Untitled Flashcards Set

Beginning in the 1660s, legislators in

Virginia and Maryland hammered

out the legal definition of chattel

slavery: the ownership of human beings

as property. The institution of slavery —

which would profoundly affect African

Americans and shape much of American

history — had been obsolete in England

for centuries, and articulating its logic

required lawmakers to reverse some of the

most basic presumptions of English law. For example, in 1662 a Virginia statute declared,

“all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condi-

tion of the mother.” This idea — that a child’s legal status derived from the mother,

rather than the father — ran contrary to the patriarchal foundations of English law. The

men who sat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses would not propose such a thing lightly.

Why would they decide that the principle of patriarchal descent, which was so funda-

mental to their own worlds, was inappropriate for their slaves?

The question needed to be addressed, according to the statute’s preamble, since

“doubts have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman

should be slave or free.” One such case involved Elizabeth Key, a woman whose father

was a free Englishman and mother was an African slave. She petitioned for her freedom

in 1656, based on her father’s status. Her lawyer was an Englishman named William

Greensted. He not only took Key’s case, but he also fathered two of her children and,

eventually, married her. Key won her case and her freedom from bondage. Elizabeth

Key escaped her mother’s fate — a life in slavery — because her father and her husband

were both free Englishmen. The 1662 statute aimed to close Key’s avenue to freedom.

The process by which the institution of chattel slavery was molded to the needs of

colonial planters is just one example of the way Europeans adapted the principles they

brought with them to the unfamiliar demands of their new surroundings. In the show-

down between people like Elizabeth Key and William Greensted, on the one hand, and

the members of Virginia’s House of Burgesses on the other, we see how people in dis-

orienting circumstances — some in positions in power, others in various states of sub-

jection to their social and political superiors — scrambled to make sense of their world

and bend its rules to their advantage. Through countless contests of power and author-

ity like this one, the outlines of a new world gradually began to emerge from the colli-

sion of cultures.

By 1700, three distinct types of colonies had developed in the Americas: the tribute

colonies created in Mexico and Peru, which relied initially on the wealth and labor of

indigenous peoples; plantation colonies, where sugar and other tropical and subtropical

crops could be produced with bound labor; and neo-Europes, where colonists sought to

replicate, or at least approximate, economies and social structures they knew at home.

SPAIN’S TRIBUTE

COLONIES

A New American World

The Columbian Exchange

The Protestant Challenge to

Spain

PLANTATION COLONIES

Brazil’s Sugar Plantations

England’s Tobacco Colonies

The Caribbean Islands

Plantation Life

NEO-EUROPEAN

COLONIES

New France

New Netherland

The Rise of the Iroquois

New England

INSTABILITY, WAR, AND

REBELLION

New England’s Indian Wars

Bacon’s Rebellion, 1675–1676

American Experiments

1521–1700

CHAPTER

41

Power and Race in the Chesapeake In this 1670 painting by Gerard Soest, proprietor Lord

Baltimore holds a map of Maryland, the colony he owned and which would soon belong to his grandson

Cecil Calvert, shown in the painting as already grasping his magnificent inheritance. The presence

of a young African servant foretells the importance of slave labor in the post-1700 economy of the

Chesapeake colonies. Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland’s State Library Resource Center. All Rights reserved.

42 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

Spain’s Tribute Colonies

European interest in the Americas took shape under

the influence of Spain’s conquest of the Aztec and Inca

empires. There, Spanish colonizers capitalized on pre-

existing systems of tribute and labor discipline to tap

the enormous wealth of Mesoamerica and the Andes.

Once native rulers were overthrown, the Spanish mon-

archs transferred their institutions — municipal coun-

cils, the legal code, the Catholic Church — to America;

the empire was centrally controlled to protect the

crown’s immensely valuable holdings. The Spanish

conquest also set in motion a global ecological trans-

formation through a vast intercontinental movement

of plants, animals, and diseases that historians call the

Columbian Exchange. And the conquest triggered hos-

tile responses from Spain’s European rivals, especially

the Protestant Dutch and English (Figure 2.1).

A New American World

After Cortés toppled Moctezuma and Pizarro defeated

Atahualpa (see pages 34–35), leading conquistadors

received encomiendas from the crown, which allowed

them to claim tribute in labor and goods from Indian

communities. Later these grants were repartitioned,

but the pattern was set early: prominent men con-

trolled vast resources and monopolized Indian labor.

The value of these grants was dramatically enhanced

by the discovery of gold and, especially, silver deposits

in both Mexico and the Andes. In the decades after

the conquest, mines were developed in Zacatecas, in

Guanajuato, and — most famously — at Potosí, high in

the Andes. Spanish officials co-opted the mita system,

which made laborers available to the Inca Empire, to

force Indian workers into the mines. At its peak, Potosí

alone produced 200 tons of silver per year, accounting

for half the world’s supply.

The two great indigenous empires of the Americas

thus became the core of an astonishingly wealthy

European empire. Vast amounts of silver poured across

the Pacific Ocean to China, where it was minted into

money; in exchange, Spain received valuable Chinese

silks, spices, and ceramics. In Europe, the gold that had

formerly honored Aztec and Inca gods now flowed into

the countinghouses of Spain and gilded the Catholic

churches of Europe. The Spanish crown benefitted

enormously from all this wealth — at least initially. In

the long run, it triggered ruinous inflation. As a French

traveler noted in 1603: “Everything is dear [expensive]

in Spain, except silver.”

A new society took shape on the conquered lands.

Between 1500 and 1650, at least 350,000 Spaniards

migrated to Mesoamerica and the Andes. About two-

thirds were males drawn from a cross section of

Spanish society, many of them skilled tradesmen. Also

arriving were 250,000–300,000 Africans. Racial mix-

ture was widespread, and such groups as mestizos

(Spaniard-Indian) and mulattos (Spaniard-African)

grew rapidly. Zambo (Indian-African) populations

developed gradually as well. Over time, a system of

increasingly complex racial categories developed — the

“casta system” — buttressed by a legal code that differ-

entiated among the principal groups.

Indians were always in the majority in Mexico and

Peru, but profound changes came as their numbers

declined and peoples of Spanish and mixed-race

descent grew in number. Spaniards initially congre-

gated in cities, but gradually they moved into the coun-

tryside, creating large estates (known as haciendas)

and regional networks of market exchange. Most

Indians remained in their native communities, under

the authority of native rulers and speaking native

1520

New Spain

1530

Spanish Peru

1542

Portuguese Brazil

1620

Plymouth Colony 1630

Massachusetts Bay 1634

Maryland

1635

Connecticut

1636

Rhode Island 1607

English Virginia

1608

New France

1613

New Netherland

1628

New Sweden

FIGURE 2.1

Chronology of European Colonies in the Americas

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 43

languages. However, Spanish priests suppressed reli-

gious ceremonies and texts and converted natives to

Christianity en masse. Catholicism was transformed in

the process: Catholic parishes took their form from

Indian communities; indigenous ideas and expecta-

tions reshaped Church practices; and new forms of

Native AmericanChristianity emerged in both regions.

The Columbian Exchange

The Spanish invasion permanently altered the natural

as well as the human environment. Smallpox, influ-

enza, measles, yellow fever, and other silent killers

carried from Europe and Africa ravaged Indian com-

munities, whose inhabitants had never encountered

these diseases before and thus had no immunity to

them. In the densely populated core areas, populations

declined by 90 percent or more in the first century

of contact with Europeans. On islands and in the trop-

ical lowlands, the toll was even heavier; native popula-

tions were often wiped out altogether. Syphilis was the

only significant illness that traveled in the opposite

direction: Columbus’s sailors carried a virulent strain

of the sexually transmitted disease back to Europe

with them.

The movement of diseases and peoples across the

Atlantic was part of a larger pattern of biological trans-

formation that historians call the Columbian Exchange

(Map 2.1). Foods of the Western Hemisphere — especially

maize, potatoes, manioc, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes —

significantly increased agricultural yields and pop-

ulation growth in other continents. Maize and pota-

toes, for example, reached China

around 1700; in the follow-

ing century, the Chinese popula-

tion tripled from 100 million to

300 million. At the same time,

many animals, plants, and germs

were carried to the Americas.

European livestock transformed

American landscapes. While

Native Americans domesticated very few animals —

dogs and llamas were the principal exceptions —

Europeans brought an enormous Old World bestiary

to the Americas, including cattle, swine, horses, oxen,

chickens, and honeybees. Eurasian graincrops — wheat,

barley, rye, and rice — made the transatlantic voyage

along with inadvertent imports like dandelions and

other weeds.

The Protestant Challenge to Spain

Beyond the core regions of its empire, Spain claimed

vast American dominions but struggled to hold them.

Controlling the Caribbean basin, which was essential

for Spain’s transatlantic shipping routes, was especially

difficult, since the net of tiny islands spanning the east-

ern Caribbean — the Lesser Antilles — provided many

safe harbors for pirates and privateers. Fortified out-

posts in Havana and St. Augustine provided some

Smallpox Victims

Hans Staden, a German soldier who was

shipwrecked in Brazil in 1552, was captured

by a Tupinambá Indian named Jeppipo

Wasu. Shortly thereafter, Wasu and his

family traveled to a neighboring village as

smallpox ravaged the population; when

they returned, they were very sick. Wasu

recovered, but he lost his mother, two

brothers, and two children. This engrav-

ing, which depicts Wasu’s return amid his

townspeople’s grief, appeared in the third

volume of Theodor de Bry’s monumental

America, published in Frankfurt in 1593.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at

Brown University.

PLACE EVENTS

IN CONTEXT

How did the ecological

context of colonization

shape interactions be-

tween Europeans and

Native Americans?

44 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

protection, but they were never sufficient to keep ene-

mies at bay.

And Spain had powerful enemies, their animosity

sharpened by the Protestant Reformation and the

resulting split in European Christendom (see p. 22). In

the wake of Martin Luther’s attack on the Catholic

Church, the Protestant critique of Catholicism broad-

ened and deepened. Gold and silver from Mexico and

Peru made Spain the wealthiest nation in Europe, and

King Philip II (r. 1556–1598) — an ardent Catholic —

its most powerful ruler. Philip was determined to

root out challenges to the Catholic Church wherever

they appeared. One such place was in the Spanish

Netherlands, a collection of Dutch- and Flemish-

speaking provinces that had grown wealthy from tex-

tile manufacturing and trade with Portuguese outposts

in Africa and Asia. To protect their Calvinist faith and

political liberties, they revolted against Spanish rule in

1566. After fifteen years of war, the seven northern

provinces declared their independence, becoming the

Dutch Republic (or Holland) in 1581.

The English king Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) ini-

tially opposed Protestantism. However, when the pope

refused to annul his marriage to the Spanish princess

Catherine of Aragon in 1534, Henry broke with Rome

and placed himself at the head of the new Church of

England, which promptly granted an annulment.

Although Henry’s new church maintained most

Catholic doctrines and practices, Protestant teachings

continued to spread. Faced with popular pressure for

reform, Henry’s daughter and successor, Queen

Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), approved a Protestant con-

fession of faith. At the same time, however, Elizabeth

retained the Catholic ritual of Holy Communion and

left the Church in the hands of Anglican bishops and

archbishops. Elizabeth’s compromises angered radical

0 1,000 2,000 kilometers

0 1,000 2,000 miles

N

S

W E

Tropic of Capricorn

Tropic of Cancer

Equator

NORTH

AMERICA

SOUTH

AMERICA

EUROPE

AFRICA

ASIA Iron bars, pigs

Yellow fever, coconuts, bananas

Sugar, rice

Cassava, manioc, cacao

Malaria, yellow fever

Sugar, rice

Sugar, plague, rice, tea

M

sq

a

u

i

a

z

s

e

h

,

,

p

p

o

e

t

p

a

p

toes, tobacco, beans, ers, cacao, syphilis

Cattle, horses, pigs, wheat, rye,

smallpox and other diseases

AUSTRALIA

MAP 2.1

The Columbian Exchange

As European traders and adventurers traversed the world between 1430 and 1600, they began

what historians call the Columbian Exchange, a vast intercontinental movement of plants,

animals, and diseases that changed the course of historical development. The nutritious, high-

yielding American crops of corn and potatoes enriched the diets of Europeans, Africans, and

Asians. However, the Eurasian and African diseases of smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, and yellow

fever nearly wiped out the native inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere and virtually

ensured that they would lose control of their lands.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 45

Protestants, but the independent Anglican Church was

anathema to the Spanish king, Philip II.

Elizabeth supported a generation of English sea-

farers who took increasingly aggressive actions against

Spanish control of American wealth. The most famous

of these Elizabethan “sea dogs” was Francis Drake, a

rough-hewn, devoutly Protestant farmer’s son from

Devon who took to the sea and became a scourge to

Philip’s American interests. In 1577, he ventured into

the Pacific to disrupt Spanish shipping to Manila.

Drake’s fleet lost three ships and a hundred men, but

the survivors completed the first English circumnavi-

gation of the globe and captured two Spanish treasure

ships. When Drake’s flagship, the Golden Hind,

returned to England in 1580, it brought enough silver,

gold, silk, and spices to bring his investors a 4,700 per-

cent return on their investment.

At the same time, Elizabeth supported military

expeditions that imposed English rule over Gaelic-

speaking Catholic Ireland. Calling the Irish “wild sav-

ages” who were “more barbarous and more brutish in

their customs . . . than in any other part of the world,”

English soldiers brutally massacred thousands, pre-

figuring the treatment of Indians in North America.

To meet Elizabeth’s challenges, Philip sent a Spanish

Armada — 130 ships and 30,000 men — against England

in 1588. Philip intended to restore the Roman Church

in England and then to wipe out Calvinism in Holland.

But he failed utterly: a fierce storm and English ships

destroyed the Spanish fleet.

Philip continued to spend his American gold and

silver on religious wars, an ill-advised policy that

diverted workers and resources from Spain’s fledgling

industries. The gold was like a “shewer of Raine,” com-

plained one critic, that left “no benefite behind.”

Oppressed by high taxes on agriculture and fearful of

military service, more than 200,000 residents ofCastile,

once the most prosperous region of Spain, migrated to

America. By the time of Philip’s death in 1598, Spain

was in serious economic decline.

By contrast, England grew significantly during the

sixteenth century, its economy stimulated, as colonial

advocate Richard Hakluyt noted, by a “wounderful

increase of our people.” As England’s population soared

from 3 million in 1500 to 5 million in 1630, its mon-

archs supported the expansion of commerce and man-

ufacturing. English merchants had long supplied

European weavers with high-

quality wool; around 1500, they

created their own outwork tex-

tile industry. Merchants bought

wool from the owners of great

estates and sent it “out” to land-

less peasants in small cottages

to spin and weave into cloth. The

government aided textile entrepreneurs by setting low

wage rates and helped merchants by giving them

monopolies in foreign markets.

This system of state-assisted manufacturing and

trade became known as mercantilism. By encouraging

textile production, Elizabeth reduced imports and

increased exports. The resulting favorable balance of

trade caused gold and silver to flow into England and

stimulated further economic expansion. Increased trade

Queen Elizabeth Receiving Dutch

Ambassadors

This sixteenth-century Dutch painting

by an anonymous artist depicts a pair

of Dutch ambassadors being received

by England’s Queen Elizabeth I. The

seventeen provinces that constituted

the Dutch Republic were in rebellion

against Spanish rule in the later dec-

ades of the sixteenth century and

hoped for Elizabeth’s support. In

1585 she signed the Treaty of Non-

such, pledging her support for the

Dutch cause. An undeclared war

with Spain ensued, punctuated by

the defeat of the Spanish Armada

in 1588. © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel/

The Bridgeman Art Library.

TRACE CHANGE

OVER TIME

Why did Spain’s economy

deteriorate and England’s

economy improve in the

sixteenth century?

46 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

with Turkey and India also boosted import duties,

which swelled the royal treasury and the monarch’s

power. By 1600, Elizabeth’s mercantile policies had laid

the foundations for overseas colonization. Now the

English had the merchant fleet and wealth needed to

challenge Spain’s control of the Western Hemisphere.

Plantation Colonies

As Spain hammered out its American empire and

struggled against its Protestant rivals, Portugal,

England, France, and the Netherlands created suc-

cessful plantation settlements in Brazil, Jamestown,

Maryland, and the Caribbean islands (Map 2.2).

Worldwide demand for sugar and tobacco fuelled the

growth of these new colonies, and the resulting influx

of colonists diminished Spain’s dominance in the New

World. At the same time, they imposed dramatic new

pressures on native populations, who scrambled, in

turn, to survive the present and carve out pathways to

the future.

Brazil’s Sugar Plantations

Portuguese colonists transformed the tropical low-

lands of coastal Brazil into a sugar plantation zone like

the ones they had recently created on Madeira, the

Azores, the Cape Verdes, and São Tomé. The work

proceeded slowly, but by 1590 more than a thousand

sugar mills had been established in Pernambuco and

Bahia. Each large plantation had its own milling oper-

ation: because sugarcane is extremely heavy and rots

quickly, it must be processed on site. Thus sugar plan-

tations combined backbreaking agricultural labor with

milling, extracting, and refining processes that made

sugar plantations look like Industrial Revolution–era

factories.

Initially, Portuguese planters hoped that Brazil’s

indigenous peoples would supply the labor required to

CUBA

ATL A N T I C

OCEAN

PACIFIC

OCEAN

Bight of

Benin

Caribbean Sea

Recife

Salvador

Quito

Cartegena

Veracruz

Havana

St. Augustine

Jamestown

Rio de Janeiro

Boston

Lisbon

Seville

0 1,000 2,000 kilometers

0 1,000 2,000 miles

NORTH AMERICA

SOUTH AMERICA

AFRICA

EUROPE

PORTUGAL SPAIN

MEXICO

FLORIDA

PERU

S T A T E S

MANDE-SPEAKING

AKAN STATES

KONGO

ANGOLA

AZORES

MADEIRA IS.

CANARY IS.

CAPE VERDE IS.

SÃO TOMÉ

BRAZIL

NEVIS

GUYANA

ST. KITTS

MARTINIQUE

BARBADOS

VIRGINIA

MARYLAND

SAINT

DOMINGUE

JAMAICA

PERNAMBUCO

BAHIA

BRAZIL Plantation colony

MAP 2.2

The Plantation Colonies

The plantation zone in the Americas extended from the tropical coast of Brazil northwestward

through the West Indies and into the tropical and subtropical lowlands of southeastern North

America. Sugar was the most important plantation crop in the Americas, but where the soil or

climate could not support it planters experimented with a wide variety of other possibilities,

including tobacco, indigo, cotton, cacao, and rice.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 47

operate their sugar plantations. But, beginning with a

wave of smallpox in 1559, unfamiliar diseases soon rav-

aged the coastal Indian population. As a result, planters

turned to African slaves in ever-growing numbers; by

1620, the switch was complete. While Spanish colonies

in Mexico and Peru took shape with astonishing speed

following conquest, Brazil’s occupation and develop-

ment progressed more gradually; it required both trial

and error and hard work to build a paying colony.

England’s Tobacco Colonies

England was slow to embrace the prospect of planting

colonies in the Americas. There were fumbling attempts

in the 1580s in Newfoundland and Maine, privately

organized and poorly funded. Sir Walter Raleigh’s three

expeditions to North Carolina likewise ended in

disaster when 117 settlers on Roanoke Island, left

unsupplied for several years, vanished. The fate of

Roanoke — the “lost colony” — remains a compelling

puzzle for modern historians.

The Jamestown Settlement Merchants then took

charge of English expansion. In 1606, King James I

(r. 1603–1625) granted to the Virginia Company of

London all the lands stretching from present-day

North Carolina to southern New York. To honor the

memory of Elizabeth I, the never-married “Virgin

Queen,” the company’s directors named the region

Virginia (Map 2.3). Influenced by the Spanish example,

in 1607 the Virginia Company dispatched an all-male

group with no ability to support itself — no women,

farmers, or ministers were among the first arrivals —

that expected to extract tribute from the region’s Indian

Carolina Indians Fishing, 1585

Though maize was a mainstay of the Indian diet,

native peoples along the Atlantic coast also

harvested protein-rich fish, crabs, and oysters. In

this watercolor by the English adventurer John

White, Indians gather fish (in their “cannow,” or

dugout canoe) in the shallow waters of the

Albemarle Sound, off present-day North Carolina.

On the left, note the weir used both to catch fish

and to store them live for later consumption.

© Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

48 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

population while it searched out valuable commodities

like pearls and gold. Some were young gentlemen with

personal ties to the company’s shareholders: a bunch of

“unruly Sparks, packed off by their Friends to escape

worse Destinies at home.” Others hoped to make a

quick profit. All they wanted, one of them said, was to

“dig gold, refine gold, load gold.”

But there was no gold, and the men fared poorly in

their new environment. Arriving in Virginia after an

exhausting four-month voyage, they settled on a swampy

peninsula, which they named Jamestown to honor the

king. There the adventurers lacked access to fresh

water, refused to plant crops, and quickly died off; only

John White’s Map of Virginia

This map, drawn by Roanoke colonist John White, may hold

a clue to the fate of the so-called lost colony. The island of

Roanoke is right of center, just off the mainland and within

the barrier islands. Directly west, on the point where the

Roanoke and Chowan rivers join, is a (barely visible) paper

patch. When lit from behind, a red fort is clearly visible

beneath the patch, suggesting that the Roanoke colonists

may already have identified a settlement site there: when he

left the colony, John White wrote that the remaining colonists

“were prepared to remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the

maine[land].” Archaeologists and historians plan to use this

discovery to guide further explorations in the area. The Art

Archive at Art Resource, NY.

Tennessee R.

Spain

France

England

Netherlands

Key settlements

Not yet explored

by Europeans

Explored but not

settled by Europeans

Areas Colonized by 1660

0 100 200 kilometers

0 100 200 miles

N

S

W E

Ohio R.

Savannah R.

St. Lawrence R.

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

Chesapeake Bay

Potomac R.

Hudson R.

Connecticut R.

TUSCARORA

LENAPE/

DELAWARE

IROQUOIS

CATAWBA

CREEK

TIMUCUAN

CHIEFDOMS

ABENAKI

ABENAKI

NEW FRANCE

VIRGINIA

MARYLAND

A P P A L A C H I A N

M O U N T A I N S

NEW

ENGLAND

St. Augustine

Jamestown

St. Mary’s City

Providence

New Haven

Plymouth

Salem

Pemaquid

Montreal

Quebec

Three Rivers

Hartford

New Amsterdam

Boston

Fort Orange

MAP 2.3

Eastern North America, 1650

By 1650, four European nations had permanent

settlements along the eastern coast of North America,

but only England had substantial numbers of settlers,

some 25,000 in New England and another 15,000 in the

Chesapeake region. French, Dutch, Swedish, and English

colonists were also trading European manufactures to

Native Americans in exchange for animal furs and skins,

with far-reaching implications for Indian societies.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 49

38 of the 120 men were alive nine months later. Death

rates remained high: by 1611, the Virginia Company

had dispatched 1,200 colonists to Jamestown, but fewer

than halfremained alive. “Our men were destroyed with

cruell diseases, as Swellings, Fluxes, Burning Fevers,

and by warres,” reported one of the settlement’s leaders,

“but for the most part they died of meere famine.”

Their plan to dominate the local Indian population

ran up against the presence of Powhatan, the powerful

chief who oversaw some thirty tribal chiefdoms

between the James and Potomac rivers. He was willing

to treat the English traders as potential allies who could

provide valuable goods, but — just as the Englishmen

expected tribute from the Indians — Powhatan

expected tribute from the English. He provided the

hungry English adventurers with corn; in return, he

demanded “hatchets . . . bells, beads, and copper” as

well as “two great guns” and expected Jamestown to

become a dependent community within his chiefdom.

Subsequently, Powhatan arranged a marriage between

his daughter Pocahontas and John Rolfe, an English

colonist (Thinking Like a Historian, p. 50). But these

tactics failed. The inability to decide who would pay

tribute to whom led to more than a decade of uneasy

relations, followed by a long era of ruinous warfare.

The war was precipitated by the discovery of a cash

crop that — like sugar in Brazil — offered colonists a

way to turn a profit but required steady expansion onto

Indian lands. Tobacco was a plant native to the

Americas, long used by Indians as a medicine and a

stimulant. John Rolfe found a West Indian strain that

could flourish in Virginia soil and produced a small

crop — “pleasant, sweet, and strong” — that fetched a

high price in England and spurred the migration of

thousands of new settlers. The English soon came to

crave the nicotine that tobacco contained. James I ini-

tially condemned the plant as a “vile Weed” whose

“black stinking fumes” were “baleful to the nose, harm-

ful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.” But the

king’s attitude changed as taxes on imported tobacco

John Smith and Opechancanough

The powerful Indian warrior Opechancanough

towers over English explorer John Smith in this

engraving. In December 1607, Smith led a party

of Jamestown colonists upriver in search of

Indian food supplies. Two hundred warriors

intercepted them, captured Smith, and took him

to the Powhatan village of Werowacomoco. It

was on this occasion that Pocahontas suppos-

edly interceded to save his life (see Thinking Like

a Historian, p. 50). The note at the bottom of

the engraving is doubly mistaken, as it was

Opechancanough (not Powhatan) who took

Smith captive. Library of Congress.

50

T H I N K I N G L I K E

A HISTORIAN

Who Was Pocahontas?

Matoaka — nicknamed Pocahontas — was born around 1596 in the region the

English would soon name Virginia. A daughter of Chief Powhatan, her interac-

tions with colonists were important at the time and have been mythologized

ever since. Pocahontas left no writings, so what we know of her comes from

others. From these accounts, we know that she acted as a mediator with the

Jamestown settlers; she was the first Native American to marry an Englishman;

and she traveled to England with her husband and son. Pocahontas fell ill and

died in Gravesend, England, in June 1617.

1. John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624.

Smith’s description of being a captive of Powhatan

in 1607.

Having feasted [Smith] after their best barbarous manner

they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclu-

sion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan:

then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to

them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with

their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings

dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his

head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save

him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he

should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads,

and copper.

2. Robert Vaughn’s engraving of Pocahontas saving

Smith’s life, from John Smith’s Generall Historie of

Virginia, 1624.

3. John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624.

Pocahontas visited Jamestown regularly in the

years following Smith’s capture. Smith returned to

England in 1609; four years later Captain Samuel

Argall kidnapped Pocahontas and held her captive

in Jamestown.

[S]he too James towne [was brought.] A messenger

forthwith was sent to her father, that his daughter

Pocahontas he loved so dearely, he must ransome with

our men, swords, peeces, tooles, &c. he treacherously had

stolen. . . . [H]e . . . sent us word, that when we would

deliver his daughter, he would make us satisfaction for all

injuries done to us, and give us five hundred bushels of

Corne, and for ever be friends with us. . . . [W]e could

not believe the rest of our armes were either lost or stolen

from him, and therefore till he sent them, we would keep

his daughter. . . . [W]e heard no more from him a long

time after. . . . .

[Long before this, Master John Rolfe, an honest

Gentle man of good behavior had been in love with

Pocahontas, and she with him. . . . T]his marriage came

soone to the knowledge of Powhatan, a thing acceptable

to him, as appeared by his sudden consent, for within ten

daies he sent Opachisco, an old Uncle of hers, and two of

his sons, to see the manner of the marriage, and to do

in that behalf what they were requested . . . which was

accordingly done about the first of April: And ever since

we have had friendly trade and commerce.

4. John Rolfe, Letter to Sir Thomas Dale, 1614.

Pocahontas and John Rolfe married in April 1614.

In June, Rolfe defended his motives in this letter to

Virginia’s deputy-governor.

I freely subject my selfe to your grave and mature judg-

ment, deliberation, approbation and determination. . . .

[I am not led by] the unbridled desire of carnal affection:

but for the good of this plantation, for the honour of our

countrie, for the glory of God, for my owne salvation, and

Source: © British Library Board / Robana / Art Resource, NY. for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus

51

[H]earing shee was at Branford with divers of my friends,

I went to see her: After a modest salutation, without any

word, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming

well contented; and in that humour her husband, with

divers others, we all left her two or three houres. . . . But

not long after, she began to talke, and remembred mee

well what courtesies she had done: saying, [“]You did

promise Powhatan what was yours should bee his, and he

the like to you; you called him father being in his land a

stranger, and by the same reason so must I doe you:[”]

which though I would have excused, I durst not allow of

that title, because she was a Kings daughter; with a well

set countenance she said, [“]Were you not afraid to come

into my fathers Countrie, and caused feare in him and all

his people (but mee) and feare you here I should call you

father; I tell you then I will, and you shall call mee childe,

and so I will bee for ever and ever your Countrieman.

They did tell us [always] you were dead, and I knew no

other till I came to [Plymouth]; yet Powhatan did com-

mand Uttamatomakkin to seeke you, and know the truth,

because your Countriemen will lie much.[”]

Sources: (1, 3, 6) John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (Glasgow: James MacLehose

and Sons, 1907), 101, 218, 220, 238–239; (4) J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of Early

Virginia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 237–244.

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

1. Most historians now believe that the event described

and shown in sources 1 and 2 was a Powhatan ritual

to make Smith an ally and that his life was not actually

in danger. What elements of these sources suggest the

validity of this interpretation? Why would Pocahontas —

a child of eleven or twelve at the time — have had a role

in such a ritual?

2. How does Vaughn (source 2) depict power relations and

social hierarchy among the Powhatans? Where does

Pocahontas fit within this hierarchy? What messages

about Pocahontas do you think Van De Pass (source 5)

intended to convey? How do these images contribute to

the Pocahontas myth?

3. How does Rolfe explain his interest in Pocahontas

(source 4)? What is his view of her? How do you inter-

pret the letter?

4. Assess the reliability of sources 1, 3, and 6 and consider

Smith’s motive in including them in his Historie. Source

6 purports to record an actual conversation between

Pocahontas and Smith. What is the tone of this encoun-

ter, and what might explain Pocahontas’s remarks?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Imagine the various encounters Pocahontas experienced

with the Jamestown Englishmen from her point of view.

Reflect on who Pocahontas was as described in these docu-

ments — savior and friend, captive, baptized wife, Virginia

Company prize, and betrayed ally — and in a brief essay, use

Pocahontas’s experience to explore the uncertain nature of

English-Powhatan relations in the first decade of contact.

Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely Pocahontas. To

whom my hartie and best thoughts are, and have [for] a

long time bin so intangled, and inthralled in so intricate a

labyrinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe

thereout. . . . [I have often thought]: surely these are

wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and

delighteth in man’s destruction[.]

I say the holy spirit of God has often demanded of

me, why I was created . . . but to labour in the Lord’s vine-

yard. . . . Likewise adding hereunto her great appearance

of love to me, her desire to be taught and instructed in the

knowledge of God, her capableness of understanding, her

aptness and willingness to receive any good impression,

and also the spirituall, besides her owne incitements stir-

ring me up hereunto. . . .

Now if the vulgar sort, who square all men’s actions by

the base rule of their owne filthiness, shall tax or taunt me

in this my godly labour: let them know, it is not any hun-

gry appetite, to gorge my selfe with incontinency; sure (if

I would, and were so sensually inclined) I might satisfy

such desire, though not without a seared conscience.

5. Portrait of Pocahontas by Simon Van De Pass,

1616. In 1616, the Virginia Company of London

sent Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and their son Thomas

to England, where she met King James and

sat for this portrait, the only surviving image

of Pocahontas.

Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/

Art Resource, NY.

6. John Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624. In

1624, John Smith recalled a meeting he had with

Pocahontas during her 1616 tour of England.

52 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

bolstered the royal treasury. Powhatan, however, now

accused the English of coming “not to trade but to

invade my people and possess my country.”

To foster the flow of migrants, the Virginia

Company allowed individual settlers to own land,

granting 100 acres to every freeman and more to those

who imported servants. The company also created a

system of representative government: the House of

Burgesses, first convened in 1619, could make laws and

levy taxes, although the governor and the company

council in England could veto its acts. By 1622, land-

ownership, self-government, and a judicial system

based on “the lawes of the realme of England” had

attracted some 4,500 new recruits. To encourage the

transition to a settler colony, the Virginia Company

recruited dozens of “Maides young and uncorrupt to

make wifes to the Inhabitants.”

The Indian War of 1622 The influx of migrants

sparked an all-out conflict with the neighboring

Indians. The struggle began with an assault led by

Opechancanough, Powhatan’s younger brother and

successor. In 1607, Opechancanough had attacked

some of the first English invaders; subsequently, he

“stood aloof ” from the English settlers and “would not

be drawn to any Treaty.” In particular, he resisted

English proposals to place Indian children in schools

to be “brought upp in Christianytie.” Upon becoming

the paramount chief in 1621, Opechancanough told

the leader of the neighboring Potomack Indians:

“Before the end of two moons, there should not be an

Englishman in all their Countries.”

Opechancanough almost succeeded. In 1622, he

coordinated a surprise attack by twelve Indian chief-

doms that killed 347 English settlers, nearly one-third

of the population. The English

fought back by seizing the fields

and food of those they now

called “naked, tanned, deformed

Savages” and declared “a per-

petual war without peace or

truce” that lasted for a decade.

They sold captured warriors

into slavery, “destroy[ing] them who sought to destroy

us” and taking control of “their cultivated places.”

Shocked by the Indian uprising, James I revoked

the Virginia Company’s charter and, in 1624, made

Virginia a royal colony. Now the king and his ministers

appointed the governor and a small advisory council,

retaining the locally elected House of Burgesses but

stipulating that the king’s Privy Council (a committee

of political advisors) must ratify all legislation. The king

also decreed the legal establishment of the Church of

England in the colony, which meant that residents had

to pay taxes to support its clergy. These institutions —

an appointed governor, an elected assembly, a formal

legal system, and an established Anglican Church —

became the model for royal colonies throughout

English America.

Lord Baltimore Settles Catholics in Maryland A

second tobacco-growing colony developed in neigh-

boring Maryland. King Charles I (r. 1625–1649),

James’s successor, was secretly sympathetic toward

Catholicism, and in 1632 he granted lands bordering

the vast Chesapeake Bay to Catholic aristocrat Cecilius

Calvert, Lord Baltimore. Thus Maryland became a ref-

uge for Catholics, who were subject to persecution in

England. In 1634, twenty gentlemen, mostly Catholics,

and 200 artisans and laborers, mostly Protestants,

established St. Mary’s City at the mouth of the Potomac

River. To minimize religious confrontations, the pro-

prietor instructed the governor to allow “no scandall

nor offence to be given to any of the Protestants” and to

“cause All Acts of Romane Catholicque Religion to be

done as privately as may be.”

Maryland grew quickly because Baltimore

imported many artisans and offered ample lands to

wealthy migrants. But political conflict threatened the

colony’s stability. Disputing Baltimore’s powers, settlers

elected a representative assembly and insisted on the

right to initiate legislation, which Baltimore grudg-

ingly granted. Anti-Catholic agitation by Protestants

also threatened his religious goals. To protect his

coreligionists, Lord Baltimore persuaded the assembly

to enact the Toleration Act (1649), which granted all

Christians the right to follow their beliefs and hold

church services. In Maryland, as in Virginia, tobacco

quickly became the main crop, and that similarity,

rather than any religious difference, ultimately made

the two colonies very much alike in their economic

and social systems.

The Caribbean Islands

Virginia’s experiment with a cash crop that created a

land-intensive plantation society ran parallel to develop-

ments in the Caribbean, where English, French, and

Dutch sailors began looking for a permanent toehold.

In 1624, a small English party under the command

of Sir Thomas Warner established a settlement on

St. Christopher(St. Kitts). A yearlater, Warner allowed a

French group to settle the other end of the island so they

could better defend their position from the Spanish.

EXPLAIN

CONSEQUENCES

How did the proximity of

the Powhatan Chiefdom

affect developments in

early Virginia?

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 53

Within a few years, the English and French colonists on

St. Kitts had driven the native Caribs from the island,

weathered a Spanish attack, and created a common set

of bylaws for mutual occupation of the island.

After St. Kitts, a dozen or so colonies were founded

in the Lesser Antilles, including the French islands of

Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Bart’s; the English

outposts of Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Anguilla,

Tortola, and Barbados; and the Dutch colony of St.

Eustatius. In 1655, an English fleet captured the Spanish

island of Jamaica — one of the large islands of the

Greater Antilles — and opened it to settlement as well.

A few of these islands were unpopulated before

Europeans settled there; elsewhere, native populations

were displaced, and often wiped out, within a decade

or so. Only on the largest islands did native popula-

tions hold out longer.

Colonists experimented with a wide variety of cash

crops, including tobacco, indigo, cotton, cacao, and

ginger. Beginning in the 1640s — and drawing on the

example of Brazil — planters on many of the islands

shifted to sugar cultivation. Where conditions were

right, as they were in Barbados, Jamaica, Nevis, and

Martinique, these colonies were soon producing sub-

stantial crops of sugar and, as a consequence, claimed

some of the world’s most valuable real estate.

Plantation Life

In North America and the Caribbean, plantations were

initially small freeholds, farms of 30 to 50 acres owned

and farmed by families or male partners. But the logic

of plantation agriculture soon encouraged consolida-

tion: large planters engrossed as much land as they

A Sugar Mill in the French West Indies, 1655

Making sugar required both hard labor and considerable expertise. Field slaves labored strenuously in the hot

tropical sun to cut the sugarcane and carry or cart it to an oxen- or wind-powered mill, where it was pressed

to yield the juice. Then skilled slave artisans took over. They carefully heated the juice and, at the proper

moment, added ingredients that granulated the sugar and separated it from the molasses, which was later

distilled into rum. The Granger Collection, New York.

54 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

could and experimented with new forms of labor disci-

pline that maximized their control over production. In

Virginia, the headright system guaranteed 50 acres of

land to anyone who paid the passage of a new immi-

grant to the colony; thus, by buying additional inden-

tured servants and slaves, the colony’s largest planters

also amassed ever-greater claims to land.

European demand for tobacco set off a forty-year

economic boom in the Chesapeake. “All our riches for

the present do consist in tobacco,” a planter remarked

in 1630. Exports rose from 3 million pounds in 1640

to 10 million pounds in 1660. After 1650, wealthy

migrants from gentry or noble families established

large estates along the coastal rivers. Coming primarily

from southern England, where tenants and wage labor-

ers farmed large manors, they copied that hierarchical

system by buying English indentured servants and

enslaved Africans to work their lands. At about the

same time, the switch to sugar production in Barbados

caused the price of land there to quadruple, driving

small landowners out.

For rich and poor alike, life in the plantation colo-

nies of North America and the Caribbean was harsh.

The scarcity of towns deprived settlers of community

(Map 2.4). Families were equally scarce because there

were few women, and marriages often ended with the

early death of a spouse. Pregnant women were espe-

cially vulnerable to malaria, spread by mosquitoes that

flourished in tropical and subtropical climates. Many

mothers died after bearing a first or second child, so

orphaned children (along with unmarried young men)

formed a large segment of the society. Sixty percent of

the children born in Middlesex County, Virginia,

before 1680 lost one or both parents before they were

thirteen. Death was pervasive. Although 15,000 English

migrants arrived in Virginia between 1622 and 1640,

the population rose only from 2,000 to 8,000. It was

even harsher in the islands, where yellow fever epi-

demics killed indiscriminately. On Barbados, burials

outnumbered baptisms in the second half of the seven-

teenth century by four to one.

Indentured Servitude Still, the prospect of owning

land continued to lure settlers. By 1700, more than

100,000 English migrants had come to Virginia and

Maryland and over 200,000 had migrated to the islands

of the West Indies, principally to Barbados; the vast

majority to both destinations traveled as indentured

servants (Figure 2.2). Shipping registers from the

English port of Bristol reveal the backgrounds of 5,000

servants embarking for the Chesapeake. Three-quarters

were young men. They came to Bristol searching for

work; once there, merchants persuaded them to sign

contracts to labor in America. Indentured servitude

contracts bound the men — and the quarter who were

women — to work for a master for four or five years,

after which they would be free to marry and work for

themselves.

For merchants, servants were valuable cargo: their

contracts fetched high prices from Chesapeake and

West Indian planters. For the plantation owners, inden-

tured servants were a bargain if they survived the

Point Comfort

Cape Charles Smith Is.

Use the scale of miles to estimate the

distance between Jamestown and the

outlying settlements (or Hundreds).

What does this suggest about the

nature of early Virginia society?

Note the location of the Indian villages.

How do you explain their position in

relation to the English settlements?

Why was Fort West located here

and what was its major function?

Note the lack of roads and the

dependence of the settlements

on river transportation. Why

was river transport particularly

important for the tobacco trade?

Machot

Werowacomoco

Orapax Fort West

Arrohateck Falling

Creek

Henrico

Bermuda Shirley Hundred Hundred

Appamatuck Flowerdew

Hundred

Smith‘s Hundred

Martin‘s

Brandon Jamestown

Smith‘s

Fort Martin‘s

Hundred

Fort

Algernon

Kecoughtan

Lawnes

Plantation

Dale‘s Gift

Berkeley Hundred

English settlement

English fort

Indian village

Fresh-salt

transition zone 0 10 20 kilometers

0 10 20 miles

N

S

W E

Chesapeake

Bay

Rappahannock River

Mattaponi River Pamunkey River

York River

Chickahominy River

James

River

Hampton

Roads

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

P O W H A T A N

MAP 2.4

River Plantations in Virginia, c. 1640

The first migrants settled in widely

dispersed plantations along the James

River, a settlement pattern promoted

by the tobacco economy. From

their riverfront plantations wealthy

planter-merchants could easily load

heavy hogsheads of tobacco onto

oceangoing ships and offload supplies

that they then sold to smallholding

planters. Consequently, few substantial

towns or trading centers developed in

the Chesapeake region.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 55

voyage and their first year in a harsh new disease

environment, a process called “seasoning.” During the

Chesapeake’s tobacco boom, a male servant could pro-

duce five times his purchase price in a single year.

To maximize their gains, many masters ruthlessly

exploited servants, forcing them to work long hours,

beating them without cause, and withholding permis-

sion to marry. If servants ran away or became preg-

nant, masters went to court to increase the term of

their service. Female servants were especially vulner-

able to abuse. A Virginia law of 1692 stated that “disso-

lute masters have gotten their maids with child; and yet

claim the benefit of their service.” Planters got rid of

uncooperative servants by selling their contracts. In

Virginia, an Englishman remarked in disgust that “ser-

vants were sold up and down like horses.”

Few indentured servants escaped poverty. In the

Chesapeake, half the men died before completing the

term of their contract, and another quarter remained

landless. Only one-quarter achieved their quest for

property and respectability. Female servants generally

fared better. Because men had grown “very sensible of

the Misfortune of Wanting Wives,” many propertied

planters married female servants. Thus a few — very

fortunate — men and women escaped a life of landless

poverty.

African Laborers The rigors of indentured servi-

tude paled before the brutality that accompanied the

large-scale shift to African slave labor. In Barbados

and the other English islands, sugar production

devoured laborers, and the sup-

ply of indentured servants quickly

became inadequate to planters’

needs. By 1690, blacks outnum-

bered whites on Barbados nearly

three to one, and white slave

owners were developing a code

of force and terror to keep sugar

flowing and maintain control of

the black majority that sur-

rounded them. The first comprehensive slave legislation

for the island, adopted in 1661, was called an “Act for

the better ordering and governing of Negroes.”

In the Chesapeake, the shift to slave labor was more

gradual. In 1619, John Rolfe noted that “a Dutch man

of warre . . . sold us twenty Negars” — slaves originally

shipped by the Portuguese from the port of Luanda in

Angola. For a generation, the number of Africans

remained small. About 400 Africans lived in the

Chesapeake colonies in 1649, just 2 percent of the pop-

ulation. By 1670, that figure had reached 5 percent.

Most Africans served their English masters for life.

However, since English common law did not acknowl-

edge chattel slavery, it was possible for some Africans

to escape bondage. Some were freed as a result of

Christian baptism; some purchased their freedom

from their owners; some — like Elizabeth Key, whose

story was related at the beginning of the chapter — won

their freedom in the courts. Once free, some ambitious

Africans became landowners and purchased slaves or

the labor contracts of English servants for themselves.

Social mobility for Africans ended in the 1660s

with the collapse of the tobacco boom and the increas-

ing political power of the gentry. Tobacco had once

sold for 30 pence a pound; now it fetched less than one-

tenth of that. The “low price of Tobacco requires it

should bee made as cheap as possible,” declared

Virginia planter-politician Nicholas Spencer, and

“blacks can make it cheaper than whites.” As they

imported more African workers, the English-born

political elite grew more race-conscious. Increasingly,

Spencer and other leading legislators distinguished

English from African residents by color (white-black)

rather than by religion (Christian-pagan). By 1671, the

Virginia House of Burgesses had forbidden Africans to

10,000

30,000

50,000

70,000

90,000

1640 1660 1680 1700

10

46% of white

population

in labor

force

% of labor

force

17 27

30

58

66

75

White

population

White

labor force

White servant

population

FIGURE 2.2

Chesapeake Whites: Workers, Dependents, and

Indentured Servants, 1640–1700

The Chesapeake’s white population grew tenfold in the

years after 1640, and it also changed significantly in

character. As more women migrated to Virginia and

Maryland and bore children, the percentage of the

population who worked in the fields daily fell dramati-

cally, from 75 percent to 46 percent. The proportion of

indentured servants in the labor force likewise declined,

from 30 percent to 10 percent.

COMPARE AND

CONTRAST

How were the experiences

of indentured servants and

slaves in the Chesapeake

and the Caribbean similar?

In what ways were they

different?

56 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

own guns or join the militia. It also barred them — “tho

baptized and enjoying their own Freedom” — from

owning English servants. Being black was increasingly

a mark of inferior legal status, and slavery was fast

becoming a permanent and hereditary condition. As

an English clergyman observed, “These two words,

Negro and Slave had by custom grown Homogeneous

and convertible.”

Neo-European Colonies

While Mesoamerica and the Andes emerged at the

heart of a tribute-based empire in Latin America, and

tropical and subtropical environments were trans-

formed into plantation societies, a series of colonies

that more closely replicated European patterns of eco-

nomic and social organization developed in the tem-

perate zone along North America’s Atlantic coast

(America Compared, opposite page). Dutch, French,

and English sailors probed the continent’s northern

coastline, initially searching for a Northwest Passage

through the continent to Asia. Gradually, they devel-

oped an interest in the region on its own terms. They

traded for furs with coastal Native American popula-

tions, fished for cod on the Grand Banks off the coast

of Newfoundland, and established freehold family

farms and larger manors where they reproduced Euro-

pean patterns of agricultural life. Many migrants also

came with aspirations to create godly communities,

places of refuge where they could put religious ideals

into practice. New France, New Netherland, and New

England were the three pillars of neo-European coloni-

zation in the early seventeenth century.

New France

In the 1530s, Jacques Cartier ventured up the St. Law-

rence River and claimed it for France. Cartier’s claim

to the St. Lawrence languished for three-quarters of a

century, but in 1608 Samuel de Champlain returned

and founded the fur-trading post of Quebec. Trade

with the Cree-speaking Montagnais; Algonquian-

speaking Micmacs, Ottawas, and Ojibwas; and

Iroquois-speaking Hurons gave the French access to

furs — mink, otter, and beaver — that were in great

demand in Europe. To secure plush beaver pelts from

the Hurons, who controlled trade north of the Great

Lakes, Champlain provided them with manufactured

goods. Selling pelts, an Indian told a French priest,

“makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread.” It also

made guns, which Champlain sold to the Hurons.

The Hurons also became the first focus of French

Catholic missionary activity. Hundreds of priests, most

of them Jesuits, fanned out to live in Indian communi-

ties. They mastered Indian languages and came to

understand, and sometimes respect, their values. Many

Indian peoples initially welcomed the French “Black

Robes” as spiritually powerful beings, but when prayers

to the Christian god did not protect them from disease,

the Indians grew skeptical. A Peoria chief charged that

a priest’s “fables are good only in his own country; we

have our own [beliefs], which do not make us die as his

do.” When a drought struck, Indians blamed the

missionaries. “If you cannot make rain, they speak of

nothing less than making away with you,” lamented

one Jesuit.

While New France became an expansive center of

fur trading and missionary work, it languished as a

The Fur Trade

Luxuriant pelts like ermine and silver fox

were always desirable, but the humble

beaver dominated the early trade

between Europeans and Indians in the

Northeast. It had thick, coarse hair,

but beneath that outer layer was soft

“underfur.” Those fine hairs were

covered in microscopic barbs that

allowed them to mat into a dense mass.

European hatmakers pressed this fur

into felt so strong and pliable that even

broad-brimmed hats would hold their

shape. As such hats became fashionable

in Europe and the colonies, beavers were

hunted to near-extinction in North

America. National Archives of Canada.

57

Plantation Colonies

Versus Neo-Europes

A M E R I C A

COMPARED

good store and better cheap to build warm houses and

make good fires, which makes the winter less tedious. . . .

[T]rue it is that some venturing too nakedly in extremity

of cold, being more foolhardy than wise, have for a time

lost the use of their feet, others the use of their fingers;

but time and surgery afterwards recovered them. Some

have had their overgrown beards so frozen together that

they could not get their strong-water bottles into their

mouths. . . . [W]hereas many do disparage the land, say-

ing a man cannot live without labor, in that they more

disparage and discredit themselves in giving the world

occasion to take notice of their dronish disposition that

would live off the sweat of another man’s brows. . . .

For all in New England must be workers of some

kind. . . . And howsoever they are accounted poor,

they are well contented and look not so much at

abundance as at competency.

Source: William Wood, New England’s Prospect (Boston: The University of Massachu-

setts Press, 1993), 28–29, 68.

Henry Whistler’s Journal, 1655

This Island [Barbados] is one of the Richest Spots of

ground in the world and fully inhabited. . . . The gentry

here doth Hue [appear] far better than ours do in En-

gland : they have most of them 100 or 2 or 3 of slaves[,]

apes who they command as they please. . . . This Island

is inhabited with all sorts : with English, French, Dutch,

Scots, Irish, Spaniards they being Jews : with Indians and

miserable Negroes borne to perpetual slavery they and

their seed : these Negroes they do allow as many wives as

they will have, some will have 3 or 4, according as they

find their body able : our English here doth think a negro

child the first day it is born to be worth £5, they cost them

nothing the bringing up, they go all ways naked : some

planters will have 30 more or les about 4 or 5 years old :

they sell them from one to the other as we do sheep. This

Island is the Dunghill whereon England doth cast forth

its rubbish. . . . A rogue in England will hardly make a

cheater here : a Bawd brought over puts on a demure

comportment, a whore if handsome makes a wife for

some rich planter.

Source: The Narrative of General Venables (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.,

1900), 145–146.

William Wood, New England’s Prospect, 1634

But it may be objected that it is too cold a country for our

English men, who have been accustomed to a warmer cli-

mate. To which it may be answered . . . , there is wood

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

1. Henry Whistler was a soldier who briefly visited Barbados

on a military expedition to the West Indies, while William

Wood lived for four years in Massachusetts Bay. How

might that difference influence the tone of these two

descriptions?

2. What core values does each author ascribe to the colony

he writes about? What kinds of people are most likely to

end up in each of these two colonies?

The prospects for Europeans who traveled to tropical plantations like Barbados

differed dramatically from those traveling to neo-European colonies like Mas-

sachusetts Bay. In the former, planters employed small armies of servants and

slaves; in the latter, the first generation of colonists worked hard, often in cold

climates and rocky soils, to eke out a living.

farming settlement. In 1662, King Louis XIV (r. 1643–

1714) turned New France into a royal colony and

subsidized the migration of indentured servants.

French servants labored under contract for three years,

received a salary, and could eventually lease a farm — far

more generous terms than those for indentured ser-

vants in the English colonies.

Nonetheless, few people moved to New France,

a cold and forbidding country “at the end of the

world,” as one migrant put it. And some state policies

discouraged migration. Louis XIV drafted tens of thou-

sands of men into military service and barred

Huguenots (FrenchCalvinist Protestants)from migrat-

ing to New France, fearing they might win converts

and take control of the colony. Moreover, the French

legal system gave peasants strong rights to their village

lands, whereas migrants to New France faced an

oppressive, aristocracy- and church-dominated feudal

system. In the village of Saint Ours in Quebec, for

example, peasants paid 45 percent of their wheat crop

58 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

to nobles and the Catholic Church. By 1698, only

15,200 Europeans lived in New France, compared to

100,000 in England’s North American colonies.

Despite this small population, France eventually

claimed a vast inland arc, from the St. Lawrence Valley

through the Great Lakes and down the course of the

Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Explorers and fur traders

drove this expansion. In 1673, Jacques Marquette

reached the Mississippi Riverinpresent-day Wisconsin;

then, in 1681, Robert de La Salle traveled down the

majestic river to the Gulf of Mexico. To honor Louis

XIV, La Salle named the region Louisiana. By 1718,

French merchants had founded the port of New

Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. Eventually a

network of about two dozen forts grew up in the Great

Lakes and Mississippi. Soldiers and missionaries used

them as bases of operations, while Indians, traders, and

their métis (mixed-race) offspring created trading

communities alongside them.

New Netherland

By 1600, Amsterdam had become the financial and

commercial hub of northern Europe, and Dutch finan-

ciers dominated the European banking, insurance, and

textile industries. Dutch merchants owned more ships

and employed more sailors than did the combined

fleets of England, France, and Spain. Indeed, the Dutch

managed much of the world’s commerce. During their

struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal

(ruled by Spanish monarchs, 1580–1640), the Dutch

seized Portuguese forts in Africa and Indonesia and

sugar plantations in Brazil. These conquests gave the

Dutch control of the Atlantic trade in slaves and sugar

and the Indian Ocean commerce in East Indian spices

and Chinese silks and ceramics (Map 2.5).

In 1609, Dutch merchants dispatched the English

mariner Henry Hudson to locate a navigable route to

the riches of the East Indies. What he found as he

probed the rivers of northeast America was a fur

bonanza. Following Hudson’s exploration of the river

that now bears his name, the merchants built Fort

Orange (Albany) in 1614 to trade for furs with the

Munsee and Iroquois Indians. Then, in 1621, the Dutch

government chartered the West India Company, which

founded the colony of New Netherland, set up New

Amsterdam (on Manhattan Island) as its capital, and

brought in farmers and artisans to make the enterprise

self-sustaining. The new colony did not thrive. The

population of the Dutch Republic was too small to

support much emigration — just 1.5 million people,

compared to 5 million in Britain and 20 million in

France — and its migrants sought riches in Southeast

Asia rather than fur-trading profits in America. To

protect its colony from rival European nations, the

West India Company granted huge estates along the

Hudson River to wealthy Dutchmen who promised to

populate them. But by 1664, New Netherland had only

5,000 residents, and fewer than half of them were

Dutch.

New Amsterdam, c. 1640

As the wooden palisade suggests,

New Amsterdam was a fortlike

trading post at the edge of a vast

land populated by alien Indian

peoples feared by the Dutch. The

city was also a pale miniature

imitation of Amsterdam, with its

many canals. The first settlers built

their houses in the Dutch style, with

gable ends facing the street (note

the two middle houses), and

excavated a canal across lower

Manhattan Island (New York City’s

Canal Street today). Library of

Congress.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 59

Like New France, New Netherland flourished as a

fur-trading enterprise. Trade with the powerful Iroquois,

though rocky at first, gradually improved. But Dutch

settlers had less respect for their Algonquian-speaking

neighbors. They seized prime farming land from the

Algonquian peoples and took over their trading net-

work, which exchanged corn and wampum from Long

Island for furs from Maine. In response, in 1643 the

Algonquians launched attacks that nearly destroyed

the colony. “Almost every place is abandoned,” a settler

lamented, “whilst the Indians daily threaten to over-

whelm us.” To defeat the Algonquians, the Dutch

waged vicious warfare — maiming, burning, and kill-

ing hundreds of men, women, and children — and

formed an alliance with the Mohawks, who were no

less brutal. The grim progression of Euro-Indian

relations — an uneasy welcome, followed by rising ten-

sions and war — afflicted even the Dutch, who had few

designs on Indian lands or on their “unregenerate”

souls and were only looking to do business.

After the crippling Indian war, the West India

Company ignored New Netherland and expanded

its profitable trade in African

slaves and Brazilian sugar. In

New Amsterdam, Governor

Peter Stuyvesant ruled in an

authoritarian fashion, rejecting

demands for a representative

system of government and alienating the colony’s

diverse Dutch, English, and Swedish residents. Con-

sequently, the residents of New Netherland offered

little resistance when England invaded the colony in

PACIFIC OCEAN

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

INDIAN OCEAN

Arabian

Sea

Strait of Magellan

ARCTIC OCEAN

Red Sea

PACIFIC

OCEAN

Curaçao

(Neth.)

Ceylon

MOLUCCAS

Sumatra

Java

Borneo

Cape Horn

Silk

Silver

Silk

Slaves

Slaves

Slaves

Wheat, timber,

fur, tar, pitch

Slaves

Slaves Slaves

Pepper, cloth

Cowrie shells

Slaves

Slaves

Silver

Silk

Fish,

pottery

Sugar

Spices

Spices

Slaves

Silk, sugar, gold, molasses

Rugs

Ivory, gold, slaves

NEW

SPAIN FLORIDA

SPANISH

MAIN GUIANA

NEW

GRANADA

PERU

CUBA HAITI

JAMAICA

BRAZIL

ARABIA

CAPE

VERDE

GOLD

COAST

PERSIA

PUERTO RICO

NETHERLANDS

PORTUGAL

Tools, cloth

INDIA

CHINA

Porcelain,

silk

JAPAN

Silver

SPAIN

Tools, cloth

ANGOLA

MADAGASCAR

MAURITIUS

(NETH.)

PHILIPPINES

INDONESIA NEW

GUINEA

GUJARAT

NORTH AMERICA

SOUTH

AMERICA

EUROPE

AFRICA

AUSTRALIA

ASIA

Mexico

City

Acapulco

Cartagena

Lima Bahia

Rio de Janeiro

Veracruz

Panama

Venice

Amsterdam

Lisbon

Seville

Madrid

Constantinople

Cairo

Tripoli

Luanda

Cape

Town

Mozambique

Mombasa

Alexandria

Sofala

Ormuz

Aden Goa

Malacca

Manila

Macao

Canton

Ningbo

Nagasaki

0 1,000 2,000 kilometers

0 1,000 2,000 miles

N

S

W E

Main Eurasian Trade Routes, 1650

Portuguese trade routes

Spanish trade routes

Dutch trade routes

Other major trade routes

European-Controlled Areas

Portuguese control

Spanish control

Dutch control

MAP 2.5

The Eurasian Trade System and European Spheres of Influence, 1650

Between 1550 and 1650, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants took control of the maritime

trade routes between Europe and India, Indonesia, and China. They also created two new trading

connections. The South Atlantic System carried slaves, sugar, and manufactured goods between

Europe, Africa, and the valuable plantation settlements in Brazil and the Caribbean islands. And

a transpacific trade carried Spanish American silver to China in exchange for silks, ceramics, and

other manufactures. (To trace long-term changes in trade and empires, see Map 1.4 on p. 24 and

Map 5.1 on p. 154.)

IDENTIFY CAUSES

Why did New France and

New Netherland struggle

to attract colonists?

60 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

1664. New Netherland became New York and fell

under English control.

The Rise of the Iroquois

Like other native groups decimated by European dis-

eases and warfare, the Five Nations of the Iroquois suf-

fered as a result of colonization, but they were able to

capitalize on their strategic location in central New

York to dominate the region between the French and

Dutch colonies. Obtaining guns and goods from Dutch

merchants at Fort Orange, Iroquois warriors inflicted

terror on their neighbors. Partly in response to a viru-

lent smallpox epidemic in 1633, which cut their

number by one-third, the Iroquois waged a series of

devastating wars against the Hurons (1649), Neutrals

(1651), Eries (1657), and Susquehannocks (1660) — all

Iroquoian-speaking peoples. They razed villages, kill-

ing many residents and taking many more captive. The

conquered Hurons ceased to exist as a distinct people;

survivors trekked westward with displaced Algonquian

peoples and formed a new nation, the Wyandots.

Iroquois warriors pressed still farther — eastward into

New England, south to the Carolinas, north to Quebec,

and west via the Great Lakes to the Mississippi —

dominating Indian groups along the way. Collectively

known as the Beaver Wars, these Iroquois campaigns

dramatically altered the map of northeastern North

America.

Many Iroquois raids came at the expense of French-

allied Algonquian Indians, and in the 1660s New

France committed to all-out war against the Iroquois.

In 1667, the Mohawks were the last of the Five Nations

to admit defeat. As part of the peace settlement, the

Five Nations accepted Jesuit missionaries into their

communities. A minority of Iroquois — perhaps 20

percent of the population — converted to Catholicism

and moved to the St. Lawrence Valley, where they set-

tled in mission communities near Montreal (where

their descendants still live today).

The Iroquois who remained in New York did not

collapse, however. Forging a new alliance with the

Englishmen who had taken over New Netherland, they

would continue to be a dominant force in the politics

of the Northeast for generations to come.

New England

In 1620, 102 English Protestants landed at a place they

called Plymouth, near Cape Cod. A decade later, a

much larger group began to arrive just north of

Plymouth, in the newly chartered Massachusetts Bay

Colony. By 1640, the region had attracted more than

20,000 migrants (Map 2.6). Unlike the early arrivals in

Virginia and Barbados, these were not parties of young

male adventurers seeking their fortunes or bound to

labor for someone else. They came in family groups to

create communities like the ones they left behind,

except that they intended to establish them according

to Protestant principles, as John Calvin had done in

Geneva. Their numbers were small compared to the

Caribbean and the Chesapeake, but their balanced sex

ratio and organized approach to community formation

allowed them to multiply quickly. By distributing land

broadly, they built a society of independent farm fami-

lies. And by establishing a “holy commonwealth,” they

gave a moral dimension to American history that sur-

vives today.

The Pilgrims The Pilgrims were religious separat-

ists — Puritans who had left the Church of England.

When King James I threatened to drive Puritans “out of

the land, or else do worse,” some Puritans chose to live

among Dutch Calvinists in Holland. Subsequently, 35

of these exiles resolved to maintain their English iden-

tity by moving to America. Led by William Bradford

and joined by 67 migrants from England, the Pilgrims

sailed to America aboard the Mayflower. Because they

lacked a royal charter, they combined themselves

“together into a civill body politick,” as their leader

explained. This Mayflower Compact used the Puritans’

self-governing religious congregation as the model for

their political structure.

Only half of the first migrant group survived until

spring, but thereafter Plymouth thrived; the cold cli-

mate inhibited the spread of mosquito-borne disease,

and the Pilgrims’ religious discipline encouraged a

strong work ethic. Moreover, a smallpox epidemic in

1618 devastated the local Wampanoags, minimizing

the danger they posed. By 1640, there were 3,000

settlers in Plymouth. To ensure political stability, they

established representative self-government, broad polit-

ical rights, property ownership, and religious freedom

of conscience.

Meanwhile, England plunged deeper into religious

turmoil. When King Charles I repudiated certain

Protestant doctrines, including the role of grace in

salvation, English Puritans, now powerful in Parlia-

ment, accused the king of “popery” — of holding

Catholic beliefs. In 1629, Charles dissolved Parliament,

claimed the authority to rule by “divine right,” and

raised money through royal edicts and the sale of

monopolies. When Charles’s Archbishop William

Laud began to purge dissident ministers, thousands of

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 61

Puritans — Protestants who did not separate from the

Church of England but hoped to purify it of its cere-

mony and hierarchy — fled to America.

John Winthrop and Massachusetts Bay The

Puritan exodus began in 1630 with the departure of

900 migrants led by John Winthrop, a well-educated

country squire who became the first governor of the

Massachusetts Bay Colony. Calling England morally

corrupt and “overburdened with people,” Winthrop

sought land for his children and a place in Christian

history for his people. “We must consider that we shall

be as a City upon a Hill,” Winthrop told the migrants.

“The eyes of all people are upon us.” Like the Pilgrims,

0 250 500 kilometers

0 250 500 miles

N

S

W E

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Caribbean Sea

VIRGINIA

1635

MARYLAND 1645

NEW ENGLAND

1620

BAHAMAS

1646

ST. CROIX

1625

ST. KITTS 1623

NEVIS

1628 BARBADOS

1625

BERMUDA 1642

000 20, AND NGL EW E TO N

00 5,0 IES LON CO AKE APE CHES TO

00 ,0 02 SDN LA

IS N IA D IN ST WE

TO

ENGLAND

Dorset counties)

0 50 100 kilometers

0 50 100 miles

EAST ANGLIA (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex,

Hartford counties)

WEST COUNTRY (Wiltshire, Hampshire,

YORKSHIRE (Yorkshire, Lincoln counties)

MASSACHUSETTS BAY

AND PLYMOUTH COLONIES

WEST

COUNTRY

EAST

ANGLIA

YORKSHIRE

ENGLAND

ORIGINS OF MASSACHUSETTS PURITANS

Braintree

Dartmouth

Exeter Salisbury

Andover Newbury

Chelmsford

Ipswich

Dedham Cambridge

Hingham

Boston

Hull

Rowley

York Newbury Rowley

Cambridge Ipswich

Hingham

Plymouth

MAP 2.6

The Puritan Migration to America, 1620–1640

Forty-five thousand Puritans left England for America and the West Indies between 1620 and 1640.

About half traveled to the New England colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Connecticut,

where they created durable societies with deep religious identities. Migrants from the three major

centers of Puritanism in England — Yorkshire, East Anglia, and the West Country — commonly

settled among those from their own region. Often they named American communities after their

English towns of origin and tried to live as they had in Old England. For example, settlers from

Rowley in Yorkshire transplanted their customary system of open-field agriculture to Rowley in

Massachusetts Bay.

To see a longer excerpt of Winthrop’s “City Upon

a Hill” sermon, along with other primary sources

from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

62 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

the Puritans envisioned a reformed Christian society

with “authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity

in the church,” as minister John Cotton put it. By their

example, they hoped to inspire religious reform

throughout Christendom.

Winthrop and his associates governed the

Massachusetts Bay Colony from the town of Boston.

They transformed their joint-stock corporation — a

commercial agreement that allows investors to pool

their resources — into a representative political system

with a governor, council, and

assembly. To ensure rule by the

godly, the Puritans limited the

right to vote and hold office to

men who were church mem-

bers. Rejecting the Plymouth

Colony’s policy of religious tol-

erance, the Massachusetts Bay Colony established

Puritanism as the state-supported religion, barred

other faiths from conducting services, and used the

Bible as a legal guide. “Where there is no Law,” they

said, magistrates should rule “as near the law of God as

they can.” Over the next decade, about 10,000 Puritans

migrated to the colony, along with 10,000 others flee-

ing hard times in England.

The New England Puritans sought to emulate the

simplicity of the first Christians. Seeing bishops as

“traitours unto God,” they placed power in the congre-

gation of members — hence the name Congregationalist

for their churches. Inspired by John Calvin, many

Puritans embraced predestination, the idea that God

saved only a few chosen people. Church members

often lived in great anxiety, worried that God had not

placed them among the “elect.” Some hoped for a con-

version experience, the intense sensation of receiving

God’s grace and being “born again.” Other Puritans

relied on “preparation,” the confidence in salvation that

came from spiritual guidance by their ministers. Still

others believed that they were God’s chosen people,

the new Israelites, and would be saved if they obeyed

his laws.

Roger Williams and Rhode Island To maintain

God’s favor, the Massachusetts Bay magistrates purged

their society of religious dissidents. One target was

Roger Williams, the Puritan minister in Salem, a

coastal town north of Boston. Williams opposed the

decision to establish an official religion and praised the

Pilgrims’ separation of church and state. He advocated

toleration, arguing that political magistrates had

authority over only the “bodies, goods, and outward

estates of men,” not their spiritual lives. Williams also

questioned the Puritans’ seizure of Indian lands. The

magistrates banished him from the colony in 1636.

Williams and his followers settled 50 miles south

of Boston, founding the town of Providence on land

purchased from the Narragansett Indians. Other reli-

gious dissidents settled nearby at Portsmouth and

Newport. In 1644, these settlers obtained a corporate

charter from Parliament for a new colony — Rhode

Island — with full authority to rule themselves. In

Rhode Island, as in Plymouth, there was no legally

established church, and individuals could worship

God as they pleased.

Anne Hutchinson The Massachusetts Bay magis-

trates saw a second threat to their authority in Anne

Hutchinson. The wife of a merchant and mother of

seven, Hutchinson held weekly prayer meetings for

women and accused various Boston clergymen of plac-

ing undue emphasis on good behavior. Like Martin

Luther, Hutchinson denied that salvation could be

earned through good deeds. There was no “covenant

of works” that would save the well-behaved; only a

“covenant of grace” through which God saved those

he predestined for salvation. Hutchinson likewise

declared that God “revealed” divine truth directly to

individual believers, a controversial doctrine that the

Puritan magistrates denounced as heretical.

The magistrates also resented Hutchinson because

of her sex. Like other Christians, Puritans believed

that both men and women could be saved. But gender

equality stopped there. Women were inferior to men

in earthly affairs, said leading Puritan divines, who

told married women: “Thy desires shall bee subject to

thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Puritan

women could not be ministers or lay preachers, nor

could they vote in church affairs. In 1637, the magis-

trates accused Hutchinson of teaching that inward

grace freed an individual from the rules of the Church

and found her guilty of holding heretical views.

Banished, she followed Roger Williams into exile in

Rhode Island.

Other Puritan groups moved out from Massa-

chusetts Bay in the 1630s and settled on or near the

Connecticut River. For several decades, the colonies of

Connecticut, New Haven, and Saybrook were inde-

pendent of one another; in 1660, they secured a charter

from King Charles II (r. 1660–1685) for the self-

governing colony of Connecticut. Like Massachusetts

Bay, Connecticut had a legally established church and

an elected governor and assembly; however, it granted

voting rights to most property-owning men, not just to

church members as in the original Puritan colony.

COMPARE AND

CONTRAST

What made New England

different from New France

and New Netherland?

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 63

The Puritan Revolution in England Meanwhile, a

religious civil war engulfed England. Archbishop Laud

had imposed the Church of England prayer book on

Presbyterian Scotland in 1637; five years later, a rebel

Scottish army invaded England. Thousands of English

Puritans (and hundreds of American Puritans) joined

the Scots, demanding religious reform and parliamen-

tary power. After years of civil war, parliamentary

forces led by Oliver Cromwell emerged victorious. In

1649, Parliament beheaded King Charles I, proclaimed

a republican Commonwealth, and banished bishops

and elaborate rituals from the Church of England.

The Puritan triumph in England was short-lived.

Popular support for the Commonwealth ebbed after

Cromwell took dictatorial control in 1653. Following

his death in 1658, moderate Protestants and a resur-

gent aristocracy restored the monarchy and the hierar-

chy of bishops. With Charles II (r. 1660–1685) on the

throne, England’s experiment in radical Protestant

government came to an end.

For the Puritans in America, the restoration of the

monarchy began a new phase of their “errand into the

wilderness.” They had come to New England expecting

to return to Europe in triumph. When the failure of the

English Revolution dashed that sacred mission, min-

isters exhorted congregations to create a godly repub-

lican society in America. The Puritan colonies now

stood as outposts of Calvinism and the Atlantic repub-

lican tradition.

Puritanism and Witchcraft Like Native Americans,

Puritans believed that the physical world was full of

supernatural forces. Devout Christians saw signs of

God’s (or Satan’s) power in blazing stars, birth defects,

and other unusual events. Noting after a storm that the

houses of many ministers “had been smitten with

Lightning,” Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan theo-

logian, wondered “what the meaning of God should

be in it.”

Puritans were hostile toward people who they

believed tried to manipulate these forces, and many

were willing to condemn neighbors as Satan’s “wizards”

or “witches.” People in the town of Andover “were

much addicted to sorcery,” claimed one observer, and

“there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as

well as any astrologer.” Between 1647 and 1662, civil

authorities in New England hanged fourteen people for

witchcraft, most of them older women accused of

being “double-tongued” or of having “an unruly spirit.”

The most dramatic episode of witch-hunting

occurred in Salem in 1692. Several girls who had expe-

rienced strange seizures accused neighbors of bewitch-

ing them. When judges at the accused witches’ trials

allowed the use of “spectral” evidence — visions of evil

beings and marks seen only by the girls — the accusa-

tions spun out of control. Eventually, Massachusetts

Bay authorities tried 175 people for witchcraft and exe-

cuted 19 of them. The causes of this mass hysteria were

complex and are still debated. Some historians point to

group rivalries: many accusers were the daughters or

servants of poor farmers, whereas many of the alleged

witches were wealthier church members or their

friends. Because 18 of those put to death were women,

other historians see the episode as part of a broader

The Protestant Almanack, 1700

The conflict between Protestants and Catholics took

many forms. To reinforce the religious identity of English

Protestants, a writer using the pseudonym Philopretes

published this almanac that charted not only the passage

of the seasons (and the influence of the pagan signs of the

“Zodiack”) but also the “Pernicious Revolutions of the Papacy

against the Lord and his Anointed.” Cambridge University Library.

64 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

Puritan effort to subordinate women. Still others focus

on political instability in Massachusetts Bay in the early

1690s and on fears raised by recent Indian attacks in

nearby Maine, which had killed the parents of some of

the young accusers. It is likely that all of these causes

played some role in the executions.

Whatever the cause, the Salem episode marked a

major turning point. Shaken by the number of deaths,

government officials now discouraged legal prosecu-

tions for witchcraft. Moreover, many influential people

embraced the outlook of the European Enlightenment,

a major intellectual movement that began around 1675

and promoted a rational, scientific view of the world.

Increasingly, educated men and women explained

strange happenings and sudden deaths by reference to

“natural causes,” not witchcraft. Unlike Cotton Mather

(1663–1728), who believed that lightning was a super-

natural sign, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and

other well-read men of his generation would investi-

gate it as a natural phenomenon.

A Yeoman Society, 1630–1700 In building their

communities, New England Puritans consciously

rejected the feudal practices of English society. Many

Puritans came from middling families in East Anglia, a

region of pasture lands and few manors, and had no

desire to live as tenants of wealthy aristocrats or submit

to oppressive taxation by a distant government. They

had “escaped out of the pollutions of the world,” the

settlers of Watertown in Massachusetts Bay declared,

and vowed to live “close togither” in self-governing

communities. Accordingly, the General Courts of

Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut bestowed land on

groups of settlers, who then distributed it among the

male heads of families.

Widespread ownership of land did not mean

equality of wealth or status. “God had Ordained differ-

ent degrees and orders of men,” proclaimed Boston

merchant John Saffin, “some to be Masters and

Commanders, others to be Subjects, and to be com-

manded.” Town proprietors normally awarded the

largest plots to men of high social status who often

became selectmen and justices of the peace. However,

all families received some land, and most adult men

had a vote in the town meeting, the main institution of

local government (Map 2.7).

In this society of independent households and self-

governing communities, ordinary farmers had much

more political power than Chesapeake yeomen and

European peasants did. Although Nathaniel Fish was

one of the poorest men in the town of Barnstable — he

owned just a two-room cottage, 8 acres of land, an

ox, and a cow — he was a voting member of the town

meeting. Each year, Fish and other Barnstable farmers

levied taxes; enacted ordinances governing fencing,

roadbuilding, and the use of common fields; and chose

The Mason Children

This 1670 portrait of David, Joanna, and

Abigail Mason by an unknown painter

illustrates the growing prosperity of

well-to-do Boston households. All three

wear white linen edged with fine lace

and expensive ribbons. Eight-year-old

David is dressed like a gentleman; his

slashed sleeves, kid gloves, and silver-

tipped walking stick represent the height

of English fashion. Puritans, with their

plain style, were uneasy about such

finery. As minister Samuel Torrey com -

plained, “a spirit of worldliness, a spirit

of sensuality” was gaining strength in the

younger generation. The Fine Arts Museums

of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial

Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D.

Rockefeller III, 1979.7.3. © Fine Arts

Museums of San Francisco.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 65

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Connecticut River

Housatonic River

Long Island

CONNECTICUT

MASSACHUSETTS

RHODE

ISLAND

(after Wood)

BERKSHIRE MOUNTAINS

Newtown

Derby

Waterbury

Wallingford

Guilford

Wethersfield Farmington

Windsor Hartford

Woodstock

Northfield Greenfield

Deerfield Sunderland

Hadley

Westfield

Worcester

Oxford

Hampton

Haverhill

Ipswich

Manchester

Newton

Salem

Sudbury

Dedham

Medfield

Barnstable

Andover

Hatfield

Plymouth

PENNACOOK

ABENAKI

MASSACHUSET

WAMPANOAG

M

SAKONNET

OHEGAN

PEQUOT

NARRAGANSETT

NIPMUCK

MAHICAN

Wethersfield,

1640

0 0.5 1 mile

Meeting House

Andover, 1650–1692

Nucleated to dispersed

in fifty years

New houses

By 1650

By 1692

Meeting House

(after Vaughn)

(after Andrews)

0 2 4 miles

Merrimack River

Meeting House

The key to the right indicates that

a central purpose of this map is to

show the geographic distribution of

nucleated and dispersed villages. Why

are there so many nucleated towns

in the Connecticut River Valley and

so many dispersed settlements in

eastern Massachusetts?

The map of Andover shows how an originally nucleated

settlement changed over time into a dispersed town.

New farms tended to be located farther and farther

from the meeting house and town center, represented

by a triangle on the town plan.

Wethersfield in 1640 is an example

of a nucleated village, with house

lots clustered around the meeting

house and fields arranged in

geometric patterns in the

surrounding countryside.

The field boundaries in Wethersfield indicate

that the land is flat in the Connecticut River

Valley. In contrast, the pattern of roads and

paths in Andover suggests a hilly topography.

These uplands gave the Merrimack River a

strong current and many rapids, which were

later harnessed for industrial development.

(See Map 9.1 on page 288.)

Village types

Nucleated

Initially nucleated,

dispersed by 1700

Continuous English

settlements by 1700

Roads

Field boundaries

Dispersed

Indian settlements

N

S

W E

0 10 20 kilometers

0 10 20 miles

MAP 2.7

Settlement Patterns in New England Towns, 1630–1700

Throughout New England, colonists pressed onto desirable Indian lands. Initially, most Puritan

towns were compact: families lived close to one another in village centers and traveled daily to

work in the surrounding fields. This 1640 map of Wethersfield, Connecticut, a town situated on the

broad plains of the Connecticut River Valley, shows this pattern clearly. The first settlers in Andover,

Massachusetts, also chose to live in the village center. However, the rugged topography of eastern

Massachusetts encouraged the townspeople to disperse. By 1692 (as the varied location of new

houses shows), many Andover residents were living on farms distant from the village center.

66 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

the selectmen who managed town affairs. The farmers

also selected the town’s representatives to the General

Court, which gradually displaced the governor as the

center of political authority. For Fish and thousands of

other ordinary settlers, New England had proved to be

a new world of opportunity.

Instability, War, and Rebellion

Everywhere in the colonies, conflicts arose over the

control of resources, the legitimacy of colonial leaders’

claims to power, and attempts to define social and cul-

tural norms. Periodically, these conflicts flared spec-

tacularly into episodes of violence. Each episode has its

own story — its own unique logic and narrative — but

taken together, they also illustrate the way that, in their

formative stages, colonial societies pressured people to

accept new patterns of authority and new claims to

power. When these claims were contested, the results

could quickly turn deadly.

New England’s Indian Wars

Relations between colonists and Indians in early New

England were bewilderingly complex. Many rival

Indian groups lived there before Europeans arrived; by

the 1630s, these groups were bordered by the Dutch

colony of New Netherland to their west and the

various English settlements to the east: Plymouth,

Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New

Haven, and Saybrook. The region’s Indian leaders cre-

ated various alliances for the purposes of trade and

defense: Wampanoags with Plymouth; Mohegans with

Massachusetts and Connecticut; Pequots with New

Netherland; Narragansetts with Rhode Island.

Puritan-Pequot War Because of their alliance

with the Dutch, the Pequots became a thorn in the

side of English traders. A series of violent encounters

began in July 1636 with the killing of English trader

John Oldham and escalated until May 1637, when a

combined force of Massachusetts and Connecticut

The Hurons’ Feast of the Dead

Hurons buried their dead in temporary

raised tombs so they could easily care for

their spirits. When they moved their

villages in search of fertile soil and better

hunting, the Hurons held a Feast of the

Dead and reburied the bones of their own

deceased (and often bones from other

villages) in a common pit lined with beaver

robes. This solemn ceremony united living

as well as dead clan members, strengthen-

ing the bonds of the Huron Confederacy. It

also was believed to release the spirits of

the dead, allowing them to travel to the

land where the first Huron, Aataentsic, fell

from the sky, “made earth and man,” and

lived with her son and assistant, Iouskeha.

Library of Congress.

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 67

militiamen, accompanied by Narragansett and Mohe-

gan warriors, attacked a Pequot village and massacred

some five hundred men, women, and children. In the

months that followed, the New Englanders drove the

surviving Pequots into oblivion and divided theirlands.

Believing they were God’s chosen people, Puritans

considered their presence to be divinely ordained.

Initially, they pondered the morality of acquiring

Native American lands. “By what right or warrant can

we enter into the land of the Savages?” they asked

themselves. Responding to such concerns, John

Winthrop detected God’s hand in a recent smallpox

epidemic: “If God were not pleased with our inheriting

these parts,” he asked, “why doth he still make roome

forus by diminishing them as we increase?” Experiences

like the Pequot War confirmed New Englanders’ confi-

dence in their enterprise. “God laughed at the Enemies

of his People,” one soldier boasted after the 1637 mas-

sacre, “filling the Place with Dead Bodies.”

Like Catholic missionaries, Puritans believed that

their church should embrace all peoples. However, their

strong emphasis on predestination — the idea that God

saved only a few chosen people — made it hard for

them to accept that Indians could be counted among

the elect. “Probably the devil” delivered these “miser-

able savages” to America, Cotton Mather suggested,

“in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would

never come here.” A few Puritan ministers committed

themselves to the effort to convert Indians. On Martha’s

Vineyard, Jonathan Mayhew helped to create an

Indian-led community of Wampanoag Christians.

John Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian and

created fourteen Indian praying towns. By 1670, more

than 1,000 Indians lived in these settlements, but rela-

tively few Native Americans were ever permitted to

become full members of Puritan congregations.

Metacom’s War, 1675–1676 By the 1670s, Euro-

peans in New England outnumbered Indians by three to

one. The English population had multiplied to 55,000,

while native peoples had diminished from an estimated

120,000 in 1570 to barely 16,000. To the Wampanoag

leader Metacom (also known as King Philip), the pros-

pects for coexistence looked dim. When his people cop-

ied English ways by raising hogs and selling pork in

Boston, Puritan officials accused them of selling at “an

under rate” and restricted their trade. When Indians

killed wandering hogs that devastated their cornfields,

authorities prosecuted them for violating English prop-

erty rights (American Voices, p. 68).

Metacom concluded that the English colonists had

to be expelled. In 1675, the Wampanoags’ leaderforged

a military alliance with the Narragansetts and Nip-

mucks and attacked white settlements throughout New

England. Almost every day, settler

William Harris fearfully reported,

he heard new reports of the

Indians’ “burneing houses, take-

ing cattell, killing men & women

& Children: & carrying others

captive.” Bitter fighting continued

into 1676, ending only when the

Indian warriors ran short of gun-

powder and the Massachusetts Bay government hired

Mohegan and Mohawk warriors, who killed Metacom.

Metacom’s War of 1675–1676 (which English set-

tlers called King Philip’s War) was a deadly affair.

Indians destroyed one-fifth of the English towns in

Metacom (King Philip), Chief of the Wampanoags

The Indian War of 1675–1676 left an indelible mark on the

history of New England. This painting from the 1850s, done

on semitransparent cloth and lit from behind for effect, was

used by traveling performers to tell the story of King Philip’s

War. Notice that Metacom is pictured not as a savage but

as a dignified man. No longer in danger of Indian attack,

nineteenth-century whites in New England adopted a

romanticized version of their region’s often brutal history.

© Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont.

UNDERSTAND POINTS

OF VIEW

How did New Englanders’

religious ideas influence

their relations with neigh-

boring Native American

peoples?

68

The Causes of

Metacom’s War

A M E R I C A N

VOICES

John Easton

A Relacion of the Indyan Warre

John Easton was the deputy governor of Rhode Island and

a Quaker. Like many Quakers, Easton was a pacifist and

tried to prevent the war. He wrote this “Relacion” shortly

after the conflict ended.

In [January 1675], an Indian was found dead; and by

a coroner inquest of Plymouth Colony judged mur-

dered. . . . The dead Indian was called Sassamon, and

a Christian that could read and write. . . .

The report came that . . . three Indians had confessed

and accused Philip [of employing them to kill Sassamon,

and that consequently] . . . the English would hang Philip.

So the Indians were afraid, and reported that . . . Philip

[believed that the English] . . . might kill him to have his

land. . . . So Philip kept his men in arms.

Plymouth governor [Josiah Winslow] required him to

disband his men, and informed him his jealousy [his

worry about land seizure] was false. Philip answered he

would do no harm, and thanked the Governor for his

information. The three Indians were hung [on June 8,

1675]. . . . And it was reported [that] Sassamon, before his

death had informed [the English] of the Indian plot, and

that if the Indians knew it they would kill him, and that

the heathen might destroy the English for their wicked-

ness as God had permitted the heathen to destroy the

Israelites of old.

So the English were afraid and Philip was afraid and

both increased in arms; but for forty years’ time reports

and jealousies of war had been very frequent that we did

not think that now a war was breaking forth. But about a

week before it did we had cause to think it would; then to

endeavor to prevent it, we sent a man to Philip. . . .

He called his council and agreed to come to us;

[Philip] came himself, unarmed, and about forty of his

men, armed. Then five of us went over [to speak to the

Indians]. Three were magistrates. We sat very friendly

together [June 14–18]. We told him our business was to

endeavor that they might not . . . do wrong. They said that

was well; they had done no wrong; the English wronged

them. We said we knew the English said that the Indians

wronged them, and the Indians said the English wronged

them, but our desire was the quarrel might rightly be

decided in the best way, and not as dogs decide their

quarrels.

The Indians owned that fighting was the worst way;

then they propounded how right might take place; we

said by arbitration. They said all English agreed against

them; and so by arbitration they had had much wrong,

many square miles of land so taken from them, for the

English would have English arbitrators. . . .

Another grievance [of the Indians]: the English cattle

and horses still increased [and that] . . . they could not

keep their corn from being spoiled [by the English

livestock]. . . .

So we departed without any discourtesies; and sud-

denly [c. June 25] had [a] letter from [the] Plymouth

governor, [that] they intended in arms to [subjugate]

Philip . . . and in a week’s time after we had been with

the Indians the war thus begun.

Source: John Easton, “A Relacion of the Indyan Warre, by Mr. Easton, of Roade Isld.,

1675,” in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 7–17.

Edward Randolph

Short Narrative of My Proceedings

Edward Randolph, an English customs official in Boston,

denounced the independent policies of the Puritan colo-

nies and tried to subject them to English control. His “Short

Narrative,” written in 1675, was a report to his superiors in

London.

Various are the reports and conjectures of the causes of

the present Indian war. Some impute it to an impudent

zeal in the magistrates of Boston to Christianize those

heathen before they were civilized and enjoining them the

The causes of — and responsibility for — every American war are much debated,

and the war of 1675–1676 between Puritans and Native Americans is no excep-

tion. The English settlers called it King Philip’s War, suggesting that the Wampa-

noag chief Metacom (King Philip) instigated it. Was that the case? We have no

firsthand Indian accounts of its origins, but three English accounts offer differ-

ent versions of events. Given the variation among the accounts and their frag-

mentary character, how can historians reconstruct what “really happened”?

69

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

1. Compare what these documents say about the causes of

the war. Where do the documents agree and disagree

about these causes?

2. According to Randolph, what did the magistrates of

Massachusetts Bay believe to be a major cause of the

war? Could historians verify or disprove their explana-

tion? How? What additional sources of evidence might

be useful?

3. Drawing from these sources, who was the prime instiga-

tor of the war? Which documents provide the most

compelling evidence for your conclusion? Why?

where they lived]. . . . They plundered the nearest houses

that the inhabitants had deserted [on the rumor of a war],

but as yet offered no violence to the people, at least none

were killed. . . . However, the alarm was given by their

numbers, and hostile equipage, and by the prey they

made of what they could find in the forsaken houses.

An express came the same day to the governor

[c. June 25], who immediately gave orders to the captains

of the towns to march the greatest part of their compa-

nies [of militia], and to rendezvous at Taunton. . . .

The enemy, who began their hostilities with plunder-

ing and destroying cattle, did not long content themselves

with that game. They thirsted for English blood, and they

soon broached it; killing two men in the way not far from

Mr. Miles’s garrison. And soon after, eight more at Mat-

tapoisett, upon whose bodies they exercised more than

brutish barbarities. . . .

These provocations drew out the resentment of some

of Capt. Prentice’s troop, who desired they might have

liberty to go out and seek the enemy in their own quarters

[c. June 26].

Source: Benjamin Church, Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War Which Began in

the Month of June, 1675, ed. Thomas Church (Boston: B. Green, 1716).

strict observation of their laws, which, to a people so rude

and licentious, hath proved even intolerable. . . . While

the magistrates, for their profit, put the laws severely

in execution against the Indians, the people, on the

other side, for lucre and gain, entice and provoke the

Indians . . . to drunkenness, to which those people are

so generally addicted that they will strip themselves to

their skin to have their fill of rum and brandy. . . .

Some believe there have been vagrant and jesuitical

[French] priests, who have made it their business, for

some years past, to go from Sachem to Sachem [chief to

chief], to exasperate the Indians against the English and

to bring them into a confederacy, and that they were

promised supplies from France and other parts to

extirpate the English nation out of the continent of

America. . . . Others impute the cause to some injuries

offered to the Sachem Philip; for he being possessed of a

tract of land called Mount Hope . . . some English had a

mind to dispossess him thereof, who never wanting one

pretence or other to attain their end, complained of inju-

ries done by Philip and his Indians to their stock and

cattle, whereupon Philip was often summoned before the

magistrate, sometimes imprisoned, and never released

but upon parting with a considerable part of his land.

But the government of the Massachusetts . . . do

declare [that because of the sins of the people] . . . God

hath given the heathen commission to rise against

them. . . . For men wearing long hair and periwigs made

of women’s hair; for women . . . cutting, curling and

laying out the hair. . . . For profaneness in the people

not frequenting their [church] meetings.

Source: Albert B. Hart, ed., American History Told by Contemporaries (New York:

Macmillan, 1897), 1: 458–460.

Benjamin Church

Entertaining Passages

Captain Benjamin Church fought in the war and helped

end it by capturing Metacom’s wife and son and leading

the expedition that killed the Indian chieftain. Forty years

later, in 1716, Church’s son Thomas wrote an account of

the war based on his father’s notes and recollections.

While Mr. Church was diligently settling his new

farm . . . Behold! The rumor of a war between the English

and the natives gave a check to his projects. . . . Philip,

according to his promise to his people, permitted them to

march out of the neck [of the Mount Hope peninsula,

70 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

Massachusetts and Rhode Island and killed 1,000 set-

tlers, nearly 5 percent of the adult population; for a

time the Puritan experiment hung in the balance. But

the natives’ losses — from famine and disease, death in

battle, and sale into slavery — were much larger: about

4,500 Indians died, one-quarter of an already dimin-

ished population. Many of the surviving Wampanoag,

Narragansett, and Nipmuck peoples moved west, inter-

marrying with Algonquian tribes allied to the French.

Over the next century, these displaced Indian peoples

would take theirrevenge, joining with FrenchCatholics

to attack their Puritan enemies. Metacom’s War did not

eliminate the presence of Native Americans in south-

ern New England, but it effectively destroyed their

existence as independent peoples.

Bacon’s Rebellion

At the same time that New England fought its war with

Metacom, Virginia was wracked by a rebellion that

nearly toppled its government. It, too, grew out of a

conflict with neighboring Indians, but this one inspired

a popular uprising against the colony’s royal governor.

Like Metacom’s War, it highlighted the way that a land-

intensive settler colony created friction with Native

American populations; in addition, it dramatized the

way that ordinary colonists could challenge the right of

a new planter elite to rule over them.

By the 1670s, economic and political power in

Virginia was in the hands of a small circle of men who

amassed land, slaves, and political offices. Through

headrights and royal grants, they controlled nearly half

of all the settled land in Virginia; what they could not

plant themselves, they leased to tenants. Freed inden-

tured servants found it ever harder to get land of their

own; many were forced to lease lands, or even sign new

indentures, to make ends meet. To make matters worse,

the price of tobacco fell until planters received only a

penny a pound for their crops in the 1670s.

At the top of Virginia’s narrow social pyramid was

William Berkeley, governor between 1642 and 1652

and again after 1660. To consolidate power, Berkeley

bestowed large land grants on members of his council.

The councilors exempted these lands from taxation

and appointed friends as justices of the peace and

county judges. To win support in the House of

Burgesses, Berkeley bought off legislators with land

grants and lucrative appointments as sheriffs and tax

collectors.But socialunrest erupted when the Burgesses

took the vote away from landless freemen, who by now

constituted half the adult white men. Although property-

holding yeomen retained their voting rights, they were

angered by falling tobacco prices, political corruption,

and “grievous taxations” that threatened the “utter ruin

of us the poor commonalty.” Berkeley and his allies

were living on borrowed time.

Frontier War An Indian conflict ignited the flame of

social rebellion. In 1607, when the English intruded,

30,000 Native Americans resided in Virginia; by 1675,

the native population had dwindled to only 3,500. By

then, Europeans numbered some 38,000 and Africans

another 2,500. Most Indians lived on treaty-guaranteed

territory along the frontier, where poor freeholders

and landless former servants now wanted to settle,

demanding that the natives be expelled or extermi-

nated. Their demands were ignored by wealthy plant-

ers, who wanted a ready supply of tenants and laborers,

and by Governor Berkeley and the planter-merchants,

who traded with the Occaneechee Indians for beaver

pelts and deerskins.

Fighting broke out late in 1675, when a vigilante

band of Virginia militiamen murdered thirty Indians.

Defying Berkeley’s orders, a larger force then sur-

rounded a fortified Susquehannock village and killed

five leaders who came out to negotiate. The Susquehan-

nocks retaliated by attacking outlying plantations and

killing three hundred whites. In response, Berkeley

proposed a defensive strategy: a series of frontier forts

to deter Indian intrusions. The settlers dismissed this

scheme as a militarily useless plot by planter-merchants

to impose high taxes and take “all our tobacco into

their own hands.”

Challenging the Government Enter Nathaniel

Bacon, a young, well-connected migrant from England

who emerged as the leader of the rebels. Bacon held a

position on the governor’s council, but he was shut out

of Berkeley’s inner circle and differed with Berkeley on

Indian policy. When the governor refused to grant him

a military commission, Bacon mobilized his neighbors

and attacked any Indians he could find. Condemning

the frontiersmen as “rebels and mutineers,” Berkeley

expelled Bacon from the council and had him arrested.

But Bacon’s army forced the governor to release their

leader and hold legislative elections. The newly elected

House of Burgesses enacted far-reaching reforms that

curbed the powers of the governor and council and

restored voting rights to landless freemen.

These much-needed reforms came too late. Poor

farmers and servants resented years of exploitation by

wealthy planters, arrogant justices of the peace, and

CHAPTER 2 American Experiments, 1521–1700 71

“wicked & pernicious Counsellors.” As one yeoman

rebel complained, “A poor manwho has only his labour

to maintain himself and his family pays as much [in

taxes] as a man who has 20,000 acres.” Backed by 400

armed men, Bacon issued a “Manifesto and Declaration

of the People” that demanded the removal of Indians

and an end to the rule of wealthy “parasites.” “All the

power and sway is got into the hands of the rich,” Bacon

proclaimed as his army burned Jamestown to the

ground and plundered the plantations of Berkeley’s

allies. When Bacon died suddenly of dysentery in

October 1676, the governor took revenge, dispersing

the rebel army, seizing the estates of well-to-do rebels,

and hanging 23 men.

In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s leaders

worked harder to appease their humble neighbors.

But the rebellion also coincided with the time when

Virginia planters were switch-

ing from indentured servants,

who became free after four

years, to slaves, who labored for

life. In the eighteenth century,

wealthy planters would make

common cause with poorer

whites, while slaves became the

colony’s most exploited workers. That fateful change

eased tensions within the free population but commit-

ted subsequent generations of Americans to a labor

system based on racial exploitation. Bacon’s Rebellion,

like Metacom’s War, reminds us that these colonies

were unfinished worlds, still searching for viable

foundations.

SUMMARY

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, three

types of colonies took shape in the Americas. In

Mesoamerica and the Andes, Spanish colonists made

indigenous empires their own, capitalizing on pre-

existing labor systems and using tribute and the dis-

covery of precious metals to generate enormous wealth,

which Philip II used to defend the interests of the

Catholic Church in Europe. In tropical and sub-

tropical regions, colonizers transferred the plantation

complex — a centuries-old form of production and

labor discipline — to places suited to growing exotic

crops like sugar, tobacco, and indigo. The rigors of

plantation agriculture demanded a large supply of

labor, which was first filled in English colonies by

indentured servitude and later supplemented and

eclipsed by African slavery. The third type of colony,

neo-European settlement, developed in North Amer-

ica’s temperate zone,where European migrants adapted

familiar systems of social and economic organization

in new settings.

Everywhere in the Americas, colonization was, first

and foremost, a process of experimentation. As resources

Nathaniel Bacon

Condemned as a rebel and a traitor in his own time,

Nathaniel Bacon emerged in the late nineteenth century as

a southern hero, a harbinger of the Confederate rebels of

1860–1865. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia

Antiquities, founded in 1888, commissioned this stained-glass

window depicting Bacon in dual guises of a well-dressed

gentleman and a rebel in body armor. Installing Bacon’s por -

trait in a window of the Powder Magazine in Williamsburg

(built by Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1715), explained

a leading member of the association, would connect “present

Virginia with her great and noble past” and commemorate

those who shed their “blood for Virginia and the South.”

Preservation Virginia.

PLACE EVENTS

IN CONTEXT

In what ways was Bacon’s

Rebellion symptomatic

of social tensions in the

colony of Virginia?

72 PART 1 TRANSFORMATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA, 1450–1700

from the Americas flowed to Europe, monarchies were

strengthened and the competition among them —

sharpened by the schism between Protestants and

Catholics — gained new force and energy. Establish-

ing colonies demanded political, social, and cultural

innovations that threw Europeans, Native Americans,

and Africans together in bewildering circumstances,

triggered massive ecological change through the

Columbian Exchange, and demanded radical adjust-

ments. In the Chesapeake and New England — the two

earliest regions of English settlement on mainland

North America — the adjustment to new circum-

stances sparked conflict with neighboring Indians and

waves of instability within the colonies. These external

and internal crises were products of the struggle to

adapt to the rigors of colonization.