APUSH Unit 2 Vocabulary

Spanish Colonization in the Americas

• The Spanish colonized the Americas primarily to extract wealth.

  • This wealth extraction took the form of cash crops.

  • The wealth extraction took the form of mining gold and silver.

• The Spanish subjected the native population to forced labor.

• They attempted to convert the natives to Christianity.

• They introduced a caste system based on racial ancestry.

French Colonization in the Americas

• The French were more interested in trade than conquest.

  • Especially the fish and fur trade.

• There were relatively few French people who came to America compared to the Spanish and the English.

• The French established trading settlements around North America

  • First permanent French settlement in Quebec

• Some French traders married American Indian women to foster kinship ties.

  • These marriages helped to maintain relationships with native trading partners.

  • The French fostered alliances with tribes like the Ojibwe.

  • There was mutual cultural exchange.

    • Indians prepared beaver skins for sale.

    • The French introduced iron cookware and manufactured goods.

Dutch Colonization in the Americas

• In 1609, the Dutch established a fur trading center on the Hudson River (present-day New York).

• The Dutch's goals for colonizing were mainly economic, similar to the French.

• The Dutch demonstrated very little interest in converting the natives to Christianity (unlike the Spanish).

• In 1624, they established New Amsterdam, which facilitated and advanced their economic goals.

  • New Amsterdam became a hub of trade that attracted traders, merchants, fishermen, and farmers.

British Colonization in the Americas

Motivations for British Colonization

• Britain was facing economic challenges.

  • The Columbian Exchange was changing the economy.

  • Wars with France and the conquest of Ireland were costly.

  • Inflation was rising, devaluing their money and hurting the noble class.

  • The lower classes faced hardship as land disappeared due to the enclosure movement.

• Motivations for colonizing the Americas included new economic opportunities and land.

• Some sought religious freedom and improved living conditions in America.

Chesapeake Region

• In 1607, the British established Jamestown, the first permanent colonial settlement in North America.

• The colony's founding was financed by a joint stock company (private investors).

• Jamestown was primarily a profit seeking venture.

  • Colonists focused on searching for gold and silver and building a military force.

• The beginnings of the settlement were difficult.

  • Disease and famine killed nearly half the settlers in the first two years.

  • Some resorted to cannibalism to survive.

  • By 1610, 7 out of 8 settlers were dead.

• In 1612, John Rolfe began experimenting with tobacco cultivation, which reversed their fortunes.

• Tobacco became a marketable crop, leading to a huge influx of investment.

• Most of the labor was performed by indentured servants.

  • Indentured servants couldn't afford passage and signed a labor contract to pay for it.

  • They worked for about seven years and then went free.

• Increased demand for tobacco led to a corresponding demand for land.

  • The colonists took land from native populations, increasing tensions.

• Indians retaliated by raiding colonial farms.

• Settlers appealed to Governor William Berkeley for protection, but he refused.

• Bacon's Rebellion occurred.

  • Nathaniel Bacon led angry poor farmers and indentured servants in an attack against the Indians.

  • They then turned their militia toward the plantations owned by Governor Berkeley, burning plantations and causing damage.

  • The rebellion was ultimately suppressed.

• The planter elites grew fearful of disgruntled indentured servants.

  • This led them to rely more heavily on African slavery.

New England Colonies

• In 1620, settled by pilgrims who migrated in family units to establish a society.

• Their goals were religious rather than profit seeking.

• They created family economies as farmers.

• They still faced a rough time initially.

  • Fevers and disease killed about half the original settlers.

• After a few years, they established a thriving colonial economy with agriculture and commerce.

British West Indies and Southern Atlantic Coast Colonies

• In the 1620s, the British established permanent colonies in the Caribbean.

  • Examples: Saint Christopher, Barbados, and Nevis.

• The warm climate allowed for year-round growing seasons.

  • They grew tobacco initially.

• By the 1630s, falling tobacco prices led to the introduction of sugarcane.

• Sugarcane was wildly popular in Europe, increasing demand.

• Sugarcane is a labor-intensive crop, leading to the increased demand for African slaves.

• By 1660, in Barbados, the population was more black than white.

• Stringent laws were passed to control the black population.

  • These laws defined enslaved people as property and governed every aspect of their lives.

  • Carolina colonies were influenced by this system.

  • Planters from the Caribbean migrated to South Carolina to replicate the Caribbean system.

Middle Colonies

• New York and New Jersey had a diverse population.

• They thrived on an export economy, mainly of cereal crops.

• There was growing inequality between classes.

  • An emerging elite class of wealthy urban merchants.

  • A lower working class made up of laborers, orphans, widows, and the unemployed.

  • A significant population of enslaved people.

• Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn, a Quaker and pacifist.

  • Religious freedom was recognized for all.

  • Land was obtained from the Indians mainly through negotiation.

• Governance in the colonies was unusually democratic at this time.

Colonial Governance

• Due to Britain being across the sea and generally letting the colonies do their own thing, the colonial leadership established self-governing structures.

• Examples:

  • The Mayflower Compact.

    • Pilgrims signed this before disembarking from the Mayflower.

    • Organized their government on the model of a self-governing church congregation.

  • The House of Burgesses in Virginia.

    • A representative assembly which could levy taxes and pass laws.

  • Representative assemblies throughout the colonies were dominated by the elite classes.

    • New York assemblies were dominated by wealthy landlords.

    • In the Southern Colonies, these assemblies were dominated by elite planters.

Atlantic Trade System

• In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, trade became global.

• A new Atlantic economy was developed with the uptick of colonization in The Americas.

  • One of the more significant manifestations of this was the triangular trade.

  • Merchant ships followed a three-part journey on this trading route.

    • Merchants in New England carried rum to West Africa and traded it for enslaved people.

    • Ships sailed the Middle Passage to the West Indies.

    • They traded the slaves for sugarcane.

    • Then they took the sugarcane back to New England to make rum, and the process started again.

• The economic system underlying this was called mercantilism.

  • Those that viewed the world through this economic lens, thought there was a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

    • Since they measured wealth by gold and silver, technically they were correct.

  • Each state's goal was to gain as much of that wealth as possible.

    • The way they did that was by maintaining a favorable balance of trade (more exports than imports).

      • If a nation is exporting goods, that means that gold and silver is coming in.

• This mercantilist system relied heavily on establishing colonies.

  • That's where the raw materials came from.

• The British government tried to weave more tightly the center of the empire with the colonies of the empire.

  • One way they did this was through the Navigation Acts.

  • This set of laws required merchants to engage in trade with English colonies and English-owned ships.

  • Certain valuable trade items were required to pass exclusively through British ports where they could then be taxed.

• This newly established Atlantic trade system changed the colonies.

  • Generated massive wealth for elites like merchants, investors, and plantation owners.

  • Turned America's seaports into thriving urban centers.

Slavery in the British Colonies

• Between 1700 and 1808, about 3,000,000 enslaved Africans were carried on British ships across the Middle Passage.

• The majority were sold to planters in the British West Indies.

• Every British colony participated in the slave trade.

  • This was because of the extraordinary wealth they gained by coerced labor in the export economies dedicated to tobacco, sugarcane, and indigo.

• New England farmers held relatively few slaves compared to the Chesapeake and Southern colonies who held lots of slaves.

• In Virginia, following the Carolinas and Barbados, strict slave codes were introduced.

  • Slaves were defined as chattel (property).

  • Slavery was turned into a perpetual institution that was handed down from one generation to the next.

  • They did this out of a desire to keep a more controlled and growing labor force.

• Some enslaved blacks resisted this system.

  • The resistance came in two different flavors: covert and overt.

  • Strategies of the covert resistors:

    • Insisting to secretly maintain cultural customs and belief systems from their homeland.

    • Breaking tools, ruining, stored seeds with moisture, or faking illness.

  • Strategies of the overt resistor:

    • The Stono rebellion.

      • Occurred in South Carolina in 1739.

      • A small group of slaves stole weapons from a store and killed its owners.

      • They marched along the Stono River.

      • Their numbers grew as they marched.

      • Along the way, they burned plantations and killed white folks.

      • The South Carolina militia squashed the rebellion, but not before losing many of their own number.

Relations Between Colonists and Indians

• Relations between the colonists and the black population was bleak.

• Relations with the Indians wasn't much better.

• Metacom's War in 1675 (King Philip's War) occurred.

• Metacom was the chief of the Wampanoag Indians, and the British called him King Philip.

• He began to see that the British encroachment on their ancestral lands would destroy their way of life, and therefore, the British must be forced out.

• The Wampanoag allied themselves with other Indian groups and attacked white settlements throughout New England.

  • They burned fields, killed men, and captured women and children.

• The British allied themselves with the Mohawk Indians who eventually ambushed and killed Metacom.

  • The movement fizzled out.

• All was not well between the British colonists and the Indians.

Colonial Society

• Religion

  • The Enlightenment was a movement in Europe that emphasized rational thinking over tradition and religious revelation.

  • People wanted to rely on their thinky thinky parts at the expense of their believey believey parts.

  • This movement took root in the colonies largely because of a robust transatlantic print culture.

    • That print culture spread the ideas of enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant.

    • This movement introduced to the colonies ideas like natural rights.

      • The idea of natural rights is that people have inborn rights given to them by a creator and not by a government.

    • The idea that the best form of government involved checking and balancing power.

      • That the best way to achieve that was to split the government into three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

    • The colonists encountered ideas like the social contract.

      • People were in a contract with their government.

      • Since the power to govern is in the people's hands.

      • Their job was to take some of that power and deliver it to the government.

      • In exchange, the government's job was then to protect the natural rights of the people.

      • If the government broke that contract, it was the people's right to overthrow that government.

  • A group of Christian colonial ministers who became known as new light clergy lamented the loss of faith engendered by the enlightenment.

    • They began to preach against such abandonment.

    • They also emphasized the democratic principles of the Bible.

    • They railed against the practice of elites buying pews in churches, which were exclusively reserved for them.

    • As their work caught on, it led to a leveling out of society.

    • The work of these new light preachers laid the groundwork for the Great Awakening.

  • The Great Awakening was a massive religious revival that swept through all the colonies and generated intense Christian enthusiasm.

    • Two notable leaders in this movement were Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield.

    • Edwards was a New England minister who preached in Northampton with the precision of a philosopher and the heart of an evangelist.

    • The revival began to catch, but it was only local at that point.

    • It took the English itinerant evangelist George Whitfield to come make the fire spread.

    • This fiery preacher traveled throughout all the colonies preaching in churches and in open city squares and in fields and wherever he could gather people.

  • The result of the Great Awakening was a large-scale return to the Christian faith and an experience that bound the colonists together.

    • Many people point to the Great Awakening as the first vestiges of a true American identity and where the seeds were sown for the rejection of the British.

• Colonies were experiencing a gradual Anglicanization, which is to say they were becoming more English like.

  • They were developing autonomous political communities that looked very much like the political communities back in England.

• Colonists began experiencing a rising frustration with the British and they began to resist.

  • The practice of impressment was the act of seizing colonial men and then forcing them to serve in the royal navy.

  • England justified this practice, because they needed soldiers for all their wars and they need the colonial troops.

  • Colonial men weren't big fans of the common experience of a royal navy sailor.

  • There was plenty of malnutrition, disease, and death.

  • In 1747, a general impressment for King George's War led to three days of rioting and resistance in the colonies.

  • The colonies were becoming increasingly aware of their natural rights and were refusing to allow their natural rights to be violated by England.