17a Lecture #1

As the seventeenth century dawned, scarcely a century after Columbus's
epochal landfall, the human face of much of the New World had already been
profoundly transformed.

Native American peoples had been nearly extinguished, mostly from disease.
From Tierra del Fuego in the south to Hudson's Bay in the north, only about 10
percent of the Indian population of 1492 survived.

Several hundred thousand African slaves toiled on Caribbean and Brazilian
sugar plantations. From Florida and New Mexico southward, most of the
southern half of the New World lay firmly within the grip of imperial Spain.

But North America in 1600 remained largely unexplored and effectively
unclaimed by Europeans. As if to herald the coming century of colonization and
conflict in the northern continent, three European powers planted three primitive
outposts in three distant corners of the continent within three years of one
another: the Spanish at Santa Fe in 1610, the French at Quebec in 1608, and,
most consequentially for the future United States, the English at Jamestown,
Virginia, in 1607.

Feeble indeed were England's efforts in the 1500s to compete with the sprawling
Spanish Empire. As Spain's ally in the first half of the century, England took little
interest in establishing its own overseas colonies. Religious conflict, moreover,
disrupted England in midcentury, after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman
Catholic church in the 1530s, launching the English Protestant Reformation.
Catholics battled Protestants for decades, and the religious balance of power
seesawed. But after the Protestant Elizabeth ascended to the English throne in
1558, Protestantism became dominant in England, and rivalry with Catholic
Spain intensified.

Ireland, which nominally had been under English rule since the twelfth century,
became an early scene of that rivalry. The Catholic Irish sought help from
Catholic Spain to throw off the yoke of the new Protestant English queen. But
Spanish aid never amounted to much; in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth's
troops crushed the Irish uprising with terrible ferocity, inflicting unspeakable
atrocities upon the native Irish people.

The English crown confiscated Catholic Irish lands and "planted" them with new
Protestant landlords from Scotland and England. This policy also planted the
seeds of the centuries-old religious conflicts that persist in Ireland to the present
day. Many English soldiers developed in Ireland a sneering contempt for the
"savage" natives, an attitude that they brought with them to the New World."

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.1
England's Imperial Stirrings

" As the seventeenth century dawned, scarcely a century after Columbus's
epochal landfall, the human face of much of the New World had already been
profoundly transformed. Native American peoples had been nearly extinguished,
mostly from disease. From Tierra del Fuego in the south to Hudson's Bay in the
north, only about 10 percent of the Indian population of 1492 survived. Several
hundred thousand African slaves toiled on Caribbean and Brazilian sugar
plantations. From Florida and New Mexico southward, most of the southern half
of the New World lay firmly within the grip of imperial Spain.

But North America in 1600 remained largely unexplored and effectively
unclaimed by Europeans. As if to herald the coming century of colonization and
conflict in the northern continent, three European powers planted three primitive
outposts in three distant corners of the continent within three years of one
another: the Spanish at Santa Fe in 1610, the French at Quebec in 1608, and,
most consequentially for the future United States, the English at Jamestown,
Virginia, in 1607.

Feeble indeed were England's efforts in the 1500s to compete with the sprawling
Spanish Empire. As Spain's ally in the first half of the century, England took little
interest in establishing its own overseas colonies. Religious conflict, moreover,
disrupted England in midcentury, after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman
Catholic church in the 1530s, launching the English Protestant Reformation.
Catholics battled Protestants for decades, and the religious balance of power
seesawed. But after the Protestant Elizabeth ascended to the English throne in
1558, Protestantism became dominant in England, and rivalry with Catholic
Spain intensified.

Ireland, which nominally had been under English rule since the twelfth century,
became an early scene of that rivalry. The Catholic Irish sought help from
Catholic Spain to throw off the yoke of the new Protestant English queen. But
Spanish aid never amounted to much; in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth's
troops crushed the Irish uprising with terrible ferocity, inflicting unspeakable
atrocities upon the native Irish people. The English crown confiscated Catholic
Irish lands and "planted" them with new Protestant landlords from Scotland and
England. This policy also planted the seeds of the centuries-old religious
conflicts that persist in Ireland to the present day. Many English soldiers
developed in Ireland a sneering contempt for the "savage" natives, an attitude
that they brought with them to the New World."

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.1
England's Imperial Stirrings

When the English landed in 1607, the chieftain Powhatan dominated the native
peoples living in the James River area. He had asserted supremacy over a few
dozen small tribes, loosely affiliated in what somewhat grandly came to be called
Powhatan's Confederacy.

The English colonists dubbed all the local Indians, somewhat inaccurately, the
Powhatans. Powhatan at first may have considered the English potential allies in
his struggle to extend his power still further over his Indian rivals, and he tried to
be conciliatory. But relations between the Indians and the English remained
tense, especially as the starving colonists took to raiding Indian food supplies.

The atmosphere grew even more strained after Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610.
He carried orders from the Virginia Company that amounted to a declaration of
war against the Indians in the Jamestown region. A veteran of the vicious
campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr now introduced "Irish tactics" against
the Indians. His troops raided Indian villages, burned houses, confiscated
provisions, and torched cornfields. A peace settlement ended this First Anglo-
Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist
John Rolfe--the first known interracial union in Virginia.

A fragile peace followed, which endured eight years. But the Indians, pressed by
the land-hungry whites and ravaged by European diseases, struck back in 1622.
A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John Rolfe. In
response the Virginia Company issued new orders calling for "a perpetual war
without peace or truce," one that would prevent the Indians "from being any
longer a people." Periodic punitive raids systematically reduced the native
population and drove the survivors ever farther westward.

In the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, the Indians made one last effort to
dislodge the Virginians. They were again defeated. The peace treaty of 1646
repudiated any hope of assimilating the native peoples into Virginian society or
of peacefully coexisting with them. Instead it effectively banished the
Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally separated Indian
from white areas of settlement--the origins of the later reservation system.

By 1669 an official census revealed that only about two thousand Indians
remained in Virginia, perhaps 10 percent of the population the original English
settlers had found in 1607. By 1685 the English considered the Powhatan
peoples extinct.

It had been the Powhatans' calamitous misfortune to fall victim to three Ds:
disease, disorganization, and disposability. Like native peoples throughout the
New World, they were extremely susceptible to European-imported maladies.
Epidemics of smallpox and measles raced mercilessly through their villages.
The Powhatans also--despite the apparent cohesiveness of "Powhatan's
Confederacy"--lacked the unity with which to make effective opposition to the
relatively well-organized and militarily disciplined whites. Finally, unlike the
Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered to the south, who could be put to
work in the mines and had gold and silver to trade, the Powhatans served no
economic function for the Virginia colonists.

They provided no reliable labor source and, after the Virginians began growing
their own food crops, had no valuable commodities to offer in commerce. They
therefore could be disposed of without harm to the colonial economy. Indeed the
Indian presence frustrated the colonists' desire for a local commodity the
Europeans desperately wanted: land."

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.5
Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake

The English colonists dubbed all the local Indians, somewhat inaccurately, the
Powhatans. Powhatan at first may have considered the English potential allies in
his struggle to extend his power still further over his Indian rivals, and he tried to
be conciliatory. But relations between the Indians and the English remained
tense, especially as the starving colonists took to raiding Indian food supplies.

The atmosphere grew even more strained after Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610.
He carried orders from the Virginia Company that amounted to a declaration of
war against the Indians in the Jamestown region. A veteran of the vicious
campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr now introduced "Irish tactics" against
the Indians. His troops raided Indian villages, burned houses, confiscated
provisions, and torched cornfields. A peace settlement ended this First Anglo-
Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist
John Rolfe--the first known interracial union in Virginia.

A fragile peace followed, which endured eight years. But the Indians, pressed
by the land-hungry whites and ravaged by European diseases, struck back in
1622. A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John Rolfe. In
response the Virginia Company issued new orders calling for "a perpetual war
without peace or truce," one that would prevent the Indians "from being any
longer a people." Periodic punitive raids systematically reduced the native
population and drove the survivors ever farther westward.

In the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, the Indians made one last effort to
dislodge the Virginians. They were again defeated. The peace treaty of 1646
repudiated any hope of assimilating the native peoples into Virginian society or
of peacefully coexisting with them. Instead it effectively banished the
Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally separated Indian
from white areas of settlement--the origins of the later reservation system. By
1669 an official census revealed that only about two thousand Indians remained
in Virginia, perhaps 10 percent of the population the original English settlers had
found in 1607. By 1685 the English considered the Powhatan peoples extinct.

It had been the Powhatans' calamitous misfortune to fall victim to three Ds:
disease, disorganization, and disposability. Like native peoples throughout the
New World, they were extremely susceptible to European-imported maladies.
Epidemics of smallpox and measles raced mercilessly through their villages.

The Powhatans also--despite the apparent cohesiveness of "Powhatan's
Confederacy"--lacked the unity with which to make effective opposition to the
relatively well-organized and militarily disciplined whites. Finally, unlike the
Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered to the south, who could be put to
work in the mines and had gold and silver to trade, the Powhatans served no
economic function for the Virginia colonists.

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.5
Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake

Maryland--the second plantation colony but the fourth English colony to be
planted--was founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore, of a prominent English Catholic
family. He embarked upon the venture partly to reap financial profits and partly
to create a refuge for his fellow Catholics. Protestant England was still
persecuting Roman Catholics; among numerous discriminations, a couple
seeking wedlock could not be legally married by a Catholic priest.

Absentee proprietor Lord Baltimore hoped that the two hundred settlers who
founded Maryland at St. Marys, on Chesapeake Bay, would be the vanguard of a
vast new feudal domain. Huge estates were to be awarded to his largely
Catholic relatives, and gracious manor houses, modeled on those of England's
aristocracy, were intended to sprout from the fertile forests. As in Virginia,
colonists proved willing to come only if offered the opportunity to acquire land of
their own. Soon they were dispersed around the Chesapeake region on modest
farms, and the haughty land barons, mostly Catholic, were surrounded by
resentful backcountry planters, mostly Protestant. Resentment flared into open
rebellion near the end of the century, and the Baltimore family for a time lost its
proprietary rights.

Despite these tensions Maryland prospered. Like Virginia, it blossomed forth in
acres of tobacco. Also like Virginia, it depended for labor in its early years
mainly on white indentured servants--penniless persons who bound themselves
to work for a number of years to pay their passage. In both colonies it was only
in the later years of the seventeenth century that black slaves began to be
imported in large numbers.

Lord Baltimore, a canny soul, permitted unusual freedom of worship at the
outset. He hoped that he would thus purchase toleration for his own fellow
worshipers. But the heavy tide of Protestants threatened to submerge the
Catholics and place severe restrictions on them, as in England. Faced with
disaster, the Catholics of Maryland threw their support behind the famed Act of
Toleration, which was passed in 1649 by the local representative assembly.

Maryland's new religious statute guaranteed toleration to all Christians. But it
decreed the death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who denied the
divinity of Jesus. The law thus sanctioned less toleration than had previously
existed in the settlement, but it did extend a temporary cloak of protection to the
uneasy Catholic minority. One result was that when the colonial era ended,
Maryland probably sheltered more Roman Catholics than any other English-
speaking colony in the New World."

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.7
Maryland: Catholic Haven

Certain distinctive features were shared by England's southern mainland
colonies: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Broad-acred, these outposts of empire were all in some degree dominated by a
plantation economy.

Profitable staple crops were the rule, notably tobacco and rice, though to a
lesser extent in small-farm North Carolina. Slavery was found in all the
plantation colonies, though only after 1750 in reform-minded Georgia. Immense
acreage in the hands of a favored few fostered a strong aristocratic atmosphere,
except in North Carolina and to some extent in debtor-tinged Georgia. The wide
scattering of plantations and farms, often along stately rivers, made the
establishment of churches and schools both difficult and expensive. In 1671 the
governor of Virginia thanked God that no free schools or printing presses existed
in his colony.
All the plantation colonies permitted some religious toleration. The tax-
supported Church of England became the dominant faith, though weakest of all
in nonconformist North Carolina.
These colonies were in some degree expansionary. "Soil butchery" by
excessive tobacco growing drove settlers westward, and the long, lazy rivers
invited penetration of the continent--and continuing confrontation with Native
Americans."

The American Pageant
Chapter 2.12
The Plantation Colonies

Little did the German friar Martin Luther know, when he nailed his protests
against Catholic doctrines to the door of Wittenberg's cathedral in 1517, that he
was shaping the destiny of a yet unknown nation. Denouncing the authority of
priests and popes, Luther declared that the Bible alone was the source of God's
word. He ignited a fire of religious reform (the "Protestant Reformation") that
licked its way across Europe for more than a century, dividing peoples, toppling
sovereigns, and kindling the spiritual fervor of millions of men and women--
some of whom helped to found America.

The reforming flame burned especially brightly in the bosom of John Calvin of
Geneva. This somber and severe religious leader elaborated Luther's ideas in
ways that profoundly affected the thought and character of generations of
Americans yet unborn. Calvinism became the dominant theological credo not
only of the New England Puritans but of other American settlers as well,
including Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and communicants of the
Dutch Reformed church.

Calvin spelled out his basic doctrine in a learned Latin tome of 1536, Institutes of
the Christian Religion. God, he argued, was all-powerful and all-good. Humans,
because of the corrupting effect of original sin, were weak and wicked. God was
also all-knowing--and he knew who was going to heaven and who to hell. Since
the first moment of creation, some souls--the elect--had been destined for
eternal bliss and others for eternal torment. Good works could not save those
whom "predestination" had marked for the infernal fires.

But neither could the elect count on their predetermined salvation and lead lives
of wild, immoral abandon. For one thing, no one could be certain of his or her
status in the heavenly ledger. Gnawing doubts about their eternal fate plagued
Calvinists. They constantly sought, in themselves and others, signs of
"conversion," or the receipt of God's free gift of saving grace. Conversion was
thought to be an intense, identifiable personal experience in which God revealed
to the elect their heavenly destiny. Thereafter they were expected to lead
"sanctified" lives, demonstrating by their holy behavior that they were among the
"visible saints."

These doctrines swept into England just as King Henry VIII was breaking his ties
with the Roman Catholic church in the 1530s, making himself the head of the
Church of England. Henry would have been content to retain Roman rituals and
creeds, but his action powerfully stimulated some English religious reformers to
undertake a total purification of English Christianity.

Many of these "Puritans," as it happened, came from the commercially
depressed woolen districts. Calvinism, with its message of stark but reassuring
order in the divine plan, fed on this social unrest and provided spiritual comfort
to the economically disadvantaged.

As time went on, Puritans grew increasingly unhappy over the snail-like progress
of the Protestant Reformation in England. They burned with pious zeal to see
the Church of England wholly de-Catholicized.

All Puritans agreed that only "visible saints" should be admitted to church
membership. But the Church of England enrolled all the king's subjects, which
meant that the "saints" had to share pews and communion rails with "the
damned." Gagging on this unholy fraternizing, a tiny group of extreme Puritans,
known as Separatists, vowed to break away entirely from the Church of England.

King James I, a shrewd Scotsman, was head of both the state and the church in
England from 1603 to 1625. He quickly perceived that if his subjects could defy
him as their spiritual leader, they might one day defy him as their political leader,
as in fact they later defied and beheaded his son, Charles I. He therefore
threatened to harass the more bothersome Separatists out of the land."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.1
The Protestant Reformation Produces Puritanism

The most famous congregation of Separatists, fleeing royal wrath, departed for
Holland in 1608. During the ensuing twelve years of toil and poverty, they were
increasingly distressed by the "Dutchification" of their children. They longed to
find a haven where they could live and die as English men and women--and as
purified Protestants. America was the logical refuge, despite the early ordeals of
Jamestown, and despite tales of New World cannibals roasting steaks from their
white victims over open fires.

A group of the Separatists in Holland, after negotiating with the Virginia
Company, at length secured rights to settle under its jurisdiction. But their
crowded Mayflower, sixty-five days at sea, missed its destination and arrived off
the rocky coast of New England in 1620, with a total of 102 persons. One had
died en route--an unusually short casualty list--and one had been born and
appropriately named Oceanus. Fewer than half of the entire party were
Separatists. Prominent among the nonbelongers was a peppery and stocky
soldier of fortune, Captain Myles Standish, dubbed by one of his critics "Captain
Shrimp." He later rendered indispensable service as an Indian fighter and
negotiator.

The Pilgrims did not make their initial landing at Plymouth Rock, as commonly
supposed, but undertook a number of preliminary surveys. They finally chose for
their site the shore of inhospitable Plymouth Bay. This area was outside the
domain of the Virginia Company, and consequently the settlers became
squatters. They were without legal right to the land and without specific authority
to establish a government.

Before disembarking, the Pilgrim leaders drew up and signed the brief
Mayflower Compact. Although setting an invaluable precedent for later written
constitutions, this document was not a constitution at all. It was a simple
agreement to form a crude government and to submit to the will of the majority
under the regulations agreed upon.

The compact was signed by forty-one adult males, eleven of them with the
exalted rank of "mister," though not by the servants and two seamen. The pact
was a promising step toward genuine self-government, for soon the adult male
settlers were assembling to make their own laws in open-discussion town
meetings--a great laboratory of liberty.

The Pilgrims' first winter of 1620-1621 took a grisly toll. Only 44 out of the 102
survived. At one time only 7 were well enough to lay the dead in their frosty
graves. Yet when the Mayflower sailed back to England in the spring, not a
single one of the courageous band of Separatists left. As one of them wrote, "It
is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage."

God made his children prosperous, so the Pilgrims believed. The next autumn,
that of 1621, brought bountiful harvests and with them the first Thanksgiving Day
in New England. In time the frail colony found sound economic legs in fur, fish,
and lumber. The beaver and the Bible were the early mainstays: the one for the
sustenance of the body, the other for the sustenance of the soul. Plymouth
proved that the English could maintain themselves in this uninviting region.

The Pilgrims were extremely fortunate in their leaders. Prominent among them
was the cultured William Bradford, a self-taught scholar who read Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. He was chosen governor thirty times in the
annual elections. Among his major worries was his fear that independent, non-
Puritan settlers "on their particular" might corrupt his godly experiment in the
wilderness. Bustling fishing villages and other settlements did sprout to the north
of Plymouth, on the storm-lashed shores of Massachusetts Bay, where many
people were as much interested in cod as God.

Quiet and quaint, the little colony of Plymouth was never important economically
or numerically. Its population numbered only seven thousand by 1691, when,
still charterless, it merged with its giant neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. But the tiny settlement of Pilgrims was big both morally and spiritually."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.2
The Pilgrims End Their Pilgrimage at Plymouth

The Bay Colony enjoyed a high degree of social harmony, stemming from
common beliefs, in its early years. But even in this tightly knit community,
dissension soon appeared. Quakers, who flouted the authority of the Puritan
clergy, were persecuted with fines, floggings, and banishment. In one extreme
case, four Quakers who defied expulsion, one of them a woman, were hanged
on the Boston Common.

A sharp challenge to Puritan orthodoxy came from Anne Hutchinson. She was
an exceptionally intelligent, strong-willed, and talkative woman, ultimately the
mother of fourteen children. Swift and sharp in theological argument, she carried
to logical extremes the Puritan doctrine of predestination. She claimed that a
holy life was no sure sign of salvation and that the truly saved need not bother
to obey the law of either God or man. This assertion, known as antinomianism
(from the Greek, "against the law"), was high heresy.

Brought to trial in 1638, the quick-witted Hutchinson bamboozled her clerical
inquisitors for days, until she eventually boasted that she had come by her
beliefs through a direct revelation from God. This was even higher heresy. The
Puritan magistrates had little choice but to banish her, lest she pollute the entire
Puritan experiment. With her family, she set out on foot for Rhode Island, though
pregnant. She finally moved to New York, where she and all but one of her
household were killed by Indians. Back in the Bay Colony, the pious John
Winthrop saw "God's hand" in her fate.

More threatening to the Puritan leaders was a personable and popular Salem
minister, Roger Williams. Williams was a young man with radical ideas and an
unrestrained tongue. An extreme Separatist, he hounded his fellow clergymen to
make a clean break with the corrupt Church of England. He also challenged the
legality of the Bay Colony's charter, which he condemned for expropriating the
land from the Indians without fair compensation. As if all this were not enough,
he went on to deny the authority of civil government to regulate religious
behavior--a seditious blow at the Puritan idea of government's very purpose.
Their patience exhausted by 1635, the Bay Colony authorities found Williams
guilty of disseminating "newe & dangerous opinions" and ordered him banished.
He was permitted to remain several months longer because of illness, but he
kept up his criticisms. The outraged magistrates, fearing that he might organize
a rival colony of malcontents, made plans to exile him to England. But Williams
foiled them."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.5
Trouble in the Bible Commonwealth

The spread of English settlements inevitably led to clashes with the Indians, who
were particularly weak in New England. Shortly before the Pilgrims had arrived
at Plymouth in 1620, an epidemic, probably triggered by contact with English
fishermen, had swept through the coastal tribes and killed more than three-
quarters of the native people. Deserted Indian fields, ready for tillage, as well as
skulls and bones greeted the Plymouth settlers and provided grim evidence of
the impact of the disease.

In no position to resist the English incursion, the local Wampanoag Indians at
first befriended the settlers. Cultural accommodation was facilitated by Squanto,
a Wampanoag who had learned English from a ship's captain who had
kidnapped him some years earlier. The Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit signed
a treaty with the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1621 and helped them celebrate the first
Thanksgiving after the autumn harvests that same year.

As more English settlers arrived and pushed inland into the Connecticut River
valley, confrontations between Indians and whites ruptured these peaceful
relations. Hostilities exploded in 1637 between the English settlers and the
powerful Pequot tribe. Besieging a Pequot village on Connecticut's Mystic
River, English militiamen and their Narragansett Indian allies set fire to the
Indian wigwams and shot the fleeing survivors. The slaughter wrote a brutal
finish to the Pequot War, virtually annihilated the Pequot tribe, and brought four
decades of uneasy peace between Puritans and Indians.

Lashed by critics in England, the Puritans made some feeble efforts at
converting the remaining Indians to Christianity, although Puritan missionary
zeal never equaled that of the Catholic Spanish and French. A mere handful of
Indians were gathered into Puritan "praying towns" to make the acquaintance of
the English God and to learn the ways of English culture.

The Indians' only hope for resisting English encroachment lay in intertribal
unity--a pan-Indian alliance against the swiftly spreading English settlements. In
1675 Massasoit's son, Metacom, called King Philip by the English, forged such
an alliance and mounted a series of coordinated assaults on English villages
throughout New England. Frontier settlements were especially hard hit, and
refugees fell back toward the relative safety of Boston. When the war ended in
1676, fifty-two Puritan towns had been attacked, and twelve destroyed entirely.
Hundreds of colonists and many more Indians lay dead. Metacom's wife and son
were sold into slavery; he himself was captured, beheaded, and drawn and
quartered, and his head was carried on a pike back to Plymouth, where it was
displayed for years.

King Philip's War slowed the westward march of English settlement in New
England for several decades. But the war inflicted a lasting defeat on New
England's Indians. Drastically reduced in numbers, disspirited, and disbanded,
they never again seriously threatened the New England colonists."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.8
Puritans Versus Indians

Massachusetts suffered further humiliation in 1686, when the Dominion of New
England was created by royal authority. Unlike the homegrown New England
Confederation, it was imposed from London. Embracing at first all New England,
it was expanded two years later to include New York and East and West Jersey.
The dominion also aimed at bolstering colonial defense in the event of war with
the Indians, and hence from the imperial viewpoint of London was a
statesmanlike move.

More importantly, the Dominion of New England was designed to promote
urgently needed efficiency in the administration of the English Navigation Laws.
Those laws reflected the intensifying colonial rivalries of the seventeenth
century. They sought to stitch England's overseas possessions more tightly to
the motherland, by throttling American trade with countries not ruled by the
English crown. Like colonial peoples everywhere, the Americans chafed at such
confinements, and smuggling became an increasingly common and honorable
occupation.

At the head of the new dominion stood autocratic Sir Edmund Andros, an able
English military man, conscientious but tactless. Establishing headquarters in
Puritanical Boston, he generated much hostility by his open affiliation with the
despised Church of England. The colonials were also outraged by his noisy and
Sabbath-profaning soldiers, who were accused of teaching the people "to drink,
blaspheme, curse, and damn."

Andros was prompt to use the mailed fist. He ruthlessly curbed the cherished
town meetings; laid heavy restrictions on the courts, the press, and the schools;
and revoked all land titles. Dispensing with the popular assemblies, he taxed the
people without the consent of their duly elected representatives. He also strove
to enforce the unpopular Navigation Laws and suppress smuggling. Liberty-
loving colonials, accustomed to unusual privileges during long decades of
neglect, were goaded to the verge of revolt.

The people of old England, likewise resisting oppression, stole a march on the
people of New England. In 1688-1689 they engineered the memorable Glorious
(or Bloodless) Revolution. Dethroning the despotic and unpopular Catholic
James II, they enthroned the Protestant rulers of the Netherlands, the Dutch-
born William III and his English wife, Mary, daughter of James II.

When the news of the Glorious Revolution reached America, the ramshackle
Dominion of New England collapsed like a house of cards. A Boston mob,
catching the fever, rose against the existing regime. Sir Edmund Andros
attempted to flee in woman's clothing but was betrayed by boots protruding
beneath his dress. He was then shipped off to England.

Massachusetts, though rid of the despotic Andros, did not gain as much from the
upheaval as it had hoped. In 1691 it was arbitrarily made a royal colony, with a
new charter and a new royal governor. The permanent loss of the ancient
charter was a staggering blow to the proud Puritans, who never fully recovered.
Worst of all, the privilege of voting, once a monopoly of church members, was
now to be enjoyed by all qualified male property holders.

England's Glorious Revolution had a far-flung impact, for unrest erupted from
New England to the Carolinas. The upheaval resulted in a permanent
abandonment of many of the objectionable features of the Andros system, as
well as a temporary breakdown of the new imperial policy of enforcing the
Navigation Laws.

Yet residues remained of Charles II's effort to assert tighter administrative
control over his empire. More English officials--judges, clerks, customs officials--
now staffed the courts and strolled the wharves of English America. Many were
incompetent, corrupt hacks who knew little and cared less about American
affairs. Appointed by influential patrons in far-off England, they blocked by their
presence the rise of local leaders to positions of political power. Aggrieved
Americans viewed them with mounting contempt and resentment as the
eighteenth century wore on."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.10
Andros Promotes the First American Revolution

A remarkable group of dissenters, commonly known as Quakers, arose in
England during the mid-1600s. Their name derived from the report that they
"quaked" when under deep religious emotion. Officially they were known as the
Religious Society of Friends.

Quakers were especially offensive to the authorities, both religious and civil.
They refused to support the established Church of England with taxes. They
built simple meetinghouses, without a paid clergy, and "spoke up" themselves in
meetings when moved. Believing that they were all children in the sight of God,
they kept their broad-brimmed hats on in the presence of their "betters" and
addressed others with simple "thee"s and "thou"s, rather than with conventional
titles.

They would take no oaths, because Jesus had said, "Swear not at all." This
peculiarity often embroiled them with government officials, for "test oaths" were
still required to establish the fact that a person was not a Roman Catholic.

The Quakers, beyond a doubt, were a people of deep conviction. They
abhorred strife and warfare and refused military service. As advocates of
passive resistance, they would turn the other cheek and rebuild their
meetinghouse on the site where their enemies had torn it down. Their courage
and devotion to principle finally triumphed. Although at times they seemed
stubborn and unreasonable, they were a simple, devoted, democratic people,
contending in their own high-minded way for religious and civic freedom.

William Penn, a well-born and athletic young Englishman, was attracted to the
Quaker faith in 1660, when only sixteen years old. His father, disapproving,
administered a sound flogging. After various adventures in the army (the best
portrait of the peaceful Quaker has him in armor), the youth firmly embraced the
despised faith and suffered much persecution.

The courts branded him a "saucy" and "impertinent" fellow. Several hundred of
his less fortunate fellow Quakers died of cruel treatment, and thousands more
were fined, flogged, or cast into "nasty stinking prisons."

Penn's thoughts naturally turned to the New World, where a sprinkling of
Quakers had already fled, notably to Rhode Island, North Carolina, and New
Jersey. Eager to establish an asylum for his people, he also hoped to
experiment with liberal ideas in government and at the same time make a profit.
Finally, in 1681, he managed to secure from the king an immense grant of fertile
land, in consideration of a monetary debt owed to his deceased father by the
crown.

The king called the area Pennsylvania ("Penn's Woodland") in honor of the sire.
But the modest son, fearing that critics would accuse him of naming it after
himself, sought unsuccessfully to change the name.

Pennsylvania was by far the best advertised of all the colonies. Its founder--the
"first American advertising man"--sent out paid agents and distributed countless
pamphlets printed in English, Dutch, French, and German. Unlike the lures of
many other American real estate promoters, then and later, Penn's inducements
were generally truthful. He especially welcomed forward-looking spirits and
substantial citizens, including industrious carpenters, masons, shoemakers, and
other manual workers. His liberal land policy, which encouraged substantial
holdings of land, was instrumental in attracting a heavy inflow of immigrants."

The American Pageant
Chapter 3.14
Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania