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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 5 · pp. 139–164
This chapter traces how England's colonies in North America and the Caribbean developed in the 1600s and early 1700s. It looks at the rise of racial slavery, the tobacco and sugar economies, and the political shocks from England's civil wars and the Glorious Revolution. It also covers the founding of colonies from Maryland to Pennsylvania, and the conflicts that shaped them, including King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, the Pueblo Revolt, and the Yamasee War.
Slavery was not invented by English colonists. In Europe it had mostly faded out in the north by the 1200s, but it lasted in the south and east. In North America before Europeans arrived, Native peoples also practiced bondage, and it usually began with the capture of enemies in war. (p. 139)
What was new in the early modern empires was the system itself: slavery run as a large commercial business and tied to race. No earlier society had organized slavery in quite this way. This is why the chapter treats slavery and the making of race together. (p. 139)
In the 1600s, European colonists enslaved many Native people. They relied on a legal argument common in Europe at the time: enslaving prisoners of war was lawful, and it was supposedly kinder than killing them. This idea made it easy to turn colonial wars into sources of captive labor. (p. 139)
Several wars show the pattern:
(p. 139)
The trade did not always work smoothly. New England colonists tried to ship enslaved Native people to Barbados, but the island's Assembly refused to take them. Its leaders feared that the captives would encourage rebellion. (p. 139)
Later wars in Florida, South Carolina, and the Mississippi Valley produced still more captives. Some were real struggles over land. Others were "manufactured" as excuses to take prisoners, and some were not wars at all but illegal raids by slave traders. Historians estimate that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were enslaved in the southern colonies from 1670 to 1715. Some stayed in the region, but many were shipped out through Charles Town, South Carolina, probably to Barbados, Jamaica, and Bermuda. Disease, violence, and starvation killed large numbers of them. (p. 139)
Enslaved Native people fought back, and enslaving them caused diplomatic problems with Native nations. For these two reasons, colonial governments began to discourage Indian slavery. It never fully ended, though, because it could not completely disappear while slavery itself was legal. (pp. 139–140)
English planters wanted a steadier workforce, so they increasingly looked to Africa. They were not the first to do so. Spain and Portugal began bringing captive Africans to the Americas in the early 1500s, and enslaved people were growing tobacco on Hispaniola by the 1530s. By 1641, more than 500,000 people of African descent were working on plantations and in mines in Spanish and Portuguese colonies. That was long before slavery was common in English colonies. By the 1670s, however, English merchants had become Europe's leading slave traders. In England's West Indian colonies, most people were now enslaved. (p. 140)
Enslaved Africans were forced to make three journeys, and the Middle Passage was the second, or middle, one. (p. 140)
(p. 140)
The scale was enormous. Between the 1500s and the 1800s, about 11 to 12 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic. About 2 million of them died at sea. Several million more died after capture in Africa or after reaching the Americas. Historians' estimates vary, with some totals as low as 9 million and others as high as 15 million. The spread shows how hard it is to count a trade that left incomplete records. (p. 140)
Slave ships were deadly. Disease spread easily, food was scarce, and some captives were driven to suicide. The ship surgeon Alexander Falconbridge described how infections and crowding combined in the hold. Dysentery, called "the bloody flux," left captives lying in their own waste. Because they were chained in tiny spaces, the metal and timber rubbed away so much skin and flesh that bones showed. Other accounts record rapes, whippings, smallpox, and the eye disease conjunctivitis. (p. 140)
The slave ship Brookes shows how little room people were given. Even after the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, the ship was permitted to carry up to 454 people. Each man was allotted a space of about 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches. Each woman got about 5 feet 10 inches by 1 foot 4 inches, and each child about 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches. A slave trader claimed that before the law the ship had carried as many as 609 people. The fact that the 1788 law still allowed such packing shows how weak early regulation was. (p. 141)
For most of the 1600s, England's colonies ran mainly on the work of English indentured servants. Virginia depended on tobacco by the 1620s. Planters borrowed ideas from the Elizabethan poor laws to build indentured servitude. Under this system, a poor English person agreed to work four or five years in America. In return, the planter paid for the voyage across the Atlantic. (p. 140)
Servants followed a yearly cycle of tobacco work:
After the middle of the 1600s, Virginia planters imported more enslaved Africans. In 1643, Virginia made African women tithable, meaning taxable. This tied African women's work to farm labor in the fields. The English ideal was different. Farms with enough servants or hired hands were supposed to spare wives and daughters from field work. White women were expected to work in dairies, gardens, and kitchens. The tax law therefore drew a line between how English and African women's work was viewed. In practice, white women sometimes did field work anyway. English servants kept working on tobacco farms, but by the early 1700s most Chesapeake workers were enslaved. (p. 142)
The move to slave labor came much earlier in the English Caribbean. Colonists began experimenting with sugar in the 1640s. Within a few decades it was England's most profitable colonial product. Its labor system was even harsher than tobacco's. (p. 142)
Planters liked slavery better than servitude for a simple reason. A servant left after four or five years, but an enslaved person was held for life. Barbados officials had announced in 1636 that Indians and Africans brought to the island would be kept in bondage permanently. (pp. 142–143)
The 1660s were a turning point. Legislatures in Barbados and Virginia wrote laws that made race central to a person's legal status. (p. 143)
The other English colonies in America soon copied these laws. Historians see them as a key step in forming modern racial ideology. (p. 143)
Enslaved Africans often landed first in the British West Indies, where they were "seasoned" in places such as Barbados. On the mainland, Charles Town (today's Charleston), founded in 1670, became the leading port for the slave trade. (p. 143)
Spanish Florida saw the new English town as a serious threat. Spain began building the fort Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine in response. In 1693, the Spanish king issued the Decree of Sanctuary. It freed enslaved people who escaped from English colonies, as long as they became Catholic and swore loyalty to Spain. Some Africans even carried weapons in the Spanish militia. This shows that Spain and England thought about race differently. (pp. 143–144)
Colonial law did not recognize the marriages of enslaved people. Even so, Black men and women formed lasting families. Some married abroad, meaning their spouse belonged to a different enslaver on a different plantation. These couples usually saw each other only on Sundays, after walking miles. Sundays also brought community gatherings, after people tended their own garden plots. Religious holidays added feasting, dancing, and music. These customs kept African traditions alive and helped shape African American culture. (p. 144)
Enslaved people also resisted in many ways:
Creole cultures were new cultures made in the Americas by blending European and African practices. They were especially common in diverse regions such as New York and Pennsylvania. Some examples show how deep the blending went:
In the 1500s, England's rulers fought over religion. Queen Elizabeth's settlement made Protestantism the official faith. Some Protestants wanted a truly godly church. Critics called them Puritans, because they believed the Church of England still kept practices that seemed Catholic. In the 1620s and 1630s, many of these dissenters moved to the New World to build a godly community. Others stayed in England and kept pushing for change. (p. 145)
By the 1640s, fights between Parliament and the Crown merged with these religious tensions. The result was civil wars across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Fighting came in 1642–1646 and again in 1648–1649. King Charles I lost and was executed. Parliament declared a republic in 1649. In 1653, the military leader Oliver Cromwell became head of a protectorate. (p. 145)
The colonies officially stayed neutral during the wars, since backing either side could pull them into the fighting. Charles's execution changed that. Six colonies, including Virginia and Barbados, declared loyalty to his son, Charles II. Parliament answered in 1650 with an embargo on these colonies, which forced them to accept its authority. It argued that the English nation had paid for and settled America, so Parliament, speaking for the nation, ruled the colonies. (pp. 145–146)
The Navigation Act of 1651 went further. It required merchants in every colony to ship goods straight to England in English ships. This tied the colonies closer to England and kept the Dutch and other European rivals out. (p. 146)
Cromwell died in 1658, and the political turmoil that followed ended with the return of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660. This event is called the Restoration. It brought new efforts to gain profit from the empire. Charles II granted new proprietary colonies to royal favorites and passed more Navigation Acts. He also created the Lords of Trade and Plantations, a new council to manage colonial affairs. (p. 146)
When Charles II died in 1685, his brother James, Duke of York, became King James II. He pushed new reforms to tighten control over the colonies. The biggest was the Dominion of New England, created in 1686. It merged New York, New Jersey, and the New England colonies into a single administrative unit. The stated goal was to defend against the military threat from French Canada. Colonists, however, saw mainly one result: they had lost the power to govern themselves. (p. 147)
The Dominion's governor, Sir Edmund Andros, made matters worse. In early 1687 he forced colonists into service for a campaign against Native Americans in Maine. Many colonists saw this forced service as a sign of arbitrary power, meaning rule by one man's will instead of by law, imposed on people who thought of themselves as free. (p. 147)
James also caused trouble at home. He was Catholic and admired absolutist rulers, such as the king of France, who held power with few limits. He pressed for toleration of Catholics and other dissenters, which put him at odds with Parliament and the Anglican establishment. In 1688 a bishop and six nobles invited James's Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, Prince William, to take the throne. William landed in southwest England with a large fleet, and James fled to France. This event was the Glorious Revolution. It cost little blood in England, though Ireland saw considerable violence. (pp. 147–148)
The result was the Bill of Rights of 1689. It set up a constitutional monarchy, which means a king or queen whose power is limited by law. It also secured three things:
This ended nearly fifty years of social and political turmoil. (p. 148)
Officials in the colonies tried to keep news of 1688 quiet, but it spread. After word of James's fall arrived, colonists rose up against royal administrators in Boston, New York City, and Maryland. Authorities put down these risings quickly, and colonial governments then swore loyalty to William and Mary. (p. 148)
Most free colonists welcomed the change. They saw themselves as part of a Protestant empire standing against Catholic tyranny and absolutism, and France was their prime example of that danger. The political order set up after 1688 lasted until the revolutionary break of the 1770s. (pp. 148–149)
By 1688 England held a continuous strip of territory along the Atlantic coast, from New England to the Carolinas, plus its Caribbean islands. Several colonies were added in the 1630s. (p. 149)
Maryland. In 1632 Charles I granted about 12 million acres around the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore. Calvert was Catholic and named the colony for the king's Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. He wanted profit from plantations and also a refuge for fellow Catholics. Yet most early settlers were Protestants, many of them dissenters who had left Virginia to escape pressure to follow the Church of England. Tension followed. Maryland Puritans revolted in 1650 and set up a government that banned both Catholicism and Anglicanism. The Calverts won control back in 1658. After the Glorious Revolution they lost the colony, and Maryland became a royal colony. (p. 149)
Connecticut and New Haven. Boston's area was becoming crowded, so Thomas Hooker led his congregation out of Massachusetts and founded Connecticut in 1636. New Haven was a separate Puritan settlement, begun in 1638 and organized in 1643. Connecticut absorbed it in 1665, but its religious tradition lived on in Yale College, founded in 1701. (p. 149)
Rhode Island. Religious radicals founded Rhode Island in 1636. Roger Williams negotiated for the land with Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi. The colonists then adopted an egalitarian constitution with religious and political freedom. Anne Hutchinson had been expelled from Massachusetts for leading private religious meetings and challenging the clergy, and she settled nearby. Because the colony tolerated different beliefs, it became a haven for Quakers, Jews, and other persecuted groups. (pp. 149–150)
New York and the Jerseys. The Mid-Atlantic had a healthier climate than the Chesapeake, milder weather than New England, and three navigable rivers: the Susquehanna, the Delaware, and the Hudson. In 1664 the English conquered New Netherland. Charles II gave it to his brother James, Duke of York, and it became New York. James then granted the land between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two noblemen, creating East Jersey and West Jersey. Dutch, English, and Scottish migrants settled East Jersey. English Quakers mostly settled West Jersey. The Crown joined the two into one royal colony in 1702. (p. 150)
Carolina. In 1663 Charles II granted Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors. They tried to attract settlers with religious tolerance, representation, freedom from fees, and large land grants. People who had fled Virginia in the 1650s, including former servants and Quakers, lived around Albemarle Sound. They resisted the proprietors successfully, and North Carolina became a separate province in 1691. (p. 150)
In 1670 three ships of migrants from Barbados reached the Ashley River and founded Charles Town. Many of them brought enslaved people, who grew rice and indigo on large coastal plantations. Rice farming expanded in the 1690s and combined African, Native, and Latin American farming practices. African knowledge and labor were so central that by the 1710s South Carolina was the first mainland province with a Black majority. (pp. 150–151)
Pennsylvania was the last proprietary colony. William Penn, the son of a Royal Navy admiral, became a Quaker in 1666. In 1681 Charles II granted him about 45,000 square miles west of the Delaware River, repaying a debt owed to his father. Quakers had been persecuted after the monarchy returned in 1660, so they built a constitution on religious toleration. Their commitment to nonviolence also led them to buy land from Native Americans instead of seizing it. Freedom of conscience, cheap land, representative government, and high wages drew settlers from across Europe. In 1685 Penn listed French, Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Danes, Finns, Scots, and English, with the English as the largest group. (p. 151)
A common misconception. It is easy to assume that all Pennsylvania Quakers opposed slavery. They did not. In 1684 the ship Isabella delivered 150 captive Africans to Philadelphia, and colonists bought them quickly. Many wealthy Philadelphia Quakers, Penn among them, owned enslaved people. Only a minority objected. Even so, that minority started antislavery activism in America. Germantown Friends submitted the first formal antislavery petition in 1688, and George Keith published the first printed antislavery tract in English America in 1693. (p. 151)
Slavery in a non-plantation region. The Mid-Atlantic had no large plantations, but slavery still mattered to its economy. Farmers in the Delaware and Hudson valleys sold their wheat mostly in the West Indies, where it fed the enslaved workers on the islands. In Philadelphia and New York City, enslaved people made up roughly 10 to 20 percent of the population. They worked in shops, shipyards, and homes. (pp. 151–152)
By the 1670s, New England's Native peoples had watched English settlement grow for decades. The Pequot War of 1637 had already broken one Native nation. Now the Narragansetts and Mohegans, who had once helped the English against the Pequots, were pulled toward the Wampanoags when conflict returned. The result was the war that ended Native power in New England (p. 152).
How it began. John Sassamon was a Christian Wampanoag educated at Harvard. He had warned the English that the sachem Metacom (called King Philip by the English) was planning an attack. In winter 1675 his body was found under pond ice. Another Native convert said three of Metacom's men had killed him. Plymouth's court convicted and executed the three in June 1675 (p. 152).
To many Native people, this showed how unequal the relationship had become. Sachems like Metacom had signed "submission" covenants, but they saw them as deals of protection and give-and-take, not rule by the English. Weeks after the executions, Wampanoags killed nine colonists at Swansea. They may have been seeking revenge or trying to restore balance. Nobody planned a general war, yet one followed (pp. 152–153).
How it spread. Plymouth called in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Metacom's forces slipped away and hit more towns. Some Native groups joined him, some stayed neutral, and some backed the English. English suspicion of neutral Native people, including demands that they hand over weapons, pushed many into the fight. By late 1675, most Native people in western and central Massachusetts were at war, and towns such as Deerfield, Hadley, and Brookfield were wrecked (p. 153).
The turning point. At first the English could not find mobile Native fighters, and they had turned down help from allies like the Mohegans. Then they attacked the neutral Narragansetts in the Great Swamp Fight (December 1675), burning their village and killing as many as a thousand people, many of them fleeing civilians. The survivors joined the war, and Native forces hit towns near Boston in early 1676 (p. 153).
In spring 1676 the colonies followed Benjamin Church's advice and used Native allies such as Pequots and Mohegans to track the fighters. Native fighters could not plant crops and had to live off the land, so their strength faded. Many fled, switched sides, or surrendered. In August 1676 a Christian Native fighter on the English side killed Metacom (pp. 153–154).
Results. About 800–1,000 English and at least 3,000 Native people died in fourteen months. Thousands more fled or were sold into slavery. Native people fell from about 25 percent of New England's population in 1670 to perhaps 10 percent ten years later. The war's cruelty also deepened many colonists' hatred of all Indigenous people (p. 154).
A new fear gripped New England sixteen years later. Trials took place in Salem Town, Salem Village, Ipswich, and Andover. Twenty people were executed (fourteen women and six men), and five more died in prison (p. 154). Causes included local rivalries, political turmoil, lingering war trauma, and unfair court procedure in which accusing someone else became a way to protect yourself. Tensions with Native people also framed events. Tituba, a Native American or African woman enslaved by the local minister, was central to the case (pp. 154–155).
Virginia's Native communities had already been shattered by wars in 1622 and 1644. A new crisis in 1675–1676 mixed conflict with Native people and conflict among colonists (p. 155).
The spark. Doeg people went to Thomas Mathew's plantation to collect a debt. When he refused to pay, they took some of his pigs. Raids and counter-raids followed. The militia mistook Susquehannocks for Doegs and killed fourteen. The Susquehannocks struck back, and the militia then executed Susquehannock ambassadors who were under a flag of truce. Revenge raids killed dozens of colonists (p. 155).
The political crisis. Frightened frontier families fled to the coast. Governor Sir William Berkeley feared a full war would turn friendly Native groups into enemies, so he chose a defensive plan: a line of forts. Settlers hated it. The building contracts went to his rich friends, who put the forts near their own plantations. Colonists called the government a corrupt oligarchy (p. 155).
Open rebellion. In 1676 frontier settlers chose Nathaniel Bacon as leader. Berkeley called them traitors and raised an army against them, not the Susquehannocks. That pushed them into real rebellion. Bacon's men also attacked friendly Natives such as the Pamunkeys and Occaneechi. Bacon accused Berkeley of plotting with a "powerful cabal" of elites and favored Indians. At Jamestown, Bacon surrounded the State House with armed followers, and the burgesses pressured Berkeley into giving him a commission to fight Native Americans (p. 156).
Collapse. The rebellion soon spiraled out of control. Many rebels deserted when they heard of Native activity, and much of the "rebellion" was local feuds and plundering of rivals' property. A few, like Sarah Drummond, wanted independence from England. White servants and enslaved Black people fought on both sides after promises of freedom for service (p. 157).
Bacon died of typhus in autumn 1676. His followers surrendered in January 1677, and Berkeley executed the leaders. Then a royal fleet arrived with over a thousand troops and commissioners, who replaced Berkeley and sent him to London (p. 157).
Aftermath. Legislators saw how angry poor colonists were and improved conditions for poor whites. Elite planters still grew rich from servants and enslaved people. As the Atlantic trade supplied more enslaved workers, Chesapeake planters adopted slave labor on a large scale (p. 157).
Spain held New Mexico partly by suppressing Native religion. Friars burned sacred objects and banned traditional practices. Popé, a Puebloan religious leader, had been whipped for "sorcery" in 1675. In 1680 he led several thousand warriors who besieged Santa Fe. They killed about 400 people, including 21 priests, and let about 2,000 others flee. Puebloans destroyed churches and returned to their own religion. Spain was driven out for twelve years and came back only in 1692 (pp. 157–158).
The Yamasee War (1715). The Yamasee, Carolina's close allies and trading partners, relied on English courts as well as guns. Feuds among English agents crippled the trade court and diplomacy. The Yamasee killed envoys and traders, and many Southeast peoples joined in. Charles Town survived by keeping its alliance with the Cherokee, and the war largely ended by 1717 (p. 159).
The Native slave trade, which had taken about fifty thousand people in five decades, faded because it was now too dangerous. Planters found more profit in importing Africans for rice plantations, the start of the Old South. Native nations kept strong armies but never again threatened the colonies' survival (p. 159).
The Walking Purchase (1737). William Penn insisted on buying land, but demand for land grew and tactics became coercive. Delaware leaders agreed to sell the land a man could walk in a day and a half. The Penns and James Logan hired fast runners to use a prepared trail. Officials then drew the boundary perpendicular to the route, claiming about 1,200 square miles, far more than the Delaware meant to sell. Many Delaware moved to the Ohio Valley and built ties with the French. Resentment lasted into the Seven Years' War (pp. 159–160).
