Describe The Foundations Of English And Dutch Settlement In South, New England
HIST 107 QUESTIONS, WALKTHROUGH AND NOTES
Posted on: Monday, September 3, 2012
History 107 Fall 2012 Homework Assignment ONE
On Brinkley, Chapters 1-4 and classroom lectures.
For Antelope Valley Students: e-mail to dlewis60@avc.edu by Wednesday. September 19.
For Citrus Students: e-mail to dlewis@citruscollege.edu by Thursday, September 20.
Answer the following in a minimum of 750 words.
You will likely find, however that you will need more than 750 words. Try and cover as much as you can.
Part One: Briefly describe the foundations of America before 1607.
Part Two: Compare the foundations of English and Dutch settlement in the South, New England and the Mid-Atlantic from 1607 to 1689.
Part Three: Tell me how the Southern, …show more content…
New England and Mid-Atlantic provinces developed different cultures within the British Empire between 1689 and 1763.
Because these questions are very broad I want to coach all of you on how to answer them and exactly what I am looking for:
For Part One:
Start with the fact that our history begins before 1607. Show me how Native Americans developed before 1492 and how Spain laid the foundations in Florida and the Southwest.
For Part Two:
What’s very important is to show me how Virginia and Carolina developed very differently from New England and New Netherland. Go back to the English roots in Wessex for the South and East Anglia for the Puritans. How did Virginia and Carolina become class-ridden conservative societies? How did the Puritans try to set up a religious utopia? How did Rhode Island create a more tolerant version? Tell me how New England reached its peak in the 1650’s and then decline? How did the English Civil War and its aftermath affect New England and Virginia? Why did English and Indians clash? Tell me about Bacon’s Rebellion, Philips War, the Dominion of New England and the dress rehearsal for revolution in 1689.
For Part Three:
I want you to pick up the story of British America after 1689. Tell me about the two wars with France between 1689 and 1713 and how that drew the colonies closer to Britain. Two themes I want you to develop are the idea of the Revolution Before The Revolution and the North-South contrast.
Show me how between 1713 and 1748 the colonies were transformed: royal governors, assemblies, no taxation w/o representation, growth of commerce, Scots-Irish and German immigration, growth of settlement. In New England show me how Puritans turned into Yankees: royal charter, Salem witch trials, Mather and science, Great Awakening, rise of commerce. Show me how the Chesapeake and Carolina became slave societies and how they differed. Show me how New York and Pennsylvania became liberal melting-pots. Tell me about Ben Franklin’s career. Finally, tell me about King George’s War, Franklin’s Plan of Union and the French and Indian War.
……………………………
THESE NOTES CONTAIN EVERYTHING IN THE PPT PRESENTATION IN CLASS BUT ARE EXPANDED. BUILD YOUR ESSAY AROUND THE NOTES USING YOUR OWN WORDS AND BRING IN FACTS AND QUOTES FROM BRINKLEY TO BACK THEM UP
His 107 Handout for Asst One: America to 1788
COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS TO 1675
Americans have a history before 1492!
Up until the 1970’s Native Americans were all but invisible in history textbooks. The traditional viewpoint saw America as a virgin wilderness in which a few Indians lived in passive harmony with nature since time immemorial. Then, our experience with the Vietnam War, civil rights and The American Indian Movement began to change our outlook.
Francis Jennings, Gary Nash and others now began to write history books that included the American Indian point of view. A very different history now presents itself: America before 1492 was far from an unpopulated wilderness. American Indians were anything but ‘noble savages’ living in harmony with nature. They shaped their environment by burning off forests and creating grasslands, digging canals, setting up trading networks.
When we think of European history we think of a progressive development of civilization. The same, we now know, is true of Precolumbian North America. Even though the story is technically “prehistory” because it is not written down, it is still a story of technological change and progress.
Timeline of America before Columbus
1800 -1000 BC: Ancestors of the Algonquins began migrating from the Pacific Northwest and possibly from Siberia where related tribes live even today.
1000 BC: Ancestors of Algonquins and Iroquoians found Eastern Woodland Culture in eastern North America.
500 BC-AD 200: Adena –Hopewell Mound Builder Culture begins in Ohio Valley .
100 BC-AD 100: Native Americans begin to grow grain and barley as well as just hunt and fish.
AD 550: Intensified global cooling dooms Adena Hopewell
AD 700: Mississippian revival of Mound Builder Civilization begins.
AD 800: Growing of corn imported from Mexico spreads across North America and begins to change American diets
AD 1000: Buffalo enter Wisconsin. Vikings reach Newfoundland.
AD 1100: The Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee adopt a written constitution . They were very egalitarian. The women voted and the men fought. Around the 1100’s Hiawatha and Deganawida persuaded the Five Nations to form a confederacy that might have given Ben Franklin the idea for a British American Union.
AD 1200 Buffalo enter Indiana . Buffalo hunt replaces deer hunt on Great Plains. Fire is used to burn off prairies to encourage grass and buffalo to come in. Indians are altering their ecology for economic benefit !!!!!!
AD 1200: Cahokia has 20,000 people biggest city in North America until 1800. It has a serpent cult, pyramids and even human sacrifice not unlike the Aztecs. Mound Builder civilization is at its peak. Cahokia suffers fire and flooding and possible wartime destruction. This is the beginning of the end of Mound Builder civilization.
AD 1300: The bow and arrow, first used to hunt deer, touches off a military revolution.
AD 1400: Complex societies in many parts of the Americas.
The Missing Century: Spanish North America: 1492-1607
The 1500’s present a huge gap in the history of America until we recognize much of our heritage is Spanish as well as English. Henry Wieneck’s article on “Spain in North America” shows the Latin roots of Florida, Texas, California, and the Southwest. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Fe , El Paso all began as Spanish missions.
Spain gave Americans ranching, cowboys, and the first Old World colonial administrations. Christopher Columbus colonized the Caribbean in the 1490’s and inspired the discoveries of Florida, Panama and the Pacific. Mexico was conquered in the 1510’s and Peru in the 1530’s.
The 1540’s saw Spanish movement into the interior with Hernando de Soto exploring the Southeast and Francisco de Coronado exploring the Southwest. De Soto’s expedition triggered an epidemic of smallpox that would decimate much of the native population.
Spain ruled a vast world empire founded heavily on Mexican silver and gold. One of the reasons for its existence was to spread the Catholic faith. Both Spain’s empire and religion were now challenged by Holland, England and their French Protestant allies. In 1564 a French Protestant settlement was planted in Carolina. This was a mortal threat to Spain’s trade links.
King Philip II of Spain sent Pedro Menendez de Aviles to America in 1565. Menendez massacred the Huguenots and then founded St. Augustine and other outposts all over Florida. Menendez even tried to colonize Virginia . An Algonquin named Opecancanough led an attack that wiped Spain out of Virginia in 1571. In the 1580’s and 1590’s Spanish Franciscans settled New Mexico.
Both Florida and New Mexico cost Spain money and few wanted to go there. Still, they were the foundation of America’s Sunbelt.
England tried to challenge Spain. The early Lost Colony at Roanoke Island in the 1580’s was overwhelmed by drought and the Algonquins. Some of the settlers intermarried with the Hatteras tribe. Others went into Virginia and were killed by the same Powhatans that killed the Spanish.
Southern Roots: Virginia: 1607-1676
Virginia was founded at Jamestown in 1607. The colony was at first made up of single men unsuited for New World survival and barely survived. The mortality rate in Virginia remained very high through the 1600’s. John Smith saved the colony in 1608 but it was starving and almost abandoned in 1610. The Powhatans, led by an aging Opecananough decimated Virginia again in 1622. Finally, the struggling colony began to stabilize. In the 1640’s and 1650’s large numbers of supporters of the king fled the English Civil War to come there. The Washingtons, Lees, Byrds and other rich planters became Virginia’s aristocracy. They brought the plantation system with them from western England. A lot of young, poor single men came as servants. Most died. There were few towns in Virginia, and plantations were strung along the swampy river valleys. Tobacco became the staple for a very class-ridden society. At first only one out of twenty servants was African.
Birth of the Melting Pot: New Netherland/New York : 1624-1664
The Dutch settled in what is now New York State in 1624. Many of the few hundred original colonists were actually Belgian. Like the English Puritans the Dutch followed the Protestant religion of John Calvin. New Netherland was very liberal and tolerated all nationalities and religions. New Amsterdam was run by the Dutch West India Company and mainly concerned with making money. Almost immediately New Amsterdam (New York City) became home for a stock market and a melting pot of nationalities and religions. People became morally loose, pushy and somewhat irreligious. Governor Wilhelm Kieft attacked the Indians. The last Dutch governor was Peter Stuyvessant. He was very unpopular and tried to end religious freedom. The Dutch, having endured the Spanish Inquisition, had no use for religious intolerance. When the English took over New Netherland and made it New York, nobody objected.
The Puritan City on A Hill: New England: 1620-1676
The most important colonies took shape in New England. A group of English Calvinists known as the Pilgrims or Separatists fled to Holland and then tried to settle in New York Harbor in 1620. They were blown off course and wound up in Massachusetts.
Ten years later their presence in Plymouth made it easier for some 16,000 Puritans to found Boston and a number of surrounding cities. The Puritans came as a network of highly-educated middle-class families. They were organized as both as the Massachusetts Bay Company and what would soon become the Congregationalist Church. Massachusetts acted as an independent country from the moment it was settled in 1630. John Winthrop became the first governor. Laws were made by a General Court. Both were elected by those in the congregation considered to be members of God’s Elect. This in effect, while an oligarchy, a rule of the few, implied an elective government.
The English Stuarts did not like this radical religious experiment. The Puritans believed Jesus Christ was returning soon and that they needed to flee from the Old World which they equated with Egypt and Babylon. Massachusetts looked upon itself as a New Israel mounting a new Exodus into the Wilderness.
The founding Puritan generation of John Winthrop, Richard Mather and John Cotton was very fervent in its beliefs. It demanded religious uniformity and expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Hutchinson challenged the need for a ministry; Williams the moral qualifications of the ministry. Both took refuge in what would become Rhode Island.
The General Court passed a written constitution called the Body of Liberties in the 1640’s based upon the Calvinist view of Old Testament law. It was virtually ready to declare independence from England and had set up a New England militia. Then civil war broke out in England in 1642 and Massachusetts was left alone for twenty years.
By the 1660’s the younger generation of Puritans by and large began to lack the messianic fervor of their elders. Puritan doctrine was very harsh. It taught most people were predestined to go to hell no matter how much they tried to please God. Morality was nonetheless imposed on others. The next generation began to rebel against the strictures of its parents. Few young people showed evidence of election. In 1660 partial church membership was granted to many through the Halfway Covenant.
Many of the older generation feared that God’s judgment was about to fall upon New England. BRITISH AMERICA: 1675-1763
British America faced a crisis that lasted from 1675 to 1713
King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion:
Colonial America’s first crisis began in the 1670’s. English settlement began to press against Indian lands. In New England the moderate Chief Massassoit was succeeded by his militant son, Metacom (called King Philip by the English). Metacom considered the English as land-hungry invaders and resented the cultural threat represented by Calvinism. During 1675-1676 savage attacks were launched against Connecticut and Massachusetts settlements. John Winthrop. Jr., now 70, led the defense of Boston. The English counterttack decimated the Indians of southern New England.
Virginia was a class-ridden society of plantations. The planters hoarded the best land. Poorer settlers and indentured servants were pushed to the frontier and had to wrest land from the Indians. When the Indians fought back the landless servants found a champion in Nathaniel Bacon. In 1675 Bacon broke the power of the Indians on the frontier. Then he turned his guns on the rich planters and briefly overthrew their government in Williamsburg. A few English warships saved Governor William Berkeley and broke the poor whites’ rebellion.
Indians were no longer strong enough to threaten the extinction of the English Colonies and white-Indian relations were now poisoned for good. King Charles II and the Lords of Trade in London began to tighten up their control of the colonies. Navigation Acts were passed to control colonial commerce.
Bacon’s Rebellion terrified many of Virginia’s planters. They now saw English labor as too rebellious to work the tobacco plantations. Fewer Englishmen were coming to Virginia anyway. Indians were likewise unsuited for such labor. Africans seemed ideal. In 1675 only 6% of Virginians were black. Thousands of Africans now began to be imported. By the early 1700’s Virginia was passing laws enslaving any nonwhite who was not born a Christian. Rich plantation owners began the process. Many small landowners simply could not compete with lifetime slave labor which cost a fraction of what a temporary English servant would. They had to become slaveowners as well. By 1750 40% of Virginians were African slaves.
Slavery became even more deeply entrenched in Carolina. Charleston was founded in 1670 by English plantation owners from Barbados. They imported the brutal system of West Indian Slavery. By 1721 Carolina was split into North and South Carolina. Many Africans died being enslaved and staged revolts in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. In the beginning they asserted their strong African identities but an African –American identity and a culture of passive resistance slowly began to emerge. Between 1700 and 1750 the eastern plains of Virginia and the Carolinas began to fill up. In the 1730’s Georgia was founded as a haven for debtors. Originally free, it was soon populated by Carolina slaveowners. End of the Puritan Theocracy:
Charles II revoked Massachusetts’s 1628 charter. In 1685 James II succeeded Charles II. James, a Catholic, wanted to be an absolute king in England …and in America. He merged all the New England colonies with New York and New Jersey into a single Dominion of New England. Sir Edmund Andros, a longtime enemy of the Puritans became the royal governor. He was a tyrant. He abolished town hall meetings, elections, and levied taxes without the consent of the people. He tried to jail any opposition.
Revolution broke out in Boston on April 18, 1689. Puritan minister Increase Mather and Wait Winthrop, John Winthrop’s grandson, led this dress rehearsal for the American Revolution that would start on April 18, 1775! The revolution was a success because James II had been deposed by Parliament in 1688.
The Dominion of New England was dissolved but the experience of absolute royal power left a bitter memory.
The Revolution of 1689 furnished British Americans a weapon against tyranny. When a government is tyrannical it was the duty of the government to change or overthrow it. No government had the right to tax its subjects other than via their elected representatives.
The new king, William III, gave Massachusetts a new charter in 1691. The new charter took power from the elected General Court and gave it to a royal governor. In the view of Mather and other Puritans this meant the rule of the ungodly! The crisis intensified when New England and New York were attacked by France and her Huron allies. Massachusetts’s governor, Sir William Phips sent an expedition to capture Quebec City. It was decimated by French guns.
The Salem Witch Trials took place in this context. New England had lost her theocracy and been defeated by the French and Indians. Samuel Parris warned his congregation In Salem every Sunday that maybe Satan’s agents had crept into New England. Many believed him. When a small incident of witchcraft took place in 1692, Salem was convulsed with hysteria. Around 150 were accused of witchcraft and 19 were executed. The witch hunt soon blew itself out. Again, the French and Hurons hit the frontier. New Englanders fought on their own until Queen Anne sent British troops that conauered Acadia and renamed it Nova …show more content…
Scotia.
Peace and Development 1713-1744
British America enjoyed thirty years of peace. Tremendous growth and changes took place.
Generational change: War had lasted two generations. One generation beat Metacom and they and their children then overthrew Andros and fought the French. The great –grandchildren of the Puritans of 1630 was the first to enjoy peace and prosperity. They wore powdered wigs, rode in carriages, and lived in an America with stone houses and paved streets. This Enlightenment Generation was not terribly religious. It won an important political battle with the royal governors:
No taxation without representation: the royal governors in New England and New York were sometimes corrupt and immoral. The cost of fighting two wars with France gave the provincial assemblies bargaining power. By the mid 1700’s the principle of “no taxation without representation” was once again established in all thirteen provinces.
Economic growth: population in British America grew from 50,000 in 1650 to 250,000 in 1700 to 1,170,000 in 1750 and 2, 460,000 by 1775. Much of this was by natural growth, but a lot was due to immigration. The value of British imports rose from £400,00 to over £ 1,000,000. Manufacturing remained virtually nil, but urban growth, trade and commerce multiplied greatly.
The Great Awakening: The Puritan becomes a Yankee: Cotton Mather died in 1728 and saw the marked decline of the religious zeal of the 1630’s. Mather himself, once a witch-hunter, embraced the new sciences of medicine physics and astronomy. New Englanders, perhaps turned off by the excesses of Salem and the zeal of their forefathers now believed that God worked more through natural law than miracles. They went to church and then out to party. New England records show high numbers of premarital pregnancies at this time.
In the late 1730’s Jonathan Edwards launched a fervent religious revival. He overawed young audiences with fervent emotional preaching that warned they were on the verge of damnation unless…they unconditionally threw themselves on God’s forgiveness. America’s youth were now swept up in a Great Awakening. Churches split over the new preaching. American evangelicalism was thus born in the 1730’s . It stressed more what Christ did for the believer than what the believer had to do to attain perfection. People began to change churches and question the divine authority of ministers. How soon before their questioning spirit would become political?
The Middle Atlantic Melting Pot: New England remained dominated by the established Congregationalist Church. The Southern provinces were almost totally Anglican. The real cradles of American liberalism were the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In 1664 New Netherland became the English province of New York. Until 1700 New York remained Dutch in culture and population. Then more and more English, Germans and Scots-Irish began to come. New York was not a big province, but it remained a diverse one. Slavery did exist there, for about 10 % of the people and New York City witnessed a race riot. Criticism of the governing establishment by journalist John Peter Zenger in 1734 led to a court case which established freedom of the press.
Much as New England, Pennsylvania was founded as a “Holy Experiment”. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were the most persecuted religious group in America. They challenged all hierarchy, tradition and authority. They advocated the equality of women, coexistence with the Indians, and opposition to slavery. Charles II granted William Penn permission to fond a royal province on the banks of the Delaware. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 and by 1700 all the farmland up to the Appalachians was settled. Rhode Island, Maryland and even New York practiced religious toleration but none with the fervor of Pennsylvania. Not only English Quakers but Scots-Irish, Welsh, Germans, Methodists, Swedes, and others flocked to the rich farmland of Pennsylvania. The only settlers in the colony who opposed religious toleration were the Anglicans and they were too few to impose their will. Philadelphia quickly became the most cosmopolitan and progressive city in America. Little wonder young Ben Franklin came here. Franklin’s story is that of America in the 1700’s. He was born in Boston in 1706, only 14 years after the witch hunt. He grew up as a Puritan fearing the wrath of God as taught him by his parents. He knew the great Puritan ministers Increase Mather and Cotton Mather. Then Franklin left his family and his belief system. He came to Philadelphia. By now he had rejected election, predestination and many other aspects of Calvinism. He still believed in his own personal and in hard work.
Franklin created America’s first national newspaper and was a rich man in his 30’s. He then devoted himself to science and bettering the public good. He founded the University of Pennsylvania and set up the first fire department and public library. He discovered electricity and invented a wood-burning stove.
The Crisis Resumes: 1745-1763
No sooner had the Great Awakening begun to run out of steam than war broke again with France which had occupied much of the American interior.
Once again, New England had to fight alone in the beginning. Yankee militia took the mighty French bastion of Louisbourg in 1745 but England gave it back when King George’s War ended in 1748. The truce did not last long. During the truce in 1752 Ben Franklin drew inspiration from the Iroquois and set forth a Plan of Union. All the English provinces in America would keep their governments but also have a British American Governor General appointed by the king and an American Parliament that alone could tax the colonies. The Lords of Trade ignored
it.
Fighting resumed in 1754. France had built Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania to block English westward settlement. The governor of Virginia, Richard Dinwiddie, sent Colonel George Washington to assert Virginia’s interests. His force was ambushed.
Between 1754 and 1757 the French were winning what we today call the French and Indian War. Britain sent General Edward Braddock to take Fort Duquesne. His army was massacred by the Indians but Washington managed a successful retreat. The French and Indians raged up and down the New York and Pennsylvania frontiers.
Britain’s Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder put Britain on full war status and sent a huge fleet and army to America to crush the French. In 1758 a British army drove into northern New York. Fort Duquesne was taken and renamed Fort Pitt. General Jeffrey Amherst took Louisbourg in 1758 and Quebec fell in 1759. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 made all of North America east of the Mississippi a vast British Empire.
Royal America at its Zenith
How did Britain’s American subjects see themselves? They saw themselves as more English than the English! In England King George II and his successor George III were seen as human beings with all their foibles. In America the king was seen as bigger than life. He was seen as protector and source of justice. He would beat the French, restrain corrupt politicians and maybe even free the slaves. Even New Englanders celebrated royal holidays and cherished the history of Britain as their own.
British Americans had sacrificed a great deal. Every church in Boston was filled with widows. Massachusetts had heavily taxed its citizens with I.O.U.’s to make America safe for British liberties and Protestantism. British Americans were not yet aware of the reality that they were becoming something other than Englishmen.
Americans were no longer purely English. Thousands of Germans had fled religious persecution to settle in Pennsylvania. Thousands of Presbyterian Scots, wild tribesmen and frontiersmen and cattle-raisers left Scotland for northern Ireland in the 1600’s. After a century they were no longer Scots but neither were they Irish nor English. In the mid-1700’s these Scots-Irish came in vast multitudes to the American frontier, bringing a warrior ethic, an uncompromising love of liberty and a total rejection of any form of class or hierarchy.
By 1763 a new society, more diverse, more enterprising, more egalitarian, more evangelical, more innovative, and perhaps more violent and liberty-loving had come into existence between Maine and Georgia. It still saw itself as royal and English, but a sudden rapid series of events would soon shatter that illusion.
Posted on: Monday, September 3, 2012
History 107 Fall 2012 Homework Assignment ONE
On Brinkley, Chapters 1-4 and classroom lectures.
For Antelope Valley Students: e-mail to dlewis60@avc.edu by Wednesday. September 19.
For Citrus Students: e-mail to dlewis@citruscollege.edu by Thursday, September 20.
Answer the following in a minimum of 750 words.
You will likely find, however that you will need more than 750 words. Try and cover as much as you can.
Part One: Briefly describe the foundations of America before 1607.
Part Two: Compare the foundations of English and Dutch settlement in the South, New England and the Mid-Atlantic from 1607 to 1689.
Part Three: Tell me how the Southern, …show more content…
New England and Mid-Atlantic provinces developed different cultures within the British Empire between 1689 and 1763.
Because these questions are very broad I want to coach all of you on how to answer them and exactly what I am looking for:
For Part One:
Start with the fact that our history begins before 1607. Show me how Native Americans developed before 1492 and how Spain laid the foundations in Florida and the Southwest.
For Part Two:
What’s very important is to show me how Virginia and Carolina developed very differently from New England and New Netherland. Go back to the English roots in Wessex for the South and East Anglia for the Puritans. How did Virginia and Carolina become class-ridden conservative societies? How did the Puritans try to set up a religious utopia? How did Rhode Island create a more tolerant version? Tell me how New England reached its peak in the 1650’s and then decline? How did the English Civil War and its aftermath affect New England and Virginia? Why did English and Indians clash? Tell me about Bacon’s Rebellion, Philips War, the Dominion of New England and the dress rehearsal for revolution in 1689.
For Part Three:
I want you to pick up the story of British America after 1689. Tell me about the two wars with France between 1689 and 1713 and how that drew the colonies closer to Britain. Two themes I want you to develop are the idea of the Revolution Before The Revolution and the North-South contrast.
Show me how between 1713 and 1748 the colonies were transformed: royal governors, assemblies, no taxation w/o representation, growth of commerce, Scots-Irish and German immigration, growth of settlement. In New England show me how Puritans turned into Yankees: royal charter, Salem witch trials, Mather and science, Great Awakening, rise of commerce. Show me how the Chesapeake and Carolina became slave societies and how they differed. Show me how New York and Pennsylvania became liberal melting-pots. Tell me about Ben Franklin’s career. Finally, tell me about King George’s War, Franklin’s Plan of Union and the French and Indian War.
……………………………
THESE NOTES CONTAIN EVERYTHING IN THE PPT PRESENTATION IN CLASS BUT ARE EXPANDED. BUILD YOUR ESSAY AROUND THE NOTES USING YOUR OWN WORDS AND BRING IN FACTS AND QUOTES FROM BRINKLEY TO BACK THEM UP
His 107 Handout for Asst One: America to 1788
COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS TO 1675
Americans have a history before 1492!
Up until the 1970’s Native Americans were all but invisible in history textbooks. The traditional viewpoint saw America as a virgin wilderness in which a few Indians lived in passive harmony with nature since time immemorial. Then, our experience with the Vietnam War, civil rights and The American Indian Movement began to change our outlook.
Francis Jennings, Gary Nash and others now began to write history books that included the American Indian point of view. A very different history now presents itself: America before 1492 was far from an unpopulated wilderness. American Indians were anything but ‘noble savages’ living in harmony with nature. They shaped their environment by burning off forests and creating grasslands, digging canals, setting up trading networks.
When we think of European history we think of a progressive development of civilization. The same, we now know, is true of Precolumbian North America. Even though the story is technically “prehistory” because it is not written down, it is still a story of technological change and progress.
Timeline of America before Columbus
1800 -1000 BC: Ancestors of the Algonquins began migrating from the Pacific Northwest and possibly from Siberia where related tribes live even today.
1000 BC: Ancestors of Algonquins and Iroquoians found Eastern Woodland Culture in eastern North America.
500 BC-AD 200: Adena –Hopewell Mound Builder Culture begins in Ohio Valley .
100 BC-AD 100: Native Americans begin to grow grain and barley as well as just hunt and fish.
AD 550: Intensified global cooling dooms Adena Hopewell
AD 700: Mississippian revival of Mound Builder Civilization begins.
AD 800: Growing of corn imported from Mexico spreads across North America and begins to change American diets
AD 1000: Buffalo enter Wisconsin. Vikings reach Newfoundland.
AD 1100: The Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee adopt a written constitution . They were very egalitarian. The women voted and the men fought. Around the 1100’s Hiawatha and Deganawida persuaded the Five Nations to form a confederacy that might have given Ben Franklin the idea for a British American Union.
AD 1200 Buffalo enter Indiana . Buffalo hunt replaces deer hunt on Great Plains. Fire is used to burn off prairies to encourage grass and buffalo to come in. Indians are altering their ecology for economic benefit !!!!!!
AD 1200: Cahokia has 20,000 people biggest city in North America until 1800. It has a serpent cult, pyramids and even human sacrifice not unlike the Aztecs. Mound Builder civilization is at its peak. Cahokia suffers fire and flooding and possible wartime destruction. This is the beginning of the end of Mound Builder civilization.
AD 1300: The bow and arrow, first used to hunt deer, touches off a military revolution.
AD 1400: Complex societies in many parts of the Americas.
The Missing Century: Spanish North America: 1492-1607
The 1500’s present a huge gap in the history of America until we recognize much of our heritage is Spanish as well as English. Henry Wieneck’s article on “Spain in North America” shows the Latin roots of Florida, Texas, California, and the Southwest. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Fe , El Paso all began as Spanish missions.
Spain gave Americans ranching, cowboys, and the first Old World colonial administrations. Christopher Columbus colonized the Caribbean in the 1490’s and inspired the discoveries of Florida, Panama and the Pacific. Mexico was conquered in the 1510’s and Peru in the 1530’s.
The 1540’s saw Spanish movement into the interior with Hernando de Soto exploring the Southeast and Francisco de Coronado exploring the Southwest. De Soto’s expedition triggered an epidemic of smallpox that would decimate much of the native population.
Spain ruled a vast world empire founded heavily on Mexican silver and gold. One of the reasons for its existence was to spread the Catholic faith. Both Spain’s empire and religion were now challenged by Holland, England and their French Protestant allies. In 1564 a French Protestant settlement was planted in Carolina. This was a mortal threat to Spain’s trade links.
King Philip II of Spain sent Pedro Menendez de Aviles to America in 1565. Menendez massacred the Huguenots and then founded St. Augustine and other outposts all over Florida. Menendez even tried to colonize Virginia . An Algonquin named Opecancanough led an attack that wiped Spain out of Virginia in 1571. In the 1580’s and 1590’s Spanish Franciscans settled New Mexico.
Both Florida and New Mexico cost Spain money and few wanted to go there. Still, they were the foundation of America’s Sunbelt.
England tried to challenge Spain. The early Lost Colony at Roanoke Island in the 1580’s was overwhelmed by drought and the Algonquins. Some of the settlers intermarried with the Hatteras tribe. Others went into Virginia and were killed by the same Powhatans that killed the Spanish.
Southern Roots: Virginia: 1607-1676
Virginia was founded at Jamestown in 1607. The colony was at first made up of single men unsuited for New World survival and barely survived. The mortality rate in Virginia remained very high through the 1600’s. John Smith saved the colony in 1608 but it was starving and almost abandoned in 1610. The Powhatans, led by an aging Opecananough decimated Virginia again in 1622. Finally, the struggling colony began to stabilize. In the 1640’s and 1650’s large numbers of supporters of the king fled the English Civil War to come there. The Washingtons, Lees, Byrds and other rich planters became Virginia’s aristocracy. They brought the plantation system with them from western England. A lot of young, poor single men came as servants. Most died. There were few towns in Virginia, and plantations were strung along the swampy river valleys. Tobacco became the staple for a very class-ridden society. At first only one out of twenty servants was African.
Birth of the Melting Pot: New Netherland/New York : 1624-1664
The Dutch settled in what is now New York State in 1624. Many of the few hundred original colonists were actually Belgian. Like the English Puritans the Dutch followed the Protestant religion of John Calvin. New Netherland was very liberal and tolerated all nationalities and religions. New Amsterdam was run by the Dutch West India Company and mainly concerned with making money. Almost immediately New Amsterdam (New York City) became home for a stock market and a melting pot of nationalities and religions. People became morally loose, pushy and somewhat irreligious. Governor Wilhelm Kieft attacked the Indians. The last Dutch governor was Peter Stuyvessant. He was very unpopular and tried to end religious freedom. The Dutch, having endured the Spanish Inquisition, had no use for religious intolerance. When the English took over New Netherland and made it New York, nobody objected.
The Puritan City on A Hill: New England: 1620-1676
The most important colonies took shape in New England. A group of English Calvinists known as the Pilgrims or Separatists fled to Holland and then tried to settle in New York Harbor in 1620. They were blown off course and wound up in Massachusetts.
Ten years later their presence in Plymouth made it easier for some 16,000 Puritans to found Boston and a number of surrounding cities. The Puritans came as a network of highly-educated middle-class families. They were organized as both as the Massachusetts Bay Company and what would soon become the Congregationalist Church. Massachusetts acted as an independent country from the moment it was settled in 1630. John Winthrop became the first governor. Laws were made by a General Court. Both were elected by those in the congregation considered to be members of God’s Elect. This in effect, while an oligarchy, a rule of the few, implied an elective government.
The English Stuarts did not like this radical religious experiment. The Puritans believed Jesus Christ was returning soon and that they needed to flee from the Old World which they equated with Egypt and Babylon. Massachusetts looked upon itself as a New Israel mounting a new Exodus into the Wilderness.
The founding Puritan generation of John Winthrop, Richard Mather and John Cotton was very fervent in its beliefs. It demanded religious uniformity and expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Hutchinson challenged the need for a ministry; Williams the moral qualifications of the ministry. Both took refuge in what would become Rhode Island.
The General Court passed a written constitution called the Body of Liberties in the 1640’s based upon the Calvinist view of Old Testament law. It was virtually ready to declare independence from England and had set up a New England militia. Then civil war broke out in England in 1642 and Massachusetts was left alone for twenty years.
By the 1660’s the younger generation of Puritans by and large began to lack the messianic fervor of their elders. Puritan doctrine was very harsh. It taught most people were predestined to go to hell no matter how much they tried to please God. Morality was nonetheless imposed on others. The next generation began to rebel against the strictures of its parents. Few young people showed evidence of election. In 1660 partial church membership was granted to many through the Halfway Covenant.
Many of the older generation feared that God’s judgment was about to fall upon New England. BRITISH AMERICA: 1675-1763
British America faced a crisis that lasted from 1675 to 1713
King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion:
Colonial America’s first crisis began in the 1670’s. English settlement began to press against Indian lands. In New England the moderate Chief Massassoit was succeeded by his militant son, Metacom (called King Philip by the English). Metacom considered the English as land-hungry invaders and resented the cultural threat represented by Calvinism. During 1675-1676 savage attacks were launched against Connecticut and Massachusetts settlements. John Winthrop. Jr., now 70, led the defense of Boston. The English counterttack decimated the Indians of southern New England.
Virginia was a class-ridden society of plantations. The planters hoarded the best land. Poorer settlers and indentured servants were pushed to the frontier and had to wrest land from the Indians. When the Indians fought back the landless servants found a champion in Nathaniel Bacon. In 1675 Bacon broke the power of the Indians on the frontier. Then he turned his guns on the rich planters and briefly overthrew their government in Williamsburg. A few English warships saved Governor William Berkeley and broke the poor whites’ rebellion.
Indians were no longer strong enough to threaten the extinction of the English Colonies and white-Indian relations were now poisoned for good. King Charles II and the Lords of Trade in London began to tighten up their control of the colonies. Navigation Acts were passed to control colonial commerce.
Bacon’s Rebellion terrified many of Virginia’s planters. They now saw English labor as too rebellious to work the tobacco plantations. Fewer Englishmen were coming to Virginia anyway. Indians were likewise unsuited for such labor. Africans seemed ideal. In 1675 only 6% of Virginians were black. Thousands of Africans now began to be imported. By the early 1700’s Virginia was passing laws enslaving any nonwhite who was not born a Christian. Rich plantation owners began the process. Many small landowners simply could not compete with lifetime slave labor which cost a fraction of what a temporary English servant would. They had to become slaveowners as well. By 1750 40% of Virginians were African slaves.
Slavery became even more deeply entrenched in Carolina. Charleston was founded in 1670 by English plantation owners from Barbados. They imported the brutal system of West Indian Slavery. By 1721 Carolina was split into North and South Carolina. Many Africans died being enslaved and staged revolts in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. In the beginning they asserted their strong African identities but an African –American identity and a culture of passive resistance slowly began to emerge. Between 1700 and 1750 the eastern plains of Virginia and the Carolinas began to fill up. In the 1730’s Georgia was founded as a haven for debtors. Originally free, it was soon populated by Carolina slaveowners. End of the Puritan Theocracy:
Charles II revoked Massachusetts’s 1628 charter. In 1685 James II succeeded Charles II. James, a Catholic, wanted to be an absolute king in England …and in America. He merged all the New England colonies with New York and New Jersey into a single Dominion of New England. Sir Edmund Andros, a longtime enemy of the Puritans became the royal governor. He was a tyrant. He abolished town hall meetings, elections, and levied taxes without the consent of the people. He tried to jail any opposition.
Revolution broke out in Boston on April 18, 1689. Puritan minister Increase Mather and Wait Winthrop, John Winthrop’s grandson, led this dress rehearsal for the American Revolution that would start on April 18, 1775! The revolution was a success because James II had been deposed by Parliament in 1688.
The Dominion of New England was dissolved but the experience of absolute royal power left a bitter memory.
The Revolution of 1689 furnished British Americans a weapon against tyranny. When a government is tyrannical it was the duty of the government to change or overthrow it. No government had the right to tax its subjects other than via their elected representatives.
The new king, William III, gave Massachusetts a new charter in 1691. The new charter took power from the elected General Court and gave it to a royal governor. In the view of Mather and other Puritans this meant the rule of the ungodly! The crisis intensified when New England and New York were attacked by France and her Huron allies. Massachusetts’s governor, Sir William Phips sent an expedition to capture Quebec City. It was decimated by French guns.
The Salem Witch Trials took place in this context. New England had lost her theocracy and been defeated by the French and Indians. Samuel Parris warned his congregation In Salem every Sunday that maybe Satan’s agents had crept into New England. Many believed him. When a small incident of witchcraft took place in 1692, Salem was convulsed with hysteria. Around 150 were accused of witchcraft and 19 were executed. The witch hunt soon blew itself out. Again, the French and Hurons hit the frontier. New Englanders fought on their own until Queen Anne sent British troops that conauered Acadia and renamed it Nova …show more content…
Scotia.
Peace and Development 1713-1744
British America enjoyed thirty years of peace. Tremendous growth and changes took place.
Generational change: War had lasted two generations. One generation beat Metacom and they and their children then overthrew Andros and fought the French. The great –grandchildren of the Puritans of 1630 was the first to enjoy peace and prosperity. They wore powdered wigs, rode in carriages, and lived in an America with stone houses and paved streets. This Enlightenment Generation was not terribly religious. It won an important political battle with the royal governors:
No taxation without representation: the royal governors in New England and New York were sometimes corrupt and immoral. The cost of fighting two wars with France gave the provincial assemblies bargaining power. By the mid 1700’s the principle of “no taxation without representation” was once again established in all thirteen provinces.
Economic growth: population in British America grew from 50,000 in 1650 to 250,000 in 1700 to 1,170,000 in 1750 and 2, 460,000 by 1775. Much of this was by natural growth, but a lot was due to immigration. The value of British imports rose from £400,00 to over £ 1,000,000. Manufacturing remained virtually nil, but urban growth, trade and commerce multiplied greatly.
The Great Awakening: The Puritan becomes a Yankee: Cotton Mather died in 1728 and saw the marked decline of the religious zeal of the 1630’s. Mather himself, once a witch-hunter, embraced the new sciences of medicine physics and astronomy. New Englanders, perhaps turned off by the excesses of Salem and the zeal of their forefathers now believed that God worked more through natural law than miracles. They went to church and then out to party. New England records show high numbers of premarital pregnancies at this time.
In the late 1730’s Jonathan Edwards launched a fervent religious revival. He overawed young audiences with fervent emotional preaching that warned they were on the verge of damnation unless…they unconditionally threw themselves on God’s forgiveness. America’s youth were now swept up in a Great Awakening. Churches split over the new preaching. American evangelicalism was thus born in the 1730’s . It stressed more what Christ did for the believer than what the believer had to do to attain perfection. People began to change churches and question the divine authority of ministers. How soon before their questioning spirit would become political?
The Middle Atlantic Melting Pot: New England remained dominated by the established Congregationalist Church. The Southern provinces were almost totally Anglican. The real cradles of American liberalism were the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In 1664 New Netherland became the English province of New York. Until 1700 New York remained Dutch in culture and population. Then more and more English, Germans and Scots-Irish began to come. New York was not a big province, but it remained a diverse one. Slavery did exist there, for about 10 % of the people and New York City witnessed a race riot. Criticism of the governing establishment by journalist John Peter Zenger in 1734 led to a court case which established freedom of the press.
Much as New England, Pennsylvania was founded as a “Holy Experiment”. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were the most persecuted religious group in America. They challenged all hierarchy, tradition and authority. They advocated the equality of women, coexistence with the Indians, and opposition to slavery. Charles II granted William Penn permission to fond a royal province on the banks of the Delaware. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 and by 1700 all the farmland up to the Appalachians was settled. Rhode Island, Maryland and even New York practiced religious toleration but none with the fervor of Pennsylvania. Not only English Quakers but Scots-Irish, Welsh, Germans, Methodists, Swedes, and others flocked to the rich farmland of Pennsylvania. The only settlers in the colony who opposed religious toleration were the Anglicans and they were too few to impose their will. Philadelphia quickly became the most cosmopolitan and progressive city in America. Little wonder young Ben Franklin came here. Franklin’s story is that of America in the 1700’s. He was born in Boston in 1706, only 14 years after the witch hunt. He grew up as a Puritan fearing the wrath of God as taught him by his parents. He knew the great Puritan ministers Increase Mather and Cotton Mather. Then Franklin left his family and his belief system. He came to Philadelphia. By now he had rejected election, predestination and many other aspects of Calvinism. He still believed in his own personal and in hard work.
Franklin created America’s first national newspaper and was a rich man in his 30’s. He then devoted himself to science and bettering the public good. He founded the University of Pennsylvania and set up the first fire department and public library. He discovered electricity and invented a wood-burning stove.
The Crisis Resumes: 1745-1763
No sooner had the Great Awakening begun to run out of steam than war broke again with France which had occupied much of the American interior.
Once again, New England had to fight alone in the beginning. Yankee militia took the mighty French bastion of Louisbourg in 1745 but England gave it back when King George’s War ended in 1748. The truce did not last long. During the truce in 1752 Ben Franklin drew inspiration from the Iroquois and set forth a Plan of Union. All the English provinces in America would keep their governments but also have a British American Governor General appointed by the king and an American Parliament that alone could tax the colonies. The Lords of Trade ignored
it.
Fighting resumed in 1754. France had built Fort Duquesne in western Pennsylvania to block English westward settlement. The governor of Virginia, Richard Dinwiddie, sent Colonel George Washington to assert Virginia’s interests. His force was ambushed.
Between 1754 and 1757 the French were winning what we today call the French and Indian War. Britain sent General Edward Braddock to take Fort Duquesne. His army was massacred by the Indians but Washington managed a successful retreat. The French and Indians raged up and down the New York and Pennsylvania frontiers.
Britain’s Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder put Britain on full war status and sent a huge fleet and army to America to crush the French. In 1758 a British army drove into northern New York. Fort Duquesne was taken and renamed Fort Pitt. General Jeffrey Amherst took Louisbourg in 1758 and Quebec fell in 1759. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 made all of North America east of the Mississippi a vast British Empire.
Royal America at its Zenith
How did Britain’s American subjects see themselves? They saw themselves as more English than the English! In England King George II and his successor George III were seen as human beings with all their foibles. In America the king was seen as bigger than life. He was seen as protector and source of justice. He would beat the French, restrain corrupt politicians and maybe even free the slaves. Even New Englanders celebrated royal holidays and cherished the history of Britain as their own.
British Americans had sacrificed a great deal. Every church in Boston was filled with widows. Massachusetts had heavily taxed its citizens with I.O.U.’s to make America safe for British liberties and Protestantism. British Americans were not yet aware of the reality that they were becoming something other than Englishmen.
Americans were no longer purely English. Thousands of Germans had fled religious persecution to settle in Pennsylvania. Thousands of Presbyterian Scots, wild tribesmen and frontiersmen and cattle-raisers left Scotland for northern Ireland in the 1600’s. After a century they were no longer Scots but neither were they Irish nor English. In the mid-1700’s these Scots-Irish came in vast multitudes to the American frontier, bringing a warrior ethic, an uncompromising love of liberty and a total rejection of any form of class or hierarchy.
By 1763 a new society, more diverse, more enterprising, more egalitarian, more evangelical, more innovative, and perhaps more violent and liberty-loving had come into existence between Maine and Georgia. It still saw itself as royal and English, but a sudden rapid series of events would soon shatter that illusion.