Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  A sudden and very great abatement of the prices of all our own commodities … whereby it came to pass that men could not pay their debts, for no money or beaver were to be had, and he who last year or but three months before was worth £1,000, could not now if he should sell his whole estate raise £200, whereby God taught us the vanity of all outward things.

  Winthrop's ‘vanity’ received another blow in June 1641, when his joy at the execution of Strafford and the arrest of Archbishop Laud (‘our great enemy’) was tempered by the fact that ‘this caused all men to stay in England in expectation of a new world, so as few coming to us, all foreign commodities grew scarce, and our own of no price’.20

  The situation of the New England colonies remained perilous throughout the decade. The Massachusetts preacher Increase Mather later claimed that ‘more persons have removed out of New England than have gone thither’. He might have added that those who ‘removed’ to support the parliamentary cause included many of the colony's elite: 14 of Harvard College's first 24 graduates (one of them George Downing, who rose to be Oliver Cromwell's spymaster); Hugh Peter, who became Cromwell's favourite preacher; and at least seven colonels in the parliamentary army (including Stephen Winthrop, son of John). Two more New Englanders (including Henry Vane, victor over the Pequots) won seats in the Long Parliament, one sat in the Westminster Assembly of Divines and one signed the king's death warrant.21 Many of those who remained in New England also became parliamentary warriors – albeit ‘in ambush’, seeking to kill royalists with their prayers and sending sermons, poems, letters and treatises of encouragement back to England. Thus early in 1643 Anne Bradstreet of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Anglo-America's first published poet, composed a verse ‘Dialogue between Old England and New concerning their present troubles’ in which the loyal colonial ‘daughter’ urged her ‘mother’ to show no mercy towards royalists:

  Go on brave Essex, shew whose son thou art,

  Not false to king, nor country in thy heart;

  But those that hurt his people and his crown

  By force expel, destroy and tread them down:

  Let gaols be fill'd with th'remnant of that pack

  And sturdy Tyburn loaded till it crack.22

  Although New England supported Parliament, Virginia (and several other colonies) remained loyal to King Charles, who denounced Parliament's efforts to spread ‘this horrible rebellion even unto those remoter parts’. Barbados, by far the most prosperous English settlement in the New World, saw neutrality as the best way to survive, and its freeholders swore ‘not to receive any alteration of government, until God shall be so merciful unto us as to unite the king and Parliament’, and vigorously pursued a policy of free trade.23 Initially the regicide changed little – only Rhode Island immediately recognized the English Commonwealth as the legitimate government – but in 1652 the young Republic dispatched one fleet to enforce its authority in the Caribbean and another to subdue Virginia. It also created a Council of Trade to promote overseas commerce and passed a Navigation Act that restricted all trade in the Anglo-Atlantic to English merchantmen. In addition it sent to America thousands of its defeated British and Irish opponents who toiled alongside tens of thousands of slaves imported from Africa; while because (in the words of a group of boastful colonists in 1643) New England enjoyed ‘peace and freedome from enemies, when almost all the world is on a fire’, the migration of freeborn English men and women also rose. In all, the population of the Anglo-American colonies quadrupled from around 50,000 to 200,000 during the 1650s.24

  The British revolution strengthened Anglo-America in other ways. The collapse in local prices and the interruption of transatlantic trade after 1640 forced the colonists to fall back on their own resources. Instead of importing what they needed from Europe, they mined and worked local iron and lead, invested more in fishing and logging and manufactured their own textiles and ships. By 1660 almost 100 ships – many of them built in New England – docked annually in Boston, exchanging goods from Europe, the southern colonies and the West Indies. Distinctive new economic, demographic, social and constitutional structures emerged in Anglo-America, from Newfoundland to Trinidad during the mid-seventeenth century; and the Restored Monarchy in London left what the Republic had wrought alone until ‘a concatenation of disasters’ in 1676 led to some significant changes.25

  In spring 1676 the Governor of Barbados noted that although his island had suffered some ‘misfortunes, by the negroes' [revolt] first, and then by the hurricane’, its inhabitants still ‘retain one advantage’:

  They sleep not so unquietly as the rest of their neighbours in America, from whence they receive nothing but ill news of daily devastations by the Indians who increase in strength and success which spread like a contagion over all the continent from New England, where they have burnt some towns and destroyed many people, to Maryland where they have done the same, likewise at Virginia.26

  The ‘daily devastations’ in New England originated in the Pequot War, which had opened the Connecticut valley to European settlement. The newcomers' increasing demand for land and food alarmed even their most loyal Indian allies and in 1642 Miantonomo, one of the Narragansett leaders who had helped to exterminate the Pequots, called upon his neighbours to unite before it was too late. Just as ‘we [are] all Indians as the English are, and say “brother” to one another, so must we be one as they are, or we shall be all gone shortly,’ he told the Montauks of Long Island.

  You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and turkeys, and our coves and rivers were full of fish and fowl. But these Englishmen have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes felled the trees. Their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.

  Miantonomo announced that he and ‘all the sachems from east to west’ had resolved ‘at one appointed day’ to ‘fall on and kill [English] men, women and children – but no cows, for they will serve to eat till our deer be increased again’.27

  Miantonomo's appeal backfired. A Montauk favourable to the English betrayed the plot, while the following year a rival Mohegan sachem captured and murdered its author; moreover, fear of a pan-Indian alliance encouraged the various groups of colonists to band together. The preamble to the ‘Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England’ (1643) noted not only the ‘sundry insolence and outrages’ committed by ‘the natives’ but also ‘those sad distractions in England, which they have heard of, and by which they know we are hindered’ from receiving protection. The new alliance promised general cooperation (including the return of fugitive criminals and indentured servants) and mutual military assistance in case of attack.28

  Within a generation, the New England colonists had created precisely the crisis predicted by Miantonomo. As Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, observed in 1676: ‘All English planters on the main[land] covet more land than they are safely able to hold’. This craving, he asserted, ‘was the cause of the New England troubles, the Indians complaining that strangers had left them no land to support and preserve their wives and children from famine’.29 His analysis contained much truth, in that the cultivable land available to the ‘Indians’ did fall below subsistence level – but it did so for a variety of reasons. First, the rapid growth of the European population (both through immigration and through the natural increase praised by Benjamin Franklin) automatically drove up the number of mouths to feed and the number of fields required to produce the food. Second, the settlers cultivated not only subsistence crops but also cash crops like tobacco, and this diversification, too, reduced the amount of arable land. Third, the settlers' livestock also required space – a lot of space: their cattle trampled down crops as they grazed while their hogs rooted up clams and corn stores, and while the natives begged the newcomers to fence in their pastures, the newcomers retorted that the natives should fence in their crops. Finally, the ‘natural archive’ of wha
t is now the eastern United States suggests a cooler climate in the mid-seventeenth century that reduced the total yield of crops, and so increased anxiety in both communities about their long-term prospects for survival. On top of all these changes the virtual extinction of the fur-bearing animals of New England, especially beavers, through excessive hunting, meant that the natives had fewer trade goods to offer the settlers. This shortfall in turn meant that, whenever the colonists' courts fined Native Americans for some transgression, land was often the only asset they had left with which to pay. This dynamic precipitated King Philip's War, which almost ended the existence of New England.

  In 1671 the Court of Massachusetts Bay imposed on the sachem of the Wampanoags, known to posterity as Philip (his English name) or Metacom (his Algonquian name), a fine of £100 – a large sum that he could pay only by surrendering some of his land to the colonists. According to a well-informed settler, Philip planned to take immediate revenge by an attack on the settlers of Massachusetts, ‘and would have done so had not God's immediate hand prevented him at that time, twice at least by great rains’, which ruined the harvest on which his people depended. So Philip began to follow Miantonomo's example and forged alliances with his neighbours, as well as acquiring guns and constructing forts. In June 1675, during the ‘year without a summer’ when unusually cool weather threatened the crops of natives and newcomers alike, ‘King Philip’ (as the English now called him) launched a coordinated attack that eventually involved some 8,000 Native Americans.30

  Philip commanded far more fighting men than the colonists, and they excelled in ‘the skulking way of war’ that consisted of raids and ambushes. Nevertheless, two critical weaknesses undermined his cause: not only the tensions inherent in any alliance, but also the lack among the New England tribes of any tradition of following a single leader – indeed, several of the traditional enemies of the Wampanoags fought for the United Colonies. So although (to quote Governor Berkeley again) Philip ‘made the New England men desert about a hundred miles of ground they had divers years seated and built towns on’, he and his allies suffered some serious defeats.31 Above all, the unusually cold winter of 1675–6 froze the ‘Great Swamp’ that normally protected an important Narragansett fort, allowing a colonial army to march across the ice to the fort and slay all within it. Then early in 1676 the Mohawks, a member of the Iroquois Confederation, assaulted Philip's winter encampment, forcing him and his followers to disperse. For a while, another poor growing season combined with hostilities to produce dearth in New England, but the colonists received supplies by sea, and from each other, whereas Philip's supporters starved.32 In addition, the colonists belatedly adopted ‘the skulking way of war’ and conducted joint operations with their Native American allies, until in August 1676 they cornered Philip and killed him. Although the war continued for another 18 months, Indian power east of the Connecticut river was broken forever.

  Nevertheless, victory came at a high price. Perhaps 3,000 Native Americans died through combat, disease and hunger; 2,000 more fled; and another 1,000 were sent in servitude to Bermuda; whereas of the 90 settler towns in New England before the war, Philip's forces attacked 52, pillaged 25 and razed 17. Some of the smaller outposts perished for ever, and ‘the work of a generation would be required to restore the frontier districts laid waste by the conflict’. It was, in proportion to population, ‘the costliest in lives of any American war. Out of a total population of some thirty thousand, one in every sixteen men of military age was killed or died as a result of war; and many men, women, and children were killed, carried into captivity, or died of starvation or exposure as a result of the Indian raids.’ The war also ‘all but wrecked the colonial economy’, disrupting the trade in furs and commerce with the West Indies, and it ‘eliminated so much of the capital invested in colonization by the two founding generations that per-capita income did not achieve 1675 levels again until 1775’. In addition, Plymouth colony alone spent over £100,000 in the war, and Connecticut £30,000 more. Since human and material losses on this scale threatened New England's ‘continued prosperity, perhaps even its survival’, in April 1676 its leaders appealed to London for assistance.33

  Shortly afterwards, another appeal arrived from Virginia. In July 1676 some of the Chesapeake planters demanded that Governor Berkeley sanction attacks on their Indian neighbours. When he refused, malcontents led by the well-connected and newly arrived Nathaniel Bacon issued a ‘Declaration’ in the name of ‘the Commons of Virginia’ that commanded ‘in his Majesty's name’ the arrest of the governor and his supporters ‘as traitors to the King’. They also garnered support in Maryland. Both sides offered freedom to any servants and slaves of their opponents who agreed to take up arms (an unprecedented step); and in September, Bacon and his supporters subjected Jamestown, the colonial capital, to an artillery bombardment. They then entered and ‘sett fire to towne, church and state house’ so that by ‘dawn, 21 September 1676, property worth £45,000 sterling was destroyed. Not a habitable house was left.’34

  In the event, the unhealthy environment of the Tidewater nipped rebellion in the bud – dysentery carried off Bacon and many of the other rebellious planters newly arrived from England – but several commentators linked the events in Virginia and New England in 1676 with those in Ireland in 1641 (‘The tyranny of the natives exceeds that of the rebellion in Ireland, if possible’; they have ‘imbrued their hands in the blood of so many of His Majesty's good subjects’). The government in London therefore dispatched a fleet of 14 warships with 1,300 regular troops, and orders first to pacify Virginia and then to proceed to Boston and restore order there.35

  James, duke of York and Albany, the future James II, played a leading role in formulating the new policy. He was already ‘proprietor’ of the North American territories acquired in 1674 from the Dutch (hence their name ‘New York’, as well as the names of the two principal towns); and his governor, Sir Edmund Andros, played a leading role in defeating King Philip by mobilizing the Iroquois against him. In 1677 Andros sealed a lasting agreement, known as the Covenant Chain, with the entire Iroquois Confederation, which brought peace to the Anglo-Indian frontier from Maine to the Carolinas – but at a price: colonial expansion westward ceased for almost a century.36 Charles II and James now took other steps to restrain the colonies. As in England (see chapter 12 above), throughout the 1680s they revoked charters and other royal concessions, while in 1686 James (now king) created the Dominion of New England, with Andros as his first governor general.

  Early in 1689 Sir Edmund was in Boston, consolidating his authority, when news arrived of the Glorious Revolution in England. A group of Massachusetts colonists immediately seized and imprisoned the governor general (and some of his appointed council); then, followed by other New England colonies, they restored the form of government laid down in their confiscated charters. The colonial elite in Massachusetts (as well as in Maryland and New York, which also supported the rebellion against James) later proclaimed William and Mary their sovereigns, but their capacity for independent action worried the new rulers: although they dismantled the Dominion created by James, the new rulers also issued new colonial charters that gave the crown far more authority.

  The memory of the great Anglo-Indian wars of the mid-seventeenth century – and their outcome – lived on beyond the Appalachians. In 1811, in a vain attempt to unite the Indian Nations of the Midwest, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh asked rhetorically ‘Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun … Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn?’37 It seems curious that Tecumseh omitted from his appeal some other ‘powerful tribes of our people’ destroyed in the mid-seventeenth century, including the Lenape (or ‘Delaware Indians’) of New York and New Jersey, and his own forefathers, the Algonquian speakers who lived around Lake Huron. Tecumseh's ancestors were not direct
ly the victims of ‘the avarice and oppression of the white man’, but of the Iroquois.

  New France and the ‘Beaver Wars’

  The history of the lands along the St Lawrence and around the Great Lakes in the seventeenth century resembled that of neighbouring New England in several respects. Above all, the European population increased very rapidly. Almost 70 per cent of all women who arrived in the colony from France married before they turned 20; while one-half of the married settler families produced four or more children and one-quarter produced ten or more. After 1650, some parishes in Québec registered three or four births for every death. The French metropolitan government rewarded this remarkable fecundity handsomely. After 1669 each French Canadian female who married before the age of 16 received 20 livres (as did each male who married before 20), and each father received an annual pension of 300 livres if he supported 10 children, and 400 livres if he supported 12. Thanks to all these factors, the number of French settlers increased from 800 in 1660 to 15,000 by 1699, the year in which Marshal Vauban (Louis XIV's leading statistical adviser) predicted that the colony's population would double every generation.38