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King James I of England
Replica of a Powhatan village near James Towne (from Wikimedia Commons)
Indians against Puritans in New England
When the French were warring against Spain in the mid-1500s, privately owned French ships – pirates in the eyes of the Spanish – attacked Spanish ships and ports in the Americas. When the war between France and Spain ended in 1559 the royal French government stopped backing its "privateers," leaving them with a hold on a few shorelines on unsettled Caribbean Islands, where they lived off the land and off the progeny of escaped cattle from Europe.
In 1562 the French tried to establish a colony in northern Florida, which failed. And in 1564 the French tried again, landing a couple of hundred people at St. John's River in northern Florida, at what was to be called Fort Caroline. An attack on Fort Caroline by Spaniards failed, and the Spaniards built a fort forty miles to the south, which they St. Augustine. The people at Fort Caroline were French Huguenots. The Spanish disliked what they saw as an "evil Lutheran sect" near them in the Americas and they attacked Fort Caroline again, killing many of the men they found there, sparing the women and children, taking over the fort and renaming it Fort San Mateo. A wealthy Huguenot, Dominique de Gourgues, sought revenge. He sold his lands and possessions in France and in 1568, with some ships and around 150 men, he destroyed San Mateo and hanged its surviving defenders.
The Spanish were left with the French to worry about and also the English. During her war against Spain, Queen Elizabeth I sent the pirate Drake and other "sea dogs" against the Spanish in the Americas. Drake sacked and plundered his way up the Pacific Coast in 1579. In 1586, Drake sacked Santo Domingo and attacked the Spanish at St. Augustine in Florida, burning houses to the ground, cutting down fruit trees and carrying away everything of value. And Drake remained the nemesis of Spanish shipping until he died of fever in 1596.
For a century, fisherman men from Normandy and Brittany (loosely included among the French) had been fishing for cod around the waters of Newfoundland, and had been going ashore to sun-dry and salt their fish for the long voyage home. Indians saw the fishermen's steel knives and copper kettles among other things, and the fishermen saw the beaver and bearskin coats of the Indians, which they could sell in Europe. Trading began, and in 1608 the French founded a settlement at Quebec, overlooking the great northeast flowing river, the St. Lawrence. Only 8 of the 28 settlers survived the first winter. More settlers came in the springtime, and soon the French were in conflict with Iroquois Indians, the French aligning themselves with Indians who had been warring against the Iroquois.
At what is now called Hudson Bay, an attempt was being made to find a passage to China. Henry Hudson, an English sea captain working for the Dutch, had failed in 1607 to find a passage to India by going east to the north of Russia, so he looked for a passage westward. In 1610 he entered the bay that now bears his name. His crew mutinied and tried to return to England, and those who succeeded were hanged. Hudson also perished. But soon the Hudson Bay Company of England was founded and was setting up posts to aid Englishmen eager to make money from the fur trade.
The Dutch, meanwhile, were at war with the Habsburg royalty of Spain, and Dutch privateers were attacking the Spanish in the Americas. The Dutch were the world's foremost traders and merchant mariners, and in 1610 the Dutch set up a trading post on the southern end of Manhattan Island. Among other things, the Dutch traded their guns to the Iroquois, the enemy of the French, and the Iroquois became better armed than their rivals, the Huron -- allies of the French.
Investors in England who had formed the Virginia Company were interested in gold and trade with the Indians, and they were afraid they were losing opportunities to enterprising people of other countries. In 1607, with the approval of their king, James I, they founded a settlement called Jamestown -- England's first permanent colony. To the disappointment of the company, no gold was discovered around their colony. Some of their colonists searched for a passage to the Pacific Ocean, believing China was much closer than it actually was, and some of them traded with local Indians such as the Powhatan and Pamunkey.
The men that the Virginia Company had sent to Jamestown were not farmers and did not have farming on their mind. Only trading with the Powhatans for their corn allowed the colonists to survive. The colonists suffered hungered and disease, and soon they suffered poor relations with the local Indians. The Virginia Company had ordered the colonists to behave properly so as not to make the Indians discontented with the colony, but among other manners that the Indians found offensive was the behavior of the Englishmen toward their women.
In 1610 and 1611 the Virginia Company sent fresh supplies and a second wave of colonists to Jamestown, one hundred people, instructing the new wave to concentrate on farming, and to add incentive they allowed individual plots of land to the new colonists. Communal possession of the colony's land was discarded.
The second wave pursued good relations with the Powhatans, and in 1612 a colonist named John Rolfe married the chief's daughter, Pocahontas. She went to England and was treated as a celebrity -- and died there in 1617. Her son returned to Virginia, and his part Indian descendants were to become prominent in Virginia society.
In addition to growing crops, the Virginia Company colonists raised cattle and sold goods to seamen: turpentine, resin, pitch, tar and lumber. The crop that worked best for the new wave of colonists was tobacco, the colonists using the same slash and burn methods as the Powhatan had been using. A good market for tobacco existed in England. The first barrels of cured tobacco reached England in 1614, and, by 1619, 50,000 pounds were being shipped annually. Smoking had become a fad in England, with King James describing it as "loathsome," harmful to the brain and dangerous to the lungs. Tobacco growing expanded and in 1619, in need of labor, some colonists bought twenty blacks from a Dutch ship that had come to the harbor for supplies -- the beginning of slavery in Anglo America.
That same year, the Virginia colony convened its first legislative assembly at Jamestown, with the owners of eleven tobacco plantations well represented. And the following year the colony had its first public library, with books donated by landowners. But following the economic boom in Virginia came a return of hard times, Between 1622 and 1624 the colony suffered from another epidemic of disease. And relations with the Indians deteriorated again. The Pamunkey resented the expansion and arrogance of the colonists. War broke out, with the Pamunkey resorting to guerrilla warfare. The colonists burned the Pamunkey's cornfields, and throughout the war the Pamunkey managed to kill 347 settlers.
The survivor rate at the Virginia colony was not good. Between six and ten thousand people had arrived at the colony since 1607 (the numbers are disputed), and of these only about a thousand were still alive -- most of the deaths caused by disease. But mismanagement was also at fault, the Virginia Company having dumped settlers on shore without provision for food or shelter. King James was concerned about the welfare of his subjects, and he was upset with the Virginia Company. In 1624 he revoked the company's charter and put the Virginia colony under direct royal administration. And from England more colonists went to replace those who had died.
In addition to the Jamestown area, English migrants from 1620 went to Barbados, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean where Arawak Indians had once lived. Another group that sailed from England were those called Pilgrims. Originally these were Puritans called Separatists, a sect that had wished to free itself from domination by bishops of the Church of England. In small bands, between 1607 and 1609, they sneaked out of England -- English law forbidding people leaving without permission -- and went to the land of refugees and Calvinism: the United Netherlands. While there the Thirty Years' War had erupted, and Spain was still a threat to the Dutch. Some of the Pilgrim refugees had decided that they would be better off in America. It was five years before King James revoked the Virginia Company's charter, and the Pilgrims agreed to work for the Virginia Company in exchange for the company providing them passage, and King James approved the Pilgrim's journey following the Pilgrim's promise to live peaceably in his colony.
In 1620, after sailing from the Netherlands to England, 35 of the Pilgrims boarded a ship called the Mayflower, and they were joined by 67 other Englanders. The Mayflower was blown off course, and rather than land in Virginia it landed at Plymouth, where there was a deep harbor and land with fresh water, timber and good soil. Europeans had been touching the coastline for years, and the Indians along this northern coastline had been decimated by smallpox that had migrated with the Europeans.
Not having been exposed to small pox for as long a period as the Europeans, the Indians had less resistance to the disease. The Pilgrims found most of the nearby Indian villages recently abandoned. Of the 3,000 or so Massachuset Indians living in the area in 1614, their number had been reduced to less than 800 by the time the Pilgrims arrived. Another people living in the area were the Wampanoag -- whose language, like the Powhatan, Pamunkey and Massachuset, was a branch of Algonquin. Disease had killed as many as 90 percent of the Wampanoag between 1616 and 1618, leaving around 1,200 who were in need of allies against hostile neighboring tribes. [note]
No land at Plymouth had been given the Pilgrims by the Virginia Company, the King of England or the Indians, the Pilgrims believing that the land under their feet had been given them by their god, Jehovah. The colonists had agreed to abide by majority rule and to cooperate for the general good of the colony. But it was December when they landed and colder than was Jamestown farther south. Only half of the settlers survived the winter, those who did inhabiting abandoned Wampanoag villages and raiding food caches.
The following spring, the settlers found streams teaming with fish, and Wampanoag showed them how to plant corn, how to cook squash and pumpkins, how to make corn pudding, and how to gather greens. The Wompanoag brought the Pilgrims the meat of deer they had hunted. The settlers and the Wompanoag made a treaty, the Wampanoag happy to have allies to help defend against hostile neighbors. And on November 25, 1621, the Wompanoag chieftain, Massasoit, and more than ninety of his warriors feasted with the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were thankful, and the day was to be celebrated in the United States as Thanksgiving.
More Puritans arrived around Plymouth. A small settlement was established at Wollaston, and a few Plymouth families crossed the bay to settle at Duxbury. In 1622, sixty people from England settled around 25 miles north of Plymouth at Weymouth. There a food shortage developed, and some of the settlers stole corn that Massachuset Indians had stored. The Indians were angered and decided to cut themselves off from trading with the settlers. The settlers threatened violence, and from Plymouth a military leader, Miles Standish, went to the rescue of the Weymouth colony. He led a raid against the Indians, defeating a group and its leader, Wituwamet, killing eight. And Standish resorted to the European tradition of displaying Wituwamet's head, on a wooden fort wall, and the local Indians began calling the settlers wotowquenange -- cut throats.
In 1623, 120 more Puritans -- men and women -- landed at Weymouth, and that year the settlement at Weymouth abandoned land sharing. Men laboring in the fields had been disgruntled by the sharing, believing they were doing more than some others, and married men disliked seeing their wives cooking for bachelors. Each family was given its own plot of land, and dissension among the settlers declined.
In 1613, the Dutch tried to establish a colony on the northern coast of South America, at Guiana. Dutch merchants sent fifty families there to try tobacco farming, but in 1614 the Spanish annihilated them. In 1624, the Dutch launched an attempt to take Brazil from the Portuguese – who were then ruled by a Spanish king. And to the Hudson River area in North America the Dutch sent thirty colonists, mostly French speaking Protestant refugees -- Walloons -- from the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1626, the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from Indians for 60 guilders (about 1,000 in 2008 dollars), and they renamed the island New Amsterdam. The Indians assumed that they would still be able to use the land, but they soon found the Europeans taking land for their exclusive use. Conflicts arose as the dogs of Indians attacked the cattle of the settlers and the cattle of the settlers trampled Indian farmland. Eventually war broke out, the governor of the colony having retaliated against the offense of one Indian by massacring a group of unoffending Indians. And during the war, crops were destroyed, buildings burned and families slain.
The total number of settlers in Dutch settlements in North America remained at less than 1,000. Meanwhile the battle for Brazil continued, the Dutch were driven from Salvador (Bahia), then in 1627 they captured it again. In 1630, the Dutch captured Olinda (Pernambuco), and the struggle to take all of Latinized Brazil lasted to 1640, after which the Dutch West India Company was in control of Brazil's sugar industry -- the world's leading sugar exporter.
Charles I succeed his father, James I, as king of England in 1625, and with the approval of Charles the Massachusetts Bay Company sponsored a new migration of around a thousand Puritans to the Massachusetts area. Puritan stockholders of the company had changed the company's emphasis from trade to religion, seeing the colony as a refuge from the Anglican (Church of England) authorities. The Anglicans were happy to see them go, and the new group arrived in more than a dozen ships, from Boston to Salem, bringing with them an abundance of tools and other supplies.
Another epidemic of small pox killed many of the remaining 500 Massachuset Indians, the new governor of the colony, John Withrop, seeing the epidemic as God "sweeping away" the Indians to make room from his Christian settlers. Many of the surviving Massachuset Indians converted to Christianity, becoming what were called "Praying Indians." And the surviving Massachuset Indians became subject to Puritan rules of conduct.
In 1632, Charles granted a charter to his friend, the Catholic aristocrat John Calvert, also known as Lord Baltimore, for a colony that was to become Maryland (as in Mary, the mother of God), a colony intended as a refuge for English Catholics, who, like the Puritans, felt harried by Anglican bishops. Calvert was tolerant and planned to leave Maryland open to any Christian, and Charles agreed not to levy taxes against the Maryland colonists except for a fifth of the gold or silver that he hoped might be found in the colony.
The tolerance planned for Maryland was rejected by Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. They saw tolerance as compromise with God's will. They had fled from the tradition of uniformity in worship demanded by the Church of England and they attempted to maintain a unity of belief among themselves. This put the Puritan colony at odds with Roger Williams, who had arrived there in 1631. Williams had been educated in England at Cambridge, and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony he became a teacher at a Puritan church and incurred the wrath of authorities by advocating a separation of church and state, holding that the state should have no jurisdiction over one's conscience. In 1635, the colony tried Williams and sentenced him to banishment. With four colleagues, Williams established a new colony at Providence, which he declared to be "a shelter for persons distressed for conscience."
Soon the Puritans of Massachusetts faced contention of a more violent nature. The colony went to war against the Pequot and other neighboring Indians. The Pequot had also suffered decimation from disease -- about 2,500 remaining in the Massachusetts area. The colonists had pushed into the lands of the Pequot and had tried to impose their rule on them, and they incurred retaliation. In what became known as the Pequot War, the Puritans emerged victorious. They executed captured Pequot, sold other Pequot as slaves, to be sent to the Caribbean, and some Pequot women and children became servants to Puritan families. About half of the Pequot had survived the war, and those who remained in Massachusetts area scattered, some of them finding refuge with other peoples, such as the Narraganset.
The English responded to French rivalry in the Americas by capturing Quebec from the French in 1629 -- Quebec then with only 20 adult males. Then in 1634, the English and French made the Treaty of St. Germanine-en-Laye, the English agreeing to Quebec's return to the French. The following year, the French expanded farther to the southwest, up the St. Lawrence river, building a fort on an island at Montreal, where fur traders had been gathering every summer. And the French built another fort farther to the southwest: Fort Niagara.
French Jesuit priests were expanding their work with Indians. They had founded their first mission in 1612, on Mount Desert Island in Penobscot Bay, and they had followed the fur traders, in 1634 becoming missionaries to the Huron Indians, working from the village of Ihonatiria.
A few Frenchmen on the frontier decided that the Indian way of life was superior and adopted Indians ways, Indian wives, Indian dress and Indian ways of worship. The Jesuits, on the other hand, believed that they were taking civilization as well as Christianity to the Indians. The Jesuits tried replacing Indian magic with Christian magic, putting a rosary around the neck of an ill Indian child to restore its health or a crucifix above the bed of a sick child in place of the father's medicine pouch. They spoke to the Indians about the terrors of hell, and impressed the Indians by their puffs of fire from sulfur. The Jesuits managed to prohibit the sale of liquor to the Indians, offending French authorities who saw alcohol to the Indians as helpful in bargaining for furs.
The Jesuits converted Indians where they were able to synthesize Christianity with Indian practices, but frequently instead of converts they found ridicule. In the tradition of Christianity the Jesuits were brave in facing Indian hostility, and Jesuits such as Jean de Brebceuf and Gabriel L'Allemant were tortured by the Iroquois.
The Dutch had more difficulty in recruiting colonists than the English, the United Netherlands not having as many people looking for refuge or for a new chance in life as did the English. By 1640 almost 60,000 Englishmen had migrated to the new world, many times that of the Dutch and the French. England sent one hundred settlers to establish a colony at Guiana. Then came the civil war in England, the execution of Charles I and the coming to power of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Migration to the Americas slowed, except for the sending of captured Scots there following Cromwell's war against them. Parliament gave the colonists of Virginia a year to adhere to its religious and political dictates, and those who did not were threatened with expulsion, but the attempt to turn Virginia into a Puritan colony failed. Instead, Virginia still had royalists who had supported Charles I, and joining them, beginning in 1647, were wealthy royalist refugees from England, fleeing from the Puritans.
In early 1650, competition with Dutch trade inspired the English to make war against the Dutch. Cromwell ended this war in 1655, and that year he began military action against Catholic Spain, a war that took place in the Caribbean region. The English seized Jamaica in 1655, with its 1500 Spanish settlers and their black slaves. The English began expelling the Spaniards and managing the sugar plantations there, using slave labor. Jamaica became a base for the English "privateers," among them the notorious Henry Morgan, and the activities of English privateers (or pirates) was to last to 1670, when England would sign a treaty with Spain ending their war.
Meanwhile in 1652, the Catholic colony of Rhode Island made slavery illegal, and the colony of Virginia had fewer than 500 slaves -- only three percent of its almost 17,000 colonists. The tobacco planters of Virginia were still dependent primarily on indentured servants for labor, the indentured servants not requiring an initial investment as did the buying of slaves.
Quakers and Baptists had begun arriving in the colonies. The Puritans of Massachusetts detested Quaker pacifism, and they interpreted the Quaker belief in an inner light and divine spark as pride. To the Puritans, a lack of authoritarian leadership among the Quakers seemed anarchistic. Then rumor spread among the Puritans that the Quakers were burning Holy Bibles. To maintain order in their colony and their uniformity in religion, the Massachusetts colony, by 1660, had imprisoned 3000 Quakers and had hanged four, and Quakers were finding refuge in the more tolerant colony at Providence.
Two Quaker women expelled from the Massachusetts colony made the mistake of going to the Dutch colony in New Amsterdam and preaching in the streets there. They were expelled. And other Quakers who wandered into New Amsterdam were imprisoned and flogged, the Dutch at New Amsterdam wanting to discourage "all sorts of riff raff" from coming to their colony. Also the Dutch expelled a Baptist cobbler, William Wickendam, who had wandered into New Amsterdam from Rhode Island. Wickendam had been seen "dipping" converts into river water.
In 1660, after eighteen years of Puritan rule in England, and after Cromwell's death, the Puritans lost power in England, the monarchy was restored, and a second wave of English migration to the Americas began. Meanwhile, merchants in England remained concerned with competition, from the Dutch and from English craftsmen in the colonies. In 1663, England's Charles II approved the Navigation Act, which required that all trade with England's colonies be done with English ships and that the colonies export only certain products -- among them tobacco and sugar.
Moving against Dutch trading in the Americas, England in 1664 put a naval blockade around New Amsterdam, adding to Dutch troubles in the Americas. The Dutch had been fighting local Indians in what is known as the "Peach War", and they were facing a revolt by Portuguese colonists in Brazil. The Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam to the English. The second war between the English and Dutch began, the war ending in 1667 with the Dutch recognizing New Amsterdam as belonging to England, the Dutch taking England's fledging colony in Guiana in exchange, and the English changing the name of New Amsterdam to New York.
Indian crops were sometimes ravaged by insects that the colonists unwittingly brought with them from Europe, and Indians had increased their hunting -- in part to obtain furs to exchange for European hardware: rifles, cooking pots, hatchets, knives, needles and other iron wares. Indians had been moving from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Their traditional crafts, such as pottery and basketry, were in decline, as was their use of the bow and arrow. Around some of their villages were now chickens, pigs, cattle or sheep. The Indians were becoming more experienced and shrewd in trade, and more covetous. They were becoming linked economically with Europeans, and along the coast from around Plymouth northward into what is now Maine, Indians rapidly depleted the beaver population, leaving them without a commodity for exchange.
The Indians had been unfamiliar with alcoholic drink and at first rejected it, thinking it tasted foul. And they had no tradition of social drinking. But eventually some of them took to it, fitting it into their own tradition by associating it with spirituality -- their traditional dream state. Drink became their paradise. They and their fellow Indians not given to drink were dismayed by the failure of their traditional medicine and spirituality against the new diseases that plagued their people. Their sweat lodge had been one of these failures. The sweat lodge had been a place of spiritual purification but disastrous for small pox. Amid their dismay, some Indians accepted modifications to their traditions in the form of Christianity, which exposed them to ridicule from other Indians.
Drink deteriorated commitments and tore apart communities. Drinkers might trade away their property or their wives and children. Resentments might escalate into murder. And murder by drunkards were often pardoned, a drunken man considered sacred in his dream state.
Colonists thought that the Indians who did not farm as they did were lazy, and Puritans viewed the Indians as "pernicious creatures" or as naked and "dirty beasts." Where they could they tried to put the Indians under their laws. Indians -- at least those who had not converted to Christianity -- continued to resent the encroachments of Europeans, whom they thought of as hairy, ugly, unintelligent and strange in their ways.
In the Massachusetts area, encroachments by the Puritans led to war, with the English drawing the first blood, shooting several Indians they discovered taking items from an abandoned house. The Indians retaliated and the war escalated. The Indians were led by Meacomet, also called Philip, the son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who had sat with the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving Day. Philip had come to realize that if the Indians did not resist, the colonists would push against the Indians until they had no land of their own. He allied his people with neighboring Indians and launched an all-out war against the colonists -- a conflict called King Philip's War. But it was too late to overcome the policies of those who had allowed the first settlements around Plymouth. The English had superior fire power. In the war, around 3,000 Indians were killed, and 600 Europeans. Like the Romans after their defeat at Cannae, the Puritans saw their losses as punishment for their transgressions, not exactly the same sins as the Romans but because they had been too lenient toward the Quakers, because men had been wearing periwigs and women had been immodest in doing and displaying their hair.
The war came to an end in 1676 with Philip hunted down and killed in a swamp. The Colonists won. They executed defeated Indian leaders, sold captured Indians into servitude or as slaves for the West Indies area, and they put curfews on local Indians and restricted their travel and assemblies.
In 1638, less than a hundred subjects of the Swedish king settled near the Delaware River. Sweden laid claim to the area but had few willing to migrate there. It sent convicts to work out their sentences as servants to the company sponsoring the colony, but by 1653 there were no more than 250 colonists, most of them Finns, at Fort Christina, and that year Sweden sent 350 more colonists, most of them soldiers. Sweden's colony came into conflict with the Dutch just to their north, the Swedes capturing a Dutch fort -- Fort Casimir. The Dutch sent a fleet of ships up the Delaware River, and Fort Christina surrendered, ending what had been called New Sweden.
By the 1680s, a couple of thousand Europeans were settled around the Delaware River -- Dutch as well as Swedes and Finns. And into this region came Quakers, a migration organized largely in England by William Penn, who gathered around him forty wealthy Quakers and founded a new colony on the west bank of the Delaware. Penn declared that his colony would have religious freedom -- except that none could vote who did not believe that Christ was the son of God. With colonists now difficult to recruit in England amid the new prosperity there, Penn included among his migrants people from Ireland, Holland, France, Germany and Switzerland.
Motivated by Quaker principles, Penn's colony established harmony with local Indians -- built upon the good relations with the Indians by the European migrants before them, who had treated Indians fairly including paying for the land that they occupied. In 1683, Penn's representative, William Markham, signed a treaty with the Indians -- which the French intellectual, Voltaire (1694-1778), was to describe as the only treaty with the Indians that Europeans never broke.
More than 1400 Quakers were among those who joined Penn's colony. They were promised land and the freest and most democratic of governments. The people of Penn's colony were guaranteed protection from arbitrary imprisonment, guaranteed the right to a trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a legislature created by universal manhood suffrage, and no capital punishment, adding to the Anglo liberalism and tolerance that had begun with Roger Williams at Maryland.
With the rise of prosperity in England, most of those going from there to the colonies were sent by order of the courts. These were vagrants and others judged lewd or dangerous. Some people were given the choice of migrating to the Americas or being hanged, and after little thought they chose America. But not wanting such people, the Virginia colony passed a law prohibiting the acceptance of such importations.
Virginia had around 8,000 colonists in 1644, and by 1675 their number had grown to 23,000. Like most colonists from England they saw themselves as English. They bought their supplies from England. They preferred to dress according to the fashion in England. And they read English books.
Virginia society was marked by class differences, with the Church of England considered a part of social high standing. Many of the successful tobacco growers among the Virginians looked upon Puritans as subversives. Those with thousands of acres of land considered themselves aristocracy. Some tobacco growers possessed several hundred acres of land, while numerous others owned between 50 and 200 acres. Some of the latter had been indentured servants who had served their time during years long past. Many of those who were just recently freed from servitude did not have the opportunity to acquire land that the older freed men had. The large plantation owners did not want competition from more growers and sought to limit the opportunities of these others. The established plantation owners looked askance at the landless young men wandering the colony, fearing they would turn to crime. And the young men without property were likely to wander into what Europeans called the frontier -- to establish themselves as best they could.
With the diminished supply of whites to work their plantations, and Indians unwilling to turn themselves into plantation slaves, the plantation owners of Virginia bought an increasing number of slaves from Africa, Virginia's slave population rising from around 2,000 in 1671 to around 4,000 in 1690. And by 1700 there were 16,000 blacks in Virginia -- 28 per cent of what has been estimated as the 57,000 Virginia colonists in 1700.
Some plantation owners were unusually kind towards their slaves, but even they resorted to brutal methods to control recalcitrant slaves. Blacks who did not take to slavery might be punished by having a finger or arm cut off. But this diminished the productivity of the slave, and other punishments were used, whippings being the most common disincentive to disobedience. Whether the slaves received decent food or a roof that kept out most of the rain depended upon the master.
England's colony at Barbados was its major source of sugar and molasses. During the Cromwell era it was a refuge for royalists. In the 1660s, hard times hit the growers in Barbados, and some of them, and some Royalists, migrated to the Carolinas. In 1663, Charles created the Carolina Charter, giving to eight "true and absolute Lords Proprietors [sic]" control over territory south of Virginia. The proprietors were obliged to pay rent, or a tax, to the king and one fourth of all the gold and silver mined there. And they were free to establish government, churches, customs duties, to tax people and to suppress rebellion as they saw fit.
In trying to build their colonies in the Carolinas, the proprietors sought European settlers where they could get them. People willing to migrate were rare. It was a migrants market, with the colonial proprietors promising freedom of worship with "liberty of conscience" for all, a representative legislature and taxation by collective agreement.
A colony was begun at Clarendon, where some adventurers from the Massachusetts area and a few hundred migrants from Barbados had settled. The newly arrived colonists did not get along with the earlier settlers. There was trouble with the Indians, and in the late 1660s the colony collapsed, with people moving to another Carolina colony, at Albemarle, or north to Virginia, to the Massachusetts area, back to Barbados, and perhaps some settled in South Carolina.
Albemarle lacked a good harbor or navigable river. It was poorly run, and its land policy discouraged settlement. By the end of the century its setters were to number only around 3,000. A most successful colony grew in South Carolina. There, at Charles Town, a fort had been built as protection from attack by Spaniards from St. Augustine. In South Carolina the nearby Kiawah branch of the Cusabo tribe welcomed the settlers as allies against Indians they were in conflict with -- such as the Westoes. By 1671, however, the settlers in South Carolina were warring against other Indians who were hostile, who turned to the Spaniards in Florida as allies in hope of exterminating the new colony.
The colony in South Carolina had a good harbor and was closely linked more in trade with Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean. Climate in South Carolina was mild. The settlers began raising cattle, engaged in the fur trade and sold supplies to passing ships. In 1680 the colony was relocated as Charleston. Colonists built tobacco plantations and began growing rice, indigo and tropical fruits. The colony's leading exports were furs, lumber, rice, beef, and pork. Some of the settlers were involved in exchanging captured Indians for sugar or for black slaves for the plantations that were developing.
The colony's proprietors offered large tracts of land to some wealthy Englishmen, one receiving 12,000 acres, another 35,800 acres. South Carolina was developing similar to Virginia, with many of the planters descended from English families of moderate wealth. By 1700 the number of black slaves in the South Carolina was around 2,400. The Indians serving the Europeans as slaves numbered around 200. And the Europeans numbered around 3,300.[note] This was only a little more than at Albemarle, but they tended to be more affluent.
Slavery was in greater demand where the slaves were needed in gangs at a common task and where the climate did not require expensive winter clothing and warm housing. The number of slaves in Massachusetts in 1680 has been estimated at 120. Most of them were domestic servants. Slaves in Massachusetts could own and inherit property, and whites and blacks were held to be equal before the law (except that the law permitted the slavery of blacks). Slaves could give testimony in court, and they had the right to counsel and due process.
The land in Massachusetts was harder than in Virginia and South Carolina and the farms smaller. The crop was mostly cereal, and most of the colonists were small farmers rather than plantation owners. New England farms did not produce much that could be sold for profit, and with little money to pay for imported good, New Englanders were encouraged to produce their own goods, including shoes, clothing and ironware, largely for their own use rather than trade. Britain's parliament forbade commercial manufacturing in the colonies, but it did permit shipbuilding. New England had more trees with which to build ships than did England, which had become deforested, and New England had the kinds of rivers on which logs could be moved to sawmills. As Kenneth Pomeranz and Stephen Topic write in The World that Trade Created, "the builders of ships became the users of ships." New Englanders became cod fishermen and then moved into whaling and merchant shipping. Merchant capitalism developing in New England. A few people there engaged in money lending and banking, and a few began living off their investments, contributing to the formation of an upper class.
The Puritans in Massachusetts were still teaching that misfortune was punishment from God for sin. They saw the magic of God at work and also the magic of demons. People still believed in the supernatural powers of witches, and in 1691 the witchhunts that had occurred in Europe appeared in the area of Salem, where judicial authorities took seriously the accusations of witchery. During a four-month period, hundreds were arrested, 19 were hanged and one was pressed to death for refusing to plead guilty or not guilty.
By 1700, Harvard College was 64-years old, having been founded to serve the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to make literate Puritan ministers. Its charter expressed dedication to the "arts and sciences" and "the education of the English and Indian youth." Also in 1700, the Massachusetts colony passed a law ordering all Roman Catholic priests to leave the colony within three months, upon penalty of life imprisonment or execution.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 1650 Montreal had a population of 196. In 1660 that increased to 472, and Montreal's population continued to grow, reaching at least 2,000 in the 1690s. The fort at Montreal was an impenetrable haven during continuous warring with the Iroquois. Montreal, rather than Quebec, had become the center of trade and society, while Quebec remained the seat of colonial government.
It was a purely Catholic society, the French, like the Spaniards, not allowing Protestants in the areas they considered theirs. The number of French in the Americas was only one twentieth of the number of people in England's colonies, prosperous France having had few who wanted to leave to try for a new life in what they saw as a primitive and dangerous America.
In 1667 the French signed a peace treaty with the Iroquois, which made possible expanded trade. Also, French fur traders had begun operating along the Missouri River as far south as the Kansas River and perhaps beyond. The French explored the Great Lakes region, and in 1672 voyaged down the Mississippi River as far as the Arkansas River. The French built a few forts in the Great Lakes area, and in 1682 the French explorer René LaSalle led 33 Frenchmen and 31 Indians down the Mississippi in canoes, to the Gulf of Mexico and back. He claimed all lands drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries for France. He named this vast area Louisiana in honor of his king, Louis XIV, and LaSalle was rewarded with a monopoly on trade in the Mississippi Valley.
LaSalle went to France in 1684 and returned to the Americas with four ships and 400 men, planning to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, but he could not find it and landed instead at Matagorda Bay in what is now Texas. There, in February 1685, he established Fort St. Louis, establishing a claim to Texas for France. Some of LaSalle's men disliked their stay at this remote outpost. They revolted, killed LaSalle and sailed away, and, by 1690, disease and Indians destroyed the last of those who remained.
By the 1680s, around 800 Frenchmen were spread out across the Great Lakes region, and several hundred Englishmen had entered the area pursuing trade with the Indians, with violence occurring when French and English frontiersmen met.. The competition between the French and English extended to the French sending 90 soldiers to capture three English trading posts at Hudson Bay, the French capturing 50,000 furs from the English.
In 1689, England and France went to war, over European rather than American concerns, but the war extended to the Americas, the English arming Iroquois who were again warring against the French. In 1689 the Iroquois burned homes, killed women and children and mutilated their bodies, the attacks forcing the French to abandon several of their more western settlements. The French struck back against the English colonists, at Portland and Schenectady, English deaths there totaling 162, men, women and children, which aroused fear among the English colonists. In 1690 an English force sailed from Boston in 34 ships, including fishing boats, the force capturing Acadia (Nova Scotia) from the French. The force reached Quebec and demanded its surrender, but it was repelled and withdrew in failure.
The war was exhausting the French and English in Europe, and in 1697 the two powers made peace, the Peace of Ryswick. Meanwhile, the French held a few islands in the Caribbean -- Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Dominique (Haiti) -- where Frenchmen operated sugar plantations and worked slaves.
Recommended Movie
The New World, about love and hate in Jamestown, by Terrence Malick
Recommended Books
American Colonies, (The Penguin History of the United States), by Alan Taylor, 2001
The Great Frontier War by William R Nester, Praeger, 2000
The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire, by Francis Jennings, Cambridge University Press, 2000
Colonial America by Ronald P Dufour, West, 1994
The Roots of American Civilization: a History of Colonial Life, by Curtis P Nettels, F S Crofts & Company, 1938
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