Period 2: 1607-1754

Huguenots

French Protestant dissenters, the Huguenots were granted limited toleration under the Edict of Nantes. After King Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in 1685, many Huguenots fled elsewhere, including to British North America.

Edict of Nantes

Decree issued by the French crown granting limited toleration to French Protestants. Ended religious wars in France and inaugurated a period of French preeminence in Europe and across the Atlantic. Its repeal in 1685 prompted a fresh migration of Protestant Huguenots to North America.

coureurs de bois

Translated as “runners of the woods,” they were French fur-trappers, also known as “voyageurs” (travelers), who established trading posts throughout North America. The fur trade wreaked havoc on the health and folkways of their Native American trading partners.

voyageurs

Translated as “runners of the woods,” they were French fur-trappers, also known as “voyageurs” (travelers), who established trading posts throughout North America. The fur trade wreaked havoc on the health and folkways of their Native American trading partners.

Protestant Reformation

Movement to reform the Catholic Church launched in Germany by Martin Luther. Reformers questioned the authority of the Pope, sought to eliminate the selling of indulgences, and encouraged the translation of the Bible from Latin, which few at the time could read. The Reformation was launched in England in the 1530s when King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church.

Roanoke Island

Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed colonial settlement off the coast of North Carolina.

Spanish Armada

Spanish fleet defeated in the English Channel in 1588. The defeat of the Armada marked the beginning of the decline of the Spanish Empire.

primogeniture

Legal principle that the oldest son inherits all family property or land. Landowners’ younger sons, forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere, pioneered early exploration and settlement of the Americas.

joint-stock company

Short-term partnership between multiple investors to fund a commercial enterprise; such arrangements were used to fund England’s early colonial ventures.

Virginia Company

English joint-stock company that received a charter from King James I that allowed it to found the Virginia colony.

charter

Legal document granted by a government to some group or agency to implement a stated purpose and spelling out the attending rights and obligations. British colonial charters guaranteed inhabitants all the rights of Englishmen, which helped solidify colonists’ ties to Britain during the early years of settlement.

Jamestown

First permanent English settlement in North America founded by the Virginia Company.

First Anglo-Powhatan War

Series of clashes between the Powhatan Confederacy and English settlers in Virginia. English colonists torched and pillaged Indian villages, applying tactics used in England’s campaigns against the Irish.

Second Anglo-Powhatan War

Last-ditch effort by the Indians to dislodge Virginia settlements. The resulting peace treaty formally separated white and Indian areas of settlement.

New Netherland

North American Dutch colony centered in New Amsterdam (now New York). Though prosperous, this colony was conquered and absorbed by the English.

Iroquois Confederacy

Bound together five tribes—the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas—in the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York State.

House of Burgesses

Representative parliamentary assembly created to govern Virginia, establishing a precedent for government in the English colonies.

Act of Toleration

Passed in Maryland, it guaranteed toleration to all Christians but decreed the death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Ensured that Maryland would continue to attract a high proportion of Catholic migrants throughout the colonial period.

Barbados slave code

First formal statute governing the treatment of slaves, which provided for harsh punishments against offending slaves but lacked penalties for the mistreatment of slaves by masters. Similar statutes were adopted by southern plantation societies on the North American mainland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

English Civil War

Armed conflict between royalists and parliamentarians, resulting in the victory of pro-Parliament forces and the execution of Charles I.

squatters

Frontier farmers who illegally occupied land owned by others or not yet officially opened for settlement. Many of North Carolina’s early settlers were squatters, who contributed to the colony’s reputation as being more independent-minded and egalitarian than its neighbors.

Tuscarora War

Began with an Indian attack on New Bern, North Carolina. After the Tuscaroras were defeated, remaining Indian survivors migrated northward, eventually joining the Iroquois Confederacy as its sixth nation.

Yamasee Indians

Defeated by the South Carolinians in the war of 1715–1716. The Yamasee defeat devastated the last of the coastal Indian tribes in the southern colonies.

buffer

In politics, a territory between two antagonistic powers, intended to minimize the possibility of conflict between them. In British North America, Georgia was established as a buffer colony between British and Spanish territory.

Calvinism

Dominant theological credo of the New England Puritans based on the teachings of John Calvin. Calvinists believed in predestination—that only “the elect” were destined for salvation.

predestination

Calvinist doctrine that God has foreordained some people to be saved and some to be damned. Though their fate was irreversible, Calvinists, particularly those who believed they were destined for salvation, sought to lead sanctified lives in order to demonstrate to others that they were in fact members of the “elect.”

conversion

Intense religious experience that confirmed an individual’s place among the “elect,” or the “visible saints.” Calvinists who experienced conversion were then expected to lead sanctified lives to demonstrate their salvation.

Puritans

English Protestant reformers who sought to purify the Church of England of Catholic rituals and creeds. Some of the most devout Puritans believed that only “visible saints” should be admitted to church membership.

Separatists

Small group of Puritans who sought to break away entirely from the Church of England; after initially settling in Holland, a number of English Separatists made their way to Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Mayflower Compact

Agreement to form a majoritarian government in Plymouth, signed aboard the Mayflower. Created a foundation for self-government in the colony.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

Established by non-separating Puritans, it soon grew to be the largest and most influential of the New England colonies.

Great English Migration

Migration of seventy thousand refugees from England to the North American colonies, primarily New England and the Caribbean. The twenty thousand migrants who came to Massachusetts largely shared a common sense of purpose—to establish a model Christian settlement in the New World.

antinomianism

Belief that the elect need not obey the law of either God or man; most notably espoused in the colonies by Anne Hutchinson.

Fundamental Orders

Drafted by settlers in the Connecticut River valley, this document was the first “modern constitution” establishing a democratically controlled government. Key features of the document were borrowed for Connecticut’s colonial charter and, later, its state constitution.

Pequot War

Series of clashes between English settlers and Pequot Indians in the Connecticut River valley. Ended in the slaughter of the Pequots by the Puritans and their Narragansett Indian allies.

King Philip’s War

Series of assaults by Metacom, King Philip, on English settlements in New England. The attacks slowed the westward migration of New England settlers for several decades.

New England Confederation

Weak union of the colonies in Massachusetts and Connecticut led by Puritans for the purposes of defense and organization; an early attempt at self-government during the benign neglect of the English Civil War.

Navigation Laws

Series of laws passed, beginning in 1651, to regulate colonial shipping; the acts provided that only English ships would be allowed to trade in English and colonial ports and that all goods destined for the colonies would first pass through England.

Dominion of New England

Administrative union created by royal authority, incorporating all of New England, New York, and East and West Jersey. Placed under the rule of Sir Edmund Andros, who curbed popular assemblies, taxed residents without their consent, and strictly enforced Navigation Laws. Its collapse after the Glorious Revolution in England demonstrated colonial opposition to strict royal control.

Glorious Revolution

Overthrow, in 1688, of the Catholic King James II of England. Rebellious English nobles invited the Protestant William of Orange to replace James II in a relatively bloodless coup. The event affirmed England’s constitutional balance between parliament and the crown.

salutary neglect

Unofficial policy of relaxed royal control over colonial trade and only weak enforcement of Navigation Laws. Lasted from the Glorious Revolution to the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.

Quakers

Religious group known for their tolerance, emphasis on peace, and idealistic Indian policy, who settled heavily in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

blue laws

Also known as sumptuary laws, they are designed to restrict personal behavior in accord with a strict code of morality. Blue laws were passed across the colonies, particularly in Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania.

indentured servants

Migrants who, in exchange for transatlantic passage, bound themselves to a colonial employer for a term of service, typically between four and seven years. Their migration addressed the chronic labor shortage in the colonies and facilitated settlement.

headright system

Employed in the tobacco colonies to encourage the importation of indentured servants, the system allowed an individual to acquire fifty acres of land if he paid for a laborer’s passage to the colony.

Bacon’s Rebellion

Uprising of Virginia backcountry farmers and indentured servants led by planter Nathaniel Bacon; initially a response to Governor William Berkeley’s refusal to protect backcountry settlers from Indian attacks, the rebellion eventually grew into a broader conflict between impoverished settlers and the planter elite.

Royal African Company

English joint-stock company that enjoyed a state-granted monopoly on the colonial slave trade from 1672 until 1698. The supply of slaves to the North American colonies rose sharply once the company lost its monopoly privileges.

middle passage

Transatlantic voyage slaves endured between Africa and the colonies. Mortality rates were notoriously high.

slave codes

Set of laws beginning in 1662 defining racial slavery. They established the hereditary nature of slavery and limited the rights and education of slaves.

Congregational Church

Self-governing Puritan congregations without the hierarchical establishment of the Anglican Church.

jeremiad

Often-fiery sermons lamenting the waning piety of parishioners first delivered in New England in the mid-seventeenth century; named after the doom-saying Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.

Half-Way Covenant

Agreement allowing unconverted offspring of church members to baptize their children. It signified a waning of religious zeal among second- and third-generation Puritans.

Salem witch trials

Series of witchcraft trials launched after a group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, claimed to have been bewitched by certain older women of the town. Twenty individuals were put to death before the trials were put to an end by the governor of Massachusetts.

Leisler’s Rebellion

Armed conflict between aspiring merchants led by Jacob Leisler and the ruling elite of New York. One of many uprisings that erupted across the colonies when wealthy colonists attempted to re-create European social structures in the New World.