Colonial America and Early Slave Trade

Vocabulary flashcards covering the Dutch colonies, English settlement, early colonial conflicts, indentured servitude, and the development of transatlantic slavery.

New Netherland

The territory occupied by the Dutch in North America, created as a profit-making enterprise focused primarily on the fur trade.

Fort Orange

A Dutch fur trading post established upriver from Manhattan Island in 1610, which was later renamed Albany.

Peter Stuyvesant

The Dutch governor of New Netherland who surrendered the colony to a threatening English fleet in 1664 without a single shot being fired.

Inner light

The Quaker belief that everyone could receive direct divine inspiration, which served as a primary reason for their persecution by the Puritans.

Lydia Wardell

A Quaker woman who protested Puritan persecution by appearing naked at Puritan services, resulting in her being whipped and banished to New Jersey.

Pennsylvania

The colony established by William Penn and named after his father, meaning "Penn's Woods."

John Ratcliffe

An early Jamestown leader who was skinned alive with oyster shells and burned by Native Americans.

Pocahontas

An Indian princess whose name means "playful one"; she interceded to save John Smith and later married John Rolfe.

Powhatan War

A 1622 conflict in which Native Americans responded to land encroachment by attacking 30 farms along the James River and killing a quarter of the English settlers.

Powhatan Confederacy

The native group that dominated the Chesapeake region, consisting of hundreds of villages, each housing around 100 people.

Bacon's Rebellion

A 1676 uprising led by Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia's planter elite, resulting in the burning of Jamestown.

Roger Williams

A colonial figure considered dangerous by Puritans for insisting on equal treatment for all religious people and calling Puritan conversion efforts "soul rape."

Pequot War

A 1636 conflict triggered by accusations that a Pequot murdered a colonist, culminating in Puritans burning a Pequot village near West Mystic.

Treaty of Hartford

The 1638 agreement under which the Pequot Nation was officially dissolved following its defeat in the Pequot War.

Metacom

The chief of the Wampanoags (also known as King Philip) who led a brutal 1675 war against English settlement before being hunted down and decapitated.

Indentured servants

Laborers, primarily young white men from Europe, who contracted to work for 3 to 7 years in exchange for passage to North America.

Middle Passage

The grueling 4 to 6 month transatlantic journey that forcibly brought enslaved Africans across the ocean to the Americas.

Society with slaves

A social and economic system, such as in 1600s North America, where slavery was merely one of multiple forms of labor alongside indentured servitude.

Slave society

A social and economic order where black racial slavery forms the core foundation of the economy, as seen in the Deep South by the early 1800s.