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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 4 · pp. 96–138
This chapter looks at how Native peoples, Europeans, and Africans met and reshaped one another in the Americas between the 1500s and about 1700. It follows Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonies, the Native nations that dealt with them, the growth of slavery, and the wars and trade that tied these societies together. This part covers the Native world before and after contact, the Atlantic World, and the early Spanish push into Florida.
Native peoples were the large majority of the people living in the Americas. They lived in thousands of separate nations and polities, from the far north to the far south. Spain controlled large areas only in Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean. Everywhere else, and especially in the interior, Native nations held most of the land. European towns there were small footholds next to strong Native neighbors. (p. 96)
Native societies were already changing before Europeans arrived. Around the 1200s and 1300s the Little Ice Age began and lasted into the 1800s. Cooler temperatures shortened growing seasons, so farms produced less food. Large centers such as Cahokia and Chaco Canyon were abandoned. The paramount chiefdoms of the Mississippian world became unstable. People migrated across the continent, and some groups moved away from centralized rule toward smaller, more equal communities. (p. 96)
Even so, many chiefdoms lasted into the 1600s. A chiefdom was a political and religious center with surrounding towns of roughly 1,000 to 5,000 people each. A paramount chiefdom joined a few, or even dozens, of these under one ruler or ruling family. Examples include the Apalachee in Florida, Cofitachequi in the Carolinas, and the Powhatan in Virginia. In the Southwest, people lived in farming towns that the Spanish called pueblos. Some, like Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma, held thousands of residents. (pp. 96–97)
Diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere hit Native peoples hard because they had never been exposed to them and had little immunity. Scholars estimate that 30 to 90 percent of Native people died from the diseases, the infections that followed, and famine. Smallpox was among the deadliest. (pp. 97, 99)
The Caribbean shows how bad this could get. Colonizers enslaved Native people and worked them until they were exhausted, which made them easier prey for infection. When workers died, colonizers captured new people to replace them, and those captures spread disease further. Enslavement and disease kept feeding each other, and the population collapsed. (pp. 97–98)
It is a mistake to think one great wave of disease crossed the whole continent at once. Away from steady contact with Europeans and Africans, epidemics struck locally and moved along Native and colonial networks. They came back every seven to ten years for more than two centuries. From 1550 to 1750, repeated waves of new diseases, not a single event, caused huge losses and deep social change. (p. 98)
Historians use the term Seventeenth-Century Transformation, or Native New World, for the changes Native peoples made in response to climate change, epidemics, and European trade. European goods such as metal tools, firearms, and linens entered Native communities, along with horses, pigs, and peaches. Native peoples traded food, furs, skins, luxury items, clothing, and captives. Competing for trade goods sharpened conflicts but also led to alliances, and these shifts helped form many Native nations that exist today. (p. 98)
This also corrects another common picture: that Native societies never changed until Europeans came. Climate shifts, migrations, and the fall of Cahokia all came earlier. After contact, Native peoples adapted again through trade, new alliances, and political reorganization. (p. 98)
Europeans and Africans changed too. The Atlantic World is the name historians give to the connected societies of Africa, Europe, North America, and South America from first contact in the 1300s–1400s through the 1800s. The Atlantic Ocean links these four continents. Atlantic history asks how people built, destroyed, and rebuilt communities, and it covers ideas as well as goods: what slavery and freedom meant, who owned land, which religion offered salvation, and what roles women should have. For example, Africans, both free and enslaved, had to build new societies in the Americas and Europe, while African communities changed through trade with Europeans. (pp. 98–100)
The Columbian Exchange is the movement of plants, animals, people, goods, and diseases across the Atlantic. From the Americas came potatoes, corn, tomatoes, tobacco, and cacao. To the Americas came wheat, sugar cane, horses, cattle, pigs, and diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza. The exchange reshaped environments and societies on every continent involved. (pp. 99–100)
Spain sent expeditions into the Southeast hoping to find rich Native cities like those of the Aztecs and Inca. Native peoples often opposed, avoided, misled, or cooperated with these expeditions to get them to move on. In 1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón founded a colony on the Georgia coast, but illness ended it within months. (p. 101)
Hernando de Soto, who had fought in Peru, landed near Tampa Bay in 1539. For four years his army raided towns and took captives while searching for gold it never found. The 1540 battle of Mabila destroyed the Tascaluza chiefdom in Alabama. De Soto died in 1542, and the survivors built boats and escaped down the Mississippi to Mexico. (p. 101)
The invasion had two effects. Native leaders could not protect their people or crops, so communities often reorganized their political and social order. At the same time, Native resistance and cooperation kept Spain from spreading easily across North America. (p. 101)
Spain did gain a foothold. In the 1560s it drove out French Protestants (Huguenots) near today's Jacksonville. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake burned wooden St. Augustine, but Spain rebuilt it. By 1600 Spanish control covered only about a thousand square miles, from the St. Johns River south to St. Augustine. (p. 101)
The Spanish tried methods used earlier in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes. The Crown let missionaries live among Timucua and Guale villagers and encouraged settlement through the encomienda system, which granted colonists the labor of Native people. In the 1630s missions reached the Apalachee, a powerful farming nation in the Florida panhandle. Their surplus corn was carried east along the Camino Real, the royal road, to St. Augustine. (p. 101)
After De Soto's failed march through the Southeast, Spain still kept a foothold in Florida. By about 1600 its territory ran from the mouth of the St. Johns River south to the area around St. Augustine, only about a thousand square miles. To control this land, Spain tried to repeat what it had done in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes (p. 101).
Two tools stand out:
Missions were not gentle. Native headmen and headwomen supplied workers and goods to missionaries and Spanish troops. In return, they got Spanish gifts and backing for their own authority (p. 103).
The Apalachee were one of the most powerful nations in Florida when Europeans arrived. They claimed land from the modern Florida–Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico. Their farmers grew large amounts of corn and other crops (p. 101).
That surplus mattered to Spain. Native traders carried food east along the Camino Real, or "royal road." It linked the western end of the mission system with St. Augustine. Spanish settlers also drove cattle east across the St. Johns River and set up ranches as far west as Apalachee. Even so, Spain's hold on Florida stayed weak (pp. 101, 103).
Native peoples pushed back against the missions. The Timucuans of central Florida had several complaints:
In 1656 the Timucuans joined several towns together and attacked the few Spaniards and enslaved Africans living among them. They asked the Apalachee for help, but the Apalachee chose the Spanish side. They attacked Timucuan towns and helped capture the rebel leaders. Spain executed eleven leaders and displayed their bodies across Timucua as a warning (p. 103).
The lesson is that Spanish power in Florida did not rest only on force. The mission system survived because Native allies, like the Apalachee, supported it (p. 103).
While Spain built its empire, Europe was in turmoil. The Reformation threw England and France, the two powers able to challenge Spain, into long and costly religious conflicts. In France alone, millions died. As that violence faded at home, the rivalry with Spain continued in the New World (p. 103).
Reports of Spanish cruelty, such as the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, spread widely. An English reprint carried a lurid title blaming the "Popish Spanish" for massacres. English writers described Native people as peaceful and Spaniards as forcing them to labor until many died or took their own lives (p. 103).
Spain said its critics were spreading a "Black Legend," meaning an exaggerated picture of Spaniards as uniquely cruel. The idea grew from religious differences and political rivalry. Spain had conquered lands in France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, and many people there wanted to be free of its influence. English writers argued that Spanish brutality was blocking the spread of Christianity, and that other monarchies could convert Native peoples more kindly. These religious claims, along with obvious money motives, brought Spain's rivals to the Americas (p. 104).
Early French explorers hoped to find a Northwest Passage, an imagined water route through North America to Asia. The St. Lawrence River looked like a possible route into the Great Lakes (pp. 104–105).
Private trading companies paid for this growth, and the fur trade shaped it. By the 1660s only about 3,200 French colonists lived along the St. Lawrence, in Quebec, Trois-Rivières (1634), and Montreal (1642). France also banned non-Catholics, including Huguenots, from New France (p. 105).
French traders depended on skilled Native trappers for furs. Trying to dominate them would have cut off the source of French wealth. So the French valued cooperation over conquest, and few came to settle (pp. 105–106).
This made French relations with Native peoples closer than typical Spanish or English ones. Some French may also have wanted to disprove the Black Legend's anti-Catholic claims. Two examples show the difference:
Closeness had costs. The Wendat built a tight bond with the French, and many converted and joined the fur trade. But disease and French and Dutch conflicts badly hurt them (p. 106).
Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha was born in the 1650s to a Mohawk father and an Algonquian mother who had been a captive. Smallpox struck her as a child and killed most of her family. She converted to Catholicism, moved to the mission of Kahnawake, and took vows of chastity. She practiced fasting and self-punishment and died of disease at twenty-four. She was made a saint in 2012. Her life shows how epidemics and mission religion changed Native lives (pp. 106–107).
The powerful Haudenosaunee pushed many Algonquian-speaking peoples toward French territory in the mid-1600s. Together they created what historians call the "middle ground": a cross-cultural space of negotiation and adjustment. Its center was the pays d'en haut, or "upper country," stretching from upriver of Montreal to the western Great Lakes (p. 106).
There, French traders formed trade and kinship ties with many peoples, including Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Miami, Wendat, and Winnebago. Traders took up Native gift-giving and mediation customs, though sometimes clumsily. Native peoples used the European market and adjusted, often unevenly, to European law. These family and trade alliances were the backbone of French authority. The middle ground lasted through the late 1600s and early 1700s, until English officials and settlers flooded into the region and strained even close bonds (pp. 106–108).
The Netherlands was a small but rich maritime nation. It broke from the Habsburgs in 1581 and became known as one of Europe's freest states. Dutch wives kept legal identities separate from their husbands, so they could own property and inherit whole estates (p. 108).
After the turmoil of the Reformation, the Dutch accepted more religious diversity and press freedom than their neighbors. Radical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews went there, and the English Pilgrims stayed first in the Netherlands. Dutch capitalism was highly advanced, with institutions like the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the Dutch East India Company. But the Dutch had limits: power stayed with a few people, and the Dutch pushed the slave trade, which was essential to their wealth (p. 108).
The Dutch did more than trade. They also built farms, villages, and lumber camps. To attract settlers, the Dutch West India Company set up the patroon system. Under it, wealthy landlords received large estates. In return, they paid the travel costs of tenant farmers who would work the land. (p. 110)
Growth had a cost. As Dutch settlements spread, they took over Native villages and hunting grounds, and relations with local Native peoples got worse. Trade also set Native groups against each other, because they competed for Dutch goods. The early hope of peaceful colonization gave way to settlers' hunger for land. In the interior, the Dutch were more careful. They kept their alliances with the Iroquois so that Beverwijck (today's Albany) could stay a fur-trade hub. (p. 110)
The colony also had too few workers. The patroon system did not bring enough tenants, and too few indentured servants came. The company's answer was to import enslaved Africans. In 1626, the same year Minuit bought Manhattan, it brought in eleven enslaved people that it owned. They built New Amsterdam, including a defensive wall on the colony's northern edge, which is where Wall Street is today. They also made its roads and kept its port working. (p. 110)
The Dutch also brought in enslaved women, partly out of fear of racial mixing, and this allowed African Dutch families to form. The first African marriage in the colony took place in 1641. By 1650 at least five hundred enslaved Africans lived there. By 1660, New Amsterdam had the largest urban enslaved population on the continent. (p. 110)
Slavery in New Amsterdam was less thoroughly exploitative than the systems that came later in America. This was typical of African slavery in the early 1600s. Some enslaved Africans sued and won back wages. Several company-owned slaves fought for the colony against the Munsee and then asked for freedom. They won "half freedom." They could farm their own land but had to pay a large tithe (a tax) to their enslavers. Their children, however, stayed enslaved to the company. (p. 110)
Some New Netherlanders objected to enslaving Africans who had become Christians. The Dutch were proud of their liberties, yet they struggled with the reality of slavery. Over time, the colony's economic goals pushed these objections aside. Dutch freedoms ended up existing alongside increasingly brutal slavery. (pp. 110–111)
Starting in the sixteenth century, five Iroquoian nations south and east of Lake Ontario formed the Great League of Peace. They were the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. The league is better known as the Haudenosaunee, meaning "people of the longhouse," or the Five Nations Iroquois. It was both a religious and a political coalition. Its roots lay in the message of Deganawidah, who used words of condolence to take away the grief of the Iroquoian leader Hiawatha. (p. 111)
These words of condolence, along with diplomatic ties among the sachems (headmen), gave the league peaceful ways to settle disputes. The goal was to end mourning wars among the five nations. A mourning war was a raid to capture enemies. Its purpose was to ease the suffering of matrilineal households (those tracing descent through women) that had lost loved ones. Ending revenge raids within the league let the Haudenosaunee become the leading power in the eastern Great Lakes until the American Revolution. (pp. 111–112)
Peace inside the league did not mean peace outside it. The Haudenosaunee were cut off from the new European settlements and their trade. These were the French on the St. Lawrence, the English in New England and the Chesapeake, and the Dutch on the Hudson. They wanted shells from the Atlantic coast, such as whelk and quahog, which were sewn into wampum. They also wanted furs from the Ohio Valley and Canada to trade. (p. 112)
The Dutch built Fort Orange in 1614 in the Hudson Valley. The Mohawks then tried to control trade with the Dutch by shutting out Mahican and other Algonquian traders. They raided trade caravans and used the stolen furs as their own trade goods. These raids led to a series of wars, including against the Mahicans (1624), Wendat (1640s), Neutrals (1651), Eries (1657), and Susquehannocks (1663). (p. 112)
As the fighting grew, the Haudenosaunee tried to replace their losses by adopting captives into matrilineal households. That drive for replacements fed more conflict. Trade, raids, and adoption also exposed them to diseases from Europe and Africa. Smallpox is first recorded among the Five Nations in 1633 and again in 1640–1641. The deaths led to still more mourning wars. (p. 113)
By keeping peace inside the league and using violence outside it, the Haudenosaunee scattered dozens of Native nations. These stretched across the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, St. Lawrence Valley, western New England, and northern Chesapeake. In 1675 they joined the English against the Algonquian alliance led by Metacom in King Philip's War. This helped ensure that the New England colonies survived. Their 1676 alliance with the English became the Covenant Chain, which lasted until the Seven Years' War. By 1675 the Haudenosaunee were the major power on the Great Lakes. (p. 113)
Portugal had led Atlantic navigation long before Columbus. Still, the wealth of New Spain sharpened its rivalry with Spain. In 1494 the pope stepped in with the Treaty of Tordesillas. An imaginary line, the Tordesillas Meridian, ran through the Atlantic. Land east of it went to Portugal, and land west of it was reserved for Spain. Both kingdoms were told to treat Native peoples with Christian compassion and place them under church protection. (p. 113)
At first Portugal focused on rich colonies in Africa and India. By 1530 it turned to Brazil, driving out French traders and founding permanent towns at São Vicente, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro. (p. 113)
Sugar and the slave trade powered early colonial Brazil. Over the whole history of the Atlantic slave trade, more Africans were enslaved in Brazil than in any other Atlantic colony. In the 1700s, gold and diamonds found in the interior pushed colonization westward. (p. 114)
Jesuit missionaries brought Christianity, but African and Native spiritual practices blended with Catholic ones. This came from the demographics of slavery. Sugar plantations had high death rates, so a steady flow of new captives arrived from Africa, which kept Brazil culturally tied to Africa. More new arrivals also meant more resistance. People who escaped founded free settlements called quilombos, which drew both Africans and Natives. Despite frequent attacks, several lasted throughout the history of Brazilian slavery. (p. 114)
From 1580 to 1640, Philip II of Spain also held Portugal's crown. This period is called Iberian Unification, though the two empires were governed separately. The Dutch took advantage of it. They were repulsed at Salvador in 1624 but conquered northeastern Brazil in 1630, making Maurisstad (Recife) the Dutch West India Company's capital. Many Brazilian colonists, including free and formerly enslaved people of African descent such as Henrique Dias, opposed both Dutch occupation and Spanish rule. (p. 114)
The Dutch wanted more than sugar plantations. They also wanted to control the slave trade, so they seized Elmina (in present-day Ghana) in 1637. After Portugal regained independence in 1640, the Dutch seized Portuguese colonies at Luanda in Angola, São Tomé, and Ano Bom in 1641. The Portuguese drove the Dutch out of Brazil in 1654, and the two nations made peace in 1661. (p. 114)
Sweden entered the race for North America in 1638. The Swedish South Company settled a mixed group of Swedes, Finns, and Dutch colonists at Fort Christina, on the site of today's Wilmington, Delaware. The colony was weak from the start. Messages crossed the ocean slowly, and loyalties were split. Dutch investors wanted quick profits, while Swedish colonists and backers wanted to build up Sweden's empire. The Lenape and Susquehannocks welcomed the Swedish traders, because they brought European goods and were too few to threaten Native towns. (p. 116)
The Dutch conquered New Sweden in 1655. The English then took New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York. Through these changes of rulers, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, Germans, and others in the Delaware Valley kept their own community identity. They did it by pledging loyalty to whoever governed them. This shows how local communities could survive imperial takeovers. (p. 116)
Several pressures pushed England toward colonization. Its population grew from under three million in 1500 to over five million by the mid-1600s. Land became expensive, and rents and prices rose faster than wages. Landowners were also switching from crops to raising livestock, so they enclosed public land and evicted tenants. The result was a large class of landless, jobless people. Supporters of colonies saw them as a place to send these people. (p. 116)
Colonization was also sold as a religious and patriotic duty. Protestant English writers claimed they could Christianize Native peoples. They also claimed they could do better than Spain, which carried the Black Legend of cruelty. (pp. 116–117)
Richard Hakluyt's 1584 "Discourse on Western Planting" gathered these arguments together. He repeated the Black Legend and said English colonies would spread Protestantism and hurt Catholic Spain. He added that new trade would bring profit and give work to the idle poor. Colonization was thus presented as a religious mission, a strike against a rival, and a cure for unemployment all at once. (p. 117)
Behind this lofty language were plain money motives. English merchants had no landed estates, so they looked to new ways of building wealth. They relied on government-backed trading monopolies and on the joint-stock company. This was a business that pooled money from many investors, who shared the profits and spread the risks. These companies were the ancestors of modern corporations. They could raise the huge sums colonies required, and the English hoped to do better than the Dutch system they copied. In 1606, James I approved the Virginia Company. (pp. 117–118)
The first English successes in the Americas were not colonies but privateering, which was piracy approved by the state. Queen Elizabeth backed sailors such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, who raided Spanish ships and towns. Drake even reached the Pacific coast of Peru. The raids made money for the sailors and the Crown, but they angered Spain. Tension rose further when Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic, was executed. (p. 118)
In 1588, Philip II of Spain sent the Armada against England. It had 130 ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, about 26,000 men in all. Smaller, faster English ships harassed it and forced it to retreat toward the Netherlands. A storm that the English called the "Protestant wind" then destroyed what remained. England was saved, and the seas opened to English expansion. (p. 118)
English colonization also drew on experience in Ireland. There England often did not try to convert or merge with the Irish. It took their land by force and left them to leave or die. Similar methods later appeared against Native Americans. (p. 118)
Early efforts went badly. Humphrey Gilbert failed to found a colony in Newfoundland. In 1587, John White left about 150 colonists, mostly men, on Roanoke Island and went back to England for supplies. The Armada crisis kept him there for years. When he returned, the settlement was empty, with the word "Croatoan" carved nearby. Historians think the colonists may have moved to a nearby island of that name, though some suggest violence. When Elizabeth died in 1603, England had no permanent colony in North America. (pp. 118–119)
Peace with Spain in 1604 made colonies more attractive. The Virginia Company hoped for gold, silver, and trade goods such as iron, furs, tar, and glass. In April 1607, colonists in three ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, sailed up the James River and founded Jamestown, the first lasting English colony in what is now the United States. The site was poor. Native people had avoided it because the soil was bad and the brackish tidal water caused disease. (p. 119)
The English were not entering empty land. The region was Tsennacommacah, the home of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. Its leader, Wahunsenacawh (called Powhatan by the English), ruled over ten thousand Algonquian speakers in more than thirty polities. They burned brush to make grasslands for hunting deer, elk, and bison. They also rotated fields of corn, beans, and squash. Without plows or draft animals, they still produced plenty of food. They prized English metal tools, kettles, and guns and traded food for them. (p. 120)
Most Jamestown colonists were gentlemen who were unready for hard labor, and supplies arrived irregularly or spoiled. Fewer than half survived the first nine months. John Smith took charge and made everyone work. Powhatan's people also supplied food. When the English demanded control over people and goods in their zone, the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614) began. The Powhatan tried to protect their control of trade and tribute by cutting off food and besieging James Fort. (p. 120)
The winter of 1609–1610 became the "starving time." Supplies were lost, relations with the Powhatan worsened, and colonists ate leather, pets, vermin, and even corpses. Only about sixty settlers were left by summer 1610. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants to Jamestown had died. (p. 121)
The colony survived partly because it made allies of Native groups outside Powhatan control, such as the Patawomecks and Chickahominies. Tension eased in 1614 when Pocahontas, Powhatan's daughter, married John Rolfe. English territorial limits stayed in place, and Pocahontas later died in England. (p. 120)
Jamestown's rescue came from tobacco. In 1616, Rolfe crossed strains from Trinidad and Guiana and planted Virginia's first crop. The first cargo reached England in 1617. Demand in Europe was high, so prices were good. Exports passed 500,000 pounds a year within fifteen years and reached 15 million pounds within forty. The boom spread to Maryland. (p. 122)
Tobacco drew settlers, mostly young men who signed indentures, contracts that bound them to work for several years in exchange for their passage. (pp. 122–123)
Tobacco turned Virginia from a struggling outpost into a profitable colony, but it created a new problem. The crop needed a great deal of hand labor, and planters had plenty of land but too few workers. Most newcomers were young men who came as indentured servants. They signed contracts, called indentures, that bound them to an employer for a set number of years in exchange for the voyage across the ocean (pp. 122–123).
The colony tried to solve the shortage with the headright policy of 1618. Anyone who migrated to Virginia received fifty acres of land. A settler who also paid for another person's passage received fifty more acres for that person. For example, a planter who brought over four servants would gain 200 extra acres on top of his own 50. This rewarded planters for importing laborers, and it tied land wealth to controlling other people's work (p. 123).
In 1619 the Virginia Company also created the House of Burgesses. It was a limited representative body made up of white landowners, and it first met at Jamestown (p. 123).
In that same year, 1619, a Dutch ship sold twenty Africans to the Virginia colonists. This sale marks the start of slavery in English Virginia (p. 123). It was not the start of slavery in the Atlantic world. Spanish colonizers had built the framework of the Atlantic slave trade more than a hundred years earlier. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, who is remembered for defending Native peoples, once suggested replacing Native labor with African labor (p. 124).
As tobacco planters spread beyond Jamestown's unhealthy peninsula, conflict with the Powhatan became almost certain. The English clearly wanted a permanent colony that kept growing. After Powhatan died in 1622, his brother Opechancanough took over and promised to push the colonists out. On March 22, 1622, a surprise attack killed over 350 colonists, about one-third of the colony. This began the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632). The English answered with repeated massacres of Native towns. War and disease then shifted the balance, and Powhatan communities were driven inland to the fall line of the James River (p. 123).
Opechancanough struck again in 1644, killing over four hundred colonists and starting the Third Anglo-Powhatan War. As in 1622, the Powhatan were trying to defend their own boundaries against English expansion. The English invaded, burning towns, cornfields, and sacred buildings. In 1646 Opechancanough was captured during peace talks and later murdered in Jamestown by a colonist (p. 125).
The 1646 treaty, signed by his successor Necotowance, made the Powhatan and their Pamunkey allies tributaries of Virginia and subjects of the Crown, supposedly in return for protection of their lands. The English limited Native movement and confined the Pamunkey to one small area. The war ended the Powhatan as a paramount chiefdom and scattered its people (pp. 125–126).
A similar mix of trade and land competition caused trouble in Maryland, which was founded in 1632. William Claiborne ran a trading post on Kent Island, where he sold European goods and firearms to the Susquehannocks. In 1638 Maryland's officials declared him a pirate, seized the post, and demanded that the Susquehannocks trade with Maryland instead. The Susquehannocks refused. Maryland then built trade ties with the Piscataways, who were enemies of the Susquehannocks. This deepened conflict between the two Native nations until the Susquehannocks made peace with Maryland in 1652 (pp. 123–124).
Virginia's leaders feared that unmarried men would not settle permanently without a chance to marry. So the Virginia Company sent 147 women to the colony between 1620 and 1622, and a prospective husband had to pay 120 pounds of tobacco for each. The plan failed, because the gap between single men and women kept growing through the century. The results were violent rivalry over women, sex before marriage, servants living together without marrying, and relationships across racial lines (p. 124).
The colonists also arrived with strong beliefs about their own superiority. Even when they were short of food and depended on the Powhatan, they saw themselves as ahead in religion, metalworking, farming, and ocean navigation. Together with outbreaks of violence, this belief made them feel entitled to Native land and resources (p. 124).
Ideas about race grew as slavery spread across the Atlantic. In other words, race followed slavery rather than causing it. English writers linked Africans with blackness and blackness with sin and baseness. One essayist in 1695 claimed that a Black person's nature could never change. Others taught that God had cursed Noah's son Ham and doomed his descendants to perpetual servitude (pp. 124–125).
It is a common mistake to think that slavery in early Virginia already worked like later American slavery. In the first decades, race was not yet fixed in law and slavery was not yet codified. Africans faced longer terms and harsher punishments than white servants, but their servitude was not always lifelong or passed on to children. Some served a set term and then became free landowners. Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who was sold into servitude, finished his indenture and became a successful tobacco planter who himself held enslaved people. White servants and enslaved Black and Native workers often worked side by side, which one scholar called a "peculiar brand of equality." That equality rested on harsh treatment, and it became more and more racialized over time (p. 125).
The law moved toward permanent, hereditary slavery. In 1662 the Virginia Assembly decided that a child's status would follow the mother's, so the children of enslaved women were born enslaved. It also raised fines for interracial sex. By the end of the century, enslaved Africans had largely replaced indentured servants as the colony's main labor force. Native enslavement and conflict also continued, as in the Susquehannock War of 1676. Virginia's success depended more and more on imported Africans (p. 126).
Farther north, English colonists founded Plymouth in 1620, on land its Native people called Wôpanâak or Ndakinna. The colonists were surprised to be greeted by Native men who spoke English. Samoset and Squanto had already traded with English ships, and Squanto had earlier been held captive by the English before being returned (pp. 126–127).
By 1621 Plymouth had made a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Wampanoag under their leader Ousamequin, whose title was great sachem (Massasoit). The agreement gave the English a peaceful start for their settlements. Ironically, this calm encouraged even more colonization (p. 127).
Puritans were English Protestants shaped by the ideas of John Calvin. 'Puritan' began as an insult, and the people it described usually called themselves 'the godly.' They thought the Church of England, since Henry VIII broke from Rome in the 1530s, still kept too many Catholic habits. They wanted worship to be simpler, with plainer churches and less ceremony, and they wanted Bible reading at the center of faith (p. 127).
Like other Calvinists, they held that people are saved by God's grace alone, not by their own deeds. They also believed each soul's fate was predestined. The minority God had already chosen were called the Elect (p. 127).
The image of Puritans as joyless killjoys is exaggerated. They did dislike excess and many holidays, including Christmas, which the Bible does not command. But they saw themselves as taking a sensible middle path. They did not give up alcohol or sex (p. 127).
After 1625, King Charles I turned against the Puritans and treated them as dangerous extremists. Under growing persecution, about 20,000 of them moved to New England between 1630 and 1640. This movement is called the Great Migration (p. 128).
These settlers differed from the 'Pilgrims' who founded Plymouth in 1620. The Pilgrims had separated from the Church of England. The Puritans still meant to reform it. Leaders like John Winthrop said they were not abandoning England. They would build a model godly community, a 'City on a Hill,' as an example for reformers at home. This was not a plan for religious toleration, which almost all European Christians then thought foolish or dangerous (p. 128).
New England's colonies were Plymouth (1620), Massachusetts Bay (1630), Connecticut (1636), and Rhode Island (1636). Four things set the region apart from Virginia (p. 128):
The economy was mixed: small farms, shops, fishing, lumber, shipbuilding, and trade with Native peoples and the Atlantic world. This produced a modest prosperity that was widely shared (p. 129).
Slavery was still part of the picture. Enslaved Africans arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1638 aboard the Desire. New England merchants also sold food and enslaved people to Caribbean sugar colonies, and some Puritans got rich as enslavers there (p. 128).
New England was healthier than the Chesapeake, which tropical diseases turned into a deadly place for newcomers. Disease also helped the English in another way. A smallpox pandemic in the 1610s, followed by later epidemics, killed as much as 90 percent of the region's Native people. The Puritans therefore met shocked survivors, not strong neighbors. Some survivors welcomed the English as allies against rival nations that had escaped the epidemics (p. 129).
The results show in the numbers. New England grew to 91,000 people by 1700 from only 21,000 immigrants. The Chesapeake took in 120,000 English yet had just 85,000 white colonists in 1700 (p. 129).
Towns began when a group of men, often from the same part of England, asked the colony's General Court for land. They split some land for immediate use and kept the rest as 'commons' for future generations. The townspeople decided home-lot sizes by each settler's wealth and status. A town could limit who joined, so newcomers had to apply (p. 129).
Government was not democratic by today's standards, but many people took part. All male property holders voted in town meetings and chose officials such as selectmen and constables. Each town wrote a covenant, echoing the Puritan idea of God's covenant with his people (p. 129). Disputes were handled by persuasion and arbitration first. If that failed, people who would not conform were punished or expelled. Massachusetts banished Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Quakers (pp. 129–130).
In the 1630s the Pequots in present-day Connecticut competed with the Dutch, English, and Narragansetts over coastal shells used to make wampum. They also collected tribute from neighbors such as the Narragansetts. After the Pequots killed two English traders, the Narragansetts and Mohegans allied with the English (p. 130).
In May 1637, Puritan forces from Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut burned the Mystic village and killed people who tried to flee. Estimates of the dead there range from about 400 to 700. The English claimed 1,500 Pequots were killed or driven out in under two months. Survivors were enslaved, either kept in New England households or sold to the Caribbean (p. 130).
The war began as a Native dispute over resources and tribute, but English involvement made it devastating. Pequot defeat made New England safer for expansion. The Narragansetts and Mohegans gained for a time, but in 1675 they joined the Wampanoags in conflict with the English in King Philip's War (p. 130).
Puritan leaders did not build the model society they hoped would inspire England. They blamed the young. Increase Mather complained that the younger generation had corrupted its founders' work. That kind of sermon, a jeremiad, became a staple of late-1600s Puritan writing (pp. 130–131).
The sermons could not stop the effects of prosperity. The population spread out and became more diverse, and religious pluralism grew. By the early 1700s Christmas, once forbidden, was observed in churches and homes. In 1711 Cotton Mather was dismayed to find young people from his own congregation at a party on Christmas (pp. 131–132). Even so, Puritan influence on New England culture lasted long after the label faded (p. 132).
Virginia and Massachusetts mattered less to England than the Caribbean sugar islands. They were seen as modest investments and places to send the poor, but they gave Britain a foothold in North America. Tobacco and sugar fed European markets, and the Atlantic economy came to depend more and more on enslaved labor. The Native slave trade also grew, bringing cycles of violence, migration, and disease. The system created new ideas about human difference and new forms of social control (p. 132).
By 1700 the English population in the Americas was 260,000, compared with only 15,000 in New France. Planters had shifted from English servants to enslaved Africans, and racial slavery had become vital to the empire. Most enslaved people in British America still worked on Caribbean sugar plantations (p. 138).
