Unit+2+Study+Notes

Please note that this study guide is intended to aide you in your reading, not act as a substitute for the reading itself. Review the reading objectives for each chapter before reading so that you understand what key concepts you need to be looking for while reading. Enjoy!


 * CHAPTER 1 //New World Encounters//**


 * LEARNING OBJECTIVES**

After mastering this chapter, you should be able to: 1. Explain how ice age hunters may have crossed the Bering Straits and began settling North America. 2. Discuss the sophistication of the cultures of the Maya, Aztec, Toltec, and Algonquian; show the impact of European diseases on the Native Americans. 3. Explain why the Norse discovery of America was ineffective. 4. List the changing social conditions and new scientific discoveries that resulted in European voyages of discovery. 5. **Describe the economic, political, social, and religious factors of the Spanish colonial system, as well as the impact of this system.** 6. **Discuss the motives, elements, problems, and impact of the French colonial empire in North America.** 7. **Show the similarity between the British treatment of the Irish in the latter part of the sixteenth century and treatment of the slaves and Native Americans during the Colonial Era.** 8. Discuss the early English attempts at planting colonies, including the work of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh.

The “discovery” of America by Columbus initiated a series of cultural contacts between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in the Western Hemisphere. Each of these peoples brought preconceptions molded by their long histories into their contacts with other peoples, and each people was molded by contact with others.
 * SUMMARY**

America first became inhabited some twenty thousand years ago when small bands of nomadic Siberian hunters chased large mammals across the land bridge between Asia and America. During this long migration, the people who became known as the American Indians escaped some of the most common diseases of humankind, such as smallpox and measles, but their children and grandchildren lost the immunities that would have protected them against such diseases.
 * I. NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORIES BEFORE CONQUEST**

__A. The Environmental Challenge: Food, Climate, and Culture__ During the thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans, the continents of North and South America experienced tremendous geologic and climate changes. As the weather warmed, the great mammals died off, and the Indians who hunted them turned increasingly to growing crops, bringing about an Agricultural Revolution.

__B. Mysterious Disappearances__ Agriculture allowed Indians to concentrate in large numbers in urban complexes, such as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Cahokia in Illinois. By the time Europeans reached these areas, the great urban centers had disappeared, either because of climate changes or overcrowding.

__C. Aztec Dominance__ In central America, the Aztecs settled in the fertile valley of Mexico and conquered a large and powerful empire, which they ruled through fear and force.

__D. Eastern Woodland Cultures__ Elsewhere, along the Atlantic coast of North America for example, Native Americans lived in smaller bands and supplemented agriculture with hunting and gathering. In some cases, women owned the farming fields, and men the hunting grounds.

The arrival of Europeans profoundly affected Native Americans, who could be said to have entered a new world.
 * II. THE WORLD TRANSFORMED**

__A. Cultural Negotiation__ Native Americans were not passive in their dealings with the Europeans. They eagerly traded for products that made life easier, but they did not accept the notion that Europeans were in any way culturally superior, and most efforts by the Europeans to convert or “civilize” the Indians failed.

__B. Threats to Survival: Trade and Disease__ Wherever Indians and Europeans came into contact, the Indian population declined at a rapid rate due to diseases like smallpox, measles, and typhus. The rate of depopulation along the Atlantic coast, from death or migration westward, may have been as high as 95 percent. An entire way of life disappeared.

Contrary to ill-informed opinion, sub-Saharan West Africa was never an isolated part of the world where only simple societies developed. As elsewhere, West Africa had seen the rise and fall of empires, such as Ghana or Dahomey. West Africa had also been heavily influenced by the coming of Islam. The arrival of Europeans was just the latest of many foreign influences that helped shape African culture. The Portuguese came first, pioneering the sea lanes from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth century. They found profit in gold and slaves, supplied willingly by native rulers who sold their prisoners of war. The Atlantic slave trade began taking about 1,000 persons each year from Africa, but the volume steadily increased. In the eighteenth century, an estimated five and one-half million were taken away. Altogether, Africa lost almost eleven million of her children to the Atlantic slave trade. Before 1831, more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas.
 * III. WEST AFRICA: ANCIENT AND COMPLEX SOCIETIES**

The Vikings discovered America before Columbus, but European colonization of the New World began only after 1492 because only then were the preconditions for successful overseas settlement attained. These conditions were the rise of nation-states and the spread of the new technologies and old knowledge.
 * IV. EUROPE ON THE EVE OF CONQUEST**

__A. Building New Nation-States__ During the fifteenth century, powerful monarchs in western Europe began to forge nations from what had been loosely associated provinces and regions. The “new monarchs” of Spain, France and England tapped new sources of revenue from the growing middle class and deployed powerful military forces, both necessary actions in order to establish outposts across the Atlantic.

__B. Technical Knowledge__ Just as necessary to colonization was the advance in technology, especially in the art of naval construction. The lateen sail allowed ships to sail into the wind, better techniques were devised for calculating position at sea, ancient scientific works were reexamined and the printing press disseminated the new knowledge rapidly.

Spain was the first European nation to meet all of the preconditions for successful colonization. After hundreds of years of fighting Moorish rule, she had become a unified nation-state under Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1492, the year made famous by Columbus’ discovery of America, Spain expelled her Jews and Muslims in a crusade to obliterate all non-Christian elements in Spanish life. Spain had also experienced the difficulties of colonization in her conquest of the Canary Islands before turning her attention to America.
 * V. IMAGINING A NEW WORLD**

__A. Myths and Realities__ Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo), born in Genoa in 1451, typified the questing dreamers of the fifteenth century. He believed it was possible to reach the Orient, the goal of all adventurers, by sailing westward from Europe. Undeterred by those who told him the voyage would be so long that the crews would perish from lack of food and water, Columbus finally persuaded Queen Isabella to finance his exploration. Although Columbus found in America a vast treasure-house of gold and silver, he had expected to find the great cities of China, and even after four separate expeditions to America, he refused to believe he had not reached the Orient. He died in poverty and disgrace after having lived to see his discovery claimed by another, Amerigo Vespucci, for whom America is named. As a further cruel irony, the all-water route to the East Indies that Columbus hoped to find was actually discovered by Vasco da Gama, who sailed from Portugal around the southern tip of Africa. The net result of his efforts had been frustration and ignominy for Columbus; however, he paved the way to world power for Spain, which claimed all of the New World except for Brazil, conceded to Portugal by treaty in 1494.

__B. The Conquistadores: Faith and Greed__ To expand Spain’s territories in the New World, the Crown commissioned independent adventurers //(conquistadores)// to subdue new lands. For God, glory, and gold they came. Within two decades they decimated the major Caribbean islands, where most of the Indians died from exploitation and disease. The Spaniards then moved onto the mainland and continued the work of conquest. Hernan Cortes destroyed the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the conquest of South America followed in the next two decades.

__C. From Plunder to Settlement__ The Spanish crown kept her unruly subjects in America loyal by rewarding the conquistadores with large land grants that contained entire villages of Indians (the //encomienda// system). As pacification of the natives progressed, the Spanish Crown limited the autonomy of the conquistadores by adding layer upon layer of bureaucrats, whose livelihoods derived directly from the Crown and whose loyalty was therefore to the officials who ruled America from Spain. The Catholic Church also became an integral part of the administrative system and brought order to the empire by protecting Indian rights and by performing mass conversions. By 1650, about half a million Spaniards immigrated to the New World. Since most were unmarried males, they mated with Indian or African women and produced a mixed-blood population that was much less racist than the English colonists who settled North America. Spain’s empire proved to be a mixed blessing. The great influx of gold and silver made Spain rich and powerful, but set off a massive inflation and encouraged the Spanish Crown to launch a series of costly wars in Europe.

France lacked the most important precondition for successful colonization, the interest of the Crown. French kings sent several expeditions to America, most notably that of Samuel de Champlain, who founded Quebec in 1608, and even established an empire in America that stretched along the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi, but the French Crown made little effort to foster settlement.
 * VI. THE FRENCH CLAIM CANADA**

England had as valid a claim to America as Spain, but did not push colonization until the late sixteenth century, when it, too, achieved the necessary preconditions for transatlantic settlement.
 * VlI. THE ENGLISH ENTER THE COMPETITION**

__A. Birth of English Protestantism__ England began to achieve political unity under the Tudor monarchs who suppressed the powerful barons. Henry VIII strengthened the Crown even further by leading the English Reformation, an immensely popular event for the average men and women who hated the corrupt clergy. Henry’s reason for breaking with the Pope was to obtain a divorce, but he began a liberating movement that outlived him. During the reign of Queen Mary, Protestants were severely persecuted, but the Reformation could not be undone.

__B. Militant Protestantism__ The Protestant Reformation had begun in 1517 in Germany when Martin Luther preached that humans were saved by faith alone, as a gift from God, and not through the sacraments and rituals of the Church. Other Reformers followed, most notably John Calvin, who stressed the doctrine of predestination, the belief that humans could do nothing to change their fate in the afterlife. The Reformers shattered the unity of the Christian world and religious wars broke out all over Europe.

__C. Woman in Power__ Elizabeth II, the second daughter of Henry VIII, inherited the crown in 1558 and ruled England successfully for nearly fifty years. She avoided a religious civil war by reconciling her subjects to an established church that was Protestant in doctrine, but still Catholic in many of its ceremonies. When the Pope excommunicated her in 1570, she became more firmly attached to the Protestant cause.

__D. Religion, War and Nationalism__ Spain, the most powerful European nation at the time, was determined to crush Protestantism in Europe. In retaliation, English “seadogs” attacked the Spanish in the Caribbean. By 1588, the king of Spain decided to invade England and launched the famous Armada. England’s providential victory over the great fleet convinced the English people that they had a special commission from God to preserve the Protestant religion.

Each nation took along its own peculiar traditions and perceptions for the task of colonizing America. For the English, Ireland was used as a laboratory in which the techniques of conquest were tested.
 * VIII. IRISH REHERSAL FOR AMERICAN SETTLEMENT**

__A. English Conquest of Ireland__ The English went into Ireland convinced that theirs was a superior way of life. The Irish, of course, disagreed and refused to change their own ways.

__B. English Brutality__ When the English seized Irish land by force, the Irish resisted. The English resorted to massacres of women and children. In Ireland, men like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Grenville learned the techniques of colonization that they would later apply in America.

Although England had the capacity for transatlantic colonization by the late sixteenth century, its first efforts were failures. Sir Walter Raleigh began England’s colonization of America in 1584 when he sent a fleet to colonize Roanoke in North Carolina. The effort failed, despite Ralegh’s continued attempts to reinforce it, and by 1600 there were no English settlements in the Western Hemisphere.
 * IX. AN UNPROMISING BEGINNING: MYSTERY AT ROANOKE**

Despite Raleigh’s failure, Richard Hakluyt kept English interest in America alive by tirelessly advertising the benefits of colonization. He did not mention, however, that those English people who went to America would encounter other peoples with deterrent dreams about what America should be.
 * X. CONCLUSION: CAMPAIGN TO SELL AMERICA**


 * CHAPTER 2 //New World Experiments: England's//**
 * //Seventeenth-Century Colonies//**


 * LEARNING OBJECTIVES**

After mastering this chapter, you should be able to: 1. List the problems in England that were motives for emigration. 2. Discuss the corporate problems involved in the settlement of Virginia. 3. **Show the importance of tobacco plantations in the social, economic, and political life of the colony of Virginia.** 4. Narrate the story of the founding and settlement of Maryland, focusing on its role for Catholics. 5. **Describe the impact of the Quakers on the settlement of the Middle Colonies.** 6. Describe the type of society William Penn tried to create in his "Holy Experiment." 7. Compare the motives for colonizing Georgia with those for colonizing the other colonies. 8. **Discuss the problems of dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colonies.**

This chapter discusses briefly the English colonies established in the seventeenth century. Its theme is the diversity of religious practices, political institutions and economic arrangements that characterized the English empire in America.
 * SUMMARY**

The English came to America for different reasons and with different backgrounds. Some wanted an opportunity to worship God in their own way; others wanted land. Some came in the early part of the century when England was relatively stable; others came at the end of the century after England had experienced a civil war. In America, the colonists had to adjust to different environments. The result was the development of different subcultures: the Chesapeake, New England, the Middle Colonies and the Carolinas.
 * I. BREAKING AWAY**

The English colonized the Chesapeake because they believed they could obtain instant profits. These dreams faded, but left behind the colony of Virginia, England's first successful effort in America.
 * II. THE CHESAPEAKE: DREAMS OF WEALTH**

__A. Entrepreneurs in Virginia__ The London Company settled a colony at Jamestown in 1607 that met immediate disaster. The location in a swamp had been a mistake, but even worse was the failure of the colonists to work together for the common good.

__B. Spinning Out of Control__ Captain John Smith, a tough professional soldier, saved the colonists by imposing order. The London Company helped, too, by reorganizing the government of the colony and by investing more money in the enterprise. Even so, Jamestown was actually abandoned for a few days in 1610 and was saved only by the coincidental arrival of a new shipload of colonists.

__C. "Stinking Weed"__ Tobacco had been growing as a common weed in the streets of Jamestown before John Rolfe recognized its value. He improved its quality and found a market for it in England. Finally, Virginians had discovered the way to wealth. The London Company, under Sir Edwin Sandys, encouraged large-scale immigration to Virginia by offering "headrights," a grant of land given to those who paid for the cost of immigration and by giving the colonists a form of self-government in an elected body called the House of Burgesses.

__D. Time of Reckoning__ After 1619, a rush of immigrants arrived in Virginia; few, however, survived for long. It was impossible to establish a normal family life because men outnumbered women by about six to one. The colony, therefore, could not count on a natural increase in its population. Disease and Indian attacks continued to take their toll, especially the sudden outbursts of violence in 1622 that almost wiped out the colony. Virginia remained a place to make a quick fortune and then leave before becoming one of the mortality statistics.

__E. Corruption and Reform__ As the colonists died in large numbers, the London Company sank into mismanagement and corruption. In 1624, King James I dissolved the London Company and made Virginia a royal colony. Despite this change, life in Virginia went on as before. The House of Burgesses continued to meet because it had become so useful to the ambitious and successful tobacco planters who dominated Virginian life. The character of daily life also remained unchanged. A high death rate, a feeling of living on borrowed time, and the constant grabbing of Indian lands so that more and more tobacco could be grown were the themes of early Virginia history.

__F. Maryland: A Troubled Refuge for Catholics__ The founding of Maryland resulted from the efforts of George Calvert to find a place of refuge for his fellow English Catholics. After his death, his son, Cecilius (Lord Baltimore), received a charter to settle Maryland in 1632. He expected that he would govern the colony along with a few of his wealthy Catholic friends, but he knew that most of the immigrants who would come from England would be Protestant. He therefore issued a law requiring Christians to tolerate one another. Lord Baltimore failed to create the society he wanted. His wealthy friends were unwilling to relocate to America, and the common settlers in Maryland demanded a greater voice in the government. Above all, religious intolerance wrecked Baltimore's plans. Protestants refused to tolerate Catholics, and the Protestants were strong enough to rise up in arms and seize control of the colony in 1655. Maryland's early history differed from Virginia's, but aggressive individualism, an absence of public spirit, and an economy based on tobacco characterized both colonies.

Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were the most important of the New England colonies. Plymouth was settled by the Pilgrims, a group of Separatists who refused to worship in the Church of England and who had fled to Holland to escape persecution. As they saw their children grow more Dutch than English, the Pilgrims decided to leave Holland for the new English colony of Virginia. They landed instead at Cape Cod and remained there. Led by William Bradford and helped by friendly Indian neighbors, the Pilgrims survived and created a society of small farming villages bound together by mutual consent (the Mayflower Compact). The colony, however, attracted few immigrants, and Plymouth was eventually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay.
 * III. REFORMING ENGLAND IN AMERICA**

__A. "The Great Migration"__ The second colony planted in New England was Massachusetts Bay, the home of the Puritans. The Puritans often have been caricatured as neurotics and prudes; in fact, they were men and women committed to changing the major institution of their society. Unlike the Separatists, the Puritans wished to remain within the Church of England, but they wanted the Church to give up all remaining vestiges of her Roman Catholic past. Puritans were also intensely nationalistic and desired a foreign policy that would align England with the Protestant states of Europe. They hoped to accomplish their goals by working within the system, but when King Charles I decided to rule the country without consulting with Parliament, the Puritans despaired. Some of them, led by John Winthrop, decided to establish a better society in America. The Massachusetts Bay Company was formed, and Charles, thinking the company no different from other joint-stock companies, granted it a charter in 1629. Ordinarily, the company should have kept its headquarters in England, where the king could supervise it, but the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company secretly agreed to bring the charter with them to America.

__B. "A City on a Hill"__ The Winthrop fleet established settlements around Boston in 1630. The first settlers were joined within a year by two thousand more, and the Bay Colony enjoyed a steady stream of immigration during its first decade. Because the settlers usually came as family units, because the area was generally healthy, and because most of the Puritan colonists were willing to sacrifice self-interest for the good of the community, Massachusetts Bay avoided the misery that had characterized colonization in the Chesapeake. Puritans proved to be pragmatic and inventive in creating social institutions. They had no intention of separating from the Church of England, but immediately dispensed with those features of the Church they found objectionable. The result was Congregationalism, a system that stressed simplicity and in which each congregation was independent. Puritans created a civil government that was neither democratic nor theocratic. A larger proportion of adult males could vote in Massachusetts Bay than in England because the only requirement for voting was a spiritual one. If a man was "born again" he became a "freeman," or voter, whether he owned property or not. The rulers of the Bay Colony were not democratic in our sense, however; they did not believe that elected officials should concern themselves with the wishes of those who had elected them. On the local level, Puritans created almost completely autonomous towns, and it was on this level that most men participated in public life. Village life was intensely communal even though townships were commercial properties, shares of which could be bought and sold.

__C. Limits of Religious Dissent__ In order to protect individual rights and to clarify the responsibilities of citizenship, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay issued the //Laws and// //Liberties// of 1648. This code of law marked the Puritans' considerable progress in establishing a stable society. Not everyone was happy in Massachusetts Bay. The two most important dissidents were Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Williams, an extreme Separatist, condemned all civil states, even one governed by Puritans. He was expelled and settled in Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson believed she was directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that once a person was "born again" he or she need not obey man-made laws (Antinomianism). Because of her religious ideas and because an assertive woman threatened patriarchal authority, she too was expelled and went to Rhode Island.

__D. Mobility and Division__ Massachusetts Bay spawned four other colonies: New Hampshire, New Haven, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Of them, New Hampshire remained too small to be significant in the seventeenth century, and New Haven became part of Connecticut. Rhode Island received the Bay Colony's outcasts (religious dissenters and Quakers for the most part), who continued to make as much trouble in Roger Williams' colony as they had in John Winthrop's. Connecticut, a well-populated colony that owed its first settlement to Thomas Hooker, duplicated the institutions and way of life of its mother colony.

No section of the English empire was more diverse in its history, its ethnic and religious pluralism, or its political institutions than the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
 * IV. DIVERSITY IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES**

__A. Anglo-Dutch Rivalry on the Hudson__ The Dutch settled New York after the voyages of Henry Hudson. The colony became the property of the Dutch West Indies Company, which gave New York little attention and sent incompetent officials. New York was Dutch in little more than ownership. Few immigrants came from Holland, so the Dutch popula- tion remained small. Even so, it was polyglot. Finns, Swedes, Germans and Africans made up sizable minorities in the colony, and these people felt no loyalty to the Dutch West Indies Company. When England sent a fleet to take New York in 1664, the colony fell without a shot being fired. New York became the personal property of James, Duke of York (later King James II). His colony included New Jersey, Delaware and Maine, as well as various islands. James attempted to rule this vast domain without allowing its inhabitants a political voice beyond the local level, but he derived little profit from the colony.

__B. Confusion in New Jersey__ New Jersey has an especially complex history. It first belonged to the Duke of York, but he sold it to two friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. When these Proprietors found how difficult it was to collect rents, Berkeley sold his interest to a group of Quakers, a deal that made it necessary to split the colony in two. The Quakers introduced a democratic system of government into West New Jersey, but both halves of the colony were marked by contention, and neither half prospered.

Pennsylvania, the most important of the Middle Colonies, owed its settlement to the rise of a religious group, the Quakers, or Society of Friends, that was formed by George Fox in England in the 1650s.
 * V. QUAKERS IN AMERICA**

__A. Quaker Beliefs and Practices__ Quakers believed that each man and woman could communicate directly with God. They rejected the idea of original sin and predestination, and cultivated an "Inner Light" that they believed all people possessed. English authorities considered Quakers to be dangerous anarchists and persecuted them.

__B. Penn's "Holy Experiment"__ William Penn, the son of an admiral and a wealthy aristocrat, converted to the Society of Friends and became one of their leaders. He used his contacts to obtain a charter for Pennsylvania, which he intended to settle as a "Holy Experiment," a society run on Quaker principles. In 1682, Penn announced a plan of government for Pennsylvania that contained some traditional features and some advanced features. Nearly all political power would be held by men of great wealth, but an elaborate system was designed to protect the rights of those without political or economic power. The scheme, however, proved too com- plicated to work.

__C. Settling Pennsylvania__ Penn successfully recruited immigrants from England, Wales, Ireland and Germany, and Pennsylvania grew rapidly in population. Many of these immigrants were not Quakers, however, and felt no sense of obligation to make the "Holy Experiment" work. Even the Quakers in Pennsylvania fought among themselves, and the people of Delaware, after Penn bought the colony from the Duke of York, preferred to rule themselves. In 1701 he gave in to the complaints of his colonists and granted them a large measure of self-rule. He also gave Delaware her independence. Even though Penn owned a colony that was becoming rich by selling wheat to the West Indies, it did him no good. Penn at one time suffered the humiliation of being locked up in a debtor's prison.

Carolina differed so much from the Chesapeake Colonies that it would be wrong to speak of the existence of "the South" in the seventeenth century.
 * VI. PLANTING THE CAROLINAS**

__A. Proprietors of the Carolinas__ King Charles II granted Carolina in 1663 to eight friends and political allies who expected to sit back and collect rents as the colony filled up. Unfortunately for them, nobody went to Carolina.

__B. The Barbadian Connection__ One of the colony's proprietors, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Earl of Shaftesbury), realized that a more active search for immigrants had to be made. He and John Locke, the famous philosopher, concocted a plan of government that would have given most power to an hereditary elite while at the same time protecting the rights of the small landowners. He also encouraged planters in Barbados, who were being crowded off the island, to take up land in Carolina. Cooper was somewhat successful. A string of settlements grew up around Charleston, but Cooper's plan of government failed. The Barbadians, who dominated early Carolina, wanted as much self-government as they had enjoyed in Barbados. The Barbadians, in turn, were opposed by French Huguenot settlers, who felt loyal to the proprietors. Carolina became a colony in turmoil. In 1729 the Crown took over Carolina and divided it into two colonies.

Georgia was founded in 1732 as a buffer to safeguard the Carolinas from the Spanish in Florida. Although conceived by James Oglethorpe as a refuge for persons imprisoned for debt in England, Georgia attracted few immigrants. By 1751, it had become a small slave colony, much like South Carolina.
 * VII. THE FOUNDING OF GEORGIA**

All of the colonies struggled for survival in their first phase, but as they developed, distinct regional differences intensified and persisted throughout the colonial period and even during the struggle for independence. Nevertheless, the colonists eventually saw themselves as a distinct people, a phenomenon that historians have to explain.
 * VIlI. CONCLUSION: LIVING WITH DIVERSITY**

 **CHAPTER 3 //Putting Down Roots:// //Opportunity and Oppression in//**
 * //Colonial Society//**


 * LEARNING OBJECTIVES**

After mastering this chapter, you should be able to: 1. **Explain the reasons for the growth and social stability of the New England colonies.** 2. Discuss the roles, obligations, and rights of colonial women. 3. Explain how conditions in the northern colonies eroded European concepts of social rank and fostered social mobility. 4. **Account for the similarities and differences in development between the New England and Chesapeake colonies.** 5. Discuss the reasons for the growth of slavery and the slave trade in the English colonies of North America. 6. Discuss the different conditions for slaves in the American colonies and the factors that contributed to the construction of a distinctive and lasting African-American culture. 7. **Explain the historical significance of colonial uprisings in the seventeenth century.** 8. Evaluate the causes of the Salem witchcraft hysteria in the 1690s.

Each colony developed a different social order depending on the local labor supply, the abundance of land, the demographic pattern, and whether there were strong commercial ties to England. This chapter examines the differences between New England and the Chesapeake Colonies.
 * SUMMARY**

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY** Each region in English America developed a characteristic culture, depending on the shape or strength of the families that comprised the population. In New England, for example, families were stable; in the Chesapeake, they were fragile. After 1660, a trend toward cultural convergence began, primarily because the Crown imposed a set of uniform commercial regulations.
 * I. SOURCES OF STABILITY: NEW ENGLAND COLONIES OF THE

__A. Immigrant Families and New Social Order__ Most New England immigrants arrived as members of a nuclear family in which the father exerted strong authority. They therefore found it easier to cope with the wilderness and to preserve English ways. It was even possible to reproduce an English family structure in New England because the sex ratio was about even. New England families differed from the English pattern in only one important aspect; people lived longer in New England. This meant that parents could expect to see their children grow up, marry, and have their own children. New England may have "invented" grandparents, who gave an additional measure of stability to society.

__B. Commonwealth of Families__ Most people in New England married neighbors of whom their parents approved. Marriage created a new household, and a New England town was really a collection of interrelated households. This was not a society in which individualists felt comfortable. The family played an important role in every aspect of life including both religion and education. Church membership, theoretically open to all, became so associated with certain families that the Puritans began to suspect that grace was inherited. The family was also the society's primary educational institution, and it did a good job in this respect. Most New England males could read, and the region produced an impressive literary culture.

__C. Women's Lives in Puritan New England__ New England women contributed to the stability and productivity of the entire society, even though no woman enjoyed full political or legal equality with men. Most women probably accepted their roles as wives and mothers, and there is plenty of evidence that New England marriages were based on mutual love. Women contributed to the stability and productivity of New England society as wives, mothers, church members, and even as small-scale farmers, raising produce and poultry.

__D. Social Hierarchy in New England__ In every colony it was necessary to create a new social order because the "natural" leaders of society, the very rich, simply did not emigrate from England. In New England, a local gentry of prominent pious families emerged, but their position as leaders was always challenged from below by men who had acquired wealth. Most New Englanders were neither gentry nor poor. They worked small farms that they owned outright. These independent yeomen gave their voluntary allegiance to the local community rather than to their own self-interest or to some external government. By 1700, the New England Puritans were proud of the society they had created.

The high death rate suffered in early Virginia, more than any other factor, created a society far different from the one that evolved in New England.
 * II. THE CHALLENGE OF THE CHESAPEAKE ENVIRONMENT**

__A. Family Life at Risk__ Most of the immigrants settling in Virginia came as young male indentured servants and most died soon after arriving. Normal family life became an impossibility. Even if a man found a wife, the chances were that one of the partners would die within a decade. Children had to expect to be orphaned and to grow up in a stranger's home. Women, because they were so scarce, may have been in a good position to bargain in the marriage market, but women who did not have a family to protect them were especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

__B. The Structure of Planter Society__ In Virginia, wealth meant tobacco, but growing tobacco in large quantities required large amounts of labor. Those who were most prosperous were able to amass a large number of dependent workers who could be pushed as hard as possible. The gentry regarded their servants as possessions and sometimes even gambled for them. In this way, Virginia prepared for the future introduction of a slave system. By the late seventeenth century, Virginian society became less fluid. The death rate declined and the gentry passed on their wealth to their children. An indigenous ruling elite emerged, more interested in Virginia than in England, and they gave the colony a greater degree of stability. Tobacco also dictated that Virginians live along the great tidal rivers within easy reach of water-borne commerce. The population therefore dispersed, and Virginia remained a completely rural society, devoid of towns.

Africans were brought to America against their will in order to fill the places of the Indians who had been decimated and the European indentured servants who did not come in sufficient numbers.
 * III. RACE AND FREEDOM IN BRITISH AMERICA**

__A. Roots of Slavery__ The English colonies in America received only a small percentage of the eight to eleven million Africans taken from their native land, because North American colonies could not pay the price for slaves that the West Indies could. Nevertheless, the English colonists took as many slaves as they could acquire. They justified their purchases by claiming that they were rescuing the Africans from barbarism and heathenism. So long as the black population remained small in Virginia, the government did not bother to define their legal position. After 1672, Virginia began to receive a steady supply of slaves from the Royal African Company, and as the number of slaves increased, their legal oppression became more strict. Africans, simply because they were black, were slaves for life, and their status was passed on to their children. White masters could even murder slaves without worrying much about the legal consequences.

__B. Constructing African American Identities__ The slave experience differed from place to place. Some Africans lived in societies where they never saw a white, while others lived in communities where they were a small and distinct minority. Africans made up a majority of the population of South Carolina and nearly half that of Virginia, but were less numerous in New England and the Middle Colonies. There was a tendency for blacks who had successfully coped with white society to look down on recent arrivals from Africa who had not yet learned English. However, all Africans participated in what was the creation of an African-American culture, which required an imaginative reshaping of African and European customs. By the early eighteenth century, Africans in America had become numerous enough to begin to reproduce themselves successfully, a fact that ensured their permanence in American life. Blacks resented the debased status forced upon them and occasionally rose up in arms, as in 1739, when blacks killed several whites at Stono, South Carolina. Such rebellions, though crushed, kept whites worried. Meanwhile, Black communities far apart were increasingly tied together by those who escaped the confines of the plantation. Many blacks, for example, worked as mariners, sailing from port to port along the Atlantic coast.

Until the 1660s the English Crown ignored the colonies. During the Restoration, the king finally realized the profits to be made by regulating colonial trade. This section discusses the mercantile system in general and the Navigation Acts in particular.
 * IV. RISE OF A COMMERCIAL EMPIRE**

__A. Response to Economic Competition__ Mercantilism was a set of conventional answers to particular problems. Its leading tenet was that one nation's gain must be another nation's loss. As the Netherlands developed into a major commercial power, England became more hostile and tried to ban the Dutch from trading with the English colonies.

__B. Regulating Colonial Trade__ The Navigation Act of 1660 was the heart of England's system of regulation. It restricted trade within the empire to English (including American) ships and //enumerated// certain cargo, such as tobacco, which could not be sold to foreigners until it had first landed at an English port. Another act, in 1663, required that most goods going to America had to come from or through England. The Dutch resented these laws, which spoiled their profitable intermediary position, and Holland fought three wars against England to force their abrogation. The Dutch failed, but the laws fell victim to New England merchants who violated the regulations or found loopholes in them. The English government retaliated by passing even stricter regulations and by sending agents to the colonies to prosecute smugglers. The most important agent was Edward Randolph, who made himself obnoxious by sending damning reports about New England back to London. England's imperial officials were hardly competent to regulate colonies so far away. Often one office did something that completely contradicted what another was trying to accomplish. Nevertheless, for every new problem, England passed more laws. The most important colonial agency was the Board of Trade, created in 1696. The Navigation Acts became effective over time, mainly because colonial merchants found it to their benefit to obey them.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the colonies of Virginia, New York and Massachusetts experienced a scramble for power among emerging gentry classes.
 * V. COLONIAL FACTIONS SPARK POLITICAL REVOLT, 1676-1691**

__A. Civil War in Virginia: Bacon's Rebellion__ In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, an Indian-hating recent immigrant, led a rebellion against the royal governor, William Berkeley. Bacon's attack allowed small farmers, blacks and women to join together to demand reforms. The rebellion, however, collapsed after Bacon died. The gentry recovered their positions and in the eighteenth century became a united force in opposition to a series of royal governors.

__B. The Glorious Revolution in the Bay Colony__ The Puritans found it hard to adjust to English regulations. A series of setbacks, including a devastating Indian war in 1676, left New England in debt and uncertain of its future. In 1684, King James II annulled the charter of Massachusetts Bay and incorporated the colonies stretching from Maine to New Jersey under a single governor, Sir Edmund Andros. In 1689, when news reached America that James II had been overthrown in England, a rebellion broke out in Boston and Andros was deposed. The new monarchs of England, William III and Mary, gave Massachusetts a charter that took the franchise away from "saints" and gave it to those with property.

__C. Contagion of Witchcraft__ The crises of the late seventeenth century culminated in the Salem witchcraft panic. Although witches had been arrested and executed before 1691, there had never been a case when so many people were involved. After the death of twenty victims, the panic subsided and a shocked community confessed its guilt.

__D. The Glorious Revolution in New York and Maryland__ The people of New York also rose up when news arrived that King James II had been chased out of England, but nobody knew who had the authority to rule. Jacob Leisler, a German immigrant and militia officer, seized control. He maintained his position for about a year before he was arrested and executed by a royal governor sent from England. In Maryland, John Coode rallied Protestants against the Catholic governor. King William approved of Coode's rebellion and took control of Maryland out of the hands of the Calvert family. It was later returned when the Calverts ceased to be Catholics and no longer favored Catholics in the colony.

All of the American colonists became more "English" as the seventeenth century progressed, but original regional distinctions remained.
 * VI. CONCLUSION: LOCAL ASPIRATIONS WITHIN AN ATLANTIC EMPIRE**