The
Growth of Colonialism in North America
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."
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."
In
1606, two years after peace with Spain, the hand of destiny beckoned toward
Virginia.
A joint-stock company, known as the Virginia
Company of London, received a charter from King James I of England for a
settlement in the New World.
The
main attraction was the promise of
gold, combined with a strong desire to find a passage through America to the
Indies.
Like
most joint-stock companies of the day, the Virginia Company was intended to
endure for only a few years, after which its
stockholders hoped to liquidate it for a profit.
This arrangement put severe pressure on the
luckless colonists, who were threatened with abandonment in the wilderness if
they did not quickly strike it rich on the company's behalf.
Few
of the investors thought in terms of
long-term colonization.
Apparently
no one even faintly suspected that the seeds of a mighty nation were being
planted.
The
charter of the Virginia Company is a significant document in American history.
It
guaranteed to the overseas settlers the same rights of Englishmen that they
would have enjoyed if they had stayed at home.
This
precious boon was gradually extended to
the other English colonies and became a foundation stone of American liberties.
Setting sail in late 1606, the Virginia
Company's three ships landed near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where Indians
attacked them.
Pushing
on up the bay, the tiny band of colonists eventually chose a location on the
wooded and malarial banks of the James
River, named in honor of King James I.
The
site was easy to defend, but it was mosquito-infested and devastatingly
unhealthful.
There,
on May 24, 1607, about a hundred English settlers, all of them men,
disembarked. They called the place
Jamestown.
The early years of Jamestown proved a
nightmare for all concerned--except the buzzards.
Forty
would-be colonists perished during the initial voyage in 1606-1607.
Another
expedition in 1609 lost its leaders and many of its precious supplies in a shipwreck off Bermuda.
Once
ashore in Virginia, the settlers died by the dozens from disease, malnutrition,
and starvation.
Ironically,
the woods rustled with game and the rivers flopped with fish, but the greenhorn
settlers, many of them self-styled
"gentlemen" unaccustomed to fending for themselves, wasted valuable
time grubbing for nonexistent gold when they should have been gathering
provisions.
Virginia was saved from utter collapse at
the start largely by the leadership and resourcefulness of an intrepid young
adventurer, Captain John Smith.
Taking over in 1608, he whipped the
gold-hungry colonists into line with the rule, "He who shall not work shall not eat."
He
had been kidnapped in December 1607 and subjected to a mock execution by the
Indian chieftain Powhatan, whose daughter Pocahontas had "saved"
Smith by dramatically interposing her head between his and the war clubs of his captors.
The
symbolism of this ritual was apparently intended to impress Smith with
Powhatan's power and with the Indians' desire for peaceful relations with the
Virginians.
Pocahontas
became an intermediary between the Indians and the settlers, helping to preserve a shaky peace and to provide needed
foodstuffs.
Still, the colonists died in droves, and
survivors were driven to desperate acts.
They
were reduced to eating "dogges, Catts, Ratts, and Myce" and even to
digging up corpses for food.
One
hungry man killed, salted, and ate his wife, for which misbehavior he was executed.
Of
the four hundred settlers who managed to make it to Virginia by 1609, only
sixty survived the "starving time" winter of 1609-1610.
Diseased and despairing, the colonists
dragged themselves aboard homeward-bound ships in the spring of 1610, only to
be met at the mouth of the James River by a long-awaited relief party headed by
a new governor, Lord De La Warr.
He
ordered the settlers back to Jamestown,
imposed a harsh military regime on the colony, and soon undertook aggressive
military action against the Indians.
Disease
continued to reap a gruesome harvest among the Virginians.
By
1625 Virginia contained only some
twelve hundred hard-bitten survivors of the nearly 8,000 adventurers who had
tried to start life anew in the ill-fated colony."
John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas,
became father of the tobacco industry and an economic savior of the Virginia
colony.
By 1616 he had perfected methods of
raising and curing the pungent weed, eliminating much of the bitter tang.
Soon the European demand for tobacco was nearly insatiable.
A tobacco rush swept over Virginia, as
crops were planted in the streets of Jamestown and even between the numerous
graves.
So exclusively did the colonists concentrate on planting the
yellow leaf that at first they had to
import some of their foodstuffs.
Colonists who had once hungered for
food now hungered for land, ever more land on which to plant ever more tobacco.
Relentlessly, they pressed the frontier
of settlement up the river valleys to
the west, further crowding the Indians.
Virginia's prosperity was finally built on
tobacco smoke.
This
"bewitching weed" played a vital role in putting the colony on firm
foundations and in setting an example for other successful colonizing
experiments.
But
tobacco--King Nicotine--was something
of a tyrant.
It was ruinous to the soil when greedily
planted in successive years, and it enchained the prosperity of Virginia to the
fluctuating price of a single crop.
Tobacco
also promoted the broad-acred plantation system and with it a brisk demand for fresh labor.
In 1619, the year before the Plymouth
Pilgrims landed in New England, what was described as a Dutch warship appeared
off Jamestown and sold some twenty black Africans.
Yet
blacks were too costly for most of the hard-pinched white colonists to acquire,
and for decades few were brought to Virginia.
In
1650 Virginia counted but three hundred blacks, although by the end of the century blacks, most of them enslaved,
made up approximately 14 percent of the colony's population.
Representative self-government was also
born in primitive Virginia, in the same cradle with slavery and in the same
year--1619.
The
London Company authorized the settlers to summon an assembly, known as the
House of Burgesses.
A
momentous precedent was thus feebly
established, for this assemblage was the first of many miniature parliaments to
mushroom from the soil of America.
As time passed, James I grew increasingly
hostile to Virginia.
He
detested tobacco and he distrusted the representative House of Burgesses, which
he branded a "seminary of sedition."
In
1624 he revoked the charter of the bankrupt and beleaguered Virginia Company, thus making Virginia a royal colony
directly under royal control.
While
the English were planting the first frail colonial shoots in the Chesapeake,
they also were busily colonizing the West Indies.
Spain,
weakened by military overextension and distracted by its rebellious Dutch
provinces, relaxed its grip on much of
the Caribbean in the early 1600s.
By
mid-seventeenth century, England had secured its claim to several West Indian
islands, including the large prize of Jamaica in 1655.
Sugar formed the foundation of the West
Indian economy.
What tobacco was to the Chesapeake, sugarcane
was to the Caribbean--with one crucial difference.
Tobacco
was a poor man's crop.
It
could be planted easily, it produced commercially marketable leaves within a year, and it required only simple
processing.
Sugarcane,
however, was a rich man's crop.
It
had to be planted extensively to yield commercially viable quantities of sugar.
Extensive
planting, in turn, required extensive
and arduous land clearing.
And
the canestalks yielded their sugar only after an elaborate process of refining
in a sugar mill.
The
need for land and for the labor to clear it and to run the mills made sugar
cultivation a capital-intense business.
Only
wealthy growers with abundant capital to invest could succeed in sugar.
The
sugar lords extended their dominion over the West Indies in the seventeenth
century.
To
work their sprawling plantations, they imported enormous numbers of African
slaves--more than a quarter of a million in the five decades after 1640.
By about 1700, black slaves outnumbered white
settlers in the English West Indies by nearly four to one, and the region's
population has remained predominantly black ever
since.
West
Indians thus take their place among the numerous children of the African diaspora
--the
vast scattering of African peoples throughout the New World in the three and a half centuries following Columbus's discovery.
To
control this large and potentially restive population of slaves, English
authorities devised formal "codes" that defined the slaves' legal
status and masters' prerogatives.
The
notorious Barbados slave code of 1661 denied even the most fundamental rights to slaves and gave
masters virtually complete control over their laborers, including the right to
inflict vicious punishments for even slight infractions.
The profitable sugar-plantation system
soon crowded out almost all other forms of Caribbean agriculture.
The
West Indies increasingly depended on the North American mainland for foodstuffs
and other basic supplies.
And
smaller English farmers, squeezed out
by the land-hungry sugar barons, began to migrate to the newly founded southern
mainland colonies.
A
group of displaced English settlers from Barbados arrived in Carolina in 1670.
They
brought with them a few African slaves, as well as the model of the Barbados
slave code, which eventually inspired
statutes governing slavery throughout the mainland colonies.
Carolina
officially adopted a version of the Barbados slave code in 1696.
Just
as the West Indies had been a testing ground for the encomienda system that the
Spanish had brought to Mexico and South
America,
so
the Caribbean islands now served as a staging area for the slave system that
would take root elsewhere in English North America."
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."
A
path-breaking experiment in union was launched in 1643, when four colonies
banded together to form the New England Confederation.
Old
England was then deeply involved in civil wars, and hence the colonials were
thrown upon their own resources.
The
primary purpose of the confederation was defense against foes or potential
foes, notably the Indians, the French, and the Dutch.
Purely
intercolonial problems, such as runaway servants and criminals who had fled
from one colony to another, also came
within the jurisdiction of the confederation.
Each
member colony, regardless of size, wielded two votes--an arrangement highly
displeasing to the most populous colony, Massachusetts Bay.
The
confederation was essentially an exclusive Puritan club.
It
consisted of the two Massachusetts colonies (the Bay Colony and bantam-sized
Plymouth) and the two Connecticut colonies (New Haven and the scattered valley
settlements).
The Puritan leaders blackballed Rhode Island as
well as the Maine outposts.
These
places, it was charged, harbored too many heretical or otherwise undesirable
characters.
Shockingly,
one of the Maine towns had made a tailor its mayor and had even sheltered an excommunicated minister of the
gospel.
Weak though it was, the confederation was
the first notable milestone on the long and rocky road toward colonial unity.
The
delegates took tottering but urgently needed steps toward acting together on
matters of intercolonial importance.
Rank-and-file
colonists, for their part, received valuable experience in delegating their votes to properly chosen
representatives.
Back
in England the king had paid little attention to the American colonies during
the early years of their planting.
They
were allowed, in effect, to become semiautonomous commonwealths.
This
era of benign neglect was prolonged when the crown, struggling to retain its power, became enmeshed during the 1640s
in civil wars with the parliamentarians.
But
when Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the royalists and
their Church of England allies were once more firmly in the saddle.
Puritan
hopes of eventually purifying the old English church withered.
Worse,
Charles II was determined to take an
active, aggressive hand in the management of the colonies.
His
plans ran headlong against the habits that decades of relative independence had
bred in the colonists.
Deepening colonial defiance was nowhere
more glaringly revealed than in Massachusetts.
One
of the king's agents in Boston was mortified to find that royal orders had no
more effect than old issues of the London Gazette.
Punishment
was soon forthcoming.
As
a slap at Massachusetts, Charles II gave rival Connecticut in 1662 a sea-to-sea
charter grant, which legalized the squatter settlements.
The
very next year the outcasts in Rhode Island received a new charter, which gave
kingly sanction to the most religiously
tolerant government yet devised in America.
A
final and crushing blow fell on the stiff-necked Bay Colony in 1684, when its
precious charter was revoked by the London authorities."
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."