- Who really "discovered" America?
- If he wasn't interested in the Bahamas, what was Columbus looking for in the first place?
- So if Columbus didn't really discover America, who did?
- Okay, the Indians really discovered America. Who were they, and how did they get here?
- If Columbus was so important, how come we don't live in the United States of Columbus?
- Where were the first European settlements in the New World?
- If the Spanish were here first, what was so important about Jamestown?
- What was the Northwest Passage?
- What was the Lost Colony?
- When and how did Jamestown get started?
- Did Pocahontas really save John Smith's life?
- What was the House of Burgesses?
- Who started the slave trade?
- Who were the Pilgrims, and what did they want?
- What was the Mayflower Compact?
- Did the Pilgrims really land at Plymouth Rock?
- Highlights in the development of New England
- Who started New York?
- Did the Indians really sell Manhattan for $24?
- How did New Amsterdam become New York?
- When did the French reach the New World?
- Why is Pennsylvania the Quaker State?
- What were the thirteen original colonies?
Few eras in American history are shrouded in as much myth and mystery as the long period covering America's discovery and settlement. Perhaps this is because there were few objective observers on hand to record so many of these events. There was no "film at eleven" when primitive people crossed into Alaska. No correspondents were on board when Columbus's ships reached land. Historians have been forced instead to rely upon accounts written by participants in the events, witnesses whose views can politely be called jaundiced. This chapter covers some of the key events during several thousand years of history.
However, the spotlight is on the development of what would become the United States, and the chapter ends with the thirteen original colonies in place.
Who Really "Discovered" America?
"In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." We all know that. But did he really discover America? The best answer is, "Sort of."
A national holiday and two centuries of schoolbooks have left the impression of Christopher Columbus as the intrepid sailor and man of God (his given name means "Christ-bearer") who was the first to reach America, disproving the notion of a flat world while he was at it. Italian-Americans who claim the sailor as their own treat Columbus Day as a special holiday, as do Hispanic Americans who celebrate El Dia de la Raza as their discovery day. It would be unthinkable to downplay the importance of Columbus's voyage, or the incredible heroism and tenacity of character his quest demanded. Even the astronauts who flew to the moon had a pretty good idea of what to expect; Columbus was sailing, as "Star Trek" puts it, "where no man has gone before."
However, rude facts do suggest a few different angles to his story.
After trying to sell his plan to the kings of Portugal, England, and France, Columbus doggedly returned to Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, who had already said no once. Convinced by one of their ministers that the risks were small and the potential return great, and fueled by an appetite for gold and fear of Portugal's lead in exploration, the Spanish monarchs later agreed. Contrary to myth, Queen Isabella did not have to pawn any of the crown jewels to finance the trip.
Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492, from Palos, Spain, aboard three ships, Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the last being his flagship. Columbus (christened Cristoforo Colombo) had been promised a ten-percent share of profits, governorship of new-found lands, and an impressive title - Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
On October 12 at 2:00 A.M., just as his crews were threatening to mutiny and force a return to Spain, a lookout named Rodrigo aboard the Pinta sighted moonlight shimmering on some cliffs or sand. Having promised a large reward to the first man to spot land, Columbus claimed that he had seen the light the night before, and kept the reward for himself. Columbus named the landfall - Guanahani to the natives - San Salvador. While it was long held that Columbus's San Salvador was Watling Island in the Bahamas, recent computer-assisted theories point to Samana Cay. Later on that first voyage, Columbus reached Cuba and a large island he called Hispaniola (presently Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Although he found some naked natives whom he christened indios in the mistaken belief that he had reached the so-called Indies or Indonesian Islands, the only gold he found was in the earrings worn by the Indians. As for spices, he did find a local plant called tobacos, which was rolled into cigars and smoked by the local Arawaks. It was not long before all Europe was savoring pipefuls of the evil weed. (Tobacco was brought to Spain for the first time in 1555. Three years later, the Portuguese introduced Europe to the habit of taking snuff. The economic importance of tobacco to the early history of America cannot be understated, especially with respect to the later English colonies, where it literally kept the settlers alive. Powerful tobacco lobbies that influence government decisions practically arrived with the first European settlers.)
Still believing that he had reached some island outposts of China, Columbus left some volunteers on Hispaniola in a fort called Natividad, built of timbers from the wrecked Santa Maria, and returned to Spain. While Columbus never reached the mainland of the present United States of America on any of his three subsequent voyages, his arrival in the Caribbean signaled the dawn of an astonishing and unequaled era of discovery, conquest, and colonization in the Americas. Although his bravery, persistence, and seamanship have rightfully earned Columbus a place in history, what the schoolbooks gloss over is that Columbus's arrival also marked the beginning of one of the cruelest episodes in human history.
Driven by an obsessive quest for gold, Columbus quickly enslaved the local population. Under Columbus and other Spanish adventurers, as well as later European colonizers, an era of genocide was opened that ravaged the native American population through warfare, forced labor, draconian punishments, and European diseases to which the Indians had no natural immunities.
If He Wasn't Interested In The Bahamas, What Was Columbus Looking For In The First Place?
The arrival of the three ships at their Caribbean landfall marks what is probably the biggest and luckiest blooper in the history of the world. Rather than a new world, Columbus was actually searching for a direct sea route to China and the Indies. Ever since Marco Polo had journeyed back from the Orient loaded with spices, gold, and fantastic tales of the strange and mysterious East, Europeans had lusted after the riches of Polo's Cathay (China). This appetite grew ravenous when the returning Crusaders opened up overland trade routes between Europe and the Orient. However, when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, it meant an end to the spice route that served as the economic lifeline for Mediterranean Europe.
Emerging from the Middle Ages, Europe was quickly shifting from an agrarian, barter economy to a new age of capitalism in which gold was the coin of the realm. The medieval Yeppies (Young European Princes) acquired a taste for the finer things such as gold and precious jewels, as well as the new taste sensations called spices, and these were literally worth their weight in gold. After a few centuries of home-cooked venison, there was an enormous clamor for the new Oriental take-out spices: cinnamon from Ceylon, pepper from India and Indonesia, nutmeg from Celebes, and cloves from the Moluccas. The new merchant princes had also acquired a taste for Japanese silks and Indian cottons, dyes, and precious stones.
Led by Prince Henry the Navigator, founder of a great scholarly seaport on coastal Portugal, Portugese sea captains like Bartholomeu Dias (who reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488) and Vasco da Gama (who sailed all the way to India in 1495) had taken the lead in exploiting Africa and navigating a sea route to the Indies. Like others of his day, Columbus believed that a direct westward passage to the Orient was not only possible, but would be faster and easier. In spite of what Columbus's public-relations people later said, the flat-earth idea was pretty much finished by the time Chris sailed. In fact, an accepted theory of a round earth had been held as far back as the days of the ancient Greeks. In the year Columbus sailed, a Nuremberg geographer constructed the first globe. The physical proof of the Earth's roundness came when eighteen survivors of Magellan's crew of 266 completed a circumnavigation in 1522.
Columbus believed a course due west along latitude twenty-eight degrees North would take him to Marco Polo's fabled Cipangu (Japan). Knowing that no one was crazy enough to sponsor a voyage of more than 3,000 miles, Columbus based his guess of the distance on ancient Greek theories, some highly speculative maps drawn after Marco Polo's return, and some figure-fudging of his own. He arrived at the convenient estimate of 2,400 miles.
In fact, the distance Columbus was planning to cover was 10,600 miles by air!
So If Columbus Didn't Really Discover America, Who Did?
The debate over who reached America before Columbus goes back almost as far as Columbus's voyage. Enough books have been written on the subject of earlier "discoverers" to fill a small library. There is plenty of evidence to bolster the claims made on behalf of a number of voyagers who may have reached the Americas, either by accident or design, well before Columbus reached the Bahamas.
Among these, the one best supported by archaeological evidence is the theory that holds that the Norse captain Leif Eriksson not only reached North America but established a colony, called Vinland, in present-day Newfoundland around 1000 A.D., five hundred years before Columbus. Most of what is guessed about the Norse colony in North America is derived from two Icelandic epics called The Vinland Sagas.
While "Leif the Lucky" gets the credit in history and the roads and festivals named after him, it was another Norseman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who was the first European to sight North America, in 985 or 986. But it was Leif who supposedly built some huts and spent one winter in this land where wild grapes - more likely berries - grew before returning to Greenland. A few years later, another Greenlander named Thorfinn Karlsefni set up housekeeping in Eriksson's spot, passing two years there. Among the problems they faced were unfriendly local Eskimo tribes, whom the Norsemen called skrelings (a contemptuous term translated as "wretch" or "dwarf"). During one attack, a pregnant Norse woman frightened the skrelings off by slapping a sword against her bare breast. Terrified at this sight, the skrelings fled back to their boats.
Then there are those who hold out for the Irish voyagers who supposedly reached America in the ninth or tenth century, sailing in small boats called curraghs. However, there is no archaeological or other evidence to support this. Another popular myth, completely unfounded, regards a Welshman named Modoc who established a colony and taught the local Indians to speak Welsh. More recent evidence, including an Oriental ship's bell found off the coast of California, suggests an ironic twist on the idea of Europeans sailing to China; fishermen from Japan and China may have sailed as far as the Pacific coast of North America.
If we are talking about North America, a significant discovery belongs to another of Columbus's countrymen, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), who was sailing for the British. In 1496, Cabot (and his son, Sebastian) received a commission from England's King Henry VII to find a new trade route to Asia. Sailing out of Bristol aboard the Matthew, it is known only that Cabot reached present-day Newfoundland, laying a claim that would eventually provide the English with their foothold in the New World. Sailing with five ships on a subsequent voyage in 1498, Cabot ran into bad weather. One of the vessels returned to an Irish port, but Cabot disappeared with the four other ships.
The distinction of being the first European to set foot on what would become United States soil rightfully belongs to Juan Ponce de Leon, the Spanish adventurer who conquered Puerto Rico. Investigating rumors of a large island north of Cuba that contained a "fountain of youth" whose waters could restore youth and vigor, Ponce de Leon found and named Florida in 1513 and "discovered" Mexico on that same trip.
Finally there is the 1524 voyage of still another Italian, Giovanni de Verrazano, who sailed in the employ of the French. Verrazano was searching for a strait through the New World that would take him westward to the Orient. He reached land at Cape Fear in the Carolinas, and sailed up the Atlantic coast until he reached Newfoundland and then returned to France. Along the way, he failed to stop in either Chesapeake or Delaware Bay. Verrazano reached New York Bay (where he only went as far as the narrows and the site of the bridge that bear his name), and Narragansett Bay, but he also missed the Bay of Fundy.
But all these European seamen were no more than Johnny- come-latelies in the Americas. In fact, America had been "discovered" long before any of these voyages. The true "discoverers" of America were the people whose culture and societies were well established here while Europe was still in the Dark Ages, the so-called Indians.
Okay, The Indians Really Discovered America. Who Were They And How Did They Get Here?
Until recently, it was generally believed that humans first lived in the Americas approximately 12,000 years ago. However, new evidence suggests that the people who would eventually come to be called Indians arrived in America some thirty to forty thousand years ago. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found in southern Chile has bolstered the argument that humans lived in America much earlier than had been widely accepted.
The version of events suggested by archaeological finds and highly accurate carbon testing is that the prehistoric people who populated the Americas were hunters following the great herds of woolly mammoths. They walked from Siberia across a land bridge into Alaska, and then began heading south toward warmer climates, slaughtering the mammoth as they went. Eventually as the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered this land bridge, creating the present-day Bering Strait and separating Alaska from Russia.
By the time Columbus arrived, there were millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of the Americas. These were divided into hundreds of tribal societies, the most advanced of which were the Mayas and later the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas of Peru, all of whom became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores. Many history books present Amerindians as either a collection of nearly savage civilizations or as groups of people living in harmony with themselves and nature. Neither view is realistic.
There were, first of all, many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to the advanced South American societies. While none of these developed along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields. On the other hand, some basic developments were lacking. Nor were these Indians free from savagery, as best witnessed by the Aztec human sacrifice that claimed as many as 1,000 victims a day in Tenochtitlan (the site of present-day Mexico City) or the Iroquois who had raised torture of captured opponents to a sophisticated but ghastly art.
Estimates of the Indian population at the time of Columbus vary, ranging from 8 million to 16 million people, spread over two continents. Although Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe was a calculated, methodical genocidal plan, the European destruction of the Indians was just as ruthlessly efficient, killing off perhaps 90 percent of the native population it found, all in the name of progress, civilization, and Christianity.
If Columbus Was So Important, How Come We Don't Live In The United States Of Columbus?
The naming of America was one of the cruel tricks of history and about as accurate as calling Indians "Indians." Amerigo Vespucci was another Italian who found his way to Spain and, as a ship chandler, actually helped outfit Columbus's voyages. In 1499 he sailed to South America with Alonso de Hojeda, one of Columbus's captains, reaching the mouth of the Amazon. He made three more voyages along the coast of Brazil. In 1504 letters supposedly written by Vespucci appeared in Italy in which he claimed to be captain of the four voyages and in which the words Mundus Novus, or "New World," were first used to describe the lands that had been found. Some years later, in a new edition of Ptolemy, this new land, still believed to be attached to Asia, was labeled "America" in Vespucci's honor.
Where Were The First European Settlements In The New World?
While we make a great fuss over the Pilgrims and Jamestown, the Spanish had roamed over much of the Americas by the time the English arrived. In fact, if the Spanish Armada launched to assault Queen Elizabeth's England hadn't been blown to bits by storms and the English "sea dogs" in 1588, this might be Los Estados Unidos, and we'd be eating tacos at bullfights.
Following Columbus's bold lead, the Spanish (and, to a lesser extent, the Portugese) began a century of exploration, colonization, and subjugation with the primary aim of providing more gold for the Spanish crown. Among the highlights of Spanish exploration:
1499
Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Hojeda (or Ojeda) sail for South America and reach mouth of Amazon.
1502
Vespucci, after second voyage, concludes South America is not part of India and names it Mundus Novus.
1505
Juan Bermudez discovers the island that bears his name, Bermuda.
1513
Balboa crosses Isthmus of Panama and reaches Pacific for the first time, but believes it to be part of the Indian Ocean.
1513
Ponce de Leon, searching for the "fountain of youth," reaches and names Florida.
1519
Cortes enters Tenochtitlan (Mexico City); Domenico de Pineda explores Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Vera Cruz.
1522
Andagoya discovers Peru.
1523
Jamaica founded.
1531
Pizarro invades Peru, conquers Incas.
1535
Lima founded.
1536
Buenos Aires founded.
1538
Bogota founded.
1539
De Soto explores Florida.
1539
First printing press in New World set up in Mexico City.
1540
Grand Canyon discovered.
1541
De Soto discovers Mississippi River; Coronado explores from New Mexico across Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern Kansas.
1549
Jesuit missionaries arrive in South America.
1551
Universities founded in Lima and Mexico City;
1565
St. Augustine founded (razed by Francis Drake in 1586).
1567
Rio de Janeiro founded.
1605
Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded (date in dispute; some say 1609).
If The Spanish Were There First, What Was So Important About Jamestown?
Winners write the history books, so, even though the Spanish dominated the New World for almost a century before the English settlers arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish were eventually supplanted in North America and the new era of English supremacy began.
Just as modern American life is shaped by global happenings, international events had begun to play an important role even at this stage in world history. By the mid-sixteenth century, Spain had grown corrupt and lazy, the Spanish king living off the spoils of the gold mines of the Americas, with a resultant lack of enterprise at home. With gold pouring in, there was little inducement or incentive to push advances in the areas of commerce or invention. Perhaps even more significant was the revolution that became known as the Protestant Reformation. A zealous Catholic, Spain's King Philip II saw England's Protestant Queen Elizabeth not only as a political and military rival, but as a heretic as well. His desire to defend Roman Catholicism dictated his policies, including his support of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth. For her part, Elizabeth saw the religious conflict as the excuse to build English power at Spain's expense. And she turned her notorious "sea dogs," or gentlemen pirates, loose on Spanish treasure ships while also aiding the Dutch in their fight with Spain. The Dutch, meanwhile, were building the largest merchant marine fleet in Europe.
When the English repulsed the Spanish Armada in 1588, the proverbial handwriting was on the wall. It was a blow from which Spain never fully recovered, and it marked the beginning of England's rise to global sea power, enabling that nation to embark more aggressively on a course of colonization.
What Was The Northwest Passage?
If you answer, "A movie by Alfred Hitchcock," Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go.
Almost a century after Columbus's first voyage, Europeans remained convinced that a faster route to China was waiting to be found and that the New World was just an annoying roadblock-although Spain was proving it to be a profitable one-that could be detoured. Some tried to go around the top of Russia, the "northeast passage." Sebastian Cabot organized an expedition in search of such a passage in 1553. Cabot had also tried going the other way back in 1509, but the voyage failed when his crew mutinied.
In 1576, Sir Humphrey (or Humfrey) Gilbert first used the phrase "North West passage," to describe a sea route around North America, and he continued to search for such a route to China. An Oxford-educated soldier, courtier, and businessman, Gilbert also played a hand in the earliest English attempts at colonization. In 1578 another Englishman, Martin Frobisher, set off for the fabled route and reached the northeast coast of Canada, exploring Baffin Island.
Among the others who searched for the route through the Arctic from Europe to Asia was Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch, who embarked on his voyage aboard the Half Moon to North America in 1609, the voyage on which he discovered the bay, river, and strait later named after him.
While a northwest passage to the East does exist, it requires sailing through far northern waters that are icebound much of the year.
What Was The Lost Colony?
In 1578 and again in 1583, Humphrey Gilbert set sail with a group of colonists and Queen Elizabeth's blessings. The first expedition accomplished little, and the second, after landing in Newfoundland, was lost in a storm, and Sir Humphrey with it.
But Gilbert's half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh (or "Ralegh" as other historians spell it), the thirty-one-year-old favorite of Queen Elizabeth, inherited Gilbert's royal patent and continued the quest. He dispatched ships to explore North America and named the land there "Virginia" in honor of Queen Elizabeth, "the virgin queen." In 1585 he was behind a short-lived attempt to form a colony on Roanoke Island on present-day North Carolina's Outer Banks. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake found the colonists hungry and ready to return to England. In the following year, Raleigh sent another group of 107 men, women, and children to Roanoke. It was an ill-planned and ill-fated expedition. The swampy island was inhospitable, and so were the local Indians. Supply ships, delayed by the attack of the Spanish Armada, failed to reach the colony in 1588, and when ships finally did arrive in 1590, the pioneers left by Raleigh had disappeared without a trace.
All that was found was some rusted debris and the word Croatoan, the Indian name for the nearby island on which Cape Hatteras is located, carved on a tree. Over the years there has been much speculation about what happened to the so-called Lost Colony, but its exact fate remains a mystery. Starvation and Indian raids probably killed off most of the unlucky colonists, with any survivors being adopted by the Indians, the descendants of whom still claim Raleigh's colonists as their ancestral kin. In his book interesting bit of historical detection. Quinn suggests that the Lost Colonists weren't lost at all; instead, they made their way north toward Virginia, settled among peaceable Indians, and were surviving at nearly the time Jamestown was planted but were slaughtered in a massacre by Powhatan, an Indian chief whose name becomes prominent in the annals of Jamestown.
When And How Did Jamestown Get Started?
It took another fifteen years and a new monarch in England to attempt colonization once again. But this time there would be a big difference: private enterprise had entered the picture. The costs of sponsoring a colony were too high for any individual, even royalty, to take on alone. In 1605, two groups of merchants, who had formed joint stock companies that combined the investments of small shareholders, petitioned King James I for the right to colonize Virginia. The first of these, the Virginia Company of London, was given a grant to southern Virginia; the second, the Plymouth Company, was granted northern Virginia. At this time, however, the name "Virginia" encompassed the entire North American continent from sea to sea. While these charters spoke loftily of spreading Christianity, the real goal remained the quest for treasure, and the charter spoke of the right to "dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold, Silver, and Copper."
On December 20, 1606, 104 colonists left port aboard three ships, Susan Constant, Goodspeed, and Discovery, under Captain John Newport. They reached Chesapeake Bay in May 1607 and founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
Here again, rude facts intrude on the neat version of life in Jamestown that the schoolbooks gave us. While the difficulties faced by the first men of Jamestown were real, many of the problems were self-induced. The choice of location, for instance, was a bad one. Jamestown lay in the midst of a malarial swamp. The settlers had arrived too late to get crops planted. Many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their menservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony. In a few months, fifty-one of the party were dead; some of the survivors were deserting to the Indians whose land they had invaded. In the "starving time" of 1609-10, the Jamestown settlers were in even worse straits. Crazed for food, the settlers were reduced to cannibalism, and one contemporary account tells of men "driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature abhorred," raiding both English and Indian graves. In one extreme case, a man killed his wife as she slept and "fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head."
Who Were Pocahontas And John Smith?
This is how you learned it in school: Captain John Smith, the fearless leader of the Jamestown colony, was captured by Powhatan's Indians. Smith's head was on a stone, ready to be bashed by an Indian war ax, when Pocahontas (a nickname loosely translated as "frisky" - her real name was Matowaka), the eleven-year-old daughter of Chief Powhatan, "took his head in her arms" and begged for Smith's life. The basis for that legend is Smith's own version of events, and he was not exactly an impartial witness to history. David Beers Quinn speculates that Smith learned of Powhatan's massacre of the Lost Colonists from the chief himself, but kept this news secret in order to keep the peace with the Indians. This "execution" was actually an initiation ceremony in which Smith was received by the Indians.
One of those larger-than-life characters with mythic stature, Captain John Smith was an English adventurer whose life before Jamestown was an extraordinary one. As a soldier of fortune in the wars between the Holy Roman Empire and the Turks, he rose to captain's rank and had supposedly been held prisoner by the Turkish Pasha and sold as a slave to a young, handsome woman. After escaping, he was rewarded for his services in the war and made a "gentleman." He later became a Mediterranean privateer, returning to London in 1605 to join Bartholomew Gosnold in a new venture into Virginia.
While some large questions exist about Smith's colorful past (documented largely in his own somewhat unreliable writings), there is no doubt that he was instrumental in saving Jamestown from an early extinction. When the Jamestown party fell on hard times, Smith became a virtual military dictator, instituting a brand of martial law that helped save the colony. He became an expert forager, and was a successful Indian trader. Without the help of Powhatan's Indians, who shared food with the Englishmen, showed them how to plant local corn and yams, and introduced them to the ways of the forest, the Jamestown colonists would have perished. Yet, in a pattern that would be repeated elsewhere, the settlers eventually turned on the Indians, and fighting between the groups was frequent and fierce. Once respected by the Indians, Smith became feared by them. While he stayed in Jamestown for only two years before setting off on a voyage of exploration that provided valuable maps of the American coast as far north as New England, Smith's mark on the colony was indelible. A hero of the American past? Yes, but, like most heroes, not without flaws.
After Smith's departure, his supposed savior, Pocahontas, continued to play a role in the life of the colony. During the sporadic battles between settlers and Indians, Pocahontas, now seventeen years old, was kidnapped and held hostage by the colonists. While a prisoner, she caught the attention of the settler John Rolfe, who married the Indian princess, as one account put it, "for the good of the plantation," cementing a temporary peace with the Indians. Rolfe later took the Indian princess to London, where she was a sensation, even earning a royal audience. Renamed "Lady Rebecca" after her baptism, she died of smallpox in England.
Besides this notable marriage, Rolfe's other distinction was his role in the event that truly saved Jamestown and changed the course of American history. In 1612 he crossed Virginia tobacco with seed from a milder Jamaican leaf, and Virginia had its first viable cash crop. London soon went tobacco-mad, and in a very short space of time, tobacco was sown on every available square foot of plantable land in Virginia.
American Voices
Powhatan to John Smith, 1607:
Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?
Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can
you get by war? . . . In these wars, my men must sit up
watching, and if a twig breaks, they all cry out 'Here comes
Captain Smith!' So I must end my miserable life. Take away
your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may
all die in the same manner.
What Was The House Of Burgesses?
Despite the tobacco profits, controlled in London by a monopoly, Jamestown limped along near extinction. Survival remained a day-to-day affair while political intrigues back in London reshaped the colony's destiny. Virginia Company shareholders were angry that their investment was turning out to be a bust, and believed that the "Magazine," a small group of Virginia Company members who exclusively supplied the colony's provisions, were draining off profits. A series of reforms was instituted, the most important of which meant settlers could own their land, rather than just working for the Company. And the arbitrary rule of the governor was replaced by English common law.
In 1619, new management was brought to the Virginia Company, and Governor Yeardley of Virginia summoned an elected legislative assembly - the House of Burgesses - which met in Jamestown that year. (A burgess is a person invested with all the privileges of a citizen, and comes from the same root as the French bourgeois.) Besides the governor, there were six councilors appointed by the governor, and two elected representatives from each private estate and two from each of the Company's four estates or tracts. (Landowning males over seventeen years old were eligible to vote.) Their first meeting was cut short by an onslaught of malaria and July heat. While any decisions they made required approval of the Company in London, this was clearly the seed from which American representative government would grow.
The little assembly had a shaky beginning, from its initial malarial summer. In the first place, the House of Burgesses was not an instant solution to the serious problems still faced by the Jamestown settlers. Despite years of immigration to the new colony, Jamestown's rate of attrition during those first years was horrific. Lured by the prospect of owning land, some 6,000 settlers had been transported to Virginia by 1624. However, a census that year showed only 1,277 colonists alive. A Royal Council asked, "What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?"
Many of them had starved. Others had died in fierce Indian fighting, including some 350 colonists who were killed in a 1622 massacre when the Indians, fearful at the disappearance of their lands, nearly pushed the colony back into the Chesapeake Bay. Responding to the troubles at Jamestown and the mismanagement of the colony, the King revoked the Virginia Company's charter in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony. Under the new Royal Governor, Thomas Wyatt, however, the House of Burgesses survived on an extralegal basis and would have much influence in the years ahead.
Exactly how representative that House was in those days is another question. Certainly women didn't vote. Before 1619 there were few women in Jamestown, and in that year a shipload of "ninety maidens" arrived to be presented as wives to the settlers. The going price for one of the brides: 120 pounds of tobacco as payment for their transport from England.
Ironically, in the same year that representative government took root in America, another ominous cargo of people arrived in the port of Jamestown. Like the women, these new arrivals couldn't vote, and also like the women, they brought a price. These were the first African slaves to be sold in the American colonies.
Who Started The Slave Trade?
While everyone wants a piece of the claim to the discovery of America, there are fewer arguments over who started the slave trade. The unhappy distinction probably belongs to Portugal, where ten black Africans were taken about fifty years before Columbus sailed. But by no means did the Portuguese enjoy a monopoly. The Spanish quickly began to import this cheap human labor to its American lands. In 1562 the English seaman John Hawkins began a direct slave trade between Guinea and the West Indies. By 1600 the Dutch and French were also caught up in the "traffick in men," and by the time those first twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Dutch slaver, a million or more black slaves had already been brought to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Caribbean and South America.
Who Were The Pilgrims, And What Did They Want?
The year after the House of Burgesses met for the first time, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower founded the second permanent English settlement in America. Their arrival in 1620 has always been presented as another of history's lucky accidents. But was it?
Had Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, turned the ship when he was supposed to, the little band would have gone to its intended destination, the mouth of the Hudson, future site of New York, and a settlement within the bounds of the Virginia Company's charter and authority. Instead, the ship kept a westerly route - the result of a bribe to the captain, as London gossip had it - and in November 1620, the band of pioneers found safe harbor in Cape Cod Bay, coming ashore at the site of present-day Provincetown. Of the 102 men, women, and children aboard the small ship, fifty were so-called Pilgrims.
Here again, as it had in Queen Elizabeth's time, the Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in events. After the great split from Roman Catholicism that created the Church of England, the question of religious reform continued heatedly in England. Many English remained Catholic. Others felt that the Church of England was too "popish" and wished to push it further away from Rome - to "purify" it - so they were called Puritans. But even among Puritans strong differences existed, and there were those who thought the Church of England too corrupt. They wanted autonomy for their congregations, and wished to separate from the Anglican church. This sect of Separatists - viewed in its day the same way extremist religious cults are thought of in our time - went too far for the taste of the authorities, and they were either forced underground or out of England.
A small band of Separatists, now called Pilgrims, went to Leyden, Holland, where their reformist ideas were accepted. But cut off from their English traditions, the group decided on another course, a fresh start in the English lands in America. With the permission of the Virginia Company and the backing of London merchants who charged handsome interest on the loans they made, the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth in 1620. Among their number were the Pilgrim families of William Brewster, John Carver, Edward Winslow, and William Bradford. The "strangers," or non-Pilgrim voyagers (men faithful to the Church of England, but who had signed on for the passage in the hope of owning property in the New World), included ship's cooper John Alden and army captain Miles Standish.
What Was The Mayflower Compact?
When the rough seas around Nantucket forced the ship back to Cape Cod and the group decided to land outside the bounds of the Virginia Company, the "strangers" declared that they would be free from any commands. Responding quickly to this threat of mutiny, the Pilgrim leaders composed a short statement of self-government, signed by almost all of the adult men.
This agreement, the Mayflower Compact, is rightly considered the first written constitution in North America. Cynicism about its creation, or for that matter about the House of Burgesses, is easy in hindsight. Yes, these noble-minded pioneers slaughtered Indians with little remorse, kept servants and slaves, and treated women no differently from cattle. They were imperfect men whose failings must be regarded alongside their astonishing attempt to create in America a place like none in Europe. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it in The Oxford History of the American People, "This compact is an almost startling revelation of the capacity of Englishmen in that era for self-government. Moreover, it was a second instance of the Englishmen's determination to live in the colonies under a rule of law."
Despite their flaws, the early colonists taking their toddling steps toward self-rule must be contrasted with other colonies, including English colonies, in various parts of the world where the law was simply the will of the King or the church.
American Voices
From the Mayflower Compact (signed December 1620):
We whose names are under-written . . . doe by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves togeather into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just and equal lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete for the generall good of the Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. . . .
Did The Pilgrims Really Land At Plymouth Rock?
After a brief exploration of Cape Cod, the Mayflower group sailed on and found a broad, round harbor that they recognized from Captain John Smith's maps as Plimoth (Plymouth). The Indians called it Patuxet. On December 16, the Mayflower's passengers reached their new home. There is no mention in any historical account of Plymouth Rock, the large stone that can be seen in Plymouth today, into which the year 1620 is carved. The notion that the Pilgrims landed near the rock and carved the date is a tradition that was created at least a hundred years later, probably by some smart member of the first Plymouth Chamber of Commerce.
Like the first arrivals at Jamestown, the Pilgrims and "strangers" had come to Plymouth at a bad time to start planting a colony. By spring, pneumonia and the privations of a hard winter had cost the lives of fifty-two of the 102 immigrants. But in March, salvation came, much as it had in Virginia, in the form of Indians, including one named Squanto, who could speak English. Who Squanto was, and how he came to speak English, are among history's unsolved mysteries. One claim is made for an Indian named Tisquantum who had been captured by an English slaver in 1615. A second is made for an Indian named Tasquantum, brought to England in 1605. Whichever he was, he moved into the house of William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, and was the means of survival for the Pilgrims until his death from fever in 1622. Another Indian of great value to the Pilgrim Fathers was Samoset, a local chief who also spoke English and introduced the settlers to the grand chief of the Wampanoags, Wasamegin, better known by his title Massasoit. Under the rule of Massasoit, the Indians became loyal friends to the Pilgrims, and it was Massasoit's braves who were the invited guests to the October feast at which the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest. For three days the colonists and their Indian allies feasted on turkey and venison, pumpkin and corn. It was the first Thanksgiving. (Thanksgiving was first officially celebrated during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1864. It became a national holiday and was moved to its November date by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
While life did not magically improve after that first year, the Pilgrims carved out a decent existence and, through trade with the Indians, were able to repay their debts to the London backers and even to buy out the shares that these London merchants held. Their success helped inspire an entire wave of immigration to New England that came to be known as the Great Puritan migration. From 1629 to 1642, between 14,000 and 20,000 settlers left England for the West Indies and New England, and most of these were Anglican Puritans brought over by a new joint stock company called the Massachusetts Bay Company. They came because life in England under King Charles I had grown intolerable for Puritans. Though the newcomers demonstrated a startling capacity for fighting among themselves, usually over church matters, these squabbles led to the settlement and development of early New England.
Highlights in the development of New England
1629
Naumkeag, later called Salem, is founded to accept first wave of 1,000 Puritan settlers.
1630
John Winthrop, carrying the Massachusetts Bay Charter, arrives at Naumkeag and later establishes Boston, named after England's great Puritan city. (In 1635, English High and Latin School, the first secondary school in America, is founded. The following year a college for the training of clergymen is founded at Cambridge and named Harvard after a benefactor in 1639.)
1634
Two hundred settlers, half of them Protestant, arrive at Chesapeake Bay and found St. Mary's, in the new colony of Maryland, granted to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who instructs his brother, the colony's leader, to tolerate the Puritans. The so-called Catholic colony, ostensibly named for Charles I's Queen Henrietta Maria, but in fact named to honor the Virgin Mary, will have a Protestant majority from the beginning.
1636
Reverend Thomas Hooker leads a group into Connecticut and founds Hartford; other Connecticut towns are soon founded.
1636
Roger Williams, a religious zealot banished from Boston by Governor Winthrop, founds Providence, Rhode Island, preaching radical notions of separation of church and state and paying Indians for land.
1638
Anne Hutchinson, banished from Boston for her heretical interpretations of sermons, which drew large, enthusiastic crowds, settles near Providence and starts Portsmouth. (Newport is founded about the same time.) In 1644, Rhode Island receives a royal colonial charter.
1638
New Haven founded.
1643
New England Confederation, a loose union to settle border disputes, is formed by Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Who Started New York?
The Englishmen who were quickly populating the Atlantic seaboard from the Carolinas to New England had no monopoly on the New World. French and Dutch explorers had also been busy, and both nations were carving out separate territories in North America. The Dutch founded New Netherland in the Hudson Valley of present-day New York State, basing their claims upon the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609.
An Englishman, Hudson was hired by a Dutch company that wanted to find the Northeast Passage, the sea route to China along the northern rim of Asia. In 1609, Hudson set off instead, aboard the Half Moon, for the northwest alternative. Sailing down the Atlantic coast, he entered Chesapeake Bay before making a U-turn and heading back north to explore the Hudson River as far upriver as Albany. Noting the absence of tides, he correctly assumed that this route did not lead to the Pacific. While we are left with reminders of Hudson's intrepid seamanship in the river, strait, and bay that bear his name, his life ended with little glory. During another voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, Hudson's crew mutinied in 1611 and put their captain into an open boat in Hudson Bay. While the mutineers returned to England, no trace of their captain was ever discovered.
England was flexing its new muscles in the early 1600s, but it was the Dutch who had become the true world power in maritime matters by building the world's largest merchant marine fleet. There was literally not a place in the known world of that day in which the Dutch did not have a hand in matters. Amsterdam had become the busiest and richest city in the European world. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company was formed with the aim of taking over trade between Europe and the New World, and the Dutch soon took from the Portuguese control of the lucrative slave and sugar trades. Fort Orange, the site of Albany, took hold as a fur-trading outpost in 1624. Two years later the trading village of New Amsterdam, soon to be renamed New York, was established at the mouth of the Hudson. The Dutch West India Company did more than trade and set up colonies. In 1628 the Dutch admiral Piet Hein captured a Spanish treasure fleet, pirating away enough silver to provide company shareholders with a 75-percent dividend.
Did The Indians Really Sell Manhattan For $24?
The first Dutch settlers to arrive on the narrow, twelve-mile-long island of Manhattan didn't bother to pay the Indians for the land they chose for their settlement. But when Peter Minuit arrived in the spring of 1624 and was chosen as leader of the settlement, he quickly met with the local Indian chiefs. Before them he set a sales agreement for all of Manhattan Island and two boxes of trade goods - probably hatchets, cloth, metal pots, and bright beads - worth sixty Dutch guilders. At the time, that equaled 2,400 English cents, which has come down in history as the famous twenty-four-dollar figure.
From its inception Dutch New Amsterdam was far less pious and more rowdy than Puritan New England. As a trading outpost it attracted a different breed of settler, and unlike Boston, taverns in New Amsterdam quickly outnumbered churches. As few Dutch settlers were lured to the new colony by the promise of low pay to work on West India Company farms, the company welcomed settlers from any nation and by 1640, at least eighteen languages were spoken in New York, a polyglot tradition that was to continue throughout the city's history.
How Did New Amsterdam Become New York?
The Dutch got New York cheap. The English went them one better. They simply took it for nothing. Why pay for what you can steal?
Dutch rule in America was not long-lived, but it was certainly influential in the stamp it put on the future New York. It was the Dutch who erected, as a defense against Indians, the wall in lower Manhattan from which Wall Street takes its name. And what would some Dutch burgher think of finding today's Bowery instead of the tidy bouweries, or farms, that had been neatly laid out in accordance with a plan drawn up in Amsterdam. Besides the settlement on Manhattan island, the Dutch had also established villages, such as Breukelen and Haarlem. And early Dutch and Walloon (Belgian Protestant) settlers included the ancestors of the Roosevelt clan.
New Amsterdam developed far differently from the English colonies, which held out the promise of land ownership for at least some of its settlers. Promising to bring over fifty settlers to work the land, a few wealthy Dutch landholders, or patroons, were able to secure huge tracts along the Hudson in a system that more closely resembled medieval European feudalism than anything else, a system that continued well after the Revolution and that contributed to New York's reputation as an aristocratic (and, during the Revolution, Loyalist) stronghold.
New Amsterdam became New York in one of the only truly bloodless battles in American history. As the two principal competing nations of the early seventeenth century, England and Holland sporadically came to war, and when Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1661 after the period of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, he asserted English rights to North America. Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York, the largest and richest territorial grant ever made by an English monarch. It included all of present New York, the entire region from the Connecticut to Delaware rivers, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the present state of Maine. In 1664, four English frigates carrying 1,000 soldiers sailed into New York Harbor. The Dutch and other settlers there, unhappy with the administration of the West India Company, gladly accepted English terms despite Peter Stuyvesant's blustery call to resist. Without a shot fired, New Amsterdam became New York.
The Duke of York in turn generously created a new colony when he split off two large tracts of land and gave one each to two friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, an area that would become New Jersey. Also gained as part of this annexation was a settlement known as New Sweden. Established in 1638 by Peter Minuit (dismissed earlier as governor of New Amsterdam and now in Swedish employ), and centered on the site of Wilmington, Delaware, New Sweden had fallen to the Dutch under Stuyvesant in 1655. (Although this Swedish colony had little lasting impact on American history, the Swedes did make one enormous contribution. They brought with them the log cabin, the construction destined to become the chief form of pioneer housing in the spreading American frontier of the eighteenth century.)
The English exercised a surprisingly tolerant hands-off policy in ruling the former New Amsterdam. Life as it had been under Dutch rule continued for many years.
When Did The French Reach The New World?
French attempts to gain a piece of the riches of the New World began in earnest with Jacques Cartier's voyage of 1534, another expedition in the ongoing search for a China route. Cartier's explorations took him to Newfoundland, discovered by Cabot almost forty years earlier, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sailing as far as the Huron Indian villages of Stadacona (modern Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal). In 1541, Cartier's attempt to settle a colony failed and he returned to France. While cod fishermen from France, as well as England and Portugal, continued to make temporary settlements around Newfoundland, the French also began some early fur-trading with Indians that would provide France with the real economic impetus for its colonizing efforts. In 1600, Tadoussac, a French trading post on the St. Lawrence, was founded.
The key mover in the French era of exploration was Samuel de Champlain, who founded Quebec in 1608, the year after Jamestown was settled. Like the Dutch in New Amsterdam, the French explorers who started New France were primarily interested in trading, as opposed to the English settlers of New England and Virginia, who were planting farms and permanent communities.
An inevitable head-to-head confrontation between England and France, already the two great European powers, over sovereignty in the New World existed almost from the beginning of the colonial period. A Scots expedition took a French fort in Acadia, and it was renamed Nova Scotia (New Scotland). Then, in 1629, an English pirate briefly captured Quebec. While New England and the other English colonies were taking in thousands of new settlers during the massive immigration of the mid-seventeenth century, the French were slow to build a colonial presence, and settlers were slow to arrive in New France. Worse for France than the threat of English attack were the Iroquois, the powerful confederacy of five tribes of Indians in New York, and the best-organized and strongest tribal grouping in North America at the time. The Iroquois were sworn enemies of France's Indian trading partners, the Huron and Algonkian Indians, and a long series of devastating wars with the Iroquois preoccupied the French during much of their early colonial period.
But if the French failed as colony builders, they excelled as explorers. Led by the coureurs de bois, the young French trappers and traders, Frenchmen were expanding their reach into the North American heartland. One of these, Medard Chouart, mapped the Lake Superior-Hudson Bay region and then sold the information to the English, who formed the Hudson Bay Company to exploit the knowledge. An even greater quest came in 1673, when Louis Joliet and the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette set out from Lake Michigan and eventually reached the Mississippi, letting the current carry them down into the American South as far as the Arkansas River. Based on these expeditions, the French laid a claim in 1671 to all of western North America in the name of King Louis XIV, the Sun King, a claim re-exerted in 1682 by La Salle, a young French nobleman who named the province Louisiana in honor of his king. From the outset, the English would contest this claim. The stage was set for an epic contest over a very substantial prize-all of North America. La Salle, like Hudson, was another of history's glorious losers. In 1684, at the head of another expedition, La Salle mistook the entrance to Matagorda Bay, in Texas, for the mouth of the Mississippi. He spent two years in search of the great river, until, tired of the hardships they were forced to endure, La Salle's men mutinied and murdered him in 1687.
Why Is Pennsylvania The Quaker State?
While the French were making their claims, the English carved out another major colonial territory in 1682, virtually completing the quilt that would become the original thirteen colonies. This was the "holy experiment" of William Penn, one of the most fascinating characters in America's early history. Although the colony, which was named for its founder's father, and its chief city, Philadelphia ("City of Brotherly Love") quickly became vibrant centers of commerce and culture, it was primarily founded to allow the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a place to worship, and to permit religious tolerance for all.
A highly individualistic left-wing Protestant sect founded in England by George Fox around 1650, the Friends had an impact on America far greater than their numbers would suggest. But life was never simple for them, in England or the colonies. Fox believed that no ministry or clergy was necessary for worship, and that the word of God was found in the human soul, not necessarily in the Bible, eliminating almost all vestiges of organized religion, including church buildings and formal liturgy. In a Friends meeting, members sat in silent meditation until the "inward light," a direct spiritual communication from God, caused a believer to physically tremble or quake, the source of the group's commonly used name. Fox also took literally the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," beginning a long tradition of Quaker pacifism.
Of course, these notions did not sit well with either the religious or the political authorities, and the Quakers were vigorously persecuted from the beginning. Three thousand English Quakers were imprisoned under Charles II. In America, where freedom to worship had been the ostensible motivating force for many colonists, every colony but Roger Williams's Rhode Island passed strident anti-Quaker laws. The worst of these was in Puritan Massachusetts, where a number of Quakers were hanged when they returned to Boston after having been banished.
Back in England, William Penn, the son of a prominent and powerful admiral, became a zealous follower of Fox in 1667, and his devotion, expressed in a tract entitled The Sandy Foundation Shaken, earned Penn a stint in the Tower of London. Released through his father's influence, Penn became a trustee of the Quaker community in West Jersey and later, with an inheritance and a proprietary grant from the Duke of York (in payment of debts owed Penn's father), Penn took possession of the territory that would become Pennsylvania.
As with other proprietary grants of colonial territory, Pennsylvania already belonged to somebody, namely the Indians who lived there. But Penn, unlike many other early founders, believed in the rights of the Indians, and on a journey to America in 1682 he negotiated a price for Pennsylvania. Like many colonial chapters, Penn's Indian dealings are obscured by mythology. In a famous painting, Penn is depicted making a treaty under the elm tree at Shackamaxon, a treaty that didn't exist. Part of the deal was known as the "Walking Purchase" in which Penn vowed to take only as much land as a man could walk in three days. Penn took a leisurely stroll. (Penn's successors were not as charitable. His son hired three runners to head off at a good pace, and the Indians were forced to relinquish a good bit more of their hunting grounds.)
The new colony faced few of the privations that the first generation of colonists had suffered. In the first place, the territory was already settled by the Swedes who had begun New Sweden, and food was plentiful. Besides the English Quakers, the colony attracted many Dutch and German Quakers and other sects lured by Penn's promise of religious tolerance and the generous terms offered by Penn for buying the new colony's extensive lands. In 1683, for instance, a group of Mennonite families from the Rhineland founded the settlement of German-town. By 1685 the colony's population numbered nearly 9,000.
Penn's liberal religious views were mirrored in his political beliefs. He developed a plan for a colonial union, and his Frame of Government provided a remarkably progressive constitution for the colony, which included selection of a governor (at first, Penn himself) by ballot. By 1700, Philadelphia trailed only Boston as an American cultural center, possessing the second colonial printing press, the third colonial newspaper, the Penn Charter school, and the colony's best hospital and charitable institutions, all a legacy of Penn's Quaker conscience.
Penn himself fared not nearly as well. He became embroiled in political and financial feuds, even being accused of treason by William and Mary. He lost possession of the colony for a period, but regained it in 1694. Money problems landed him in debtors' prison and a stroke left him incapacitated. But his legacy of practical idealism marks Penn as one of America's early heroes. And the Quaker traditions of nonviolence and social justice that he established left indelible marks on American history as Quakers stood in the forefront of such movements as Abolitionism, Prohibition, universal suffrage, and pacifism.
What Were The Thirteen Original Colonies?
With Pennsylvania quickly established, all but one of the thirteen future states were in place by the end of the seventeenth century. In order of settlement, they were as follows:
1607 - Virginia (Jamestown)
1620 - Massachusetts (Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony)
1626 - New York (originally New Amsterdam; annexed by the English)
1633 - Maryland
1636 - Rhode Island
1636 - Connecticut
1638 - Delaware (originally New Sweden; annexed by the Dutch and later the English)
1638 - New Hampshire
1653 - North Carolina
1663 - South Carolina
1664 - New Jersey
1682 - Pennsylvania
In 1732, Georgia, the last of the original thirteen, was founded by James Oglethorpe, a humanitarian interested in recruiting settlers from English debtors' prisons. The colony, which became another haven for persecuted Protestants, was of special strategic importance, standing as a buffer between South Carolina and possible attacks from Spanish Florida and French Louisiana.
§
Title:
Don't Know Much About History
Author:
Davis, Kenneth C.
Date: New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1990