2

The Planting of English America

���

1500–1733

. . . For I shall yet to see it [Virginia] an Inglishe nation.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1602

As the seventeenth century dawned, scarcely a hundred years after Columbus’s momentous

landfall, the face of much of the New World hadalready been profoundly transformed. Europeancrops and livestock had begun to alter the very land-scape, touching off an ecological revolution thatwould reverberate for centuries to come. FromTierra del Fuego in the south to Hudson Bay in thenorth, disease and armed conquest had cruelly win-nowed and disrupted the native peoples. Severalhundred thousand enslaved Africans toiled onCaribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations. FromFlorida and New Mexico southward, most of the NewWorld lay firmly within the grip of imperial Spain.

But North America in 1600 remained largelyunexplored and effectively unclaimed by Euro-peans. Then, as if to herald the coming century ofcolonization and conflict in the northern continent,

three European powers planted three primitive out-posts in three distant corners of the continentwithin three years of one another: the Spanish atSanta Fe in 1610, the French at Quebec in 1608, and,most consequentially for the future United States,the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.

England’s Imperial Stirrings

Feeble indeed were England’s efforts in the 1500s tocompete with the sprawling Spanish Empire. AsSpain’s ally in the first half of the century, Englandtook little interest in establishing its own overseascolonies. Religious conflict, moreover, disruptedEngland in midcentury, after King Henry VIII brokewith the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s,

25

launching the English Protestant Reformation.Catholics battled Protestants for decades, and thereligious balance of power seesawed. But after theProtestant Elizabeth ascended to the English thronein 1558, Protestantism became dominant in Eng-land, and rivalry with Catholic Spain intensified.

Ireland, which nominally had been underEnglish rule since the twelfth century, became anearly scene of that rivalry. The Catholic Irish soughthelp from Catholic Spain to throw off the yoke of thenew Protestant English queen. But Spanish aidnever amounted to much; in the 1570s and 1580s,Elizabeth’s troops crushed the Irish uprising withterrible ferocity, inflicting unspeakable atrocitiesupon the native Irish people. The English crownconfiscated Catholic Irish lands and “planted” themwith new Protestant landlords from Scotland andEngland. This policy also planted the seeds of thecenturies-old religious conflicts that persist in Ire-land to the present day. Many English soldiersdeveloped in Ireland a sneering contempt for the“savage” natives, an attitude that they brought withthem to the New World.

Elizabeth Energizes England

Encouraged by the ambitious Queen Elizabeth,hardy English buccaneers now swarmed out uponthe shipping lanes. They sought to promote the twingoals of Protestantism and plunder by seizing Span-ish treasure ships and raiding Spanish settlements,even though England and Spain were technically atpeace. The most famous of these semipiratical “seadogs” was the courtly Francis Drake. He plunderedhis way around the planet, returning in 1580 withhis ship heavily ballasted with Spanish booty. Theventure netted profits of about 4,600 percent to hisfinancial backers, among whom, in secret, wasQueen Elizabeth. Defying Spanish protest, shebrazenly knighted Drake on the deck of his barna-cled ship.

The bleak coast of Newfoundland was the sceneof the first English attempt at colonization. Thiseffort collapsed when its promoter, Sir HumphreyGilbert, lost his life at sea in 1583. Gilbert’s ill-starreddream inspired his gallant half-brother Sir WalterRaleigh to try again in warmer climes. Raleighorganized an expedition that first landed in 1585 onNorth Carolina’s Roanoke Island, off the coast of

Virginia—a vaguely defined region named in honorof Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen.” After several falsestarts, the hapless Roanoke colony mysteriouslyvanished, swallowed up by the wilderness.

These pathetic English failures at colonizationcontrasted embarrassingly with the glories of theSpanish Empire, whose profits were fabulouslyenriching Spain. Philip II of Spain, self-anointed foeof the Protestant Reformation, used part of hisimperial gains to amass an “Invincible Armada” ofships for an invasion of England. The showdowncame in 1588, when the lumbering Spanish flotilla,130 strong, hove into the English Channel. TheEnglish sea dogs fought back. Using craft that wereswifter, more maneuverable, and more ablymanned, they inflicted heavy damage on the cum-bersome, overladen Spanish ships. Then a devastat-ing storm arose (the “Protestant wind”), scatteringthe crippled Spanish fleet.

The rout of the Spanish Armada marked thebeginning of the end of Spanish imperial dreams,though Spain’s New World empire would not fullycollapse for three more centuries. Within a few

26 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

decades, the Spanish Netherlands (Holland) wouldsecure their independence, and much of the Span-ish Caribbean would slip from Spain’s grasp. Bloatedby Peruvian and Mexican silver and cockily con-vinced of its own invincibility, Spain had over-reached itself, sowing the seeds of its own decline.

England’s victory over the Spanish Armada alsomarked a red-letter day in American history. Itdampened Spain’s fighting spirit and helped ensureEngland’s naval dominance in the North Atlantic. Itstarted England on its way to becoming master of

the world oceans—a fact of enormous importanceto the American people. Indeed England now hadmany of the characteristics that Spain displayed onthe eve of its colonizing adventure a century earlier:a strong, unified national state under a popularmonarch; a measure of religious unity after a pro-tracted struggle between Protestants and Catholics;and a vibrant sense of nationalism and nationaldestiny.

A wondrous flowering of the English nationalspirit bloomed in the wake of the Spanish Armada’sdefeat. A golden age of literature dawned in thisexhilarating atmosphere, with Shakespeare, at itsforefront, making occasional poetical references toEngland’s American colonies. The English wereseized with restlessness, with thirst for adventure,and with curiosity about the unknown. Everywherethere blossomed a new spirit of self-confidence, ofvibrant patriotism, and of boundless faith in thefuture of the English nation. When England andSpain finally signed a treaty of peace in 1604, theEnglish people were poised to plunge headlong intothe planting of their own colonial empire in the NewWorld.

England on the Eve of Empire

England’s scepter’d isle, as Shakespeare called it,throbbed with social and economic change as theseventeenth century opened. Its population wasmushrooming, from some 3 million people in 1550to about 4 million in 1600. In the ever-green Englishcountryside, landlords were “enclosing” croplandsfor sheep grazing, forcing many small farmers intoprecarious tenancy or off the land altogether. It wasno accident that the woolen districts of eastern andwestern England—where Puritanism had takenstrong root—supplied many of the earliest immi-grants to America. When economic depression hitthe woolen trade in the late 1500s, thousands offootloose farmers took to the roads. They driftedabout England, chronically unemployed, often end-ing up as beggars and paupers in cities like Bristoland London.

This remarkably mobile population alarmedmany contemporaries. They concluded that Eng-land was burdened with a “surplus population,”though present-day London holds twice as manypeople as did all of England in 1600.

England Prepares for Colonization 27

At the same time, laws of primogeniture de-creed that only eldest sons were eligible to inheritlanded estates. Landholders’ ambitious youngersons, among them Gilbert, Raleigh, and Drake, wereforced to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Bad luckplagued their early, lone-wolf enterprises. But by theearly 1600s, the joint-stock company, forerunner ofthe modern corporation, was perfected. It enabled aconsiderable number of investors, called “adventur-ers,” to pool their capital.

Peace with a chastened Spain provided theopportunity for English colonization. Populationgrowth provided the workers. Unemployment, aswell as a thirst for adventure, for markets, and forreligious freedom, provided the motives. Joint-stockcompanies provided the financial means. The stagewas now set for a historic effort to establish anEnglish beachhead in the still uncharted NorthAmerican wilderness.

England Plants the Jamestown Seedling

In 1606, two years after peace with Spain, the handof destiny beckoned toward Virginia. A joint-stockcompany, known as the Virginia Company of Lon-

don, received a charter from King James I of Eng-land for a settlement in the New World. The mainattraction was the promise of gold, combined with astrong desire to find a passage through America tothe Indies. Like most joint-stock companies of theday, the Virginia Company was intended to endurefor only a few years, after which its stockholdershoped to liquidate it for a profit. This arrangementput severe pressure on the luckless colonists, whowere threatened with abandonment in the wilder-ness if they did not quickly strike it rich on the com-pany’s behalf. Few of the investors thought in termsof long-term colonization. Apparently no one evenfaintly suspected that the seeds of a mighty nationwere being planted.

The charter of the Virginia Company is a signifi-cant document in American history. It guaranteedto the overseas settlers the same rights of English-men that they would have enjoyed if they hadstayed at home. This precious boon was graduallyextended to subsequent English colonies, helping toreinforce the colonists’ sense that even on the farshores of the Atlantic, they remained comfortablywithin the embrace of traditional English institu-

28 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

In the years immediately following the defeatof the Spanish Armada, the English writerRichard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) extravagantlyexhorted his countrymen to cast off their“sluggish security” and undertake thecolonization of the New World:

“There is under our noses the great andample country of Virginia; the inland whereofis found of late to be so sweet andwholesome a climate, so rich and abundantin silver mines, a better and richer countrythan Mexico itself. If it shall please theAlmighty to stir up Her Majesty’s heart tocontinue with transporting one or twothousand of her people, she shall by God’sassistance, in short space, increase herdominions, enrich her coffers, and reducemany pagans to the faith of Christ.”

Sources of the Puritan “Great Migration” to New England,1620–1650 The dark green areas indicate the main sourcesof the migration.

tions. But ironically, a century and a half later, theirinsistence on the “rights of Englishmen” fed the hotresentment of the colonists against an increasinglymeddlesome mother country and nourished theirappetite for independence.

Setting sail in late 1606, the Virginia Company’sthree ships landed near the mouth of ChesapeakeBay, where Indians attacked them. Pushing on upthe bay, the tiny band of colonists eventually chosea location on the wooded and malarial banks of theJames River, named in honor of King James I. Thesite was easy to defend, but it was mosquito-infested and devastatingly unhealthful. There, onMay 24, 1607, about a hundred English settlers, allof them men, disembarked. They called the placeJamestown.

The early years of Jamestown proved a night-mare for all concerned—except the buzzards. Forty

would-be colonists perished during the initial voy-age in 1606–1607. Another expedition in 1609 lost itsleaders and many of its precious supplies in a ship-wreck off Bermuda. Once ashore in Virginia, the set-tlers died by the dozens from disease, malnutrition,and starvation. Ironically, the woods rustled withgame and the rivers flopped with fish, but the green-horn settlers, many of them self-styled “gentlemen”unaccustomed to fending for themselves, wastedvaluable time grubbing for nonexistent gold whenthey should have been gathering provisions.

Virginia was saved from utter collapse at thestart largely by the leadership and resourcefulnessof an intrepid young adventurer, Captain JohnSmith. Taking over in 1608, he whipped the gold-hungry colonists into line with the rule, “He whoshall not work shall not eat.” He had been kid-napped in December 1607 and subjected to a mockexecution by the Indian chieftain Powhatan, whosedaughter Pocahontas had “saved” Smith by dramat-ically interposing her head between his and the warclubs of his captors. The symbolism of this ritualwas apparently intended to impress Smith withPowhatan’s power and with the Indians’ desire forpeaceful relations with the Virginians. Pocahontasbecame an intermediary between the Indians andthe settlers, helping to preserve a shaky peace andto provide needed foodstuffs.

Still, the colonists died in droves, and livingskeletons were driven to desperate acts. They werereduced to eating “dogges, Catts, Ratts, and Myce”and even to digging up corpses for food. One hun-gry man killed, salted, and ate his wife, for whichmisbehavior he was executed. Of the four hundredsettlers who managed to make it to Virginia by 1609,only sixty survived the “starving time” winter of1609–1610.

Virginia’s Beginnings 29

King James I (1566–1625) had scantenthusiasm for the Virginia experiment,partly because of his hatred of tobaccosmoking, which had been introduced into the Old World by the Spanish discoverers.In 1604 he published the pamphlet ACounterblast to Tobacco:

“A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful tothe nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous tothe lungs, and in the black stinking fumethereof, nearest resembling the horribleStygian smoke of the pit [Hades] that isbottomless.”

The Tudor Rulers of England*

Name, Reign Relation to America

Henry VII, 1485–1509 Cabot voyages, 1497, 1498Henry VIII, 1509–1547 English Reformation beganEdward VI, 1547–1553 Strong Protestant tendencies“Bloody” Mary, 1553–1558 Catholic reactionElizabeth I, 1558–1603 Break with Roman Catholic Church final;

Drake; Spanish Armada defeated

*See p. 53 for a continuation of the table.

Diseased and despairing, the remainingcolonists dragged themselves aboard homeward-bound ships in the spring of 1610, only to be met atthe mouth of the James River by a long-awaitedrelief party headed by a new governor, Lord De LaWarr. He ordered the settlers back to Jamestown,

imposed a harsh military regime on the colony, andsoon undertook aggressive military action againstthe Indians.

Disease continued to reap a gruesome harvestamong the Virginians. By 1625 Virginia containedonly some twelve hundred hard-bitten survivors ofthe nearly eight thousand adventurers who hadtried to start life anew in the ill-fated colony.

Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake

When the English landed in 1607, the chieftainPowhatan dominated the native peoples living inthe James River area. He had asserted supremacyover a few dozen small tribes, loosely affiliated inwhat somewhat grandly came to be called Pow-hatan’s Confederacy. The English colonists dubbedall the local Indians, somewhat inaccurately, thePowhatans. Powhatan at first may have consideredthe English potential allies in his struggle to extendhis power still further over his Indian rivals, and hetried to be conciliatory. But relations between theIndians and the English remained tense, especiallyas the starving colonists took to raiding Indian foodsupplies.

The atmosphere grew even more strained afterLord De La Warr arrived in 1610. He carried ordersfrom the Virginia Company that amounted to a dec-laration of war against the Indians in the Jamestownregion. A veteran of the vicious campaigns againstthe Irish, De La Warr now introduced “Irish tactics”against the Indians. His troops raided Indian vil-lages, burned houses, confiscated provisions, andtorched cornfields. A peace settlement ended thisFirst Anglo-Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by themarriage of Pocahontas to the colonist John Rolfe—the first known interracial union in Virginia.

A fragile respite followed, which endured eightyears. But the Indians, pressed by the land-hungrywhites and ravaged by European diseases, struckback in 1622. A series of Indian attacks left 347 set-tlers dead, including John Rolfe. In response the Vir-ginia Company issued new orders calling for “aperpetual war without peace or truce,” one thatwould prevent the Indians “from being any longer a people.” Periodic punitive raids systematicallyreduced the native population and drove the sur-vivors ever farther westward.

In the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, theIndians made one last effort to dislodge the Virgini-

30 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

The authorities meted out harsh discipline inthe young Virginia colony. One Jamestownsettler who publicly criticized the governorwas sentenced to

“be disarmed [and] have his arms broken andhis tongue bored through with an awl [and]shall pass through a guard of 40 men andshall be butted [with muskets] by every oneof them and at the head of the troop kickeddown and footed out of the fort.”

ans. They were again defeated. The peace treaty of1646 repudiated any hope of assimilating the nativepeoples into Virginian society or of peacefully coex-isting with them. Instead it effectively banished theChesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands andformally separated Indian from white areas of set-tlement—the origins of the later reservation system.By 1669 an official census revealed that only abouttwo thousand Indians remained in Virginia, perhaps10 percent of the population the original Englishsettlers had encountered in 1607. By 1685 theEnglish considered the Powhatan peoples extinct.

It had been the Powhatans’ calamitous misfor-tune to fall victim to three Ds: disease, disorganiza-tion, and disposability. Like native peoples through-out the New World, they were extremely susceptibleto European-borne maladies. Epidemics of small-

pox and measles raced mercilessly through their vil-lages. The Powhatans also—despite the apparentcohesiveness of “Powhatan’s Confederacy”—lackedthe unity with which to make effective opposition tothe comparatively well-organized and militarily dis-ciplined whites. Finally, unlike the Indians whomthe Spaniards had encountered to the south, whocould be put to work in the mines and had gold andsilver to trade, the Powhatans served no economicfunction for the Virginia colonists. They provided noreliable labor source and, after the Virginians begangrowing their own food crops, had no valuable com-modities to offer in commerce. The natives there-fore could be disposed of without harm to thecolonial economy. Indeed the Indian presence frus-trated the colonists’ desire for a local commoditythe Europeans desperately wanted: land.

The Indians’ New World

The fate of the Powhatans foreshadowed the des-tinies of indigenous peoples throughout the conti-nent as the process of European settlement wentforward. Native Americans, of course, had a historywell before Columbus’s arrival. They were nostrangers to change, adaptation, and even catastro-phe, as the rise and decline of civilizations such asthe Mississippians and the Anasazis demonstrated.But the shock of large-scale European colonizationdisrupted Native American life on a vast scale,inducing unprecedented demographic and culturaltransformations.

Some changes were fairly benign. Horses—stolen, strayed, or purchased from Spanishinvaders—catalyzed a substantial Indian migrationonto the Great Plains in the eighteenth century. Peo-ples such as the Lakotas (Sioux), who had previouslybeen sedentary forest dwellers, now moved onto thewide-open plains. There they thrived impressively,adopting an entirely new way of life as mountednomadic hunters. But the effects of contact withEuropeans proved less salutary for most other nativepeoples.

Disease was by far the biggest disrupter, as OldWorld pathogens licked lethally through biologicallydefenseless Indian populations. Disease took morethan human life; it extinguished entire cultures andoccasionally helped shape new ones. Epidemicsoften robbed native peoples of the elders who pre-served the oral traditions that held clans together.

Virginians and Native Americans 31

Devastated Indian bands then faced the dauntingtask of literally reinventing themselves without ben-efit of accumulated wisdom or kin networks. Thedecimation and forced migration of native peoplessometimes scrambled them together in wholly newways. The Catawba nation of the southern piedmontregion, for example, was formed from splinteredremnants of several different groups uprooted by theshock of the Europeans’ arrival.

Trade also transformed Indian life, as traditionalbarter-and-exchange networks gave way to thetemptations of European commerce. Firearms, forexample, conferred enormous advantages on thosewho could purchase them from Europeans. Thedesire for firearms thus intensified competitionamong the tribes for access to prime huntinggrounds that could supply the skins and pelts thatthe European arms traders wanted. The result wasan escalating cycle of Indian-on-Indian violence,fueled by the lure and demands of European tradegoods.

Native Americans were swept up in the expand-ing Atlantic economy, but they usually struggled invain to control their own place in it. One desperate

band of Virginia Indians, resentful at the pricesoffered by British traders for their deerskins, loadeda fleet of canoes with hides and tried to paddle toEngland to sell their goods directly. Not far from theVirginia shore, a storm swamped their frail craft.Their cargo lost, the few survivors were picked up byan English ship and sold into slavery in the WestIndies.

Indians along the Atlantic seaboard felt the mostferocious effects of European contact. Fartherinland, native peoples had the advantages of time,space, and numbers as they sought to adapt to theEuropean incursion. The Algonquians in the GreatLakes area, for instance, became a substantialregional power. They bolstered their population byabsorbing various surrounding bands and dealtfrom a position of strength with the few Europeanswho managed to penetrate the interior. As a result, aBritish or French trader wanting to do business withthe inland tribes had little choice but to conform toIndian ways, often taking an Indian wife. Thus wascreated a middle ground, a zone where both Euro-peans and Native Americans were compelled toaccommodate to one another—at least until theEuropeans began to arrive in large numbers.

Virginia: Child of Tobacco

John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, becamefather of the tobacco industry and an economic sav-ior of the Virginia colony. By 1612 he had perfectedmethods of raising and curing the pungent weed,eliminating much of the bitter tang. Soon the Euro-pean demand for tobacco was nearly insatiable. Atobacco rush swept over Virginia, as crops wereplanted in the streets of Jamestown and evenbetween the numerous graves. So exclusively didthe colonists concentrate on planting the yellow leafthat at first they had to import some of their food-stuffs. Colonists who had once hungered for foodnow hungered for land, ever more land on which toplant ever more tobacco. Relentlessly, they pressedthe frontier of settlement up the river valleys to thewest, abrasively edging against the Indians.

Virginia’s prosperity was finally built on tobaccosmoke. This “bewitching weed” played a vital role inputting the colony on firm economic foundations.But tobacco—King Nicotine—was something of a

32 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) in a 1753letter to Peter Collinson commented on theattractiveness of Indian life to Europeans:

“When an Indian child has been brought upamong us, taught our language andhabituated to our customs, yet if he goes tosee his relations and make one Indian ramblewith them, there is no persuading him everto return. [But] when white persons of eithersex have been taken prisoners by theIndians, and lived awhile among them,though ransomed by their friends, andtreated with all imaginable tenderness toprevail with them to stay among the English,yet in a short time they become disgustedwith our manner of life, and the care andpains that are necessary to support it, andtake the first good opportunity of escapingagain into the woods, from whence there isno reclaiming them.”

tyrant. It was ruinous to the soil when greedilyplanted in successive years, and it enchained thefortunes of Virginia to the fluctuating price of a single crop. Fatefully, tobacco also promoted thebroad-acred plantation system and with it a briskdemand for fresh labor.

In 1619, the year before the Plymouth Pilgrimslanded in New England, what was described as aDutch warship appeared off Jamestown and soldsome twenty Africans. The scanty record does notreveal whether they were purchased as lifelongslaves or as servants committed to limited years ofservitude. However it transpired, this simple com-

mercial transaction planted the seeds of the NorthAmerican slave system. Yet blacks were too costlyfor most of the hard-pinched white colonists toacquire, and for decades few were brought to Vir-ginia. In 1650 Virginia counted but three hundredblacks, although by the end of the century blacks,most of them enslaved, made up approximately 14percent of the colony’s population.

Representative self-government was also bornin primitive Virginia, in the same cradle with slaveryand in the same year—1619. The London Companyauthorized the settlers to summon an assembly,known as the House of Burgesses. A momentousprecedent was thus feebly established, for thisassemblage was the first of many miniature parlia-ments to flourish in the soil of America.

As time passed, James I grew increasingly hos-tile to Virginia. He detested tobacco, and he dis-trusted the representative House of Burgesses,which he branded a “seminary of sedition.” In 1624he revoked the charter of the bankrupt and belea-guered Virginia Company, thus making Virginia aroyal colony directly under his control.

Maryland: Catholic Haven

Maryland—the second plantation colony but thefourth English colony to be planted—was foundedin 1634 by Lord Baltimore, of a prominent EnglishCatholic family. He embarked upon the venturepartly to reap financial profits and partly to create arefuge for his fellow Catholics. Protestant England

Slavery and Democracy in Early Virginia 33

The wife of a Virginia governor wrote to hersister in England in 1623 of her voyage:

“For our Shippe was so pestered with peopleand goods that we were so full of infectionthat after a while we saw little but throwingfolkes over board: It pleased god to send memy helth till I came to shoare and 3 dayesafter I fell sick but I thank god I am wellrecovered. Few else are left alive that camein that Shippe. . . .”

was still persecuting Roman Catholics; amongnumerous discriminations, a couple seeking wed-lock could not be legally married by a Catholicpriest.

Absentee proprietor Lord Baltimore hoped thatthe two hundred settlers who founded Maryland atSt. Marys, on Chesapeake Bay, would be the van-guard of a vast new feudal domain. Huge estateswere to be awarded to his largely Catholic relatives,and gracious manor houses, modeled on those ofEngland’s aristocracy, were intended to arise amidstthe fertile forests. As in Virginia, colonists provedwilling to come only if offered the opportunity toacquire land of their own. Soon they were dispersedaround the Chesapeake region on modest farms,and the haughty land barons, mostly Catholic, weresurrounded by resentful backcountry planters,mostly Protestant. Resentment flared into openrebellion near the end of the century, and the Balti-more family for a time lost its proprietary rights.

Despite these tensions Maryland prospered.Like Virginia, it blossomed forth in acres of tobacco.Also like Virginia, it depended for labor in its earlyyears mainly on white indentured servants—penni-less persons who bound themselves to work for anumber of years to pay their passage. In both

colonies it was only in the later years of the seven-teenth century that black slaves began to beimported in large numbers.

Lord Baltimore, a canny soul, permitted unusualfreedom of worship at the outset. He hoped that hewould thus purchase toleration for his own fellowworshipers. But the heavy tide of Protestants threat-ened to submerge the Catholics and place severerestrictions on them, as in England. Faced withdisaster, the Catholics of Maryland threw their sup-port behind the famed Act of Toleration, which waspassed in 1649 by the local representative assembly.

Maryland’s new religious statute guaranteedtoleration to all Christians. But, less liberally, itdecreed the death penalty for those, like Jews andatheists, who denied the divinity of Jesus. The lawthus sanctioned less toleration than had previouslyexisted in the settlement, but it did extend a tempo-rary cloak of protection to the uneasy Catholicminority. One result was that when the colonial eraended, Maryland probably sheltered more RomanCatholics than any other English-speaking colony inthe New World.

The West Indies: Way Station to Mainland America

While the English were planting the first frail colo-nial shoots in the Chesapeake, they also were busilycolonizing the West Indies. Spain, weakened by mil-itary overextension and distracted by its rebelliousDutch provinces, relaxed its grip on much of theCaribbean in the early 1600s. By the mid-seven-teenth century, England had secured its claim toseveral West Indian islands, including the large prizeof Jamaica in 1655.

Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indianeconomy. What tobacco was to the Chesapeake,sugar cane was to the Caribbean—with one crucialdifference. Tobacco was a poor man’s crop. It couldbe planted easily, it produced commercially mar-ketable leaves within a year, and it required only sim-ple processing. Sugar cane, in contrast, was a richman’s crop. It had to be planted extensively to yieldcommercially viable quantities of sugar. Extensiveplanting, in turn, required extensive and arduousland clearing. And the cane stalks yielded their sugaronly after an elaborate process of refining in a sugar

34 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

Early Maryland and Virginia

Jamestown(1607)

St. Marys(1634)

V I R G I N I A

M A R Y L A N DDelawar

e R.

SusquehannaR.

York R.James R.

Chesapeake

Bay

Delaware Bay

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

Potomac R.

RoanokeIsland(1580s)

Limit of original grant to Lord Baltimore

Present boundary of Maryland

mill. The need for land and for the labor to clear itand to run the mills made sugar cultivation a capital-intensive business. Only wealthy growers with abun-dant capital to invest could succeed in sugar.

The sugar lords extended their dominion overthe West Indies in the seventeenth century. To worktheir sprawling plantations, they imported enor-mous numbers of African slaves—more than aquarter of a million in the five decades after 1640. Byabout 1700, black slaves outnumbered white settlersin the English West Indies by nearly four to one, andthe region’s population has remained predomi-nantly black ever since. West Indians thus take theirplace among the numerous children of the African

diaspora—the vast scattering of African peoplesthroughout the New World in the three and a halfcenturies following Columbus’s discovery.

To control this large and potentially restive pop-ulation of slaves, English authorities devised formal“codes” that defined the slaves’ legal status and

English Colonization in the Caribbean 35

African slaves destined for the West Indiansugar plantations were bound and brandedon West African beaches and ferried out incanoes to the waiting slave ships. An Englishsailor described the scene:

“The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leavetheir own country, that have often leap’d outof the canoes, boat and ship, into the sea,and kept under water till they were drowned,to avoid being taken up and saved by ourboats, which pursued them; they having amore dreadful apprehension of Barbadoesthan we can have of hell.”

masters’ prerogatives. The notorious Barbados slavecode of 1661 denied even the most fundamentalrights to slaves and gave masters virtually completecontrol over their laborers, including the right to inflict vicious punishments for even slight infractions.

The profitable sugar-plantation system sooncrowded out almost all other forms of Caribbeanagriculture. The West Indies increasingly dependedon the North American mainland for foodstuffs andother basic supplies. And smaller English farmers,squeezed out by the greedy sugar barons, began tomigrate to the newly founded southern mainlandcolonies. A group of displaced English settlers fromBarbados arrived in Carolina in 1670. They broughtwith them a few African slaves, as well as the modelof the Barbados slave code, which eventuallyinspired statutes governing slavery throughout themainland colonies. Carolina officially adopted aversion of the Barbados slave code in 1696. Just asthe West Indies had been a testing ground for theencomienda system that the Spanish had brought toMexico and South America, so the Caribbean

islands now served as a staging area for the slavesystem that would take root elsewhere in EnglishNorth America.

Colonizing the Carolinas

Civil war convulsed England in the 1640s. KingCharles I had dismissed Parliament in 1629, andwhen he eventually recalled it in 1640, the memberswere mutinous. Finding their great champion in thePuritan-soldier Oliver Cromwell, they ultimatelybeheaded Charles in 1649, and Cromwell ruled Eng-land for nearly a decade. Finally, Charles II, son of thedecapitated king, was restored to the throne in 1660.

Colonization had been interrupted during thisperiod of bloody unrest. Now, in the so-calledRestoration period, empire building resumed witheven greater intensity—and royal involvement. Car-olina, named for Charles II, was formally created in1670, after the king granted to eight of his courtfavorites, the Lords Proprietors, an expanse ofwilderness ribboning across the continent to thePacific. These aristocratic founders hoped to growfoodstuffs to provision the sugar plantations in Bar-bados and to export non-English products like wine,silk, and olive oil.

Carolina prospered by developing close eco-nomic ties with the flourishing sugar islands of theEnglish West Indies. In a broad sense, the mainlandcolony was but the most northerly of those out-

36 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

The Barbados slave code (1661) declared,

“If any Negro or slave whatsoever shall offerany violence to any Christian by striking orthe like, such Negro or slave shall for his orher first offence be severely whipped by theConstable. For his second offence of thatnature he shall be severely whipped, his noseslit, and be burned in some part of his facewith a hot iron. And being brutish slaves,[they] deserve not, for the baseness of theircondition, to be tried by the legal trial oftwelve men of their peers, as the subjects ofEngland are. And it is further enacted andordained that if any Negro or other slaveunder punishment by his masterunfortunately shall suffer in life or member,which seldom happens, no personwhatsoever shall be liable to any finetherefore.”

posts. Many original Carolina settlers in fact hademigrated from Barbados, bringing that island’sslave system with them. They also established a vig-orous slave trade in Carolina itself. Enlisting the aidof the coastal Savannah Indians, they forayed intothe interior in search of captives. The Lords Propri-etors in London protested against Indian slave trad-ing in their colony, but to no avail. ManacledIndians soon were among the young colony’s majorexports. As many as ten thousand Indians were dis-patched to lifelong labor in the West Indian cane-fields and sugar mills. Others were sent to New

England. One Rhode Island town in 1730 countedmore than two hundred Indian slaves from Carolinain its midst.

In 1707 the Savannah Indians decided to endtheir alliance with the Carolinians and to migrate tothe backcountry of Maryland and Pennsylvania,where a new colony founded by Quakers underWilliam Penn promised better relations betweenwhites and Indians. But the Carolinians determinedto “thin” the Savannahs before they could depart. Aseries of bloody raids all but annihilated the Indiantribes of coastal Carolina by 1710.

The “Restoration Colonies” 37

The Thirteen Original Colonies

Name Founded by Year Charter Made Royal 1775 Status

1606 Royal (under the crown)1. Virginia London Co. 1607 1609 1624

16122. New Hampshire John Mason 1623 1679 1679 Royal (absorbed by Mass.,

and others 1641–1679)3. Massachusetts Puritans c. 1628 1629 1691 Royal

Plymouth Separatists 1620 None (Merged with Mass., 1691)Maine F. Gorges 1623 1639 (Bought by Mass., 1677)

4. Maryland Lord Baltimore 1634 1632 ——— Proprietary (controlled byproprietor)

5. Connecticut Mass. emigrants 1635 1662 ——— Self-governing (underlocal control)

New Haven Mass. emigrants 1638 None (Merged with Conn.,1662)

6. Rhode Island R. Williams 1636 1644 ——— Self-governing1663

7. Delaware Swedes 1638 None ——— Proprietary (merged withPa., 1682; same governor,but separate assembly, granted 1703)

8. N. Carolina Virginians 1653 1663 1729 Royal (separated informallyfrom S.C., 1691)

9. New York Dutch c. 1613Duke of York 1664 1664 1685 Royal

10. New Jersey Berkeley and 1664 None 1702 RoyalCarteret

11. Carolina Eight nobles 1670 1663 1729 Royal (separated formallyfrom N.C., 1712)

12. Pennsylvania William Penn 1681 1681 ——— Proprietary13. Georgia Oglethorpe and 1733 1732 1752 Royal

others

{

{

After much experimentation, rice emerged asthe principal export crop in Carolina. Rice was thenan exotic food in England; no rice seeds were sentout from London in the first supply ships to Car-olina. But rice was grown in Africa, and the Carolini-ans were soon paying premium prices for WestAfrican slaves experienced in rice cultivation. TheAfricans’ agricultural skill and their relative immu-nity to malaria (thanks to a genetic trait that also,unfortunately, made them and their descendantssusceptible to sickle-cell anemia) made them ideallaborers on the hot and swampy rice plantations. By1710 they constituted a majority of Carolinians.

Moss-festooned Charles Town—also named forthe king—rapidly became the busiest seaport in theSouth. Many high-spirited sons of English landedfamilies, deprived of an inheritance, came to theCharleston area and gave it a rich aristocratic flavor.The village became a colorfully diverse community,to which French Protestant refugees and otherswere attracted by religious toleration.

Nearby, in Florida, the Catholic Spaniardsabhorred the intrusion of these Protestant heretics.Carolina’s frontier was often aflame. Spanish-incited Indians brandished their tomahawks, andarmor-clad warriors of Spain frequently unsheathedtheir swords during the successive Anglo-Spanishwars. But by 1700 Carolina was too strong to bewiped out.

The Emergence of North Carolina

The wild northern expanse of the huge Carolinagrant bordered on Virginia. From the older colonythere drifted down a ragtag group of poverty-stricken outcasts and religious dissenters. Many ofthem had been repelled by the rarefied atmosphereof Virginia, dominated as it was by big-plantationgentry belonging to the Church of England. NorthCarolinians, as a result, have been called “the quin-tessence of Virginia’s discontent.” The newcomers,who frequently were “squatters” without legal rightto the soil, raised their tobacco and other crops onsmall farms, with little need for slaves.

Distinctive traits developed rapidly in NorthCarolina. The poor but sturdy inhabitants, regardedas riffraff by their snobbish neighbors, earned a rep-utation for being irreligious and hospitable topirates. Isolated from neighbors by raw wildernessand stormy Cape Hatteras, “graveyard of theAtlantic,” the North Carolinians developed a strongspirit of resistance to authority. Their locationbetween aristocratic Virginia and aristocratic SouthCarolina caused the area to be dubbed “a vale ofhumility between two mountains of conceit.” Fol-lowing much friction with governors, North Car-olina was officially separated from South Carolina in1712, and subsequently each segment became aroyal colony.

North Carolina shares with tiny Rhode Islandseveral distinctions. These two outposts were themost democratic, the most independent-minded,and the least aristocratic of the original thirteenEnglish colonies.

Although northern Carolina, unlike the colony’ssouthern reaches, did not at first import large num-bers of African slaves, both regions shared in theongoing tragedy of bloody relations between Indi-ans and Europeans. Tuscarora Indians fell upon thefledgling settlement at Newbern in 1711. The NorthCarolinians, aided by their heavily armed brothersfrom the south, retaliated by crushing the Tuscaro-ras in battle, selling hundreds of them into slaveryand leaving the survivors to wander northward toseek the protection of the Iroquois. The Tuscaroraseventually became the Sixth Nation of the IroquoisConfederacy. In another ferocious encounter fouryears later, the South Carolinians defeated and dis-persed the Yamasee Indians.

38 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

RoanokeIsland1585

Cape Hatteras

Jamestown1607

Newbern1710

Charleston1670

Savannah1733

SPANISH �FLORIDA

VIRGINIA

NORTH �CAROLINA �

1712

SOUTH �CAROLINA �

1670

GEORGIA �1733

James R.

Added to Georgia 1763

Early Carolina and Georgia Settlements

With the conquest of the Yamasees, virtually allthe coastal Indian tribes in the southern colonieshad been utterly devastated by about 1720. Yet in the interior, in the hills and valleys of theAppalachian Mountains, the powerful Cherokees,Creeks, and Iroquois (see “Makers of America: TheIroquois,” pp. 40–41) remained. Stronger and morenumerous than their coastal cousins, they managedfor half a century more to contain British settlementto the coastal plain east of the mountains.

Late-Coming Georgia:The Buffer Colony

Pine-forested Georgia, with the harbor of Savannahnourishing its chief settlement, was formallyfounded in 1733. It proved to be the last of the thir-teen colonies to be planted—126 years after thefirst, Virginia, and 52 years after the twelfth, Penn-sylvania. Chronologically Georgia belongs else-where, but geographically it may be grouped with itssouthern neighbors.

The English crown intended Georgia to servechiefly as a buffer. It would protect the more valu-able Carolinas against vengeful Spaniards fromFlorida and against the hostile French fromLouisiana. Georgia indeed suffered much buffeting,especially when wars broke out between Spain andEngland in the European arena. As a vital link inimperial defense, the exposed colony received mon-etary subsidies from the British government at theoutset—the only one of the “original thirteen” toenjoy this benefit in its founding stage.

Named in honor of King George II of England,Georgia was launched by a high-minded group ofphilanthropists. In addition to protecting theirneighboring northern colonies and producing silkand wine, they were determined to carve out a havenfor wretched souls imprisoned for debt. They werealso determined, at least at first, to keep slavery outof Georgia. The ablest of the founders was thedynamic soldier-statesman James Oglethorpe, whobecame keenly interested in prison reform after oneof his friends died in a debtors’ jail. As an able mili-tary leader, Oglethorpe repelled Spanish attacks. Asan imperialist and a philanthropist, he saved “theCharity Colony” by his energetic leadership and byheavily mortgaging his own personal fortune.

The hamlet of Savannah, like Charleston, was amelting-pot community. German Lutherans andkilted Scots Highlanders, among others, added colorto the pattern. All Christian worshipers exceptCatholics enjoyed religious toleration. Many mis-sionaries armed with Bibles and hope arrived inSavannah to work among debtors and Indians.Prominent among them was young John Wesley,who later returned to England and founded theMethodist Church.

Georgia grew with painful slowness and at theend of the colonial era was perhaps the least popu-lous of the colonies. The development of a planta-tion economy was thwarted by an unhealthfulclimate, by early restrictions on black slavery, andby demoralizing Spanish attacks.

The Plantation Colonies

Certain distinctive features were shared by Eng-land’s southern mainland colonies: Maryland, Vir-ginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.Broad-acred, these outposts of empire were all insome degree devoted to exporting commercialagricultural products. Profitable staple crops werethe rule, notably tobacco and rice, though to alesser extent in small-farm North Carolina. Slaverywas found in all the plantation colonies, thoughonly after 1750 in reform-minded Georgia. Im-mense acreage in the hands of a favored few fos-tered a strong aristocratic atmosphere, except inNorth Carolina and to some extent in debtor-tingedGeorgia. The wide scattering of plantations andfarms, often along stately rivers, retarded thegrowth of cities and made the establishment ofchurches and schools both difficult and expensive.In 1671 the governor of Virginia thanked God thatno free schools or printing presses existed in hiscolony.

All the plantation colonies permitted some reli-gious toleration. The tax-supported Church of Eng-land became the dominant faith, though weakest ofall in nonconformist North Carolina.

These colonies were in some degree expansion-ary. “Soil butchery” by excessive tobacco growingdrove settlers westward, and the long, lazy riversinvited penetration of the continent—and continu-ing confrontation with Native Americans.

The Colonial South 39

The Iroquois

Well before the crowned heads of Europe turnedtheir eyes and their dreams of empire toward

North America, a great military power had emergedin the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York State.The Iroquois Confederacy, dubbed by whites the“League of the Iroquois,” bound together five Indiannations—the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Ononda-gas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas. According to Iro-quois legend, it was founded in the late 1500s by twoleaders, Deganawidah and Hiawatha. This proudand potent league vied initially with neighboringIndians for territorial supremacy, then with theFrench, English, and Dutch for control of the furtrade. Ultimately, infected by the white man’s dis-eases, intoxicated by his whiskey, and intimidatedby his muskets, the Iroquois struggled for their verysurvival as a people.

The building block of Iroquois society was thelonghouse (see photo p. 41). This wooden structuredeserved its descriptive name. Only twenty-five feetin breadth, the longhouse stretched from eight totwo hundred feet in length. Each building containedthree to five fireplaces around which gathered twonuclear families, consisting of parents and children.All families residing in the longhouse were related,

their connections of blood running exclusivelythrough the maternal line. A single longhouse mightshelter a woman’s family and those of her mother,sisters, and daughters—with the oldest woman

40

Lake Ontario

L. Erie

LakeChamplain

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NEW FRANCE

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Montreal

Quebec

New Amsterdam

Fort Orange

Algonquin

Montagnais

Huron

Mohawk

Mah

ican

Cayuga

Onondaga

Oneida

Seneca

IroquoisConfederacy

Abe

naki

0 100 Miles50

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Iroquois Lands and European Trade Centers, c. 1590–1650

being the honored matriarch. When a man married,he left his childhood hearth in the home of his mother to join the longhouse of his wife. Men dominated in Iroquois society, but they owedtheir positions of prominence to their mothers’families.

As if sharing one great longhouse, the fivenations joined in the Iroquois Confederacy but kepttheir own separate fires. Although they celebratedtogether and shared a common policy toward out-siders, they remained essentially independent ofone another. On the eastern flank of the league, theMohawks, known as the Keepers of the Eastern Fire,specialized as middlemen with European traders,whereas the outlying Senecas, the Keepers of theWestern Fire, became fur suppliers.

After banding together to end generations ofviolent warfare among themselves, the Five Nationsvanquished their rivals, the neighboring Hurons,Eries, and Petuns. Some other tribes, such as theTuscaroras from the Carolina region, sought peace-ful absorption into the Iroquois Confederacy. TheIroquois further expanded their numbers by meansof periodic “mourning wars,” whose objective wasthe large-scale adoption of captives and refugees.But the arrival of gun-toting Europeans threatenedIroquois supremacy and enmeshed the confederacyin a tangled web of diplomatic intrigues. Through-

out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theyallied alternately with the English against theFrench and vice versa, for a time successfully work-ing this perpetual rivalry to their own advantage.But when the American Revolution broke out, theconfederacy could reach no consensus on whichside to support. Each tribe was left to decide inde-pendently; most, though not all, sided with theBritish. The ultimate British defeat left the confed-eracy in tatters. Many Iroquois, especially theMohawks, moved to new lands in British Canada;others were relegated to reservations in westernNew York.

Reservation life proved unbearable for a proudpeople accustomed to domination over a vast terri-tory. Morale sank; brawling, feuding, and alco-holism became rampant. Out of this morass arose aprophet, an Iroquois called Handsome Lake. In 1799angelic figures clothed in traditional Iroquois garbappeared to Handsome Lake in a vision and warnedhim that the moral decline of his people must end ifthey were to endure. He awoke from his vision towarn his tribespeople to mend their ways. Hissocially oriented gospel inspired many Iroquois toforsake alcohol, to affirm family values, and torevive old Iroquois customs. Handsome Lake diedin 1815, but his teachings, in the form of the Long-house religion, survive to this day.

41

42 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

Chronology

1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England

c. 1565-1590 English crush Irish uprising

1577 Drake circumnavigates the globe

1585 Raleigh founds Roanoke colony

1588 England defeats Spanish Armada

1603 James I becomes king of England

1604 Spain and England sign peace treaty

1607 Virginia colony founded at Jamestown

1612 Rolfe perfects tobacco culture in Virginia

1614 First Anglo-Powhatan War ends

1619 First Africans arrive in Jamestown Virginia House of Burgesses established

1624 Virginia becomes royal colony

1634 Maryland colony founded

1640s Large-scale slave-labor system established in English West Indies

1644 Second Anglo-Powhatan War

1649 Act of Toleration in MarylandCharles I beheaded; Cromwell rules

England

1660 Charles II restored to English throne

1661 Barbados slave code adopted

1670 Carolina colony created

1711-1713 Tuscarora War in North Carolina

1712 North Carolina formally separates from South Carolina

1715-1716 Yamasee War in South Carolina

1733 Georgia colony founded

For further reading, see page A1 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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