughly 1,000 square miles. The
Spaniards attempted to duplicate methods for establishing control used previously in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes. The Crown
granted missionaries the right to live among Timucua and Guale villagers in the late 1500s and early 1600s and encouraged settlement
through the encomienda system (grants of Indian labor).1 
In the 1630s, the mission system extended into the Apalachee district in the Florida panhandle. The Apalachee, one of the most powerful
tribes in Florida at the time of contact, claimed the territory from the modern Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico. Apalachee
farmers grew an abundance of corn and other crops. Indian traders carried surplus products east along the Camino Real (the royal road) that

connected the western anchor of the mission system with St. Augustine. Spanish settlers drove cattle eastward across the St. Johns River and
established ranches as far west as Apalachee. Still, Spain held Florida tenuously.
Further west, in 1598, Juan de Oñate led 400 settlers, soldiers, and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico. The Spanish Southwest had
brutal beginnings. When Oñate sacked the Pueblo city of Acoma, the “sky city,” the Spaniards slaughtered nearly half of its roughly 1,500
inhabitants, including women and children. Oñate ordered one foot cut o of every surviving male over 15 and he enslaved the remaining
women and children.2
Santa Fe, the rst permanent European settlement in the Southwest, was established in 1610. Few Spaniards relocated to the southwest due
to the distance from Mexico City and the dry and hostile environment. Thus, the Spanish never achieved a commanding presence in the
region. By 1680, only about 3,000 colonists called Spanish New Mexico home.3 There, they traded with and exploited the local Puebloan
peoples. The region’s Puebloan population had plummeted from as many as 60,000 in 1600 to about 17,000 in 1680.4 
Spain shifted strategies after the military expeditions wove their way through the southern and western half of North America. Missions
became the engine of colonization in North America. Missionaries, most of whom were members of the Franciscan religious order, provided
Spain with an advance guard in North America. Catholicism had always justi ed Spanish conquest, and colonization always carried religious
imperatives. By the early seventeenth century, Spanish friars established dozens of missions along the Rio Grande, in New Mexico, and in
California.

 

III. Spain’s Rivals Emerge

The earliest plan of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan). 1660. Wikimedia.

While Spain plundered the New World, unrest plagued Europe. The Reformation threw England and France, the two European powers
capable of contesting Spain, into turmoil. Long and expensive con icts drained time, resources, and lives. Millions died from religious
violence in France alone. As the violence diminished in Europe, however, religious and political rivalries continued in the New World.

The Spanish exploitation of New Spain’s riches inspired European monarchs to invest in exploration and conquest. Reports of Spanish
atrocities spread throughout Europe and provided a humanitarian justi cation for European colonization. An English reprint of the
writings of Bartolomé de las Casas bore the sensational title: “Popery Truly Display’d in its Bloody Colours: Or, a Faithful Narrative of the
Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manners of Cruelties that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish
Spanish.” An English writer explained that the Indians “were simple and plain men, and lived without great labour,” but in their lust for
gold the Spaniards “forced the people (that were not used to labour) to stand all the daie in the hot sun gathering gold in the sand of the
rivers. By this means a great number of them (not used to such pains) died, and a great number of them (seeing themselves brought from so
quiet a life to such misery and slavery) of desperation killed themselves. And many would not marry, because they would not have their
children slaves to the Spaniards.”5 The Spanish accused their critics of fostering a “Black Legend.” The Black Legend drew on religious
di erences and political rivalries. Spain had successful conquests in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands and left many in those
nations yearning to break free from Spanish in uence. English writers argued that Spanish barbarities were foiling a tremendous opportunity
for the expansion of Christianity across the globe and that a benevolent conquest of the New World by non-Spanish monarchies o ered the
surest salvation of the New World’s pagan masses. With these religious justi cations, and with obvious economic motives, Spain’s rivals
arrived in the New World.

 

The French

The French crown subsidized exploration in the early sixteenth century. Early French explorers sought a fabled Northwest Passage, a
mythical waterway passing through the North American continent to Asia. Despite the wealth of the New World, Asia’s riches still
beckoned to Europeans. Canada’s Saint Lawrence River appeared to be such a passage, stretching deep into the continent and into the Great
Lakes. French colonial possessions centered on these bodies of water (and, later, down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans).

French colonization developed through investment from private trading companies. Traders established Port-Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia)
in 1603 and launched trading expeditions that stretched down the Atlantic coast as far as Cape Cod. The needs of the fur trade set the future
pattern of French colonization. Founded in 1608 under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain, Quebec provided the foothold for what
would become New France. French fur traders placed a higher value on cooperating with the Indians than on establishing a successful
French colonial footprint. Asserting dominance in the region could have been to their own detriment, as it might have compromised their
access to skilled Indian trappers, and therefore wealth. Few Frenchmen traveled to the New World to settle permanently. In fact, few traveled
at all. Many persecuted French Protestants (Huguenots) sought to emigrate after France criminalized Protestantism in 1685, but all non-
Catholics were forbidden in New France.6 

Jean-Pierre Lassus, “Veüe et Perspective de la Nouvelle Orleans,” 1726, Centre des archives d’outre-mer, France via Wikimedia. This depiction of New Orleans in 1726 when it was
an 8-year-old French frontier settlement.

The French preference for trade over permanent settlement fostered more cooperative and mutually bene cial relationships with Native
Americans than was typical among the Spanish and English. Perhaps eager to debunk the anti-Catholic elements of the Black Legend, the
French worked to cultivate cooperation with Indians. Jesuit missionaries, for instance, adopted di erent conversion strategies than the
Spanish Franciscans. Spanish missionaries brought Indians into enclosed missions, whereas Jesuits more often lived with or alongside Indian
groups. Many French fur traders married Indian women.7 The o spring of Indian women and French men were so common in New France
that the French developed a word for these children, Métis(sage). The Huron people developed a particularly close relationship with the
French and many converted to Christianity and engaged in the fur trade. But close relationships with the French would come at a high cost.
The Huron were decimated by the ravages of European disease, and entanglements in French and Dutch con icts proved disastrous.8
Despite this, some native peoples maintained alliances with the French.

Pressure from the powerful Iroquois in the east pushed many Algonquian-speaking peoples toward French territory in the mid-seventeenth
century and together they crafted what historians have called a “middle ground,” a kind of cross-cultural space that allowed for native and
European interaction, negotiation, and accommodation. French traders adopted–sometimes clumsily–the gift-giving and mediation
strategies expected of native leader. Natives similarly engaged the impersonal European market and adapted–often haphazardly–to
European laws. The Great Lakes “middle ground” experienced tumultuous success throughout the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth
centuries until English colonial o cials and American settlers swarmed the region. The pressures of European expansion strained even the
closest bonds.9

 

The Dutch

The Netherlands, a small maritime nation with great wealth, achieved considerable colonial success. In 1581, the Netherlands had o cially
broken away from the Hapsburgs and won a reputation as the freest of the new European nations. Dutch women maintained separate legal
identities from their husbands and could therefore hold property and inherit full estates.

Ravaged by the turmoil of the Reformation, the Dutch embraced greater religious tolerance and freedom of the press than other European
nations.10 Radical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews ocked to the Netherlands. The English Pilgrims, for instance, ed rst to the
Netherlands before sailing to the New World years later. The Netherlands built its colonial empire through the work of experienced
merchants and skilled sailors. The Dutch were the most advanced capitalists in the modern world and marshaled extensive nancial resources
by creating innovative nancial organizations such as the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the East India Company. Although the Dutch
o ered liberties, they o ered very little democracy—power remained in the hands of only a few. And Dutch liberties certainly had their
limits. The Dutch advanced the slave trade and brought African slaves with them to the New World. Slavery was an essential part of Dutch
capitalist triumphs.

Sharing the European hunger for access to Asia, in 1609 the Dutch commissioned the Englishman Henry Hudson to discover the fabled
Northwest Passage through North America. He failed, of course, but nevertheless found the Hudson River and claimed modern-day New
York for the Dutch. There they established New Netherland, an essential part of the Dutch New World empire. The Netherlands chartered
the Dutch West India Company in 1621 and established colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The island of Manhattan
provided a launching pad to support its Caribbean colonies and attack Spanish trade.

Spiteful of the Spanish and mindful of the “Black Legend,” the Dutch were determined not to repeat Spanish atrocities. They fashioned
guidelines for New Netherlands that conformed to the ideas of Hugo Grotius, a legal philosopher who believed native peoples possessed the
same natural rights as Europeans. Colony leaders insisted that land be purchased; in 1626 Peter Minuit therefore “bought” Manhattan from
Munsee Indians.11 Despite the seemingly honorable intentions, it is very likely that the Dutch paid the wrong Indians for the land (either
intentionally or unintentionally) or that the Munsee and the Dutch understood the transaction in very di erent terms. Transactions like

these illustrated both the Dutch attempt to nd a more peaceful process of colonization and the inconsistency between European and
Native American understandings of property.

Like the French, the Dutch sought to pro t, not to conquer. Trade with Native peoples became New Netherland’s central economic
activity. Dutch traders carried wampum along pre-existing Native trade routes and exchanged it for beaver pelts. Wampum consisted of shell
beads fashioned by Algonquian Indians on the southern New England coast and were valued as a ceremonial and diplomatic commodity
among the Iroquois. Wampum became a currency that could buy anything from a loaf of bread to a plot of land.12 

In addition to developing these trading networks, the Dutch also established farms, settlements, and lumber camps. The West India
Company directors implemented the patroon system to encourage colonization. The patroon system granted large estates to wealthy
landlords, who subsequently paid passage for the tenants to work their land. Expanding Dutch settlements correlated with deteriorating
relations with local Indians. In the interior of the continent, the Dutch retained valuable alliances with the Iroquois to maintain Beverwijck,
modern-day Albany, as a hub for the fur trade.13 In the places where the Dutch built permanent settlements, the ideals of peaceful
colonization succumbed to the settlers’ increasing demand for land. Armed con icts erupted as colonial settlements encroached on Native
villages and hunting lands. Pro t and peace, it seemed, could not coexist.

Labor shortages, meanwhile, crippled Dutch colonization. The patroon system failed to bring enough tenants and the colony could not
attract a su cient number of indentured servants to satisfy the colony’s backers. In response, the colony imported 11 company-owned slaves
in 1626, the same year that Minuit purchased Manhattan. Slaves were tasked with building New Amsterdam (modern-day New York
City), including a defensive wall along the northern edge of the colony (the site of modern-day Wall Street). They created its roads and
maintained its all-important port. Fears of racial mixing led the Dutch to import enslaved women, enabling the formation of African Dutch
families. The colony’s rst African marriage occurred in 1641, and by 1650 there were at least 500 African slaves in the colony. By 1660 New
Amsterdam had the largest urban slave population on the continent.14 

As was typical of the practice of African slavery in much of the early seventeenth century, Dutch slavery in New Amsterdam was less
comprehensively exploitative than later systems of American slavery. Some enslaved Africans, for instance, successfully sued for back wages.
When several company-owned slaves fought for the colony against the Munsee Indians, they petitioned for their freedom and won a kind of
“half freedom” that allowed them to work their own land in return for paying a large tithe, or tax, to their masters. The children of
these “half-free” laborers remained held in bondage by the West India Company, however. The Dutch, who so proudly touted their liberties,
grappled with the reality of African slavery, and some New Netherlanders protested the enslavement of Christianized Africans. The
economic goals of the colony slowly crowded out these cultural and religious objections, and the much boasted liberties of the Dutch came
to exist alongside increasingly brutal systems of slavery.

 

The Portuguese 

The Portuguese had been leaders in Atlantic navigation well ahead of Columbus’s voyage. But the incredible wealth owing from New
Spain piqued the rivalry between the two Iberian countries, and accelerated Portuguese colonization e orts. This rivalry created a crisis
within the Catholic world as Spain and Portugal squared o in a battle for colonial supremacy. The Pope intervened and divided the New
World with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Land east of the Tordesillas Meridian, an imaginary line dividing South America, would be
given to Portugal, whereas land west of the line was reserved for Spanish conquest. In return for the license to conquer, both Portugal and
Spain were instructed to treat the natives with Christian compassion and to bring them under the protection of the Church.

Lucrative colonies in Africa and India initially preoccupied Portugal, but by 1530 the Portuguese turned their attention to the land that
would become Brazil, driving out French traders and establishing permanent settlements. Gold and silver mines dotted the interior of the
colony, but two industries powered early colonial Brazil: sugar and the slave trade. In fact, over the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade,

more Africans were enslaved in Brazil than any other colony in the Atlantic World. Gold mines emerged in greater number throughout the
eighteenth century, but still never rivaled the pro tability of sugar or slave-trading.
Jesuit missionaries succeeded in bringing Christianity to Brazil, but strong elements of African and native spirituality mixed with orthodox
Catholicism to create a unique religious culture. This culture resulted from the demographics of Brazilian slavery. High mortality rates on
sugar plantations required a steady in ux of new slaves, thus perpetuating the cultural connection between Brazil and Africa. The reliance
on new imports of slaves increased the likelihood of resistance, however, and escaped slaves managed to create several free settlements,
called quilombos. These settlements drew from both African and Native slaves, and despite frequent attacks, several endured throughout the
long history of Brazilian slavery.15 
Despite the arrival of these new Europeans, Spain continued to dominate the New World. The wealth owing from the exploitation of the
Aztec and Incan Empires greatly eclipsed the pro ts of other European nations. But this dominance would not last long. By the end of the
sixteenth century, the powerful Spanish Armada would be destroyed, and the English would begin to rule the waves.

 

IV. English Colonization

Nicholas Hilliard, The Battle of Gravelines, 1588, via National Geographic España 

Spain had a one-hundred year head start on New World colonization and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned.
The Protestant Reformation had shaken England but Elizabeth I assumed the English crown in 1558. Elizabeth oversaw England’s so-called
“golden age” that included both the expansion of trade and exploration and the literary achievements of Shakespeare and Marlowe. English
mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading system, created and maintained markets. The markets provided a steady supply of
consumers and laborers, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.
However, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English population. The island’s population increased from fewer than
three million in 1500 to over ve million by the middle of the seventeenth century.16 The skyrocketing cost of land coincided with
plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose but wages stagnated. Moreover, movements to enclose public land–sparked by the
transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock-raising–evicted tenants from the land and created hordes of landless, jobless
peasants that haunted the cities and countryside. One-quarter to one-half of the population lived in extreme poverty.17 

New World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English fortunes among the wealthy, a tense Spanish rivalry, and
mounting internal social unrest. But supporters of English colonization always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-
interest. They claimed to be doing God’s work. Many claimed that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by
Christianizing the New World’s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon The
History of the Kings of Britain, written by the twelfth century monk Geo rey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur’s
conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest.18 Moreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New
World Indians would satisfy God and glorify England’s “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I, who was seen as nearly divine by some in England. The
English—and other European Protestant colonizers—imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of
inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.

In his 1584 “Discourse on Western Planting,” Richard Hakluyt amassed the supposed religious, moral, and exceptional economic bene ts of
colonization. He repeated the “Black Legend” of Spanish New World terrorism and attacked the sins of Catholic Spain. He promised that
English colonization could strike a blow against Spanish heresy and bring Protestant religion to the New World. English interference,
Hakluyt suggested, may provide the only salvation from Catholic rule in the New World. The New World, too, he said, o ered obvious
economic advantages. Trade and resource extraction would enrich the English treasury. England, for instance, could nd plentiful materials
to out t a world-class navy. Moreover, he said, the New World could provide an escape for England’s vast armies of landless “vagabonds.”
Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring pro t, but also provide work for England’s jobless poor. A Christian enterprise, a blow
against Spain, an economic stimulus, and a social safety valve all beckoned the English toward a commitment to colonization.19

This noble rhetoric veiled the coarse economic motives that brought England to the New World. New economic structures and a new
merchant class paved the way for colonization. England’s merchants lacked estates but they had new plans to build wealth. By collaborating
with new government-sponsored trading monopolies and employing nancial innovations such as joint-stock companies, England’s
merchants sought to improve on the Dutch economic system. Spain was extracting enormous material wealth from the New World; why
shouldn’t England? Joint-stock companies, the ancestors of the modern corporations, became the initial instruments of colonization. With
government monopolies, shared pro ts, and managed risks, these money-making ventures could attract and manage the vast capital needed
for colonization. In 1606 James I approved the formation of the Virginia Company (named after Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”).

Rather than formal colonization, however, the most successful early English ventures in the New World were a form of state-sponsored
piracy known as privateering. Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors, or “Sea Dogges,” such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to plunder
Spanish ships and towns in the Americas. Privateers earned a substantial pro t both for themselves and for the English crown. England
practiced piracy on a scale, one historian wrote, “that transforms crime into politics.”20 Francis Drake harried Spanish ships throughout the
Western Hemisphere and raided Spanish caravans as far away as the coast of Peru on the Paci c Ocean. In 1580 Elizabeth rewarded her
skilled pirate with knighthood. But Elizabeth walked a ne line. With Protestant-Catholic tensions already running high, English
privateering provoked Spain. Tensions worsened after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain
unleashed the fabled Armada. With 130 Ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, Spain launched the largest invasion in history to destroy the
British navy and depose Elizabeth. 

An island nation, England depended upon a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion. England had fewer ships than Spain but they
were smaller and swifter. They successfully harassed the Armada, forcing it to retreat to the Netherlands for reinforcements. But then a uke
storm, celebrated in England as the “divine wind,” annihilated the remainder of the eet.21 The destruction of the Armada changed the
course of world history. It not only saved England and secured English Protestantism, but it also opened the seas to English expansion and
paved the way for England’s colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark upon its dominance over North America.

English colonization would look very di erent from Spanish or French colonization. England had long been trying to conquer Catholic
Ireland. Rather than integrating with the Irish and trying to convert them to Protestantism, England more often simply seized land through
violence and pushed out the former inhabitants, leaving them to move elsewhere or to die. These same tactics would later be deployed in
North American invasions. 

English colonization, however, began haltingly. Sir Humphrey Gilbert labored throughout the late-sixteenth century to establish a colony in
Newfoundland but failed. In 1587, with a predominantly male cohort of 150 English colonizers, John White reestablished an abandoned
settlement on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island. Supply shortages prompted White to return to England for additional support but the
Spanish Armada and the mobilization of British naval e orts stranded him in Britain for several years. When he nally returned to Roanoke,
he found the colony abandoned. What befell the failed colony? White found the word “Croatan” carved into a tree or a post in the
abandoned colony. Historians presume the colonists, short of food, may have ed for a nearby island of that name and encountered its
settled native population. Others o er violence as an explanation. Regardless, the English colonists were never heard from again. When
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had yet established a permanent North American colony.
After King James made peace with Spain in 1604, privateering no longer held out the promise of cheap wealth. Colonization assumed a new
urgency. The Virginia Company, established in 1606, drew inspiration from Cortes and the Spanish conquests. It hoped to nd gold and
silver as well as other valuable trading commodities in the New World: glass, iron, furs, pitch, tar, and anything else the country could supply.
The Company planned to identify a navigable river with a deep harbor, away from the eyes of the Spanish. There they would nd an Indian
trading network and extract a fortune from the New World.

 

V. Jamestown

“Incolarum Virginiae piscandi ratio (The Method of Fishing of the Inhabitants of Virginia),” c1590, via the Encyclopedia Virginia.

In April 1607 Englishmen aboard three ships—the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—sailed forty miles up the James River
(named for the English king) in present-day Virginia (Named for Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen”) and settled upon just such a place. The
uninhabited peninsula they selected was upriver and out of sight of Spanish patrols. It o ered easy defense against ground assaults and was
both uninhabited and located close enough to many Indian villages and their potentially lucrative trade networks. But the location was a
disaster. Indians had ignored the peninsula for two reasons: Terrible soil hampered agriculture and brackish tidal water led to debilitating
disease. Despite these setbacks, the English built Jamestown, the rst permanent English colony in the present-day United States.

The English had not entered a wilderness but had arrived amid a people they called the Powhatan Confederacy. Powhatan, or
Wahunsenacawh, as he called himself, led nearly 10,000 Algonquian-speaking Indians in the Chesapeake. They burned vast acreage to clear
brush and create sprawling arti cial park-like grasslands so they could easily hunt deer, elk, and bison. The Powhatan raised corn, beans,
squash, and possibly sun owers, rotating acreage throughout the Chesapeake. Without plows, manure, or draft animals, the Powhatan
achieved a remarkable number of calories cheaply and e ciently.

Jamestown was a pro t-seeking venture backed by investors. The colonists were mostly gentlemen and proved entirely unprepared for the
challenges ahead. They hoped for easy riches but found none. As John Smith later complained, they “Would rather starve than
work.”22 And so they did. Disease and starvation ravaged the colonists, thanks in part to the peninsula’s unhealthy location and the fact
that supplies from England arrived sporadically or spoiled. Fewer than half of the original colonists survived the rst nine months.

John Smith, a yeoman’s son and capable leader, took command of the crippled colony and promised, “He that will not work shall not eat.”
He navigated Indian diplomacy, claiming that he was captured and sentenced to death but Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, intervened to
save his life. She would later marry another colonist, John Rolfe, and die in England.

Powhatan kept the English alive that rst winter. The Powhatan had welcomed the English and placed a high value on metal axe-heads,
kettles, tools, and guns and eagerly traded furs and other abundant goods for them. With 10,000 confederated natives and with food in
abundance, the Indians had little to fear and much to gain from the isolated outpost of sick and dying Englishmen.

John White, “Village of the Secotan, 1585, via Wikimedia.

Despite reinforcements, the English continued to die. Four hundred settlers arrived in 1609, but the overwhelmed colony entered a desperate
“starving time” in the winter of 1609-1610. Supplies were lost at sea. Relations with the Indians deteriorated and the colonists fought a kind
of slow-burning guerrilla war with the Powhatan. Disaster loomed for the colony. The settlers ate everything they could, roaming the woods
for nuts and berries. They boiled leather. They dug up graves to eat the corpses of their former neighbors. One man was executed for killing
and eating his wife. Some years later, George Percy recalled the colonists’ desperation during these years, when he served as the colony’s
president: “Having fed upon our horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs, cats, rats and
mice … as to eat boots shoes or any other leather … And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing was spared
to maintain life and to doe those things which seam incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them.”23 Archaeological
excavations in 2012 exhumed the bones of a fourteen-year-old girl that exhibited signs of cannibalism.24 All but 60 settlers would die by the
summer of 1610.

Little improved over the next several years. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants that arrived in Jamestown had perished. England’s
rst American colony was a catastrophe. The colony was reorganized, and in 1614 the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe eased relations

with the Powhatan, though the colony still limped along as a starving, commercially disastrous tragedy. The colonists were unable to nd any
pro table commodities remained dependent upon the Indians and sporadic shipments from England for food. But then tobacco saved
Jamestown.

By the time King James I described tobacco as a “noxious weed, … loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and
dangerous to the lungs,” it had already taken Europe by storm. In 1616 John Rolfe crossed tobacco strains from Trinidad and Guiana and
planted Virginia’s rst tobacco crop. In 1617 the colony sent its rst cargo of tobacco back to England. The “noxious weed,” a native of the
New World, fetched a high price in Europe and the tobacco boom began in Virginia and then later spread to Maryland. Within fteen years
American colonists were exporting over 500,000 pounds of tobacco per year. Within forty, they were exporting fteen million.25 

Tobacco changed everything. It saved Virginia from ruin, incentivized further colonization, and laid the groundwork for what would
become the United States. With a new market open, Virginia drew not only merchants and traders, but also settlers. Colonists came in
droves. They were mostly young, mostly male, and mostly indentured servants who signed contracts called indentures that bonded them to
employers for a period of years in return for passage across the ocean. But even the rough terms of servitude were no match for the promise
of land and potential pro ts that beckoned English farmers. But still there were not enough of them. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop and
ambitious planters, with seemingly limitless land before them, lacked only laborers to escalate their wealth and status. The colony’s great
labor vacuum inspired the creation of the “headright policy” in 1618: any person who migrated to Virginia would automatically receive 50
acres of land and any immigrant whose passage they paid would entitle them to 50 acres more.

In 1619 the Virginia Company established the House of Burgesses, a limited representative body composed of white landowners that rst
met in Jamestown. That same year, a Dutch slave ship sold 20 Africans to the Virginia colonists. Southern slavery was born.

Soon the tobacco-growing colonists expanded beyond the bounds of Jamestown’s deadly peninsula. When it became clear that the English
were not merely intent on maintaining a small trading post, but sought a permanent ever-expanding colony, con ict with the Powhatan
Confederacy became almost inevitable. Powhatan died in 1622 and was succeeded by his brother, Opechancanough, who promised to drive
the land-hungry colonists back into the sea. He launched a surprise attack and in a single day (March 22, 1622) killed over 350 colonists, or
one-third of all the colonists in Virginia.26 The colonists retaliated and revisited the massacres upon Indian settlements many times over. The
massacre freed the colonists to drive the Indians o their land. The governor of Virginia declared it colonial policy to achieve the “expulsion
of the savages to gain the free range of the country.”27 War and disease destroyed the remnants of the Chesapeake Indians and tilted the
balance of power decisively toward the English colonizers.

English colonists brought to the New World particular visions of racial, cultural, and religious supremacy. Despite starving in the shadow of
the Powhatan Confederacy, English colonists nevertheless judged themselves physically, spiritually, and technologically superior to native
peoples in North America. Christianity, metallurgy, intensive agriculture, trans-Atlantic navigation, and even wheat all magni ed the
English sense of superiority. This sense of superiority, when coupled with outbreaks of violence, left the English feeling entitled to
indigenous lands and resources.

Spanish conquerors established the framework for the Atlantic slave trade over a century before the rst chained Africans arrived at
Jamestown. Even Bartolomé de las Casas, celebrated for his pleas to save Native Americans from colonial butchery, for a time recommended
that indigenous labor be replaced by importing Africans. Early English settlers from the Caribbean and Atlantic coast of North America
mostly imitated European ideas of African inferiority. “Race” followed the expansion of slavery across the Atlantic world. Skin-color and
race suddenly seemed xed. Englishmen equated Africans with categorical blackness and blackness with Sin, “the handmaid and symbol of
baseness.”28 An English essayist in 1695 wrote that “A negro will always be a negro, carry him to Greenland, feed him chalk, feed and manage
him never so many ways.”29 More and more Europeans embraced the notions that Europeans and Africans were of distinct races. Others
now preached that the Old Testament God cursed Ham, the son of Noah, and doomed black people to perpetual enslavement.

And yet in the early years of American slavery, ideas about race were not yet xed and the practice of slavery was not yet codi ed. The rst
generations of Africans in English North America faced miserable conditions but, in contrast to later American history, their initial servitude

was not necessarily permanent, heritable, or even particularly disgraceful. Africans were de nitively set apart as fundamentally di erent from
their white counterparts, and faced longer terms of service and harsher punishments, but, like the indentured white servants whisked away
from English slums, these rst Africans in North America could also work for only a set number of years before becoming free landowners
themselves. The Angolan Anthony Johnson, for instance, was sold into servitude but ful lled his indenture and became a prosperous
tobacco planter himself.30 
In 1622, at the dawn of the tobacco boom, Jamestown had still seemed a failure. But the rise of tobacco and the destruction of the Powhatan
turned the tide. Colonists escaped the deadly peninsula and immigrants poured into the colony to grow tobacco and turn a pro t for the
Crown.

 

VI. New England

Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, via The History Project (UC Davis).

The English colonies in New England established from 1620 onward were founded with loftier goals than those in Virginia. Although
migrants to New England expected economic pro t, religious motives directed the rhetoric and much of the reality of these colonies. Not
every English person who moved to New England during the seventeenth century was a Puritan, but Puritans dominated the politics,
religion, and culture of New England. Even after 1700, the region’s Puritan inheritance shaped many aspects of its history.
The term Puritan began as an insult, and its recipients usually referred to each other as “the godly” if they used a speci c term at all. Puritans
believed that the Church of England did not distance itself far enough from Catholicism after Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1530s.
They largely agreed with European Calvinists—followers of theologian Jean Calvin—on matters of religious doctrine. Calvinists (and
Puritans) believed that mankind was redeemed by God’s Grace alone, and that the fate of an individual’s immortal soul was predestined. The
happy minority God had already chosen to save were known among English Puritans as the Elect. Calvinists also argued that the decoration
or churches, reliance on ornate ceremony, and corrupt priesthood obscured God’s message. They believed that reading the Bible was the best
way to understand God.

Puritans were stereotyped by their enemies as dour killjoys, and the exaggeration has endured. It is certainly true that the Puritans’ disdain for
excess and opposition to many holidays popular in Europe (including Christmas, which, as Puritans never tired of reminding everyone, the
Bible never told anyone to celebrate) lent themselves to caricature. But Puritans understood themselves as advocating a reasonable middle
path in a corrupt world. It would never occur to a Puritan, for example, to abstain from alcohol or sex.

During the rst century after the English Reformation (c.1530-1630) Puritans sought to “purify” the Church of England of all practices
that smacked of Catholicism, advocating a simpler worship service, the abolition of ornate churches, and other reforms. They had some
success in pushing the Church of England in a more Calvinist direction, but with the coronation of King Charles I (r. 1625-1649), the
Puritans gained an implacable foe that cast English Puritans as excessive and dangerous. Facing growing persecution, the Puritans began the
Great Migration, during which about 20,000 people traveled to New England between 1630 and 1640. The Puritans (unlike the small band
of separatist “Pilgrims” who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620) remained committed to reforming the Church of England, but
temporarily decamped to North America to accomplish this task. Leaders like John Winthrop insisted they were not separating from, or
abandoning, England, but were rather forming a godly community in America, that would be a “City on a Hill” and an example for
reformers back home.31 The Puritans did not seek to create a haven of religious toleration, a notion that they—along with nearly all
European Christians—regarded as ridiculous at best, and dangerous at worst.

While the Puritans did not succeed in building a godly utopia in New England, a combination of Puritan traits with several external factors
created colonies wildly di erent from any other region settled by English people. Unlike those heading to Virginia, colonists in New England
(Plymouth [1620], Massachusetts Bay [1630], Connecticut [1636], and Rhode Island [1636]) generally arrived in family groups. The
majority of New England immigrants were small landholders in England, a class contemporary English called the “middling sort.” When
they arrived in New England they tended to replicate their home environments, founding towns comprised of independent landholders.
The New England climate and soil made large-scale plantation agriculture impractical, so the system of large landholders using masses of
slaves or indentured servants to grow labor-intensive crops never took hold.

There is no evidence that the New England Puritans would have opposed such a system were it possible; other Puritans made their fortunes
on the Caribbean sugar islands, and New England merchants pro ted as suppliers of provisions and slaves to those colonies. By accident of
geography as much as by design, New England society was much less strati ed than any of Britain’s other seventeenth-century colonies.

Although New England colonies could boast wealthy landholding elites, the disparity of wealth in the region remained narrow compared to
the Chesapeake, Carolina, or the Caribbean. Instead, seventeenth-century New England was characterized by a broadly-shared modest
prosperity based on a mixed economy dependent on small farms, shops, shing, lumber, shipbuilding, and trade with the Atlantic World.

A combination of environmental factors and the Puritan social ethos produced a region of remarkable health and stability during the
seventeenth century. New England immigrants avoided most of the deadly outbreaks of tropical disease that turned Chesapeake colonies
into graveyards. Disease, in fact, only aided English settlement and relations to Native Americans. In contrast to other English colonists who
had to contend with powerful Native American neighbors, the Puritans confronted the stunned survivors of a biological catastrophe. A
lethal pandemic of smallpox during the 1610s swept away as much as 90 percent of the region’s Native American population. Many
survivors welcomed the English as potential allies against rival tribes who had escaped the catastrophe. The relatively healthy environment
coupled with political stability and the predominance of family groups among early immigrants allowed the New England population to
grow to 91,000 people by 1700 from only 21,000 immigrants. In contrast, 120,000 English went to the Chesapeake, and only 85,000 white
colonists remained in 1700.32

The New England Puritans set out to build their utopia by creating communities of the godly. Groups of men, often from the same region
of England, applied to the colony’s General Court for land grants.33 They generally divided part of the land for immediate use while keeping
much of the rest as “commons” or undivided land for future generations. The town’s inhabitants collectively decided the size of each settler’s
home lot based on their current wealth and status. Besides oversight of property, the town restricted membership, and new arrivals needed to
apply for admission. Those who gained admittance could participate in town governments that, while not democratic by modern standards,
nevertheless had broad popular involvement. All male property holders could vote in town meetings and choose the selectmen, assessors,

constables, and other o cials from among themselves to conduct the daily a airs of government. Upon their founding, towns wrote
covenants, re ecting the Puritan belief in God’s covenant with His people. Towns sought to arbitrate disputes and contain strife, as did the
church. Wayward or divergent individuals were persuaded, corrected, or coerced. Popular conceptions of Puritans as hardened authoritarians
are exaggerated, but if persuasion and arbitration failed, people who did not conform to community norms were punished or removed.
Massachusetts banished Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and other religious dissenters like the Quakers.

Although by many measures colonization in New England succeeded, its Puritan leaders failed in their own mission to create a utopian
community that would inspire their fellows back in England. They tended to focus their disappointment on the younger generation. “But
alas!” Increase Mather lamented, “That so many of the younger Generation have so early corrupted their [the founders’] doings!”34 The
Jeremiad, a sermon lamenting the fallen state of New England due to its straying from its early virtuous path, became a staple of late
seventeenth-century Puritan literature.

Yet the Jeremiads could not stop the e ects of prosperity. The population spread and grew more diverse. Many, if not most, New Englanders
retained strong ties to their Calvinist roots into the eighteenth century, but the Puritans (who became Congregationalists) struggled against a
rising tide of religious pluralism. On December 25, 1727, Judge Samuel Sewell noted in his diary that a new Anglican minister “keeps the day
in his new Church at Braintrey: people ock thither.” Previously forbidden holidays like Christmas were celebrated publicly in church and
privately in homes. Puritan divine Cotton Mather discovered on the Christmas of 1711, “a number of young people of both sexes,
belonging, many of them, to my ock, had…a Frolick, a reveling Feast, and a Ball, which discovers their Corruption.”35

Despite the lamentations of the Mathers and other Puritan leaders of their failure, they left an enduring mark on New England culture and
society that endured long after the region’s residents ceased to be called “Puritan.”

 

VII. Conclusion

The edgling settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts paled in importance when compared to the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Valued
more as marginal investments and social safety valves where the poor could be released, these colonies nonetheless created a foothold for
Britain on a vast North American continent. And although the seventeenth century would be fraught for Britain–religious, social, and
political upheavals would behead one king and force another to ee his throne–settlers in Massachusetts and Virginia were nonetheless tied
together by the emerging Atlantic economy. While commodities such as tobacco and sugar fueled new markets in Europe, the economy
grew increasingly dependent upon slave labor. Enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic would further complicate the collision of
cultures in the Americas. The creation and maintenance of a slave system would spark new understandings of human di erence and new
modes of social control. The economic exchanges of the new Atlantic economy would not only generate great wealth and exploitation, they
would also lead to new cultural systems and new identities for the inhabitants of at least four continents.

 

VIII. Primary Sources

Richard Hakluyt makes the case for English colonization, 1584

Richard Hakluyt used this document to persuade Queen Elizabeth I to devote more money and energy into encouraging English
colonization. In twenty-one chapters, summarized here, Hakluyt emphasized the many bene ts that England would receive by creating
colonies in the Americas.

John Winthrop dreams of a city on a hill, 1630

John Winthrop delivered the following sermon before he and his fellow settlers reached New England. The sermon is famous largely for
its use of the phrase “a city on a hill,” used to describe the expectation that the Massachusetts Bay colony would shine like an example to
the world. But Winthrop’s sermon also reveals how he expected Massachusetts to di er from the rest of the world.

John Lawson encounters North American Indians, 1709

John Lawson took detailed notes on the various peoples he encountered during his exploration of the Carolinas. Lawson recorded many
aspects of Native American life and even noticed the progress of disease as it swept through native communities. 

A Gaspesian Indian defends his way of life, 1641

Chrestien Le Clercq traveled to New France as a missionary, but found that many Native Americans were not interested in adopting
European cultural practices. In this document, LeClercq records the words of a Gaspesian Indian who explained why he believed that
his way of life was superior to Le Clercq’s. 

The Legend of Moshup, 1830

Most Native American peoples shared information solely through the spoken word. These oral cultures present unique challenges to
historians, and force us to look beyond traditional written sources. Folk tales o er a valuable window into the ways that Native
Americans understood themselves and the wider world. The Wampanoag legend of Moshup describes an ancient giant who lived on
Martha’s Vineyard Island and o ered stories about the history of the region.

Painting of New Orleans, 1726

During the contact period, the frontier was constantly shifting and places that are now considered old were once tenuous settlements.
This watercolor painting depicts New Orleans in 1726 when it was an 8-year-old French frontier settlement, nearly forty years prior to
the Spanish acquisition of the Louisiana territory. In the foreground, enslaved Africans fell trees on land belonging to the Company of
the Indies, and another enslaved man spears a massive alligator. Land has been cleared only just beyond the town limits and a wooden
palisade provides meager protection from competing European empires.

Sketch of Algonquin village, 1585

Native settlements were usually organized around political, economic, or religious activity. John White shows this Algonquin
community engaged in some kind of celebration across from the re he identi ed as “The place of solemne prayer,” indicating that
ceremonial activity could be both solemn and raucous. In the center of the image, a communal meal has been laid alongside crops that
are in varying stages of growth, suggesting the use of planting techniques like crop rotation. He also shows the interior of several
longhouses, made of bent saplings and covered with bark and woven maps. Among the Powhatan, similar structures were called
yehakins. In putting the longhouses and the settlement in a series of rows, White’s English perspective comes through: archaeological
evidence shows that these houses were usually situated around communal gathering places or moved next to elds under cultivation not
ordered in European-style rows.

 

IX. Reference Materials

This chapter was edited by Ben Wright and Joseph Locke, with content contributions by Erin Bonuso, L.D. Burnett, Jon Grandage, Joseph
Locke, Lisa Mercer, Maria Montalvo, Ian Saxine, Jennifer Tellman, Luke Willert, and Ben Wright.

Recommended citation: Erin Bonuso et al, “Colliding Cultures,” Ben Wright and Joseph L. Locke, eds. The American Yawp, Joseph L.
Locke and Ben Wright, ads., last modi ed August 1, 2017,  http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

 

Recommended Reading

Armitage, David and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002.
Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2009.
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London and New York:
Verso, 1997.
Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors. Iberianizing the Atlantic , 1550-1700. Stanford University Press, 2006.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Daniels, Christine and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820. New
York: Routledge, 2002.
Dubcovsky, Alejandra. Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2016.
Elliot, John H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2016.
Goetz, Rebecca Anne. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2012.  
Grandjean, Katherine. American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2015.
Gould, Eliga H. “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery.” American
Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 764-786.
Mancall, Peter C. Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1975.
Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women:Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004.
Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. New York: Houghton Mi in
Harcourt, 2017.
Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Snyder, Christina. Slavery In Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2010.
Stoler, Ann Laura. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial
Studies.” Journal of American History 88: 3 (Dec. 2001): 829- 897.

Thorton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1992.
Warren. Wendy. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.
Weimer, Adrian. Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.

 

Notes

1. Stanley L. Engerman, Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol I The Colonial Era (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 21. [↩]

2. Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015),
46. [↩]

3. John E Kicza and Rebecca Horn, Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 122.
[↩]

4. Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995),
155. [↩]

5. John Ponet, A Short Treatise on Political Power: And of the true Obedience which Subjects owe to Kings, and other civil Governors (London: 1556), 43-44. [↩]
6. Alan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Tortonto Press, 1997). [↩]
7. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

2001). [↩]
8. Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1659 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 116.

[↩]
9. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). [↩]
10. Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 20-53. [↩]
11. Allen W. Trelease, Indian A airs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960/1997), 36. [↩]
12. Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 101. [↩]
13. Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). [↩]
14. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 21. [↩]
15. Alida C. Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). See also James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa:

Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. [↩]
16. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 30. [↩]
17. John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 131-135. [↩]
18. Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 15. [↩]
19. Richard Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting (1584). Available online from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/discourseonweste02hakl_0. [↩]
20. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. , 1975), 9. [↩]
21. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). [↩]
22. John Smith, Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters
of New England, or Anywhere
or
The Pathway To Experience to Erect a Plantation (London:

1631), 16. [↩]
23. George Percy, “A True Relation of the Proceedings and Occurrents of Moment which Have Hap’ned in Virginia,” quoted in, Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness

Accounts of the Virginia Colony, the First Decade, 1607–1617, Edward Wright Haile, ed. (Champlain, Va.: Round House, 1998), p. 505. [↩]
24. Eric A. Powell, “Chilling Discovery at Jamestown,” Archaeology (June 10, 2013). Available online at: www.archaeology.org/issues/96-1307/trenches/973-

jamestown-starving-time-cannibalism. [↩]
25. Dennis Montgomery, 1607: Jamestown and the New World (Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2007), 126. [↩]
26. Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 57. [↩]
27. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 75. [↩]
28. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-12 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 7. [↩]
29. Ibid., 16. [↩]
30. T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press,

1980/2005). [↩]







skin and esh from cha ng against metal and timber that their bones protruded. Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases like
smallpox and conjunctivitis aboard slave ships.4
“Middle” had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave ships, the Middle Passage was one leg in the
maritime trade in sugar and other semi- nished American goods, manufactured European commodities, and African slaves. For the enslaved
Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg of three distinct journeys from Africa to the Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to
a coastal slave-trading factory, often a trek of hundreds of miles. Second—and middle—was an oceanic trip lasting from one to six months in a
slaver. Third was acculturation (known as “seasoning”) and transportation to the American mine, plantation, or other location where new slaves
were forced to labor.

“Slave ships transported 11-12 million Africans to destinations in North and South America, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that any regulation was introduced. The
Brookes print dates to after the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, but still shows enslaved Africans chained in rows using iron leg shackles. The slave ship Brookes was allowed to carry
up to 454 slaves, allotting 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man; 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each women, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches
(0.36 m) to each child, but one slave trader alleged that before 1788, the ship carried as many as 609 slaves.Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of
1788,” 1789, via Wikimedia.

The impact of the Middle Passage on the cultures of the Americas remains evident today. Many foods associated with Africans, such as cassava,
were originally imported to West Africa as part of the slave trade and were then adopted by African cooks before being brought to the Americas,
where they are still consumed. West African rhythms and melodies live in new forms today in music as varied as religious spirituals and
synthesized drumbeats. African in uences appear in the basket making and language of the Gullah people on the Carolina Coastal Islands.

Recent estimates count between 11 and 12 million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with
about 2 million deaths at sea as well as an additional several million dying in the trade’s overland African leg or during seasoning.5 Conditions in
all three legs of the slave trade were horrible, but the rst abolitionists focused especially on the abuses of the Middle Passage.
Southern European trading empires like the Catalans and Aragonese were brought into contact with a Levantine commerce in sugar and slaves
in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries. Europeans made the rst steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors
landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims who dominated Mediterranean trade. Beginning in the 1440s, ship
captains carried African slaves to Portugal. These Africans were valued primarily as domestic servants, as peasants provided the primary
agricultural labor force in Western Europe.6 European expansion into the Americas introduced both settlers and European authorities to a new
situation—an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships became the conduits for Africans forced to
America. The western coast of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and the west-central coast were the sources of African captives. Wars of expansion and
raiding parties produced captives who could be sold in coastal factories. African slave traders bartered for European nished goods such as beads,
cloth, rum, rearms, and metal wares.

The rst trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea and the oldest European building southern of the Sahara, Elmina Castle was established as a trade settlement by the Portuguese in the
15th century. The fort became one of the largest and most important markets for African slaves along the Atlantic slave trade. “View of the castle of Elmina on the north-west side, seen
from the river. Located on the gold coast in Guinea,” in Atlas Blaeu van der Hem, c. 1665-1668. Wikimedia.

Slavers often landed in the British West Indies, where slaves were seasoned in places like Barbados. Charleston, South Carolina, became the
leading entry point for the slave trade on the mainland. The founding of Charleston (“Charles Town” until the 1780s) in 1670 was viewed as a
serious threat by the Spanish in neighboring Florida, who began construction of Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine as a response. In 1693
the Spanish king issued the Decree of Sanctuary, which granted freedom to slaves eeing the English colonies if they converted to Catholicism
and swore an oath of loyalty to Spain.7 The presence of Africans who bore arms and served in the Spanish militia testi es to the di erent
conceptions of race among the English and Spanish in America.

About 450,000 Africans landed in British North America, a relatively small portion of the 11 to 12 million victims of the trade.8 As a proportion
of the enslaved population, there were more enslaved women in North America than in other colonial slave populations. Enslaved African
women also bore more children than their counterparts in the Caribbean or South America, facilitating the natural reproduction of slaves on the
North American continent.9 A 1662 Virginia law stated that an enslaved woman’s children inherited the “condition” of their mother; other
colonies soon passed similar statutes.10 This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which all children born to slave
women would be slaves for life, whether the father was white or black, enslaved or free.

Most fundamentally, the emergence of modern notions of race was closely related to the colonization of the Americas and the slave trade. African
slave traders lacked a rm category of race that might have led them to think that they were selling their own people, in much the same way that
Native Americans did not view other Indian groups as part of the same “race.” Similarly, most English citizens felt no racial identi cation with
the Irish or the even the Welsh. The modern idea of race as an inherited physical di erence (most often skin color) that is used to support systems
of oppression was new in the early modern Atlantic world.

In the early years of slavery, especially in the South, the distinction between indentured servants and slaves was initially unclear. In 1643,
however, a law was passed in Virginia that made African women “tithable.”11 This, in e ect, associated African women’s work with di cult
agricultural labor. There was no similar tax levied on white women; the law was an attempt to distinguish white from African women. The
English ideal was to have enough hired hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did not have to partake in manual
labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens, and kitchens. Of course, due to the labor shortage in early
America, white women did participate in eld labor. But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving of
themselves as better than other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the West Africans arriving in slave ships to the colonies.
For many white colonists, the association of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a further justi cation for the enslavement
and subordination of Africans.

Ideas about the rule of the household were informed by legal and customary understandings of marriage and the home in England. A man was
expected to hold “paternal dominion” over his household, which included his wife, children, servants, and slaves. In contrast, slaves were not
legally masters of a household, and were therefore subject to the authority of the white master. Slave marriages were not recognized in colonial
law. Some enslaved men and women married “abroad”; that is, they married individuals who were not owned by the same master and did not live
on the same plantation. These husbands and wives had to travel miles at a time, typically only once a week on Sundays, to visit their spouses.
Legal or religious authority did not protect these marriages, and masters could refuse to let their slaves visit a spouse, or even sell a slave to a new
master hundreds of miles away from their spouse and children. Within the patriarchal and exploitative colonial environment, enslaved men and
women struggled to establish families and communities.

 

III. Turmoil in Britain

Religious con ict plagued sixteenth-century England. While Spain plundered the New World and built an empire, Catholic and Protestant
English monarchs vied for supremacy and attacked their opponents as heretics. Queen Elizabeth cemented Protestantism as the o cial religion
of the realm, but questions endured as to what kind of Protestantism would hold sway. Many radical Protestants (often called “Puritans” by their
critics) looked to the New World as an opportunity to create a beacon of Calvinist Christianity, while others continued the struggle in England.
By the 1640s, political and economic con icts between Parliament and the Crown merged with long-simmering religious tensions, made worse
by a King who seemed sympathetic to Catholicism. The result was a bloody civil war. Colonists reacted in a variety of ways as England waged war
on itself, but all were a ected by these decades of turmoil.

Between 1629 and 1640 the absolute rule of Charles I caused considerable friction between the English Parliament and the King. Con ict
erupted in 1640 when a parliament called by Charles refused to grant him subsidies to suppress a rebellion in Scotland. The Irish rebelled the
following year, and by 1642 strained relations between Charles and Parliament led to civil war in England. In 1649 Parliament won, Charles I was
executed, and England became a republic and protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. These changes rede ned England’s relationship with its
American colonies, as the new government under Cromwell attempted to consolidate its hold over its overseas territories.

In 1642, no permanent British North American colony was more than 35 years old. The Crown and various proprietors controlled most of the
colonies, but settlers from Barbados to Maine enjoyed a great deal of independence. This was especially true in Massachusetts Bay, where Puritan
settlers governed themselves according to the colony’s 1629 charter. Trade in tobacco and naval stores tied the colonies to England economically,
as did religion and political culture, but in general the English government left the colonies to their own devices.

The English Revolution of the 1640s forced settlers in America to reconsider their place within the empire. Older colonies like Virginia and
proprietary colonies like Maryland sympathized with the Crown. Newer colonies like Massachusetts Bay, populated by religious dissenters taking
part in the Great Migration of the 1630s, tended to favor Parliament. Yet during the war the colonies remained neutral, fearing that support for
either side could involve them in war. Even Massachusetts Bay, which nurtured ties to radical Protestants in Parliament, remained neutral.

King Charles I, pictured with the blue sash of the Order of the Garter, listens to his commanders detail the strategy for what would be the rst pitched battle of the First English Civil
War. As all previous constitutional compromises between King Charles and Parliament had broken down, both sides raised large armies in the hopes of forcing the other side to concede
their position. The Battle of Edgehill ended with no clear winner, leading to a prolonged war of over four years and an even longer series of wars (known generally as the English Civil
War) that eventually established the Commonwealth of England in 1649. Charles Landseer, The Eve of the Battle of Edge Hill, 1642, 1845. Wikimedia.

Charles’s execution in 1649 challenged American neutrality. Six colonies, including Virginia and Barbados, declared allegiance to the dead
monarch’s son, Charles II. Parliament responded with an Act in 1650 that leveled an economic embargo on the rebelling colonies, forcing them
to accept Parliament’s authority. Parliament argued that America had been “planted at the Cost, and settled” by the English nation, and that it, as
the embodiment of that commonwealth, possessed ultimate jurisdiction over the colonies.12 It followed up the embargo with the Navigation Act
of 1651, which compelled merchants in every colony to ship goods directly to England in English ships. Parliament sought to bind the colonies
more closely to England and deny other European nations, especially the Dutch, from interfering with its American possessions.

England found itself in crisis after the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, leading in time to the reestablishment of the monarchy. On his 30th birthday (May 29, 1660), Charles II sailed
from the Netherlands to his restoration after nine years in exile. He was received in London to great acclaim, as depicted in his contemporary painting. Lieve Verschuler, The arrival of
King Charles II of England in Rotterdam, 24 May 1660. c. 1660-1665. Wikimedia.

The monarchy was restored with Charles II, but popular suspicions of the Crown’s Catholic and French sympathies lingered. Charles II’s
suppression of the religious and press freedoms that ourished during the civil war years demonstrated the Crown’s desire to re-impose order
and royal rule. But it was the openly Catholic and pro-French policies of his successor, James II, that once again led to the overthrow of the
monarchy in 1688. In that year a group of bishops and Parliamentarians o ered the English throne to the Dutch Prince William of Holland and
his English bride, Mary, the daughter of James II. This relatively peaceful coup was called the Glorious Revolution.

In the decades before the Glorious Revolution English colonists experienced religious and political con ict that re ected transformations in
Europe as well as distinctly colonial conditions. In the 1670s and early 1680s King Charles II tightened English control over North America and
the West Indies through the creation of new colonies, the imposition of new Navigation Acts, and the establishment of a new executive Council
called the Lords of Trade and Plantations.13 As imperial o cials attempted to curb colonists’ autonomy, threats from Native Americans and
New France on the continent led many colonists to believe Indians and Catholics sought to destroy English America. In New England an
uprising beginning in 1675 led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, or King Philip as the English called him, seemed to con rm these fears.
Indian con icts helped trigger the revolt against royal authorities known as Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia the following year.

James II worked to place the colonies on rmer administrative and defensive footing by creating the Dominion of New England in 1686. The
Dominion consolidated the New England colonies, New York, and New Jersey into one administrative unit to counter French Canada, but
colonists strongly resented the loss of their individual provinces. The Dominion’s governor, Sir Edmund Andros, did little to assuage fears of
arbitrary power when he forced colonists into military service for a campaign against Maine Indians in early 1687. Impressment into military
service was a longstanding grievance among English commoners that was transplanted to the colonies.

In England, James’s push for religious toleration of Catholics and Dissenters brought him into con ict with Parliament and the Anglican
establishment in England. After the 1688 invasion by the Protestant William of Orange, James ed to France. When colonists learned imperial
o cials in Boston and New York City attempted to keep news of the Glorious Revolution secret, simmering hostilities toward provincial leaders
burst into the open. In Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland colonists overthrew colonial governments as local social antagonisms fused with
popular animosity towards imperial rule. Colonists in America quickly declared allegiance to the new monarchs. They did so in part to maintain
order in their respective colonies. As one Virginia o cial explained, if there was “no King in England, there was no Government here.”14 A
declaration of allegiance was therefore a means toward stability.

More importantly, colonists declared for William and Mary because they believed their ascension marked the rejection of absolutism and
con rmed the centrality of Protestantism and liberty in English life. Settlers joined in the revolution by overthrowing the Dominion
government, restoring the provinces to their previous status, and forcing out the Catholic-dominated Maryland government. They launched
several assaults against French Canada as part of “King William’s War,” and rejoiced in Parliament’s 1689 passage of a Bill of Rights, which
curtailed the power of the monarchy and cemented Protestantism in England. For English colonists, it was indeed a “glorious” revolution as it
united them in a Protestant empire that stood counter to Catholic tyranny, absolutism, and French power.

 

IV. New Colonies

Despite the turmoil in Britain, colonial settlement grew considerably throughout the seventeenth century, and several new settlements joined the
two original colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts.

In 1632, Charles I set a tract of about 12 million acres of land at the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay aside for a second colony in America.
Named for the new monarch’s queen, Maryland was granted to Charles’s friend and political ally, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore.
Calvert hoped to gain additional wealth from the colony, as well as to create a haven for fellow Catholics. In England, many of that faith found
themselves harassed by the Protestant majority and more than a few considered migrating to America. Charles I, a Catholic sympathizer, was in
favor of Lord Baltimore’s plan to create a colony that would demonstrate that Catholics and Protestants could live together peacefully.

In late 1633, both Protestant and Catholic settlers left England for the Chesapeake, arriving in Maryland in March 1634. Men of middling
means found greater opportunities in Maryland, which prospered as a tobacco colony without the growing pains su ered by Virginia.

Unfortunately, Lord Baltimore’s hopes of a diverse Christian colony were thwarted. Most colonists were Protestants relocating from Virginia.
Many of these Protestants were radical Quakers and Puritans who were frustrated with Virginia’s e orts to force adherence to the Anglican
Church, also known as the Church of England. In 1650, Puritans revolted, setting up a new government that prohibited both Catholicism and
Anglicanism. Governor William Stone attempted to put down the revolt in 1655, but would not be successful until 1658. Two years after the
Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), the Calverts lost control of Maryland and the province became a royal colony. 

Religion was a motivating factor in the creation of several other colonies as well, including the New England colonies of Connecticut and Rhode
Island. The settlements that would eventually comprise Connecticut grew out of settlements in Saybrook and New Haven. Thomas Hooker and
his congregation left Massachusetts for Connecticut because the area around Boston was becoming increasingly crowded. The Connecticut
River Valley was large enough for more cattle and agriculture. In June 1636, Hooker led one hundred people and a variety of livestock in settling
an area they called Newtown (later Hartford).

New Haven Colony had a more directly religious origin, as the founders attempted a new experiment in Puritanism. In 1638, John Davenport,
Theophilus Eaton, and other supporters of the Puritan faith settled in the Quinnipiac (New Haven) area of the Connecticut River Valley. In
1643 New Haven Colony was o cially organized with Eaton named governor. In the early 1660s, three men who had signed the death warrant
for Charles I were concealed in New Haven. This did not win the colony any favors, and it became increasingly poorer and weaker. In 1665, New
Haven was absorbed into Connecticut, but its singular religious tradition endured with the creation of Yale College.

Religious radicals similarly founded Rhode Island. After his exile from Massachusetts, Roger Williams created a settlement called Providence in
1636. He negotiated for the land with the local Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. Williams and his fellow settlers agreed on an
egalitarian constitution and established religious and political freedom in the colony. The following year, another Massachusetts exile, Anne
Hutchinson, and her followers settled near Providence. Others soon arrived, and the colony was granted a charter by Parliament in 1644.
Persistently independent and with republican sympathies, the settlers refused a governor and instead elected a president and council. These
separate communities passed laws abolishing witchcraft trials, imprisonment for debt and, in 1652, chattel slavery. Because of the colony’s policy
of toleration, it became a haven for Quakers, Jews, and other persecuted religious groups. In 1663, Charles II granted the colony a royal charter
establishing the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the English neglected the area between Virginia and New England despite obvious environmental
advantages. The climate was healthier than the Chesapeake and more temperate than New England. The mid-Atlantic had three highly navigable
rivers: the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. The Swedes and Dutch established their own colonies in the region: New Sweden in the
Delaware Valley and New Netherland in the Hudson Valley.

Compared to other Dutch colonies around the globe, the settlements on the Hudson River were relatively minor. The Dutch West India
Company realized that in order to secure its fur trade in the area, it needed to establish a greater presence in New Netherland. Toward this end,
the company formed New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1625.

Although the Dutch extended religious tolerance to those who settled in New Netherland, the population remained small. This left the colony
vulnerable to English attack during the 1650s and 1660s, resulting in the hand-over of New Netherland to England in 1664. The new colony of
New York was named for the proprietor, James, the Duke of York, brother to Charles II and funder of the expedition against the Dutch in 1664.
New York was brie y reconquered by the Netherlands in 1667, and class and ethnic con icts in New York City contributed to the rebellion
against English authorities during the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Colonists of Dutch ancestry resisted assimilation into English culture
well into the eighteenth century, prompting New York Anglicans to note that the colony was “rather like a conquered foreign province.”15

After the acquisition of New Netherland, Charles II and the Duke of York wished to strengthen English control over the Atlantic seaboard. In
theory, this was to better tax the colonies; in practice, the awarding of the new proprietary colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the
Carolinas was a payo of debts and political favors.

In 1664, the Duke of York granted the area between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two English noblemen. These lands were split into two
distinct colonies, East Jersey and West Jersey. One of West Jersey’s proprietors included William Penn. The ambitious Penn wanted his own,
larger colony, the lands for which would be granted by both Charles II and the Duke of York. Pennsylvania consisted of about 45,000 square
miles west of the Delaware River and the former New Sweden. Penn was a member of the Society of Friends, otherwise known as Quakers, and
he intended his colony to be a “colony of Heaven for the children of Light.”16 Like New England’s aspirations to be a City Upon a Hill,
Pennsylvania was to be an example of godliness. But Penn’s dream was to create not a colony of unity, but rather a colony of harmony. He noted
in 1685 that “the people are a collection of diverse nations in Europe, as French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Scotch, and English;
and of the last equal to all the rest.”17 Because Quakers in Pennsylvania extended to others in America the same rights they had demanded for
themselves in England, the colony attracted a diverse collection of migrants. Slavery was particularly troublesome for some paci st Quakers of
Pennsylvania on the grounds that it required violence. In 1688, members of the Society of Friends in Germantown, outside of Philadelphia,
signed a petition protesting the institution of slavery among fellow Quakers.

The Pennsylvania soil did not lend itself to the slave-based agriculture of the Chesapeake, but other colonies would depend heavily on slavery
from their very foundations. The creation of the colony of Carolina, later divided into North and South Carolina and Georgia, was part of
Charles II’s scheme to strengthen the English hold on the eastern seaboard and pay o political and cash debts. The Lords Proprietor of Carolina
—eight very powerful favorites of the king—used the model of the colonization of Barbados to settle the area. In 1670, three ships of colonists
from Barbados arrived at the mouth of the Ashley River, where they founded Charles Town. This de ance of Spanish claims to the area signi ed
England’s growing con dence as a colonial power.

To attract colonists, the Lords Proprietor o ered alluring incentives: religious tolerance, political representation by assembly, exemption from
fees, and large land grants. These incentives worked, and Carolina grew quickly, attracting not only middling farmers and artisans but also
wealthy planters. Colonists who could pay their own way to Carolina were granted 150 acres per family member. The Lords Proprietor allowed
for slaves to be counted as members of the family. This encouraged the creation of large rice and indigo plantations along the coast of Carolina,
which were more stable commodities than the deerskin and Indian slave trades. Because of the size of Carolina, the authority of the Lords
Proprietor was especially weak in the northern reaches on the Albemarle Sound. This region had been settled by Virginians in the 1650s and was
increasingly resistant to Carolina authority. As a result, the Lords Proprietor founded the separate province of North Carolina in 1691.18 

Henry Popple, “A map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish settlements adjacent thereto,” 1733 via Library of Congress.

 

V. Riot, Rebellion, and Revolt

The seventeenth century saw the establishment and solidi cation of the British North American colonies, but this process did not occur
peacefully. English settlements on the continent were rocked by explosions of violence, including the Pequot War, the Mystic massacre, King
Philip’s War, the Susquehannock War, Bacon’s Rebellion, and the Pueblo Revolt.    

In May 1637, an armed contingent of English Puritans from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut colonies trekked into Indian
country in territory claimed by New England. Referring to themselves as the “Sword of the Lord,” this military force intended to attack “that
insolent and barbarous Nation, called the Pequots.” In the resulting violence, Puritans put the Mystic community to the torch, beginning with
the north and south ends of the town. As Pequot men, women, and children tried to escape the blaze, other soldiers waited with swords and
guns. One commander estimated that of the “four hundred souls in this Fort…not above ve of them escaped out of our hands,” although
another counted near “six or seven hundred” dead. In a span of less than two months, the English Puritans boasted that the Pequot “were drove
out of their country, and slain by the sword, to the number of fteen hundred.”19

The foundations of the war lay within the rivalry between the Pequot, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan, who battled for control of the fur
and wampum trades in the northeast. This rivalry eventually forced the English and Dutch to choose sides. The war remained a con ict of
Native interests and initiative, especially as the Mohegan hedged their bets on the English and reaped the rewards that came with displacing the
Pequot.

Victory over the Pequots not only provided security and stability for the English colonies, but also propelled the Mohegan to new heights of
political and economic in uence as the primary power in New England. Ironically, history seemingly repeated itself later in the century as the
Mohegan, desperate for a remedy to their diminishing strength, joined the Wampanoag war against the Puritans. This produced a more violent
con ict in 1675 known as King Philip’s War, bringing a decisive end to Indian power in New England.

In the winter of 1675, the body of John Sassamon, a Christian, Harvard-educated Wampanoag, was found under the ice of a nearby pond. A
fellow Christian Indian informed English authorities that three warriors under the local sachem named Metacom, known to the English as King
Philip, had killed Sassamon, who had previously accused Metacom of planning an o ensive against the English. The three alleged killers appeared
before the Plymouth court in June 1675. They were found guilty of murder, and executed. Several weeks later, a group of Wampanoags killed
nine English colonists in the town of Swansea.