Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  The Slaves of Virginia

  The introduction of slaves into Georgia was the hardest blow to Oglethorpe’s dream, and he returned to England, disgusted with the entire enterprise. Like most other even modestly enlightened individuals, Oglethorpe regarded slavery as evil. Yet it persisted—even in a would-be utopia—and would persist until it tore a nation apart. just as Georgia was a latecomer into the British colonial fold, so it had adopted slavery late in the scheme of things. In 1619, just 12 years after Jamestown got its shaky start, Dutch traders imported African slaves at the behest of the Virginia tobacco farmers. The first 20 or so were landed at Jamestown and were not racially discriminated against, but were classed with white indentured servants brought from England under work contracts. Indeed, many years passed before African slaves were brought to the colonies in large numbers. At first, they were purchased primarily to replace indentured servants who had either escaped or had served out the term of their indentures.

  As the plantations of the southern colonies, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, expanded, demand for slavery grew, as did commerce in slaves. The so-called “triangle trade” developed: Ships leaving England with trade goods landed on the African west coast, traded the merchandise for African slaves, transported this “cargo” via the “Middle Passage.” to the West Indies or the mainland English colonies, where the slaves were exchanged for the very agricultural products—sugar, tobacco, and rice—slave labor produced. The final leg of the triangle was back to England, laden with New World produce. Nor were the northern colonies untouched by the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Although a later generation of New Englanders would pride themselves on being fierce abolitionists, fighters for the freedom of the slaves, their forefathers had profited from the trade. New England ports became a regular stop for vessels about to return to Old England. The sugar and molasses acquired at southern ports was often unloaded here in order to manufacture rum, an important New England export.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The Pilgrims were Puritans who left England, settling first in Holland and then in New England (at Plymouth) in 1620. Separatists were somewhat less radical Puritans who settled there (at Massachusetts Bay) beginning in 1630.

  The other major English colonies were also established as havens for freedom of worship; Georgia was meant to be a utopia.

  Intolerance among the Puritans and slavery in the South marred the colonies’ ideal of liberty.

  Main Event

  In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims invited their Native American benefactors to a feast in celebration of the first harvest, in which Indian aid had been so instrumental. The event was the first Thanksgiving (unless you count the collective prayer of thanksgiving offered on December 4, 1619, by members of the Berkeley plantation near present-day Charles City, Virginia). Our first president, George Washington, proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day, on November 26, 1789, but it wasn’t until 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving an annual holiday to be commemorated on the last Thursday in November. During 1939-41, by proclamation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the day was celebrated on the third Thursday in November, but then was returned by act of Congress to the date set by Lincoln.

  Main Event

  In February 1692, two daughters of the Reverend Samuel Parris and le of their friends are diagnosed by a Salem, Massachusetts, physician as victims of witchcraft. Under questioning, the girls accuse certain women of being witches. The town magistrates proceed against the accused on February 29 not of the year, accusations multiply: 140 are accused, 107 of them women. The royal governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, establishes a special court to try more than 70 of the cases. Of 26 individuals convicted, 19 are executed.

  The Salem witchcraft epidemic, though extreme, was hardly unique. Witches had been tried before 1692 in Massachusetts as well as Connecticut and, even more frequently, throughout Europe. Who stood accused in all of these places? “Witches” were usually poor, elderly women (sometimes men) who quarreled with their neighbors and were generally disruptive, disagreeable social misfits.

  Word for the Day

  Pennsylvania, which means “Penn’s Woods,” was named by King Charles II not after the colony’s founder and proprietor, but in honor of Penn’s father, also named William, a great British admiral.

  They Could’ve Been Contenders

  (1608-1680s)

  In This Chapter

  Champlain founds Quebec

  Joliet and Marquette discover Mississippi and claim “Louisiana”

  The Dutch West India Company creates New Netherland

  New Sweden

  The English seize New Netherland and rename it New York

  Compared to the Spanish, the English got off to a slow start in the New World, but they soon became one of the two principal forces in the Americas. The other was France, which directed its main efforts at settlement along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Canada and in the West Indies. Although “black robes”—Catholic priests—came in the wake of French exploration and set up missions to the Indians, religion was never as strong a component of settlement as it was for the Spanish, nor so compelling a motive for settlement as it was for the English. The fact was that the ambitious Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), who, in effect, ruled France as prime minister under the weak-willed Louis XIII, needed money to finance his campaign to make France the dominant power in Europe. And the New World offered opportunity for profit.

  Enter Champlain

  As a boy growing up in France, Samuel de Champlain (ca. 1570-1635) showed a real flair for drawing. He especially liked to design maps—inspired in large part by the tales of adventure his naval captain father brought home. Champlain followed in his father’s footsteps and was commissioned by the French government no fewer than a dozen times between 1603 and 1633 to probe the waters of North America and also explore inland. As with so many other explorers at this time, Champlain’s primary objective was to find a Northwest Passage through to Asia, but he also worked to promote trade in furs and other commodities. When Richelieu became convinced that money was to be made from North America, even if a Northwest Passage were never found, he also authorized Champlain to establish colonies and (for Richelieu was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, after all) to promote Christianity.

  Champlain established a broad beachhead for France in North America. During the seven voyages made between 1603 and 1616, he thoroughly mapped northern reaches of the continent (accurately charting the Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod), he established settlements, he got the French fur trade off to a most promising start, and he struck alliances with the Algonquin tribes and Hurons against the tribes of the powerful Iroquois League. These alliances would strengthen the French position in the New World at the often bloody expense of their archrivals, the British, who, during the next 150 years, would make few Indian allies but many Indian enemies. Beginning with Champlain, the lines of alliance and enmity among Frenchman, Englishman, and Indian were sharply drawn. These would, by the middle of the next century, deepen into the wounds of the long and tragic French and Indian War.

  Champlain erected a crude settlement at Sainte-Croix in 1604, then moved it to Port Royal the following year. This was the nucleus around which the colony of Acadia would be formed. In July 1608, Champlain directed the digging of a ditch and the erection of a stockade. He called this Quebec.

  In 1609, operating from his base in Quebec, Champlain sailed up the St. Lawrence and the river he named after his patron, Richelieu, to the lake that was subsequently named after Champlain himself. Here he attacked a group of Iroquois, on behalf of his Algonquin allies, thereby cementing the French-Algonquin alliance all the more strongly. Later, in 1615, he would venture farther west, across the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and help the Huron Indians in an attack on the Oneida and Onondaga (two tribes of the Iroquois League). In these actions, Champlain was determined to secure the St. Lawrence region for France
. He saw that this served as a major avenue of trade for the Indians. Whoever commanded the region would also command trade in the upper Northeast. Of course, securing alliance with one Indian group meant incurring the wrath of another. And the Iroquois were enemies to be feared. Highly organized, the Iroquois League—five tribes, whose territory stretched from the east coast west to Lake Ontario—waged war mercilessly, employing tactics of torture and terror to intimidate their enemies.

  Champlain was an enthusiastic booster of Canada, promoting it in the French court of Louis XIII and Richelieu, yet he initially discouraged out-and-out colonization. Little wonder. For Champlain was interested in operating Quebec as a kind of private trading post, with himself in a position to collect a healthy portion of the profits. Nevertheless, the settlement was the nucleus of a French North American fur-trading empire that would endure for the next 125 years.

  The Sun King Casts His Rays

  Louis XIV was born to Louis XIII and his queen, Anne of Austria, on September 5, 1638. Four years later, Louis XIII died, and his son ascended the throne under the regency of Cardinal Mazarin. Only on the death of Mazarin in 1661 did Louis XIV begin to rule in his own right, and thoughts of New France, while not uppermost in his mind, were at least in his mind. Unlike his father—and Cardinal Richelieu—Louis XIV did not want New France to be merely a source of quick trade profit. He understood that, in order to hold the colony, it had to be a genuine colony, populated not just by coureurs de bois, but by sturdy, stable yeoman farmers.

  What happened in 1671, then, shouldn’t have been a surprise. Pierre-Spirit Radisson and Medart Chouart two coureurs, proposed to the emperor a scheme to create a company that would effectively monopolize the northern fur trade. But that wasn’t all. They promised also to find the Northwest Passage, which (they said) would become an exclusively French route for the transportation of fur directly to Asia. In Japan and China, a little fur would buy a lot of spice. But the king was not interested in sending his subjects on such errands. In response to the proposal, he sent women to New France in order to entice trappers like Radisson and Chouart to settle down; he also offered a bounty to be paid for those who sired large families in New France; and, finally, he urged the Church to excommunicate men who left their farms without the government’s permission. In turn, Radisson and Chouart made their own response: They went to the English and secured backing to create the Hudson’s Bay Company, which would be for many years the single most powerful mercantile force on the North American continent.

  Two years later, the French intendant (chief administrator) in Canada, Jean Baptiste Talon, stuck his neck out and went against official policy by hiring a fur trader named Louis Joliet to follow up on something he had heard from the Indians-tales concerning a “father” of all the rivers. Perhaps this would prove to be the passage to the Pacific, Talon thought. The Indians called it the “Mesippi.” But Talon despaired of ever actually getting Joliet on the move, because a new governor was due to arrive from France, and surely he would nip the expedition in the bud.

  To Talon’s surprise and delight, the governor, Le Comte de Frontenac, a crusty old man who nevertheless possessed a combination of shrewd practicality and vision for the future, approved the expedition. Even if Joliet failed to find a passage to the Pacific, Frontenac reasoned, pushing the claims of France westward was of great strategic importance in and of itself.

  Joliet, with a Jesuit priest named Jacques Marquette, did not find a shortcut to the western ocean, but did find the Mississippi, thereby establishing France’s claim to a vast portion of what one day would be the United States. In honor of their monarch, they called the territory Louisiana, and it encompassed (as the French saw it) a vast expanse of land between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains.

  Not that the French really knew what to do with all they had found. Louis XIV—called the “Sun King” because of the magnificence of his opulent court and his even more opulent dreams of greatness for a French empire—had visions of a vast agricultural kingdom to reflect in the New World the glories of the Old. But, by the end of Louis’s long reign and life, New France consisted of nothing more than a scattering of precarious settlements in Nova Scotia, along the St. Lawrence, and one or two isolated outposts in Louisiana.

  The Dutch Invest $24 in Manhattan Real Estate

  So, let’s see. The English set up Jamestown in 1607. Quebec was founded by France the next year. And, in 1609, Henry Hudson, sailing in the Dutch service, reached the site of present-day Albany. Like everybody and his brother, he was looking for the Northwest Passage. And like everyone who looked for it, he failed. However, his search did give the Netherlands a claim to the richest fur-bearing region of North America south of the St. Lawrence.

  This did not bring a rush of colonization. A handful of Dutch sea captains traded for furs with the Indians—often bartering hard liquor—but a colonial movement did not get underway until the Dutch West India Company was founded in 1621. Although it strikes us today as culturally and geographically bizarre, Holland was once controlled by Spain. It was one of that nation’s seven Northern Provinces until 1581, when it declared independence. Unfortunately, Spain did not recognize this claim, and the Dutch West India Company was founded by the young Dutch Republic as part of a long, ongoing struggle to remain free.. The company was authorized to commission privateers to disrupt Spain’s trade with its American colonies and, a little later, to undertake colonization efforts in Brazil, Dutch Guiana (now Surinam), the Antilles, and in the North American region staked out by Henry Hudson, which, in 1623, was christened New Netherland. The following year, the company established a trading post at Fort Orange (present-day Albany), and in 1626 dispatched Peter Minuit (ca. 1580-1638) to serve as the colony’s first director-general.

  The conquistadors of Spain, when they came to the Americas, simply took the Indians’ land. But most of the other European colonizers made attempts to buy the land. It seemed more legal that way. Minuit’s first step, then, was to legitimate Dutch claims to New Netherland by purchasing Manhattan Island from the Manhattan Indians, a band of the Delaware tribe, for trade goods valued in 1624 at 60 guilders. Now, that figure was computed by a 19th-century historian as being the equivalent of $24, but, with a hundred and more years’ worth of inflation, that computation hardly stands as an eternal truth. Still, it is interesting to contemplate the fact that, today, all $24 will buy you is a slot in a Manhattan parking garage near Radio City Music Hall for about 12 hours, and generations of self-satisfied readers of history have chuckled over what has been called the greatest real estate bargain in history. Few have stopped to think, however, that the joke was not on the Indians. After all, they never claimed to own Manhattan Island. The concept of land ownership was foreign to most Native American cultures. For them, land was part of the natural world, and you could no more own the land you walked on than you could own, say, the air you breathed. If Minuit wanted to part with a load of trade goods just because an island was named after them, the Manhattan Indians were not about explain to him the error of his ways. In any case, Minuit built a fort at the tip of the island and called it New Amsterdam.

  A Tale of Two Governors

  The Dutch established a profitable trade with the Indians of New Netherland during the 1620s and 1630s—a period (as we shall see in the next chapter) during which New England settlers were locked in bloody war with their Native American neighbors. It wasn’t that the Dutch were kinder and gentler than the English, but that, at first, they were interested in trading rather than settling down on farms. Once the local supply of beavers (whose pelts were the principal trade commodity) became depleted due to overhunting, the Dutch also started to stake out farms, thereby displacing the Indians.

  By 1638, when Willem Kieft (1597-1647) arrived in New Netherland as the colony’s fifth governor, two intimately related truths were operative: Violence between the Dutch and Indians was frequent, and aggressive territorial expansion had become a prime Dutch objective. Kieft was ap
palled by the condition of New Amsterdam. Its defenses were practically nonexistent, and its capacious harbor boasted only one seaworthy vessel. Assuming dictatorial powers, he made sweeping reforms in civil and military administration. Among these was a heavy tax imposed on the local Indians in return for defending them against “hostiles”—mainly the Mohawks. In truth, the Mohawks had become important trading partners with the Dutch and were now allies—henchmen, really—whom Kieft deliberately used to terrorize other tribes. The “defense” tax was actually protection money, and Kieft was behaving no better than a gangster.

  When the Raritan Indians, living near New Amsterdam, refused to pay the protection money in 1641 and attacked an outlying Dutch colony, Kieft declared brutal war on them. Two years later, he put the squeeze on the Wappinger Indians, who lived along the Hudson River above Manhattan. To convince them of the wisdom of paying tribute, he unleashed the Mohawks on them. The Wappingers fled down to Pavonia (present-day Jersey City, New Jersey), just across the Hudson from Manhattan. Failing to understand the situation, they appealed to Kieft for aid. In response, he dispatched the Mohawks to Pavonia, then sent Dutch troops in to finish off the refugees. During the night of February 25-26, 1643, Dutch soldiers killed men, women, and children in what was later called the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” The heads of 80 Indians were brought back to New Amsterdam, where soldiers and citizens used them as footballs. Thirty prisoners were publicly tortured to death.