APUSH SUMMER HW

CHAPTER 1

Native Americans Before European Conquest

• During the Ice Age, around 35,000 years ago, the ocean levels dropped, exposing land bridges between Eurasia and the Americas. Asian nomads immigrated to Alaska first, becoming the first Native Americans. 

  • As the Ice Age slowly ended around 10,000 years ago, the glaciers melted, raising the ocean levels again, creating a barrier between the continents again. This left the Native Americans trapped/isolated in the Americas. 

• These Americans explored throughout the Americas with the empty valleys that the Ice Age exposed, going from Alaska to the tip of South America. 

• By the time Europeans arrived in 1492, there were already about 54 million people inhabiting the two continents. 

  • During this time, they split into cultural groups, evolving over 2,000 languages. 

• Some sophisticated civilizations include: Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, Aztecs in Mexico. 

  • The most densely populated Native American societies thrived on large-scale agriculture, particularly a wild grass turned corn crop called maize. 

    • The civilizations further north and east were less dependent on agriculture. Some Native Americans fished and whaled, some hunted deer and buffalo, and others gathered acorns, wild rice, berries, roots, and wild plants. 

• Anasazis (Navajo for ancient ones): built impressive cliff-dwellings throughout the present-day Southwest, including an elaborate structure of more than six hundred interconnected rooms at Chaco Canyon in modern-day New Mexico. However, due to prolonged drought, these ancient cultures fell into decline around 1300. 

• Cahokia: near present-day East St Louis, had over 25,000 people, was the center of a vast trading network that stretched across the South and lower Midwest. Due to flooding, climate change, and deforestation, Mississippian settlements including Cahokia began to disappear around 1100-1300. 

• Iroquois: relied heavily on agriculture, and lived in stable, permanent villages. The Iroquois Confederacy developed the political and organizational skills to sustain a military alliance that menaced its neighbors for centuries. 

• Three-sister farming: growing bean trellis of the cornstalks, and squash covering the planting mounds to retain moisture in the soil. 

  • This technique came from the Southeastern Atlantic seaboard region of North America around 1000. 

  • The rich diet provided by this environmentally clever farming technique produced some of the highest population densities on the continent: the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples. 

• In the northeast, some Native Americans maintained summer and winter villages, moving between them as the seasons changed. 

• In more settled agricultural groups, women tended the crops, while men hunted, fished, gathered fuel, and cleared fields for planting. 

  • This structure gave women more power/authority, and often the power and possessions of a family would be passed down the female side of the family. 

• Trade between Native groups spread exotic goods to the far corners of the continent: shells, shark and alligator teeth, copper, silver, furs, obsidian, mica, and pottery. 

Portuguese Conquest in the New World (Africa and America)

• Around 1000, sailors from Scandinavia landed at a place near present-day Newfoundland that had a lot of wild grapes, so they named the spot Vinland. At the time, no strong nation supported them, so their flimsy settlements were soon abandoned, and their discovery was mostly forgotten. 

• When Christians went on missions to convert the world to Christianity, in Muslim and Asian nations, they learned about silk, drugs, perfume, colorful draperies, and spices. The luxuries from the East were extremely expensive in Europe, so many Europeans were looking for a way to obtain these in a cheaper way. 

• In 1295, Marco Polo returned to Europe after sailing the world, claiming that he had found China (he actually saw the Americas). 

  • After this, Europeans wanted to follow him to see what was there. 

• For the longest time, European sailors refused to sail south along the coast of West Africa because they could not find their way home against the strong winds and currents. 

• In 1450, Portuguese mariners overcame those obstacles.

  • They had developed the caravel, a ship that could sail more closely into the wind. They also discovered that they could return to Europe by sailing northwest from the African coast, where the prevailing westward breezes would carry them home. 

• The Portuguese set up trading posts along the African shore for the purchase of gold and slaves. 

• Techniques from Arab & African slavers (that the Portuguese later adopted): 

  • Buying slaves from farther places so that they could not easily flee/be rescued (even if they are significantly more expensive). 

  • Deliberately separating slaves from the same tribes, mixing unlike people so they couldn’t organize and rebel. 

• Portuguese and later Spanish slaves worked on the sugar plantations established on the African islands of Madeira, the Canaries, São Tome, and Principe. Due to this, slave trading became a big business. Around 40,000 Africans were carried away to the sugar plantation islands between 1450-1500. Millions more were traded after the discovery of the Americas. 

Spanish Conquest in the New World

• When Spain became unified under Christian rule in 1469-1492 after the marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, they wanted to defeat Portugal in the conquest of colonizing the New World. 

  • Because Portugal controlled the African coast and thus India (because the journey to India requires sailing around Africa), Spain decided to go to the west.

• Christopher Columbus was a skilled Italian sailor, who persuaded the Spanish monarchs to provide him with 3 small ships and a crew so he could explore the west. His superstitious crew, scared of exploring the unknown ocean, grew increasingly rebellious. 

• October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed at an island in the Bahamas. He thought the place he had stumbled upon was India, so he called the Native Americans Indians, which somehow stuck (Native Americans are often called Indians). 

• Native New World plants such as tobacco, maize, beans, tomatoes, and potato revolutionized the international economy and European diet. These foods were among the most important Native American gifts to the Europeans and to the rest of the world. 

  • Around 3/5 of the crops cultivated worldwide today originated in the Americas. 

• In exchange for the American crops, the Europeans brought Old World crops and animals to the New World. Columbus returned to the Caribbean island Hispaniola (present-day Haiti) in 1493 with 17 ships that unloaded 1,200 men and a lot of cows, swine, and horses. 

  • The horses soon reached the North American mainland through Mexico. Over the next 2 centuries, they spread as far as Canada. 

    • Southwestern Native American tribes like the Comanche, Apache, and Navajo swiftly adopted the horse, and the northern tribes like the Lakota, Shoshone, and Blackfeet also did later.

• The Europeans also unknowingly brought germs that caused smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria. Old World diseases quickly devastated the Native Americans. Generations of not having those illnesses wiped out their natural protective antibodies. Without natural resistance to the sicknesses, many Native Americans died. Within 50 years of Spanish arrival, the population of the Taino people in Hispaniola dwindled from 1 million to 200. 

• The germs spread among the New World people fast, and most of the Native Americans affected by the diseases had never come in contact with a European. In the centuries after Christopher Columbus’ “discovery,” 90% of the Native Americans died from disease, violence, and enslavement. 

  • Entire cultures, languages, and ancient ways of life were extinguished forever. 

  • The vengeful Native American slaves kneaded dirty blood into their masters’ bread, but to little effect. 

• Later, Native Americans unintentionally took revenge by infecting the early European explorers with syphilis, a deadly STD that was unknown to Europe. 

• Spain secured its claim to Columbus’ discovery in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), dividing the new land with Portugal. Most of it went to Spain, but Portugal received some territory in Africa and Asia, and some areas in South America (modern-day Brazil). 

• The islands of the Caribbean Sea (Columbus called it the “West Indes”) served as offshore bases for planning of Spanish invasion of the mainland Americas. Supplies were stored here, and men and horses could be rested. 

• The loosely organized and vulnerable Native communities of the West Indies also let the Spanish test techniques for them to use to conquer the advanced Indigenous civilizations of Mexico and Peru. 

  • The most important such technique was the institution known as the encomienda. The Spanish government commanded Indigenous people with the promise of converting them to Christianity (slavery with a different name). 

    • Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish missionary, was appalled by the encomienda system in Hispaniola, and called it “a moral pestilence invented by Satan.”

• In 1519, Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba to Mexico with 16 horses and hundreds of men on 11 ships. 

  • On the island of Cozumel, he rescued a Spanish castaway who had been enslaved for years by the Mayans. 

  • He also rescued a Native enslaved woman, Malinche, who knew Mayan and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs). 

    • Malinche eventually learned Spanish and was baptized with the Spanish name of Doña Marina.

    • Malinche’s name in the Mexican language turned into malinchista, or “traitor.” 

  • Because of this, Cortés had the advantage of having interpreters that understood the speech of the Natives he was about to conquer. 

• Europeans were extremely interested in the gold and silver in Mexico and Peru, which Cortés had heard tales of. After arriving, he boldly burned his ships. 

• Through his interpreters, Cortés learned that the Aztecs had consolidated their power and wealth by conquering rival city-states. Cortés promised revenge to these Aztec rivals by gathering a force of around 20,000 Native Americans and went to Tenochtitlán. 

  • Hearing this, Aztec chief Moctezuma sent ambassadors with gifts to welcome the approaching Spaniards. The ambassadors reported back that Cortés said that they only want gold. 

  • Moctezuma believed that Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl, whose return from the eastern sea was predicted in Aztec legends, so Moctezuma allowed them to approach his capital unopposed. 

• At first, Moctezuma welcomed Cortés, but Spaniards’ hunger for gold became exhausting. On June 30, 1520, the Aztecs attacked the Spanish. Cortés surrounded the city with his armed forces, and the Aztecs surrendered on August 13, 1521. 

  • In 1521, there was also a smallpox epidemic in the Valley of Mexico, weakening the Aztec population. 

• The Aztec empire surrendered to 3 centuries of Spanish rule. Tenochtitlán’s temples were replaced with Christian cathedrals. The Native population of Mexico shrank from 20 million to 2 million people in less than a century. 

• In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro crushed the Incas of Peru. 

• By 1600, Spain was swimming in New World silver, mostly from the mines at Potosí (present-day Bolivia), with the help of Native Americans slaves. 

  • Their new riches paid for their trade with Asia (the Asians didn’t care for much other than silver). 

  • Some scholars believe that this wealth was what fueled growth of the capitalist economic system and the modern banking system. 

• The conquistadors brought crops, animals, language, laws, customs, religion. 

  • The surviving Indigenous people in Mexico intermarried with the Europeans, creating mestizos: people of mixed Indigenous and European heritage. 

    • To this day, Mexico’s population is 60-90% mestizo. 

• Mexicans celebrate Columbus Day as the Dia de la Raza. 

• Other early Spanish explorers include: 

• In 1508, 1513 and 1521, Juan Ponce de León explored Puerto Rico and Florida (which he at first thought was an island) to find gold. He died by a Native American arrow. 

• In 1513, Vasco Nuñez Balboa, “discovered” the Pacific Ocean off Panama and claimed for Spain all the lands in that ocean. 

• In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Spain to the tip of South America with five tiny ships. Although he was slain by the inhabitants of the Philippines, one of his ships made it back to Spain in 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. 

• In 1539-1542, Hernando de Soto, with 600 armored men, undertook a gold-seeking expedition. He discovered and crossed the Mississippi River. He died of fever and wounds. 

• In 1540-1542, Francisco Coronado, in search of gold, wandered through Arizona, New Mexico, and even Kansas. While exploring, he discovered the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and enormous herds of buffalo (bison). 

• In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the California coast, but failed to find anything of much interest. 

• Early explorers from other countries include: 

  • In 1497-1498, England wanted a share of the new land, so they sent Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) to explore the northeastern coast of North America. 

  • In 1524, The French king dispatched an Italian mariner, Giovanni da Verrazano, to explore the Atlantic coast of North America. 

  • In 1534, the French conquistador Jacques Cartier journeyed hundreds of miles up the St. Lawrence River. 

  • In the 1680s, France sent Robert de La Salle to explore the Mississippi River. 

• The Spanish tried to safeguard the northern borders of the New World so that other explorers wouldn’t be able to come, and to convert more Indigenous people to Christianity. 

• In 1565, in order to block French explorers, the Spanish built a fortress at St. Augustine, Florida. 

• In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate led an expedition through the Sonora Desert from Mexico into the Rio Grande Valley. The Spaniards abused the Pueblo peoples they encountered. 

  • In the Battle of Acoma in 1599, the Spanish (winners) sentenced young Native American survivors to 20 years of servitude. 

  • In 1609, the Spanish proclaimed the area to be the province of New Mexico and founded its capital at Santa Fe in 1610. 

    • Because of the little gold they could find in New Mexico, the mission to convert as many natives to Christianity became the central institution in New Mexico. 

    • Pueblo Revolt of 1680: The Pueblo rebels destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers. The Indigenous peoples rebuilt a kiva (ceremonial religious chamber) on the ruins of the Spanish plaza at Santa Fé. It took almost 50 years for the Spanish fully to reclaim New Mexico from the Pueblos. 

• In 1716, the Spanish began to establish settlements in Texas and California. 

  • Texas: some Spanish refugees from the Pueblo Uprising fled to Texas, and a few missions were established there (ex. Alamo). Despite this, the Spanish presence remained weak past Mexico. 

  • California: In 1769, Spanish missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra founded a chain of 21 missions, from San Diego to Sonoma (north of San Francisco). Serra converted around 300,000 Native Californians, and turned them into slaves. However, due to the diseases brought by the Europeans, most of the converted native Californians died. 

• As the Spanish pushed northward from Mexico, they found their own horses. When the Pueblos revolted and seized Spanish horses in 1680, Indigenous peoples were breeding and trading them. The horse speed gave the natives an enormous new military advantage. 

• Black Legend: Spain's Protestant enemies spread the belief that the Spanish were cruel conquerors who tortured and killed Native Americans, stole their gold, spread diseases, and left only suffering behind. 

CHAPTER 2

French Conquest in the New World

• Because France was fighting domestic wars, they were late to the colonization. During this time, Jacques Cartier, searching for Asia (like Columbus), ended up along the shore of eastern Canada. He claimed Canada for France. 

• The leader of the Québec settlement was Samuel de Champlain. Champlain had served for 2 years as a spy in New Spain, where he witnessed the power, wealth, and violence of the Spanish empire in the New World. Champlain’s approach to negotiating with the Native Americans was respectful. 

  • Champlain agreed to accompany the neighboring Huron tribe into battle against the Iroquois. Because of this, Iroquois hated the French. They ravaged later French settlements in the Ohio Valley, and often chose to side with the English. 

• The population of Catholic New France grew fast. By 1750, there were only around 60,000 white colonists (meaning that the natives and original colonists had kids). 

  • French peasants were able to own land, so had little economic incentive to move. 

  • Protestant colonists, who might have had a religious motive to migrate, were denied a refuge in this raw colony, so they were forced to stay. 

• The French government still favored its Caribbean island colonies over Canada. 

  • The Caribbean islands had sugar and rum, which can be sold. 

• Different groups of French colonizers had 3 goals: wealth (primarily beaver hunting in New France), souls (converting natives to catholicism), and empire

  • New France had one valuable item: the beaver. Beaver-pelt hats were used for warmth. Beaver hunters were known as “coureurs de bois,” or “runners of the woods.” Some of the European hunters also recruited Native Americans to help run the business as demand grew in Europe. 

    • The natives recruited into the fur business were exposed to Old World diseases and the effects of alcohol. Mass slaughtering beavers also went against their religious beliefs. 

  • Some French catholic missionaries (notably the Jesuits) tried to save the natives from the beaver hunters by converting them to catholicism. 

  • An ambitious Robert de La Salle went down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682 to block Spanish settlers, and named the interior basin Louisiana (in honor of Louis XIV). Robert de La Salle returned to the Gulf 3 years later to establish an empire, but landed in Spanish Texas instead of the Mississippi delta, and was murdered in 1687. 

    • The French continued to try to block the Spanish out of the Gulf of Mexico by establishing fortified outposts in Mississippi and Louisiana, and most importantly in New Orleans (1718). 

    • The French established forts and trading posts in Illinois at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes. This was the center of their colony. 

    • Because the French had less people, they relied on the nearby tribes for trading, negotiating, and military assistance more than the English. 

English Conquest in the New World

• From around 1500-1550, England and Spain were allies, so England didn’t bother forming colonies in the New World. In 1530, when King Henry VIII started the Protestant Reformation by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, there was a long war between the Spanish, English, and England’s Irish colonies. In 1580, there was a new Protestant ruler, Queen Elizabeth I. 

• Unlike previous rulers, Queen Elizabeth I wanted colonies in the New World because:

1. To promote Protestantism

2. To seize Spanish treasure ships and raid Spanish settlements (even though at this point, the Spanish and English were technically at peace)

• Early English attempts of colonization: 

  • Sir Humphrey Gilbert was the first English explorer to attempt to colonize the New World, but unfortunately died at sea in 1583. 

  • Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother was inspired by him and set sail to North Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1585, but his colony didn’t last long and mysteriously disappeared (likely swallowed up by the wilderness or the natives). 

• When Spain found out that England had been attempting to colonize behind their backs, Phillip II established an “Invincible Armada” to attack England. In 1588, the Spanish attacked England through the English Channel. Because a storm arose, most of the Spanish ships became cripped, leading England to win. In 1604, England and Spain signed a peace treaty. 

  • Within a few decades of this loss, much of the Spanish Caribbean and Spanish Netherlands would secure their independence. 

• In 1606, the Virginia Company of London received a charter from King James I for a settlement in the New World. The intention was to endure for only a few years, find gold and other riches, and only then would King James I send ships for them to come home. This way, the colonists would have more motivation to find wealth. The plan was to have temporary settlements, and no one would have expected anything permanent. 

  • Their ships landed near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, but because the Native Americans attacked them immediately, they sailed a bit more north, and settled at Jamestown, named after King James I on May 24, 1607. 

  • Although Jamestown was easy to defend, it was mosquito infested. Many of the settlers died of starvation after they spent all their time scrubbing for gold instead of hunting for food. 

• In 1608, Captain John Smith took over. He had been kidnapped in December 1607 and was mock subject to execution by the Native American chief Powhatan. His 11 year old daughter Pocahontas “saved” Smith by dramatically standing between the war clubs and John Smith (the whole thing is planned and scripted). The symbolism of the ritual intended to impress Smith with Powhatan’s power and with the Native peoples’ desire for peaceful relations with the Virginians. 

  • Following this, Pocahontas became a mediator between the Native Americans and the settlers, mostly to provide food for the English settlers. The English and Virginians also exchanged several young boys to spend years living in the other’s community and serve as translators, diplomats, and spies. 

• By the start of 1610, only 60 out of the 400 colonists survived. Due to their desperation, they were reduced to eating dogs, cats, mice, rats, and even went as far as digging up corpses for food. 

• The English were ready to go home, and planned to sail home in the spring of 1610. They were met at the mouth of the James River by a new governor, Lord De La Warr. He ordered the settlers back to Jamestown and imposed a harsh military regime on the colony, and soon undertook aggressive military action against the Native Americans. 

• Relations between the settlers and the natives were tense, especially because the starving settlers raided all the native people’s food supplies. 

• It became even worse when Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610. He carried orders from the Virginia Company, like a declaration of war against the Native Americans in the Jamestown area. His troops raided Native American villages, burned houses, confiscated provisions, and torched cornfields. This became the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1614. 

  • A peace settlement ended this war, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe. This was the first known interracial union in Virginia. 

• The Native Americans struck back in 1622. A series of Native American attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John Rolfe. In response, the Virginia Company issued new orders calling for “a perpetual war without peace or truce.” Their raids reduced the Native population and drove the survivors farther westward. 

• In the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, the Native Americans made one last effort to dislodge the Virginians, where they were defeated by the English. The peace treaty of 1646 banished the Chesapeake Native Americans from their ancestral lands and formally separated Native from white areas of settlement. 

  • By 1669, an official census revealed that only about 2,000 Native Americans remained in Virginia, less than 10% of the population the original English settlers had encountered in 1607. 

  • By 1685, the English considered the Powhatan peoples extinct. 

    • Like all other native peoples throughout the New World, the Powhatans were extremely susceptible to European diseases. They had epidemics of smallpox and measles. They also had no leader, as Powhatan died in 1618, and no successor was successful in uniting the scattered Native American tribes. The Powhatans also served no economic function for the Virginia colonists: they provided no labor source, and were useless after the settlers started growing their own food. The natives could be disposed of without harm to the colonial economy. 

Dutch Conquest in the New World

• In the 1500’s, the oppressed people of the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic Spain with the help of Protestant England, and won their independence. Soon, many Dutch looked to make their fortunes overseas. Between England and the Netherlands, 3 great Anglo-Dutch naval wars were fought in the 1600’s. 

• The Dutch also became a leading colonial power, conquering the East Indies. There, it maintained a profitable empire for over 3 centuries. 

• Dutch Companies:

  • Dutch East India Company: was virtually a state within a state (because it was so massive). At one time, they supported an army of 10,000 men and a fleet of 190 ships, 40 of them men-of-war vessels. They managed the colonies in the East Indies, primarily Indonesia. This was the main commercial interest for the Dutch. 

  • Dutch West India Company: maintained profitable enterprises in the Caribbean. They both traded and raided. They captured a fleet of Spanish treasure ships with loot worth $15 million. The company also established outposts in Africa and a thriving sugar industry in Brazil. 

• Seeking still greater riches, they employed an English explorer, Henry Hudson. Disregarding orders to sail northeast, he ventured into Delaware Bay and New York Bay in 1609 and then ascended the Hudson River. There, he filed a Dutch claim. 

• New Netherland started in 1623-1624, established by the Dutch West India Company for its fur trade. They famously purchased the island of Manhattan from its Native American inhabitants for a small quantity of goods: shirts, powder, musket, axes, knives, and other useful items. Because the Native American residents continued to live on the island, the settlers built a fence (palisade) to protect the settlement, for which Wall Street is named. 

• New Amsterdam (later New York City) was a company town. In time, New Amsterdam attracted a cosmopolitan population, as is common in seaport towns. 23 Jews arrived in 1654, refugees from religious persecution in Catholic Brazil. A French Jesuit missionary, visiting in the 1640s, noted that 18 different languages were being spoken in the streets. 

• The Dutch colonies were falling apart: 

  • The directors and generals of the Dutch colonies were incompetent. 

  • Company shareholders demanded their dividends, even at the expense of the colony’s welfare. 

  • New Netherland was a 2nd priority for the Dutch government. 

  • Local Native Americans were infuriated by Dutch cruelties and retaliated. 

  • New England opposed Dutch expansion, and English settlers in Connecticut forced the Dutch out of the rich river valley. 

  • The Swedish trespassed on Dutch preserves (in 1638-1655) by planting the colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River. 

    • During and after the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, where King Gustavus Adolphus paved the way for Protestantism, the outburst of energy in Sweden caused it to enter the colonial race in the Americas. 

    • After finding out about the Swedish intrusion, the Dutch dispatched a military expedition in 1655, led by Peter Stuyvesant (he lost a leg in the West Indies and called “Father Wooden Leg” by the Native Americans). The Dutch won, and the Swedish rule on the Delaware River ended. 

• New Netherlands lay under a shadow of vigorous English colonies to their north, and it was full of New England immigrants (½ of the population was English in 1664). 

• In 1664, King Charles II granted the Hudson area of New Netherland to his brother, the Duke of York. A strong English military attacked New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant was forced to surrender without firing a shot. New Amsterdam was renamed New York. 

• Although the English took over New York, they kept many of the autocratic properties of the Dutch settlement. Once the corrupt English governors arrived, they granted large plots of land to influential people, such as the Livingstons and the De Lanceys. These 2 factors discouraged European immigrants from coming to New York. 

• Dutch influences: 

  • Names that stuck in New York from the Dutch include Harlem (Haarlem), Brooklyn (Breuckelen), and Hell Gate (Hellegat). 

  • Social customs: easter eggs, Santa Claus, waffles, bowling, sleighing, skating, and golf

Native Americans After European Conquest

• Large-scale European colonization disrupted Native American life: such as demographic and cultural transformations. 

  • Some changes were harmless: Horses (stolen, strayed, or purchased) from Spanish invaders were used for migration to the Great Plains in the 1700’s. They adopted an entirely new way of life as hunters (most lived in forests before). 

  • Most changes were detrimental: 

    • European diseases: entire cultures and tribes were wiped out. Natives had to reinvent themselves without the accumulated wisdom of their elders (who most likely passed from diseases) or family networks. 

    • Forced migration (to get away from the Europeans): some groups mixed together, forming a new group. (ex. the Catawba nation in the southern Piedmont region was formed this way)

    • Trade: used traditional barter-and-exchange systems to get European goods, commonly firearms. The desire for firearms intensified competition among the tribes for access to hunting grounds that could supply the skins/pelts that European traders wanted, starting rivalries and mini wars. 

• The Native Americans that lived farther inland had the advantage of time and space to adapt to the European invasion. 

  • Some Native American tribes were able to have a balance between native powers and European powers. For example, the Algonquins in the Great Lakes area became a regional power. 

  • Different Native Americans tribes would band together to form a larger population. As a result, English or French traders wanting to do business with them would have to conform to native ways, often marrying a native wife. 

CHAPTER 3

The English Colonies: Virginia

• When the first Virginian colonists found no treasure (gold, jewels) in the Chesapeake Bay, they looked to find other ways to make the colony profitable. John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas) found tobacco, and became leader of the tobacco industry. Tobacco was especially profitable because of its quick and simple processing. By 1612, he had perfected his methods, which got rid of the bitterness and tang. As the European demand for tobacco grew, Virginia went through a tobacco rush. The colonists focused on tobacco exclusively, and even had to import some of their food. 

• Demand for more tobacco came with demand for labor. In 1619, a Dutch warship sold around 20 African slaves to Jamestown. This transaction evolved into a deep-rooted slave system that bound Africans and their descendants to a life of slavery. 

  • In 1619, this system was not formalized yet. Slaves were too expensive for the colonists, and few were able to be bought (few were brought to Virginia). 

  • In 1650, there were 300 Africans in Virginia. In 1700, there were about 58,000 Africans, making up 14% of the colonial population. 

• In 1619, the Virginia Company authorized settlers to create a representative self-government, known as the House of Burgesses. 

  • In 1624, King James I made Virginia a royal colony directly under his control by revoking the charter of the bankrupt and problematic Virginia Company. 

The English Colonies: Maryland

• Maryland was founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore (from a prominent English Catholic family) and around 200 other settlers. It was the 4th English colony and the 2nd plantation colony. He created it for financial profits and a refuge for Catholics, as Protestant England was still persecuting Catholics. Lord Baltimore gave his Catholic relatives mansions. 

  • The arrogant land barons (the lowest rank of nobility) were mostly Catholic. The upset backcountry planters were mostly Protestant. 

  • Due to the backcountry planters’ resentment, there was a rebellion, and the Baltimore family lost their exclusive rights for a short period of time. 

• Despite tensions, Maryland prospered due to tobacco farming. Instead of slaves, Maryland used white indentured servants (people who willingly worked without pay for a few years to pay off debts or to fund transportation to the colonies)

  • In the late 1600’s, things changed when African slaves were mass imported in both Maryland and Virginia. 

• Lord Baltimore allowed freedom of religion, but the large population of Protestants threatened to overpower the Catholics and place restrictions on them, like in England. 

  • The Catholics of Maryland passed the Act of Toleration in 1649, which guaranteed toleration to all Christians. It also enforced the death penalty for non-Christians, commonly atheists and Jews. 

The English Colonies: The Caribbean (Jamaica, Barbados, etc…)

• When Spain was dealing with their rebellious Dutch provinces in the early 1600’s, England took over their colonies in the Caribbean. Around 1650, England secured several West Indian islands, with the most important being Jamaica in 1655. 

  • The West Indian economy relied heavily on sugar cane. Harvesting sugar cane was an extremely long process: it had to be planted extensively in order to produce commercially viable quantities of sugar, and was difficult to process. 

    • Extensive planting required a long process of clearing land, and the processing required sugar mills to be built, so it could be refined. 

  • Due to this, only wealthy investors could be successful in the sugar business. 

    • The sugar lords extended the business all across the West Indies. 

      • Just like in Jamestown, the West Indies only focused on sugar, so their own food was imported from the North American mainland. 

    • They imported more than 250,000 African slaves from 1640-1690. By 1700, there were about 4 African slaves for every 1 white settler. 

      • To control the slaves, English authorities defined the slaves’ legal status in “codes.” The notorious Barbados slave code of 1661 denied fundamental human rights to slaves, and gave slave owners complete control over them. 

The English Colonies: Carolina

• Smaller English farmers realized they wouldn’t be able to profit off of the West Indies, and migrated to the southern colonies of North America. In 1670, a group of English settlers from Barbados arrived in Carolina. 

• They brought a few African slaves with them, and shared the Barbados slave code model with the other settlers. 

  • The slave code inspired slave owners across America. In 1696, Carolina slave owners officially adopted a version of the Barbados slave code. 

• In the 1640’s, England fell into a civil war. In 1629, King Charles I got rid of Parliament. When he recalled it in 1640, the members were angry and beheaded Charles in 1649, and elected Oliver Cromwell to the throne. The war ended in 1660 when Charles II (Charles’ son) restored the throne. 

  • During this period, England was not focused on colonization. However, after, King Charles II became more involved in colonial affairs. 

• Carolina (named after Charles II) was formally created in 1670, granting it to the Lords Proprietors (8 of his court favorites). They hoped to grow food to provide for the sugar plantations in Barbados, and the tobacco industry in Jamestown. They also hoped to export wine, silk, olive oil, and other non-English products. 

  • The slaves that the original Carolina settlers (from Barbados) brought were used to establish an intricate slave trade in Carolina. 

  • They also had Native American slaves. With the help from natives from the Coastal Savannah area, they attacked other tribes in search for native captives to turn into slaves. Around 10,000 natives were exported to the West Indies and New England. Enslaved natives were one of the colony’s major exports. 

    • The Lords Proprietors in London actually protested against trading Native Americans in their colony, but to no avail. 

• In 1707, the natives in Savannah ended their alliance with the English in Carolina. The natives migrated to Maryland and Pennsylvania, and joined another colony founded by the Quakers under William Penn. He promised better relations between white and native people. 

  • In 1710, the English launched a series of raids that killed many natives from the coastal area of Carolina. 

• No rice seeds were sent from London in the first supply ships to Carolina (rice used to be an exotic food in England), but after much experimentation and accidental seed shipments, rice became the #1 export crop in Carolina. The Carolinians were now paying extra money for West African slaves experienced in rice farming. 

  • The Africans’ agricultural skill and relative immunity to malaria made them ideal laborers on the hot and swampy rice plantations. By 1710, African slaves became a majority for Carolinians. 

• Charles Town (named after King Charles II, modern Charleston), rapidly became the busiest seaport in the south. The village became a diverse community due to its religious tolerance, with French Protestant refugees, Jews, and others emigrating there. 

  • In Florida, the Catholic Spaniards were disgusted by the Protestant rebels. With the help of native allies, the Spanish attempted to push the English out of Carolina in Anglo-Spanish wars around the year of 1700. 

• In 1712, North Carolina and South Carolina became independent colonies. 

  • Carolina’s northern border is shared with Virginia. From Virginia, some groups of poverty-stricken outcasts and religious dissenters emigrated to Carolina. 

    • As a result, North Carolinians have been called “the epitome of Virginia’s discontent.” They also developed a strong spirit of resistance against authority. 

    • North Carolinians earned a reputation for being non-religious and being welcoming to pirates. 

• The newcomers (often squatters: people living on land that they don’t have legal rights over) raised crops (often tobacco) on small farms, with little need for slave labor. 

• Their location between aristocratic Virginia and aristocratic South Carolina led people to call it, “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” 

• After tension between governors, North Carolina was officially separated from South Carolina in 1712, and each became a royal colony. 

• Unlike South Carolina, North Carolina didn’t import large amounts of African slaves. However, they were both involved in wars between Native Americans and Europeans. 

  • In 1711, the Tuscarora tribe suddenly attacked the young settlement of New Bern. The North and South Carolinians retaliated by defeating them in the Tuscarora War. 

    • Afterwards, the Carolinians sold hundreds of natives in slave trades, and left the survivors to seek protection from the Iroquois. The Tuscarora eventually became the 6th Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. 

  • The persistent slave trading among the English in America led to the Yamasee War in 1715-1717, where the South Carolinians defeated the native tribe of Yamasee. By 1720, virtually all the coastal Native American tribes in the southern colonies disappeared (either went extinct or merged with larger tribes)

  • Despite this, near the Appalachian Mountains, the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw tribes remained powerful. They were stronger and had more people compared to the coastal tribes. For about 50 years, they managed to contain English settlement to the coastal plains, east of the mountains. 

The English Colonies: Georgia

• Georgia was officially founded in 1733 (named after King George II), and was the last of 13 mainland colonies (126 years after the 1st, and 52 years after the 12th). The English intended for Georgia to serve as a neutral zone, in order to protect the more valuable Carolinas against the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana. Additionally, they produced silk and wine. 

  • When wars broke out between Spain and England back in Europe, the Spanish in Florida would also incite chaos in Georgia. Because of this, the colony received monetary subsidies (financial incentives provided by governments to support individuals) from England, the only colony to have this benefit. 

  • Because Georgia was launched by a group of philanthropists, they were determined to have it be: 

    • A safe shelter for prisoners of debt in England. 

    • A colony of independent farmers, keeping slavery out of Georgia (at first). They feared that slaves could easily escape to Spanish Florida (to become free, as slavery was prohibited in Florida). 

  • One of the founders was James Oglethorpe, an imperialist and philanthropist. He became interested in prison reform after one of his friends died in jail due to debt. He was a competent military leader, and successfully fought off Spanish attacks. 

  • People consider him Georgia’s savior, due to his energetic leadership and the fact that he heavily mortgaged his own personal fortune. 

• Savannah (in Georgia) was a melting-pot community, with German Lutherans and Scots Highlanders among others living there. Many Christian missionaries arrived in Savannah to work among debtors and natives (all Christian worshipers except Catholics enjoyed religious toleration). 

  • Among them, there was John Wesley (who later returned to England and founded the Methodist Church). 

• Georgia grew slowly, and was the least populated of the colonies at the end of the colonial period. They weren’t able to plant a lot of crops due to the unhealthy climate, early restrictions on Black slaves, and Spanish attacks. 

  • In 1750, slavery became legal in Georgia after the founders gave in to their settlers’ demands. 

• Large amounts of land being owned by a few wealthy elites created a strong aristocratic society everywhere in the South, except in North Carolina and parts of Georgia. 

  • The vast majority of the land was plantations and farms, which slowed the growth of cities and made establishing churches and schools both difficult and expensive. 

    • In 1671, the governor of Virginia (Sir William Berkeley) thanked God that no free schools or printing presses existed in his colony, as he believed that widespread literacy and a free press led to disobedience. 

• Excessive tobacco growth exhausted land, to the point where the soil’s nutrients were completely depleted. This drove settlers westward, where they were once again met with confrontations with Native Americans. 

The English Colonies: Massachusetts

• In 1517, Martin Luther, a German friar (a male member of a Roman Catholic church who takes vows of poverty and obedience), protested against the Catholic doctrines at Wittenberg’s Cathedral. Luther declared that the Bible alone was the source of God’s word, not priests and popes. 

  • This ignited the Protestant Reform in Europe that lasted more than a century. 

  • John Calvin of Geneva was a religious leader that followed Martin Luther’s ideas, creating Calvinism. 

    • Calvinism became the dominant theology among the New England Puritans and other American settlers, including the Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and communicants of the Dutch Reformed Church. 

• In 1536, John Calvin created a doctrine called Institutes of the Christian Religion. 

  • He argued that God was all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, while humans were weak and wicked because of our sins. He said that God knew who was going to heaven or hell from the moment of their creation, and that good deeds can’t save those whose predestination was hell. 

    • Calvinists did not use their belief of predetermined salvation as an excuse to sin. Since no one knew for sure if they were chosen for heaven, they constantly looked for proof of God’s grace. 

• In the 1530’s, Calvin’s doctrines became popular in England, just as King Henry VIII was cutting ties with the Roman Catholic Church, and making himself the head of the Church of England. Henry intended to keep some Roman rituals. 

  • Some English religious reformers (who were mostly poor: Calvinism fed on social unrest and provided spiritual comfort to the poor) wanted a total purification of English Christianity. 

  • Over time, Puritans became increasingly unhappy with the slow progress of the Protestant Reformation in England. 

• Some extreme Puritans believed that only “visible saints” (people who feel God’s grace in their souls) should be able to go to church, but the Church of England allowed everyone to go to church (this upset the Puritans because that meant the “saints” had to share the space with the “damned”). 

  • This extreme group of Puritans, known as Separatists, wanted to break away entirely from the Church of England. 

• King James I was the head of the state and the church in 1603-1625. He thought that if his subjects could disobey him as their spiritual leader, they would also be able to disobey him as their political leader. Therefore, he threatened to harass the Separatists out of England. 

• Fleeing royal persecution, a group of purified Protestants departed for Holland, The Netherlands, in 1608. During their 12 years there, they were concerned about their children becoming too Dutch. They wanted to find a place where they could live as English men and women, and also as purified Protestants: they decided on America. 

• After negotiating with the Virginia Company, a group of purified Protestants in England secured rights to settle under the authority of the Virginia Company. They planned to set sail on the Mayflower. The group in Holland joined the Mayflower. 

• The Mayflower had a total of 102 people (1 died during the voyage, and 1 baby was born, keeping the population at 102). In 1620, 65 days after they set sail from Plymouth, England, they arrived off the coast of New England. 

  • The Pilgrims didn’t initially land at Plymouth Rock, but actually had smaller boats to explore the coast to find their way there. 

• The Pilgrims settled along the coast of Plymouth Bay, a site they thought was uninhabited. The spot was actually within the territory of the Wampanoag Nation. This area was outside the domain of the Virginia Company, so the settlers became squatters. 

  • European diseases reduced the Wampanoag population (originally 40,000) by over ⅔ before the Mayflower’s arrival. Fearful of further infection, they kept their distance from the Pilgrims. 

• Before disembarking, the Pilgrim leaders signed the Mayflower Compact. It was a simple agreement to submit to the will of the majority under the regulations agreed upon. The compact was signed by 41 adult men, though not by the servants and 2 seamen. 

  • A prominent Pilgrim leader was William Bradford, a self-taught scholar who read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. He was elected governor 30 times in the annual elections. 

• During the Pilgrims’ first winter of 1620-1621, only 44 out of the 102 survived. At some point, only 7 were well enough to lay the dead in their graves. Yet, when the Mayflower set sail back to England in the spring, none of the Separatists left. 

• The autumn of 1621 brought large quantities of harvests, and with them the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. 

• Wampanoag leaders, seeking an alliance with the English, eventually overcame their fear of disease and made contact. Thanks to the natives’ knowledge, the colony found ways to make profits from fur, fish, and lumber. 

• By 1691, when the colony was still charterless, it merged with Massachusetts. At the time, the population of Plymouth was only around 7,000. 

• Moderate Puritans (unlike the extreme Separatist Pilgrims) sought to reform the Church of England from within. They slowly gathered support, especially in Parliament. When King Charles I dismissed Parliament in 1629 and allowed Archbishop William Laud to persecute Puritans, many Puritans feared England was heading toward catastrophe. 

  • In 1629, a group of non-Separatist Puritans secured a royal charter to form the Massachusetts Bay Company. They proposed to establish a settlement in the less-fertile Massachusetts area, with Boston becoming its hub. 

  • The original expedition of 1630 had 11 ships carrying nearly 1,000 immigrants. 

  • Continuing turmoil in England led to more waves of Puritans in Massachusetts in the following decade. 

    • During the Great English Migration of the 1630s, about 70,000 refugees left England, but not all of them were Puritans, and only about 20,000 came to Massachusetts. Most went to the West Indies, especially the sugar-rich island of Barbados. 

• The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor was John Winthrop, who was a successful attorney and manor lord in England. He believed that he had a calling from God to lead. He served as governor for 19 years. He and other settlers led Massachusetts prosper within fur trading, fishing, and shipbuilding industries. 

  • Due to this, Massachusetts Bay became the biggest and most influential of the New England colonies. 

• Before, Massachusetts was only a place of refuge for the Pilgrims. Soon, they allowed all “freemen” (Puritan adult males) to come as well. 

• Voting in Massachusetts:

  • In provincial elections, only men who went to church could vote. Women could not vote. Around 40% of adult men in the colony were able to vote. 

  • The larger provincial government was not a democracy. Leaders like Governor Winthrop didn’t trust regular citizens, and thought democracy was the worst way to run a society. 

    • Despite this, voters were able to elect the governor and legislature every year (for the larger provincial government). Voters were approved members of the Puritan church. 

• Puritans believed that the government’s only job should be to enforce God’s laws on everyone, whether they believed in them or not. Believers and Non-believers both had to pay taxes to the government and church. 

• Religious leaders had a lot of power, as they influenced admission to church membership (they can control who gets to vote, who gets church benefits, etc…). 

  • However, the powers of religious leaders were not absolute. A congregation could hire and fire ministers, and set their salaries. Religious leaders (clergymen) were also not allowed to hold formal political office. 

    • This is because back in England, the Puritans suffered from the actions of religious leaders in political positions. 

    • In a way, the colonists endorsed the idea of a separate church and state. 

• A prominent church figure was John Cotton. He was a Puritan who studied at Cambridge University. He immigrated to Massachusetts to avoid persecution for his criticism of the Church of England. He defended the government’s duty to enforce religious rules. 

• Puritans were often very intense due to their strong spiritual beliefs. Like John Winthrop, they believed in “callings” to do God’s work on Earth. The “Protestant Ethic” they shared involved serious commitment to work and focused on secular and materialistic activities. Although, the Puritans also enjoyed simple pleasures, like eating and drinking plentifully, singing songs, and making love. 

  • The Puritans passed strict laws to limit human instincts and keep pleasures simple (in New Haven, a married couple was fined for kissing in public). These strict rules were called "sumptuary laws" or "blue laws" (because they were printed on blue paper). 

    • To the puritans, hell was a terrifyingly real place, which made their lives deadly serious. A local bestselling poem, Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom (1662), vividly described the horrifying, eternal agony of sinners in hell, showing how Jesus would ignore their screams for mercy and banish them to suffer forever. 

• Religious unrest in Massachusetts:

  • At first, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was relatively peaceful because everyone shared the same Puritan beliefs, but religious differences soon led to arguments. When the Quakers arrived in 1656, they refused to respect the authority of the Puritan ministers, so the Puritans punished them with fines, whippings, banishment, and public hangings (they hung 4 Quakers who refused to leave, including Mary Dyer) in Boston. 

  • Anne Hutchinson was a brilliant, strong-willed mother of 14, who used the Puritans' own religious logic to argue against them. She argued that living a good, holy life did not prove you were going to heaven (since Puritans believe God already decided who was going to heaven or hell), and people saved by God did not need to obey laws. 

    • During her trial in 1638, she outsmarted her judges, but ruined her case by claiming she received instructions through a direct revelation from God. This was considered the ultimate sin, so the judges banished her from the colony. She walked to Rhode Island while pregnant, and eventually to New York, where she and almost her entire family were killed by Native Americans. The Puritan leader John Winthrop viewed this as God's punishment. 

  • Roger Williams was a well-liked Salem minister who was young and radical, spoke his mind, and an extreme Separatist. He constantly pressured other ministers to break away from the corrupt Church of England. He attacked the legality of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official charter by arguing that the government had stolen land from the natives without paying them fairly. He also argued that the Puritan government should have no right to regulate people’s religious behavior. 

    • By 1635, the colony authorities found Williams guilty of spreading “new and dangerous opinions.” The government officials planned to banish him to England (they were afraid he would start a rival colony), but Williams managed to escape and fled in the winter of 1636. 

The English Colonies: Rhode Island

• With the help of the Native American tribe Narragansett, Roger Williams fled from Massachusetts Bay to the Rhode Island area, where he established Providence and built a Baptist church (likely the first in America). He made it one of the most liberal English settlements in the New World. He established freedom of religion, even extending his tolerance to Jews and Catholics. He made sure there was no mandatory attendance at church, and no taxes to support a state church. He allowed all men to vote (he later took this right away from men who did not own a certain amount of property). He opposed special privilege of any sort, creating freedom of opportunity. He also sheltered Quakers despite disagreeing with their views. 

• Other scattered settlements formed throughout Rhode Island, filled with exiles who fled the suffocating religious rules of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These people had little in common with Roger Williams, except for the fact that they were unwelcome everywhere else. Boston’s Puritan clergy mocked the Rhode Island colony as a “sewer where the Lord’s debris rotted.” 

  • Because Rhode Island was filled with outcasts, it became extremely independent and individualistic. 

• What started as an illegal squatter colony in 1636, finally gained official recognition with a Parliamentary charter in 1644. 

The English Colonies: Maine (as part of Massachusetts Bay until 1820)

• Fishermen and fur traders operated on the Maine coast years before Plymouth was founded. After Sir Ferdinando Gorges failed at colonizing the area in 1623, Massachusetts Bay bought the land from his heirs in 1677, keeping Maine as a part of Massachusetts for around 150 years before it became a separate state. 

The English Colonies: New Hampshire

• New Hampshire also grew from coastal fishing and trading, and was absorbed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641 through a loose interpretation of their charter. Annoyed by this greed, King Charles II took New Hampshire away from Massachusetts in 1679 and turned it into a royal colony. 

The English Colonies: Connecticut

• The fertile Connecticut River Valley attracted Dutch and English settlers, leading to the founding of Hartford in 1635. In 1636, a group of Boston Puritans led by Reverend Thomas Hooker also moved to the Hartford area. 

  • In 1639, these settlers drafted the Fundamental Orders, a constitution that created a government democratically controlled by its wealthier citizens. Its core ideas were later used for Connecticut's colonial charter and state constitution. 

• Meanwhile, in 1639, a community was formed in New Haven by Puritans. They created a strict alliance between the church and the government. The New Haven colonists angered King Charles II by sheltering 2 of the judges who sentenced his father (King Charles I) to death. In 1662, King Charles II granted a charter to Connecticut that forced New Haven to merge with the more democratic Connecticut Valley settlements. 

The English Colonies: New Jersey

• In 1664, New Jersey was established when the Duke of York granted the land to 2 proprietors, attracting New England farmers. 

• In 1674, West New Jersey was sold to Quakers to establish a sanctuary (this was before Pennsylvania's founding). Later, east New Jersey was also sold to the Quakers, and it merged both into a single royal colony in 1702. 

Native Americans Amidst the English Conquest

• The spread of English settlements naturally led to conflict with Native Americans. Just before the Pilgrims arrived, a devastating epidemic introduced by English fishermen killed over ⅔ of the local coastal native people. 

• The local Wampanoag people initially formed friendly relations with the Pilgrims, with the help of Tisquantum (known to the colonists as Squanto), a Wampanoag who had learned English after being kidnapped years earlier by an English captain. 

• In 1621, the Wampanoag chief Massasoit signed a treaty with the Plymouth Pilgrims and helped them celebrate the first Thanksgiving following that autumn's harvest. 

• However, as more English settlers moved into the Connecticut River Valley, peaceful relations broke down into conflict with the Pequot tribe in 1637. During the Pequot War, English militiamen and their Narragansett allies attacked a Pequot village along Connecticut's Mystic River, burning their houses (wigwams) and shooting survivors. This killed nearly all of the Pequot tribe, and kicked off 4 centuries of uneasy peace between the Puritans and the Native Americans. 

• The natives realized their best chance of resisting English expansion was uniting, so Massasoit's son Metacom (known to the English as King Philip) formed a Native alliance in 1675 and launched coordinated attacks on New England villages. This damaged settlements and forced refugees to flee to Boston. 

  • By the time King Philip’s War ended in 1676, the natives attacked 52 Puritan towns and destroyed 12. Hundreds of colonists and even more natives died. Metacom's family was sold into slavery, and Metacom himself was killed and had his head displayed on a pike in Plymouth for years. 

  • King Philip's War slowed English westward expansion for decades, but it also left local Indigenous populations severely reduced and scattered. 

  • Still, this war, alongside other uprisings like Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia and the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, demonstrated that Native American nations remained the dominant powers over most of North America in the late 1600’s. 

English Control on the American Colonies

• 4 Puritan colonies formed the New England Confederation in 1643, seeking a joint military defense against Native Americans, the French, and the Dutch. 

• The English colonies operated independently, especially when England fell into civil war in the 1640s. When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he sought to regain control over the colonies, particularly targeting Massachusetts Bay. 

  • King Charles II challenged Massachusetts by granting rival Connecticut a charter that legalized squatter settlements in 1662, and granted a new charter to Rhode Island that sanctioned a remarkably tolerant government in 1663. In 1684, the ultimate blow to Massachusetts came when London authorities revoked its colonial charter entirely. Charles II's successor, James II, continued tightening control by enforcing the Navigation Laws to limit colonial trade to English ships. 

• In 1686, the English created the Dominion of New England, encompassing all of New England, New York, and New Jersey, and placed the authoritarian Sir Edmund Andros in charge. Andros angered colonists by openly practicing non-Puritan religious customs, revoking land titles, and suppressing town meetings, courts, schools, and the press. 

  • When England's Glorious Revolution in 1688 dethroned the Catholic King James II in favor of the Dutch Protestant William III and his wife Mary II, the people of Boston revolted and drove Andros back to England after catching him trying to escape disguised in women's clothing. 

    • This revolution sparked additional uprisings across New York and Maryland in 1689-1691, until new royal governors restored order. 

  • William III and Mary II relaxed their grip on trade and Navigation Laws were weakly enforced, though the persistent presence of corrupt, appointed English officials continued to fuel growing American resentment throughout the 1700s. 

The English Colonies: Pennsylvania

• Emerging in the mid-1600s, a religious group known as the Religious Society of Friends (commonly called Quakers because they were said to “quake” under intense emotion) frequently angered civil and church authorities through their egalitarian beliefs (belief that all people are equal) and passive resistance. 

  • They refused to pay taxes supporting the Church of England, addressed everyone as equals with simple "thee" and "thou" language, refused to remove their hats for social superiors, and rejected taking allegiance oaths or joining the military due to their strict pacifism (belief that war, violence, and killing are morally unjustifiable). During their meetings, they sat in together, and any man, woman, or child could speak; they didn’t have a paid clergyman because they believed spiritual guidance was a free gift from God, not a job or career. 

    • Despite facing harsh punishment (heavy fines, beatings, imprisonment, and the deaths of hundreds of members), their commitment to civil and religious freedom endured. 

  • In 1660, 16 year old William Penn was drawn to the Quaker faith, enduring a severe beating from his father and facing intense persecution from English courts as he abandoned a potential military career to fully embrace the religion. 

• Looking to create an asylum for persecuted Quakers and experiment with liberal government ideas, William Penn looked to the New World. By then, some Quakers had already settled in areas like Rhode Island, New Jersey, and North Carolina. 

• In 1681, William Penn secured a massive grant of fertile land from King Charles II to settle debts that the English royalty owed to his dead father. King Charles II named the land Pennsylvania (meaning "Penn's woodland”) in honor of Penn's father. 

  • William Penn advertised his new colony using paid agents and promotional pamphlets published in English, Dutch, French, and German. Penn offered fully truthful promises, actively recruiting skilled traders, manual workers, and forward-thinking settlers with a generous land policy that quickly attracted a massive influx of immigrants. 

  • William Penn formally launched his colony later in 1681. There were already many Dutch, Swedish, English, and Welsh squatters along the banks of the Delaware River, which made his job of expanding the colony easier. 

• Philadelphia (meaning “brotherly love” in Greek) was more carefully planned than most colonial settlements. Philadelphia’s wide, attractive streets and town squares became a major influence on later American cities. 

  • Penn bought land from the Native Americans, including Chief Tammany (later patron saint of New York’s political Tammany Hall). His treatment of the natives was so fair that the Quakers lived among them unarmed, and some even employed the natives to babysit their children. 

    • Due to this, some southern tribes even migrated to Pennsylvania. 

• However, as non-Quaker Europeans immigrated to Philadephia, they ignored the Quakers’ policy regarding the natives, particularly the Scotish and Irish. 

• Ironically, Penn owned a small number of African slaves, even as slavery became increasingly unpopular in his colony. 

• William Penn’s government was remarkably liberal, features included:

  • An elected representative assembly. 

  • No tax-supported church. 

  • Guaranteed freedom of religion (pressure from London later forced him to exclude Catholics and Jews from voting or holding office). 

  • The only crimes that someone could be charged for were treason and murder (at the time, England only had around 200 crimes). 

  • No military defense. 

  • Immigration was unrestricted and naturalization was made easy. 

• Although the colony took a century to outlaw slavery, the humane Quaker founders quickly developed a strong opposition towards it. Their open and modern environment provided economic opportunity, civil liberty, and religious refuge all sorts of ethnic groups fleeing harsher colonies. 

• Driven by Quaker business acumen and agricultural exports, Pennsylvania grew so rapidly that by 1700, it lagged behind only Virginia and Massachusetts in population and wealth, with Philadelphia alone boasting 300 houses and 2,500 residents within 2 years. 

  • Despite this success, Penn spent only 4 years in the colony, faced constant opposition from colonists who clashed with his governors for political power. Penn’s close relationship with the Catholic King James II led to 3 treason arrests, debtor's prison, a debilitating stroke, and a sorrowful death. 

• Swedish-influenced Delaware (named after Lord De La Warr, Virginia's harsh 1610 governor) consisted of just 3 small counties closely linked to Penn's colony. Though Delaware was granted its own legislative assembly in 1703, it remained tied to Pennsylvania under the same governor until the American Revolution. 

The English Colonies: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania

• The middle colonies: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, shared several key features: fertile soil, broad lands, and heavy grain exports, earning them the nickname "bread colonies." 

  • Broad and calm rivers like the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson enabled access to the inland fur trade. 

  • Deep estuaries created thriving commercial seaports at New York, Philadelphia, and Albany. 

  • Due to being in between the southern plantations and New England, they have a balanced mix of local government types and a moderate industrial output. 

  • They were uniquely distinguished by their diverse, ethnically mixed populations, religious freedom, accessible farmland, and strong economic democracy. 

    • They were largely influenced by the compassionate Quakers. 

    • Aristocratic New York remained an exception. 

• Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, and moved to Philadelphia in 1720, when he was 17 years old. 

CHAPTER 4

Population and Diseases

• The early Chesapeake was ridden with diseases like malaria, dysentery, and typhoid, which cut years off life expectancies. Half of the people born in early Virginia and Maryland died before turning 20, few women lived past 40, and few men lived past 50. 

• Population growth was slow and relied heavily on having new English immigrants. Most of them were single young men in their late teens and early twenties, who often died soon after arriving. Men heavily outnumbered women, by around 6:1 in 1650 and 3:2 by the end of the 1600s. 

  • Family life in the Chesapeake environment was rare: men struggled to find wives and those who married often lost a spouse to death within 7 years. 

  • Few children grew up with both parents, almost no one knew a grandparent, and weak family structures contributed to widespread premarital pregnancies. 

• Nevertheless, the colonies endured as native-born residents developed immunity to local diseases and the arrival of more women fostered growing families. By the end of the 1600s, the white population began increasing through its own birthrate rather than just immigration. By the 1700s, Virginia became the most populous colony with around 59,000 people, followed by Massachusetts (56,000), then Maryland (30,000). 

Indentured Servitude & Bacon’s Revolution

• As the Chesapeake was ideal for growing tobacco, profit-driven settlers prioritized it over food crops like corn. Intense farming quickly depleted the soil, driving commercial growers to move more north, up river valleys for fresh land, which triggered more conflicts with Native Americans. 

  • Tobacco exports from the Chesapeake Bay rose from around 1.5 million pounds per year in the 1630s, to 40 million pounds per year by the end of the century. 

  • This excess supply caused tobacco prices to drop, but farmers responded by planting more acres, bringing even more tobacco to the market. 

• As local families grew too slowly, Native American families died rapidly from diseases, and African slaves became too expensive, farm owners looked to England’s massive population of displaced and unemployed farmers. These farmers became indentured servants, who agreed to work for Chesapeake masters for several years in exchange for transportation across the Atlantic, and eventually freedom (typically including corn, clothes, and sometimes a small piece of land)

  • To encourage this system of indentured servitude, Virginia and Maryland used the headright system, which awarded 50 acres of land to whoever paid for a worker’s transportation across the Atlantic. 

    • This meant wealthy masters, rather than the servants, gained the land, allowing well-off men to expand their slave investments into real estate holdings and become even more powerful. 

• Farm owners imported around 100,000 indentured servants to the Chesapeake by 1700, making these servants over ¾ of all European immigrants to Virginia and Maryland during the 1600s. 

• While the indentured servants endured hard labor with the hope of eventually owning land, the prime land eventually became scarce, and masters grew reluctant to include land in freedom dues. This left many freed workers with no land, little money, and no choice but to work for their former masters for pitifully low wages. 

  • By the end of the 1600s, the Chesapeake region was filled with impoverished, landless young men frustrated by their inability to secure land or wives. 

  • The Virginia assembly in 1670 denied most landless men from their right to vote. Governor William Berkeley famously cried over ruling a population where 6/7 people were poor, indebted, discontented, and armed. 

• In 1676, 29 year old planter Nathaniel Bacon led about 1,000 Virginians (many of them poor backcountry frontiersmen) in a rebellion over land shortages and Berkeley's refusal to retaliate against Native American attacks. 

  • They attacked Native American communities, chased Berkeley from Jamestown, and burned the capital to the ground. 

  • After Bacon suddenly died of disease, Berkeley brutally crushed the uprising by hanging over 20 rebels, drawing criticism even from King Charles II in England. 

  • Still, the lingering fear of rebellion led farm owners to seek a less rebellious labor force from African slaves. 

??

• Between Columbus's arrival and the mid 1800s, around 10 million African slaves were brought to the Americas. Only around 400,000 of them were sent to North America (mostly arriving after 1700), while the vast majority were sent to Spanish and Portuguese South America or the sugar islands of the West Indies. 

• Africans first arrived in Jamestown in 1619, but their numbers remained small. In 1670, only they made up around 2,000 of Virginia’s 35,000 residents, and just 7% of the 50,000 total people living in the southern colonies. 

  • During these early years, struggling white colonists favored cheaper white indentured servants over African slaves, as they were far more expensive and carried a high risk of early death from harsh conditions. 

  • In the 1680s, as rising wages in England reduced the supply of indentured servants, and wealthy planters became increasingly afraid of uprisings from former servants, farm owners shifted towards African slaves. 

• By around 1685, Black slaves outnumbered white servants for the first time. 

• When American traders, particularly from Rhode Island, entered the slave trade, the slave supply surged. In 1698, the Royal African Company lost its monopoly over African slaves due to intense pressure from colonial planters, creating cheaper alternatives. 

  • Most slaves brought to North America came from West Africa, near modern Senegal and Angola, where they were captured by coastal African tribes and traded to European and American merchants. The captives endured the horrific Middle Passage, with death rates reaching up to 20% before the survivors even reached the New World. 

• By 1700, enslaved Black people made up more than ⅓ of the population of South Carolina. By 1720, they outnumbered white colonists 2:1. By 1750, Black people made up nearly ½ of the population of Virginia. A few Africans (who arrived in the New World before the influx of Africans, near the end of the 1600s) gained freedom and occasionally owned slaves themselves. 

• Slaves in the North vs South: 

  • In the deepest South, slave life was especially severe, with the hostile climate and tough labor on South Carolina’s rice and indigo plantations. This led to mass deaths of slaves, and required masters to constantly import new slaves to maintain the population. 

  • By contrast, slaves in Chesapeake Bay’s tobacco plantations faced less physically demanding work. Because the plantations were also closely situated, slaves were able to keep frequent contact with friends and family. 

    • By around 1720, the number of women in the Chesapeake slave population grew enough to make family life possible. This allowed the area’s slave population to grow through natural reproduction, making it one of the rare slave societies in history to sustain itself through fertility. 

• In 1688, Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania, made the earliest known public protest against slavery in America, arguing that kidnapping people, separating families, and selling them was against the Golden Rule. 

• Despite early objections, most enslaved people taken to North America were captured along the west coast of Africa (from modern Senegal to Angola), sold to European merchants, and forced onto crowded, dangerous ships for the horrific "middle passage," a journey where death rates reached 20%. 

  • Survivors were brought to port cities like Newport or Charleston and sold into slavery at public markets. 

• While some of the earliest Africans in America gained freedom and even owned land, white colonists grew increasingly fearful as the Black population grew rapidly late in the 1600s. The legal distinction between a slave and a servant was blurry, but laws quickly changed to define slavery by race. 

• In 1662, Virginia created new slave codes that legally classified all Black people and their children as lifelong property, and forbade teaching slaves to read or write. The slave codes also included that converting to Christianity would not bring freedom. 

  • Although slavery began for economic reasons, deep-seated racial discrimination permanently shaped American laws and society, drawing a firm line between freedom and slavery based entirely on skin color. 

New England’s Growth

• New England was a much healthier environment for settlers than the disease-plagued Chesapeake Bay, as clean water and cool temperatures limited deadly microbes. On average, immigrants in New England lived 10 years more than people back in England. 

  • The average lifespan of first-generation Puritan colonists was about 70 years, similar to the average lifespan of modern Americans. 

• Most immigrants of the Chesapeake were individual males, while most immigrants of New England migrated as families. This made the family unit central to society and drove population growth through natural reproduction. 

  • Early marriages had a high birth rate. Women typically married in their early 20s, and gave birth every 2 years until menopause. 

  • Although a married woman could expect up to 10 pregnancies and 8 surviving children, the never-ending children physically drained women and filled them with a constant fear of dying in childbirth. 

    • Massachusetts Governor William Phips was one of 27 children born to a single mother!

  • Because raising children was a full-time occupation that lasted from early marriage until death, family life remained the foundation of 1600s New England. 

• The longevity of the people in New England created high family stability. Children were taught obedience and had the presence of grandparents, which led historians to believe that New England essentially “invented” the idea of grandparents. 

  • This stability resulted in low premarital pregnancy rates and social order, though legal and economic rights for women differed sharply between regions. 

    • In the South, where men died young, widows were granted strong property rights to support their families. 

    • In New England, Puritan laws required married women to give up property rights. However, they still protected the property of widows' and protected wives from spousal abuse, punishing husbands for acts like kicking a wife or drawing rude snow portraits. 

• While women could not vote and were viewed as morally weaker due to the biblical story of Eve, they posessed the more authority to make clinical decisions in areas like midwifery, with one Boston midwife delivering over 3,000 babies. 

• Puritan law emphasized the importance of the sacredness of marriage, making divorces rare. The only exceptions were in cases of abandonment (ghosting) or adultery (cheating), for which the convicted, especially women, were publicly whipped and forced to permanently wear a cloth letter "A" on their clothing. This ordeal inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. 

• New Englanders developed a tight-knit society centered on small villages and farms, and surrounding geographical boundaries, neighboring the French, Dutch, and the natives. 

• Puritan moral intensity created a strong community unity that later fueled the 19th century abolitionist movement led by Massachusetts reformers. 

• Unlike the individualistic expansion of the Chesapeake, New England was organized. 

  • Land owners received colonial legislature grants to layout planned towns featuring a central meetinghouse for worship and town hall duties, a village for militia drills, and assigned family plots for crops, wood, and pasture. 

  • Education was highly prioritized. Towns of over 50 families were required to have elementary schools, leading to widespread literacy. In 1636, just 8 years after Massachusetts was founded, Puritans established Harvard College to train ministers. Virginia didn’t establish its first institution, William and Mary, until 1693. 

• Democratic self-governance in the local Church led to political democracy through town meetings. Adult males gathered to vote for officials, hire teachers, and manage civic tasks. Thomas Jefferson hailed this as the best school of political liberty in the world. 

• As population growth scattered Puritans onto outlying farms beyond community control, the religious passion began to fade. This prompted mid-1600s preachers to deliver "jeremiads," which were scolding sermons modeled after the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, aiming to address fading religious faith and declining number of casual Christians that transition to devoted followers. 

  • To combat shrinking church membership, ministers introduced the Half-Way Covenant in 1662. This granted baptism and partial membership (though, they didn’t have the complete spiritual and civic rights of a church member) to the unconverted children of existing members. This change let more people join the church instead of just a holy few, and soon women became most of the group. 

• In 1692, tensions exploded when a group of adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, claimed to be bewitched. This ignited a hysterical witch hunt that led to the legal execution of 20 people, 19 hanged and 1 pressed to death, along with 2 dogs. 

  • Rooted in traditionalists' fears of growing commercialism (economic system with the primary focus on profit), the accusations pitted inland farming families (who had only the bare minimum of food and resources needed to stay alive) against accused "witches" linked to Salem's expanding market economy. 

  • In 1693, the hysteria finally ended when the governor (whose own wife had been accused of being a witch) prohibited further trials and pardoned the convicted. 20 years later, the legislature went on to declare that they were wrong about the convictions, and paid reparations to the victims' heirs. 

    • This permanently embedded "witch-hunting" into the American vocabulary as a metaphor for finding scapegoats during periods of social anxiety. 

• New England was shaped by its stony, glaciated soil and severe climate, which forced settlers into back-bending labor that bred a culture of penny-pinching frugality and sharp trading. Connecticut was even nicknamed "the Nutmeg State." 

• New England land wasn’t broad and fertile like in the south, so staple crops like tobacco weren’t flourishing. Due to this, black slavery was unprofitable on small farms, and the region attracted fewer European immigrants, resulting in it being less ethnically diverse. 

  • Instead of relying on one single crop, the short, rapid rivers and coastal mountains led to diversified agriculture. 

• Unlike Native Americans, who used the land seasonally for hunting and fishing without claiming individual possession, English colonists felt a duty to "improve" the earth by clearing forests for pasture and crop farms, building fences and roads, and constructing permanent settlements. This justified their overtaking of native land, as they felt the native people weren’t using all of the food and resources to the fullest extent. 

• The introduction of European livestock (pigs, horses, sheep, and cattle) radically altered the New England environment. They required constant forest clearing for pasture land while their grazing and heavy hooves compacted the soil, accelerating erosion, flooding, and even shifting local microclimates toward temperature extremes. 

• Settlers used America’s natural harbors to harvest timber for shipbuilding, commerce, and the massive exploitation of Newfoundland cod banks. They called the cod banks, the true "gold mines of New England," since they generated more wealth than Aztec treasures. This legacy is commemorated today by the "sacred cod" replica hanging in the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston. 

• The combination of Calvinism, harsh geography, and severe weather led New Englanders to be energetic, stubborn, and self-reliant, and viewed themselves as God's chosen community and spiritual hub of the universe. 

• As fresh soil led thousands of New Englanders to migrate westward to Ohio, Oregon, and beyond, they spread their orderly town models and democracy across the nation. They embedded "Yankee (someone from New England) grit" and the idealistic "New England conscience" into the broader American spirit and future reform movements. 

• Daily life for all early American colonists depended on the natural cycles of the sun and seasons. The vast majority of the colonists worked as farmers who planted in spring, tended crops in summer, harvested in fall, and prepared for the next year in winter. Rising at dawn and sleeping at dusk, settlers performed tasks after dark only if they were "worth the candle” (if something was important enough to spend money on a candle). 

• Women (enslaved or free and living in the North or South) performed domestic work like cooking, weaving, cleaning, and child care, while men cleared land, planted crops, cut firewood, and slaughtered livestock, and children assisted alongside with their schooling. 

• By 1600s European standards, life was going relatively well and land was cheap: an acre of unused soil in the northern and middle colonies cost about a single day's wages for a carpenter, who earned around 3x as much as an English carpenter did. 

• Most white immigrants were from the middle class, with the exception of indentured servants. While the primitive conditions initially limited class distinction, some prominent settlers eventually sought to replicate European social hierarchies and faced resistance from growing democratic ideals. 

  • Resentment against the upper-class sparked conflicts such as Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 in Virginia, a late-1600s Protestant uprising in Maryland, and Leisler's Rebellion in New York City from 1689-1691 between landholders and merchants. 

• Elite colonists attempted to enforce social order through restrictive laws, such as: 

  • Massachusetts banning poor people from wearing gold or silver lace in 1651

  • A 1700s Virginia tailor being jailed for horse racing

• However, these attempts to recreate rigid European class systems ultimately failed to take root in the American wilderness, where relative equality flourished for white settlers. 

CHAPTER 5

Overview of the English Colonies in the 1700s

• The popular phrase "13 original colonies" is somewhat misleading. By 1775, Britain governed 32 North American colonies, including in Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean. 

  • However, only those 13 chose to fight for independence. The reason why those specific colonies broke away is because of their unique social, economic, and political systems, and their newly developed American identity. 

• At the start of the 1700s, European settlements were largely clustered near the Atlantic coast and major rivers. Most Native Americans initially faced little direct competition, but as European trade networks brought deadly diseases that wiped out tribes, forcing the remaining survivors to migrate westward and creating conflicts with interior tribes. 

• Access to European trade goods transformed Indigenous societies. For example, the Caddo in 1718 Texas, the Osage in Arkansas, and the Chickasaw in the Southeast used horses and muskets to gain military advantages. 

• Many powerful tribes remained neutral; for example, the Iroquois signed peace with both the English and French in 1700 to remain a key neutral power for 50 years. 

Diversity in the English Colonies

• The English colonies experienced explosive growth, rising from fewer than 300,000 residents in 1700 (around 20,000 being African slaves) to 2.5 million by 1775 (around 500,000 being Black). 

  • The growth of whites mostly came from natural fertility, which doubled the population every 25 years (although around 400,000 were immigrants). 

    • In 1775, the average colonial age was 16. 

  • Due to the fast-growing colony population, the ratio of English subjects in England to colonists fell from 20:1 in 1700, to 3:1 in 1775. 

• Most colonists remained east of the Allegheny Mountains (in Virginia), though some early pioneers settled Tennessee and Kentucky in 1775. Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Maryland were the most populated colonies. 

  • 90% of the population lived in rural areas, so only Philadelphia (34,000 residents), New York, Boston, and Charleston were true cities. 

• The colonies were very diverse from the start, but more and more diverse ethnic groups immigrated to the Americas gradually. 

  • In 1775, Germans fleeing religious persecution, economic oppression, and war immigrated to the colonies, making up 6% of the population (150,000 people). They settled mainly in Pennsylvania where they were 1/3 of the city’s population. They preserved their language and customs, and didn’t have much British loyalty. 

  • In the early 1700s, many Scots and Irish people immigrated to Pennsylvania after facing economic restrictions and religious conflict in Ulster. They squatted on frontier lands, and eventually established settlements along the Great Wagon Road in Georgia. The Scots and Irish were known for their anti-government mindset, as they led armed protests such as the 1764 Paxton Boys march in Philadelphia and the Regulator movement in North Carolina. In 1775, Scots and Irish people made up around 7% of the colony’s population (175,000 people). 

  • Other European groups made up around 5% of the colony’s population: French Huguenots, Welsh, Dutch, Swedes, Jews, Irish, Swiss, and Scots Highlanders. 

  • Africans formed the largest non-English group at around 20% in 1775, concentrated mainly in the South. 

• New England remained the least ethnically diverse region, while there was heavy immigration to the middle colonies. By 1775, excluding New England, half the population of the colonies was non-English. This led 18 out of the 56 signers of the 1776 Declaration of Independence to be non-English. 

  • In the 1770s, this led French settler Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur to ponder a new American identity. 

The Expansion of Slavery in the English Colonies

• Slavery expanded dramatically in the 1700s in English America, varying by region. 

  • The deep South relied on brutal labor in rice and indigo plantations, and relied on fresh imports of slaves. 

  • The Chesapeake relied on tobacco plantations, where rising female slave populations around 1720 enabled natural reproduction, reducing slave imports. 

  • North of the Chesapeake, around the 1770s, there were around 48,000 slaves. Slaves worked in cities or in agricultural gangs like those in New York's Hudson River valley and northern New Jersey. 

• African American culture developed as native-born numbers grew. 

  • On South Carolina's sea islands, enslaved people created Gullah: a mix of English and African languages like Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa. 

    • It contributed words like goober, gumbo, and voodoo to modern English, and also instruments like the banjo and bongo drum. Their ringshout dance later influenced jazz. 

• Slaves continuously resisted oppression with uprisings. 

  • The 1712 New York revolt killed 9 whites and led to 21 executions (of slaves), and the 1739 Stono River rebellion in South Carolina, where 50 Black men marched toward Spanish Florida before being suppressed by militia. 

• In the 1700s, English America offered relative equality for free white colonists. However, growing wealth from military contracts in the 1690s and early 1700s concentrated riches. By midcentury, the top 10% owned nearly 2/3 of the wealth in Boston and Philadelphia, leading to almshouses (similar to homeless shelters) in the 1730s and a large homeless population in Boston by 1750. The homeless wore the letter "P," as a pauper’s badge to signify that they received public financial relief or charity from the town. 

• Social hierarchy:

1. Wealthy planters. Groups of land and slave owners like the Fizhughs, Lees, and Washingtons dominated both the economy and the House of Burgesses. 70% of Virginia’s legislative leaders came from the “first families of Virginia” (FFVs), established before 1690. 

2. Small farmers. They were the largest social group, who lived hand-to-mouth on modest plots, sometimes with 1-2 slaves. 

3. Indentured servants (two of whom signed the Declaration of Independence). The landless whites’ and active indentured servants’ numbers shrank toward the end of the 1600s. 

4. British criminals (often called "jayle birds"), with a population of 50,000. 

5. Black slaves. 

• Fearing uprisings, colonies like South Carolina attempted to limit slave imports in 1760, but English authorities repeatedly vetoed these efforts to protect cheap labor supplies. 

• When Thomas Jefferson wrote an initial clause, criticizing the English slave trade in the Declaration of Independence, it was removed due to fierce pushback from southern slaveholders. 

The Economy of the English Colonies

• Industries in the colonies: 

  • Agriculture was the leading colonial industry, employing about 90% of the population. Tobacco remained the staple crop in Maryland and Virginia. On depleted tobacco soil, farmers also grew wheat. 

  • The fertile middle colonies produced large quantities of grain. New York alone exported 80,000 barrels of flour every year by 1759, and colonists enjoyed a historically high standard of living. 

  • In New England, fishing and whaling were major industries. They exported dried cod to Europe, boosted shipbuilding, and trained skilled mariners. 

  • Yankee (New England) traders participated in the infamous "triangular trade," where New England rum was exchanged in West Africa for slaves, who were traded in the West Indies for molasses to make more rum. 

  • Secondary industries included rum distilling in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, beaver hat manufacturing, spinning and weaving by women, and iron forges such as Pennsylvania's Valley Forge (which were larger than in England by 1775). 

  • Lumbering was the primary manufacturing activity. By 1770, there was a shipbuilding boom, where 400 vessels were launched annually. ⅓ of the English merchant marine was American-built. 

  • Naval stores like tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine received generous English bounties. Though, colonists disliked fines for cutting down trees reserved as masts for the royal navy. 

• By the 1730s, rapid American population growth created a trade imbalance. Colonists needed more English products than England needed in return, which forced Americans to sell to non-British markets like the French West Indies to earn cash for British imports. 

  • To crush this trade, the British Parliament passed the Molasses Act in 1733 after complaints from British West Indian planters, but American merchants bypassed the law through bribery and smuggling. 

• Colonial professions:

• The Christian ministry was the most honored position among colonial professions. Although the church’s influence had decreased by 1775 compared to early Massachusetts, the clergy maintained high prestige. 

• Physicians were poorly trained, held in low esteem, and relied on brief apprenticeships before practicing. They often used risky treatments like bleeding or leaving procedures to barbers, with the first colonial medical school not opening until 1765. 

  • Epidemics presented constant terror: smallpox struck 1 in 5 colonists, including George Washington. In 1721, he used their version of a vaccine, despite opposition from doctors and clergy who viewed it as interfering with God's will.

  • Remedies like powdered dried toad were used for deadly diphtheria outbreaks in the 1730s that killed thousands. 

• The legal profession was similarly disrespected in early colonial society, as individuals usually represented themselves. Lawyers were seen as rogues or noisy windbags, grouped alongside drunkards and brothel owners in an early Connecticut law. 

  • Future president John Adams faced disapproval from his soon-to-be father-in-law for simply studying law. 

• Early American transportation was hard, due to bad roads, a lack of money, and scarce labor, meaning land travel only connected major cities starting in the 1700s on dirt paths that turned to dust in summer and mud in winter. 

  • Traveling by stagecoach was dangerous due to overturned carriages and runaway horses, so travelers often wrote wills before leaving. 

  • Travel was extremely slow, with Benjamin Franklin needing 9 days in 1720 to go from Boston to Philadelphia and news of the 1776 Declaration of Independence taking 29 days to reach Charleston. 

  • Because of the poor roads, colonists relied on rivers and coastwise sea shipping. 

  • Roadside taverns emerged as social hubs where people mingled over games, drink, and political debates. They served as centers for figures like Samuel Adams at Boston's Green Dragon Tavern to organize revolutionary support. 

• An intercolonial postal system emerged by the mid 1700s, but it was slow, handled some mail on credit, and lacked privacy as mail carriers often read letters during long trips. 

Religion in the English Colonies

• Religiously, the colonies were dominated by Protestantism, featuring 2 tax-supported established churches in 1775: the Anglican and Congregational churches, though a large portion of colonists belonged to no church at all. 

  • The Church of England (Anglicanism) served as the official faith in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and parts of New York as a symbol of royal authority. Its clergy was often seen as worldly and less intense than New England Puritans, which led to the founding of the College of William and Mary in 1693 to better train ministers. 

  • The Congregational Church, derived from Puritanism, was established in all New England colonies except Rhode Island. 

  • As revolutionary ideas spread, Congregational and Presbyterian ministers preached rebellion, while Anglican clergy generally remained loyal to the king. 

• Overall, religious freedom was tolerated more in America than in Europe. Despite lingering discrimination against Roman Catholics in politics, anti-Catholic laws were enforced less strictly, allowing people general freedom to worship (or not) as they chose.

• In the early 1700s, religious passion had gone down across the colonies. Puritanism struggled with overly complex doctrines and liberalized membership rules, which led to complaints about tedious sermons. 

• New liberal ideas challenged traditional views by suggesting good works could bring salvation. Arminianism (named after Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius) argued that free will rather than predestination determined eternal fate, pushing some churches to drop spiritual conversion requirements for membership. 

  • This setting sparked the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, ignited in Northampton, Massachusetts, by Jonathan Edwards. He rejected salvation by good works, affirmed complete dependence on God's grace, and delivered vivid sermons on hell such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". 

  • In 1738, English itinerant preacher George Whitefield revolutionized colonial spiritual life with his highly emotional outdoor sermons that moved crowds to tears, including Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. He inspired dramatic, emotional revival outbursts. 

    • The movement created a sharp rift between skeptical traditionalists ("old lights") and revival supporters ("new lights"), splitting Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches and driving many converts to more emotional sects like Baptists and Methodists. 

    • Ultimately, the Great Awakening weakened traditional clergy authority, increased church competition, inspired missionary work among Native Americans and Black people, leading to the founding of "new light" colleges like Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth, and stands as the first mass movement that broke down regional boundaries to foster a shared American identity. 

Education in the English Colonies

• Breaking away from the traditional English view of education as an aristocratic male privilege, colonial America gradually established its own schooling systems, led by Puritan New England where the Congregational Church emphasized Bible reading to make devout Christians. 

  • While New England built primary and secondary schools early on, southern geography made school systems hard to set up, forcing wealthy families to rely on private tutors, while Black slaves were denied formal education entirely. 

• Colonial schools and colleges were characterized by strict discipline, often involving birchingm, and a heavy focus on religion, Latin, and Greek rather than independent reasoning. However, by 1750 higher education began shifting toward modern subjects, and Benjamin Franklin helped found the non-denominational University of Pennsylvania. 

• American arts and culture remained heavily dependent on European models. 

  • Artists like John Trumbull (1756-1843), Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), Benjamin West (1738-1820), and John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) had to travel to England for patrons and training. 

  • Colonial architecture adapted European designs like the Swedish log cabin and the red-brick Georgian style introduced around 1720. 

  • In literature, Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), an enslaved African-born girl brought to Boston at age 8, produced praised Latin and English poetry celebrated by figures like Washington and Franklin.

  • Benjamin Franklin shaped American culture through Poor Richard's Almanack, which he edited from 1732 to 1758. Franklin also led colonial scientific progress with his electricity experiments, bifocals, Franklin stove, and the lightning rod, despite criticism from clergymen who viewed controlling lightning as trying to take power over divine authority. 

• Most early American settlers were too poor or busy to purchase and read books, though prominent collections existed, such as the Byrd family’s 4,000 volume library in Virginia and Benjamin Franklin's pioneer subscription library in Philadelphia, which laid the groundwork for roughly 50 subscription libraries by 1776. 

• Colonial printing presses produced pamphlets, essays under classical pseudonyms, and around 40 weekly single-sheet newspapers right before the Revolution. 

• A landmark moment for journalism occurred during the 1734-1735 Zenger trial, when printer John Peter Zenger was tried for criticizing New York's corrupt royal governor. 

  • Defended by former indentured servant Andrew Hamilton, Zenger was acquitted by a jury that asserted the right to print the truth, establishing a foundational precedent for freedom of the press and the legality of criticizing public officials. 

Government in the English Colonies

• By 1775, colonial governance took 3 forms: 8 royal colonies with governors appointed by the king, 3 proprietary colonies (Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) with governors chosen by proprietors, and 2 self-governing charter colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island) that elected their own leaders. 

• Almost every colony maintained a two-house legislature where elected popular assemblies held the "power of the purse," frequently withholding salaries to control unpopular royal governors like Lord Cornbury (appointed over New York and New Jersey in 1702), creating ongoing political friction with Britain. 

• Local administration varied from southern county systems to New England town meetings, though strict property and religious voting requirements led to reduced voting rights for about ½ of adult white males. 

  • Despite these limitations and voters being overall less interested, 1775 America stood far more democratic than Europe, fostering core ideals of self-taxation, representative governance, free speech, and personal liberty. 

Culture and Daily Life in the English Colonies

• Although colonial life may look glamorous today, daily life was drab, tedious, and filled with heavy, constant labor. However, food was plentiful and Americans ate more bountifully, particularly regarding meat, than people in the Old World. 

• However, basic modern comforts were non-existent: unheated churches forced women to carry charcoal foot-warmers, homes were poorly heated by inefficient fireplaces without running water or indoor toilets, lighting came from faint candles and whale-oil lamps, and primitive garbage disposal relied on free-roaming hogs. 

• Colonists pursued amusements whenever possible. For example, military musters involving drilling and merrymaking, frontier work-pleasure combinations like house-raisings and quilting bees, social gatherings at funerals and weddings with heavy drinking, northern winter sports, and southern pastimes like card playing, horse racing, cockfighting, and fox hunting, and dancing (which was popular in the South but illegal in many northern colonies). 

• Other approved diversions included universal lotteries used to fund churches and colleges like Harvard. Stage plays were popular in the South but opposed or banned by law in Quaker and Puritan colonies. 

• Holidays were celebrated everywhere, though Puritans frowned upon Christmas as an offensive reminder of "popery" while embracing Thanksgiving as a uniquely American festival combining thanks with heavy feasting and drinking. 

• By the mid-1700s, despite their local differences, Britain's North American colonies shared striking similarities: English language and customs, a Protestant religion requiring some degree of ethnic and religious tolerance, unusual opportunities for social mobility compared to contemporary Europe, some measure of self-government, and economies tied to human enslavement. 

• By 1775, improving communication and transportation made British North America look like a patchwork quilt stitched together by common origins, ways of life, beliefs in tolerance, economic development, self-rule, and a vast 3,000 mile ocean separating them from imperial authority, setting the stage for their fight for independence together.