Lecture 4
Polycolonial History
The United States has a polycolonial history including:
Spanish
French
British
Russian
Indigenous colonialism
New Spain and the American West
New Spain and the American West were a grand prize for European powers.
Spain was the first to control it.
Traditional Narrative vs. Reality
The traditional narrative of the U.S. originates from 13 British colonies.
It is portrayed as a white, English-speaking, Anglo, and Christian nation.
The U.S. had a deeply indigenous history and a polycolonial past.
Importance of New Spain
New Spain is extremely important in global history.
It included much of the Western United States, making the American West unique.
It was part of the Spanish empire from the 16th to the early 19th century, longer than the U.S. has claimed it.
Indigenous groups have an even longer claim on the region.
Spanish Influence
Spanish claim to the West has left its stamp on the region.
Spanish settlements were the first European towns and cities in America.
Spaniards established defining industries of the West, brought livestock, and established mining techniques.
Spanish legal traditions established a foundation of European legal systems in the West (e.g., common property law, water rights).
It also established a unique cultural heritage, seen in Spanish colonial architecture.
Language and place names reflect Spanish influence.
Spanish Colonialism and its Legacy
The lecture will discuss Spanish colonialism and its legacy in North America.
Subsequent lectures will cover French, British, and Russian colonialism.
Each form of colonialism will be characterized to highlight their differences.
Characteristics of the Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire had four important characteristics:
Speculation Empire
Reliance on Indigenous Social Structures
Sedentary Dense Indigenous Villages
Catholicism
Speculation Empire
The method of financing the empire was tied to the promise of wealth.
The Spanish monarchy licensed conquistadors via adelantos, giving them a license to conquer and claim.
In return, the crown received one-fifth of the plunder.
Spanish law required conquistadors to read the Recorimento, ordering defiant Indians to submit to Spanish rule and convert to Christianity.
Failure to comply would result in just war, justifying violence and conquest.
The Recorimento was read in Spanish, which indigenous people didn't understand.
Successful conquistadors received encomiendas, land or labor grants, entitling them to extract tribute from conquered Indian villages and set up plantations.
A cut of profits would go to the Spanish crown.
The Incommendiero was entitled to enslave conquered indigenous people and receive tribute from them.
Mortality rates under the system were extremely high.
The Incomediero was supposed to defend his Uncomienda from invaders and convert the conquered people to Christianity.
The encomender system depended upon indigenous villages.
The Spaniards goal was to exploit indigenous peoples.
Local elites, called caziques or chiefs, were used by encomenderos to manage the labor.
This enabled indigenous leaders to retain their positions.
The Incomienda system was a cheap way for the Spanish crown to expand its empire.
Critics of the Incomienda System
Indigenous peoples didn't like the Incomienda system, leading to rebellions.
Bartolome de la Casa, a 16th-century Dominican priest, spoke out against the system.
Las Casas witnessed conquest directly, opposed torture and conquest, and wrote extensively about it.
Las Casas pushed for passage of new laws in 1542 that abolished the Incomienda system.
His writings also provided fodder for the so-called black legend.
The Black Legend
The black legend is a cultural practice portraying Spanish colonialism as uniquely wicked or evil.
Other European colonialism was sometimes just as bad or worse.
Other European colonial powers helped spread this black legend.
It became a popular argument for creating colonies and opposing the Spaniards in the Americas.
Images from Bartolomé de la Casa's book were used as evidence of Spanish colonialism's wickedness.
In The United States, these images were circulated well into the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It became an important part of American culture after the war with Mexico in the mid-19th century to justify the conquest of Mexican territory. Images served to portray Mexican state as wicked as well.
Reliance on Indigenous Social Structures
Conquest relied on existing indigenous social structures.
They needed ruling elites who would cooperate with Spanish overlords creating a tradition of paying tribute.
The Aztecs and the Incas already had this in place.
The Spanish took the existing indigenous social structure of tribute from conquered villages and simply set themselves on top.
Rather than changing or completely reformatting the social order, they kept the social order in place and simply put themselves at top.
Sedentary Dense Indigenous Villages
The Spanish empire often required sedentary dense indigenous villages to function because their system was largely focused on the extraction of labor.
British and the French colonial systems focused on other forms of exploitation.
The French largely looked for trade rather than necessary labor extraction.
The British were looking for land, but the Spanish were looking for labor.
The Spanish colonies clustered around plantations and mines.
They used large indigenous villages as sources of labor for those mines and for those plantations.
Catholicism
Colonialism and Catholicism went hand in hand in the Spanish system.
The church and state were combined in Spanish colonialism.
Franciscan friars and Jesuit priests were present at nearly all stages of the colonial process.
Conversion was a major goal for Spaniards.
Decline of the Spanish Empire
Several factors led to the decline of the Spanish empire:
Continued population decline of indigenous peoples from disease, overwork, and enslavement.
Concentration of power in the hands of Income and others made coordination difficult.
Environmental factors and the geography that surrounded the Spanish empire.
Challenges
The constant demand for more labor took a toll on indigenous populations.
Some became wealthier than the king himself (e.g., Cortez).
Cortez held the largest encomienda in New Spain, taking tribute from 23,000 families.
This created uneven centers of power within the Spanish colonial system.
The Spanish empire contained massive territory, but water was scarce, limiting Spanish colonial expansion in many parts of it.
The American Southwest
From the perspective of New Spain's capital at Mexico City, the American Southwest were the Far Northern provinces.
During the 16th century, these lands were largely unknown to the Spaniards.
They were seen as their frontier, El Norte was their La Frontera.
Frontiers is a term that has special importance American history.
The idea of a frontier is often embedded within Eurocentric values of civilization and savagery.
The frontier is often defined as the boundary between civilizations and savagery.
The frontier was always a more complicated and complex place.
In the minds of the Spanish colonizers, the Far North was full of savage people (Los Barbados, the barbarians).
Cabeza de Vaca
Campeza de Baca's narrative was one of the most important narratives about what would become the American Southwest and the American South.
He set out from Cuba for La Florida in 1527, but his ship wrecked.
The survivors spent seven years wandering around what is today Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas.
They were the first Europeans to lay eyes on the Mississippi River.
When he returned to Spain, De Vaca wrote a very popular account of his journey.
Other conquistadors focused on one scene in which he described a large copper bowl, igniting hopes for a new Mexico rich with gold.
They all wanted to be the new Cortez.
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de So to was one of Pizarro's lieutenants, making him a wealthy man.
He financed an expedition of conquest into North America, looking for wealthy indigenous empires to conquer.
He saw many large horticultural societies.
He moved through the remnants of that great society.
He burned hole in indigenous talents to the ground, but he found very little gold, if any at all.
De So to eventually died a fever somewhere along the banks of the Mississippi River in 1542.
Marcos de Niza
Marcos de Niza's expedition went into also the American Southwest looking for wealth and souls to convert.
He is probably the first European to see the Rocky Mountains.
Francisco Vasquez de Cornaro
Francisco Vasquez de Cornaro's expedition into the Southwest was also encouraged by Cabeza de Vaca's account.
He encountered the Pueblos and asked them where the gold was.
He was told stories of a great city of great wealth called Quivira.
Somewhere in the middle of Kansas, he figured out it was a ruse.
He killed his guides and went back for vengeance.
He attacked several Pueblo villages, murdering hundreds of people.
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo
Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition went along the California Coast.
His hope was to find the Northwest Passage.
He believed whoever could discover this fabled Northwest Passage would control a new trade route that could reach across the continent to Asia and gain power and wealth.
Going up the California coast was slow work for Cabrillo due to the strong southbound currents, the Alaska current, along the California coast.
He sailed after meeting it to Monterey Bay, that's his Northern, he went to Monterey Bay, then he went up to San Francisco and he went up along the California coast somewhere along the North Bay Of San Francisco, and then eventually turned around.
While overwintering on the Channel Islands, Cabrillo fell on some rocks and broke his shin on some jagged rocks and set in and he died.
Second Generation of Conquistadors
Three conclusions about the second generation of conquistadors:
They were quickly establishing a reputation for violence in El Norte.
They experienced little success when they did not encounter large indigenous cities to conquer.
They lost almost all their men and sometimes themselves in these great expeditions.
The Northern Frontier didn't look very promising, cooling Spanish desires to push North for nearly fifty years.
Permanent Holdings
Anxieties over English expansion encouraged the Spaniards to establish permanent holdings in this Northern frontier.
This was sparked by the piracy and voyages of Francis Drake.
In the Spanish speaking world, he's remembered as El Zoraco, the dreaded English pirate who attacked Spanish galleons full of gold from The Philippines, who sunk the so called Manila fleet and took entire Spanish towns hostage.
King Philip of Spain offered 20,000 ducats, which is about in today's currency for his head.
It was to stop British raids on Spanish fleets and towns that drove the Spanish to conquer and establish permanent settlements in California and the American Southwest.
The first step was to take over the Pueblos that Coronado had found because they were the closest thing that the Spanish could find towards a kind of settled, established urban indigenous population.
Juan de Onata
Juan de Onata crossed the Rio Grande in 1598 and claimed everything north of the river for Spain.
He occupied those indigenous Pueblos, established his own encomienda, and demanded tribute, food, and labor from the indigenous Pueblo people.
The indigenous Acoma Pueblos resisted and killed 13 Spaniards, including Onyate's nephew.
In 1599, Onate sent out a force to crush the rebellion in a brutal manner, known as the massacre at Acoma.
The Spaniards killed 800 Pueblos at Acoma and enslaved 500 more.
Onyate cut off the left foot of each surviving man over the age of 25.
Onyate's goal was to make an example of a coma that would discourage similar rebellions among the Pueblos.
Trade connections between New Mexico and Mexico City did develop, but this colony remained the backwater of backwaters.
It took three months to get from Mexico City to Santa Fe and the main export was slaves.
Spanish slavers and Pueblo indigenous peoples raided their neighbors, the Apaches, taking captives and selling them as slaves.
The Apaches often retaliated, creating further instability in what is now New Mexico.
Pueblo Revolt of 1680
A series of events set the stage for the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was led by Pope or Popei and was based in Taos Pueblo.
Pope was intent upon driving the Spanish out and orchestrated a coordinated attack among the many different Pueblos in this area.
He dispatched runners to all of the Pueblos carrying a knotted cord that telling of the number of days remaining until the appointed day when they would all attack.
Each morning, the leaders of every Pueblo untied one knot from the court.
When the last knot was untied, would all, they would signal for them all to rise up against the Spaniards in unison.
These are semi autonomous or even completely autonomous Pueblo villages.
The rebellion broke out on 08/10/1680 and all over all at once, they rose up in every village and attacked any Spaniard they could find killing as many as they could.
The Pueblo Revolt drove the Spanish out and killed many of them.
The Pueblos killed three seventy five of the 2,350 colonists that were living in the Spanish settlements around these Pueblos.
The Pueblos killed 21 of 33 missionaries or 64%, which has led historians to speculate that there was a religious motivation behind these revolts, even kind of a religious organization around it.
Once the Spaniards were gone, this Pueblo unity vanished.
Popeyes rebellion pushed for transitions back to pre Spanish practices and beliefs.
But this clashed with the ways of some Pueblo peoples who had already begun to adopt Spanish culture and religion and kind of led to political fracturing among the Pueblo's.
Nothing larger came out of the Pueblo revolt.
When the Spanish came back, there was no organized resistance to prevent them from coming.
Legacy of the Pueblo Revolt
Two legacies of the Pueblo revolt:
It's the most successful and largest scale indigenous resistance to colonialism in this period of time.
The results of it are impactful.
One of the significant things that comes out of the public revolt, because they had driven the Spaniards out and captured anything the Spaniards left behind as they ran to save for their lives, the Pueblos captured a lot of horses.
This led to the spread of horses among and throughout the rest of North America and widely throughout indigenous trade networks
These horses began to spread widely throughout the American West, changing North American society, culture, environment, politics and the economy.
We today cannot even imagine American history, the history of the American West without thinking about horses.
Spanish colonial loom laid the deepest foundations of American history.