Colonial America
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4. J. Leo Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (Athens, Ga., 1992); Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln, 1997).
5. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia; Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and Powhatan's Dilemma (New York, 2004).
6. Historians have been dependent for information on this period on Smith himself, who often exaggerated his exploits. For an analysis of his claims, see Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, 3 vols (Chapel Hill, 1986).
7. The most thorough analysis to date of evidence about the killing of the lost colonists and reasons for it is James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke (New York, 2010).
8. Townsend, Pocahontas and Powhatan's Dilemma.
9. Reasons for the different development of English and Spanish systems of colonial government are analyzed in J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006).
10. Karen Kupperman has observed that the key to successful colonization for each of the English colonies, beginning with Virginia, was the institutionalization of private property in land, control of taxation by a representative assembly, and civilian control of the colony's military (Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York, 1993), 19). Kupperman further explores the evolution of English colonial efforts in Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony, 2nd edn (Lanham, 2007), and The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
11. Servants, who were not free, were not included.
12. It used to be thought that the demise of the company, and by implication, that of the assembly, was part of the Stuart kings' design to impose a more absolutist form of government. This interpretation was popular with nineteenth-century Whig nationalist historians, who were keen to affirm that the destiny of America was an inevitable progression to liberty and democracy. The most famous work in this mold is George Bancroft, History of the United States, 10 vols (Boston, 1834–74). The reality is that the disputes over the company had only tenuous links with those between the king and Parliament. The real reason for the demise of the company was its failure to make a profit, which exasperated the shareholders, enough for them first to take their cause to the general court and then to raise it in Parliament, the Privy Council, and anywhere else where they could get a hearing. The latter interpretation was first put forward by Wesley Frank Craven in Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), and by Charles M. Andrews in The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols (New Haven, 1934–8{1964 in the biblio.}). Both were members of the imperial school who were keen to emphasize the benefits of the English connection, partly as a result of the greater impartiality that time brings, and partly because they felt that the Anglo-Saxon nations ought to stand together.
13. Various historians have concluded that English abandoned a policy of trade and assimilation and adopted a policy of expulsion after 1622. See, for example, Alden T. Vaughan, “‘Expulsion of the Salvages’: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 57–84; Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, 1980), and Karen Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, 1980), 175–80. However, peaceful contacts did occur after 1622, especially in the fur trade; see Frederick J. Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the Development of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds, Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1989).
14. Writers who have stressed the fluidity of the situation in the early period include Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and Mary Quarterly, 7 (1950), 199–222; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); and T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York, 1980). Other historians who have argued that pre-existing English racial attitudes made the development of African slavery in North America more likely include Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (New York, 1959); Alden T. Vaughan, “Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (1972), 469–78; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), and J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen and Africans on the Eastern Shore during the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993). More recently, historians have argued that race is a matter of social construction rather than biology; that racial attitudes are the product of unequal relationships and misguided ideology. Such writers have been influenced by modern genetics, which indicate that there are no significant biological differences between the different races. For an interpretation arguing that race was a matter of social construction, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). The two approaches are discussed in Michael McGiffert, ed., “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 1–252.
15. Historians currently make this distinction, based on the ratio between free and enslaved persons, on the grounds that “societies with slaves,” where the majority of the population was free, were more likely to be humane and less racist than “slave societies,” where the dominant slave population seemingly posed a threat to the white inhabitants.
16. For the origin of these Africans, see Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20 Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 396–8.
17. The story of Anthony Johnson is detailed most fully in Breen and Innes, “Myne Owne Ground,” which includes information on Johnson's son John at pp. 92–3.
Chapter 4
The Conquest Continues
New England, 1620–1660
1607 The Sagadahoc settlement fails.
1616–18 An epidemic decimates population in the Cape Cod region.
1620 The Plymouth colony is founded by the Pilgrims.
1626 The settlement of Naumkeag (later Salem) is founded.
1629 The Massachusetts Bay Company is formed.
1630 The Puritans found Boston and 10 other settlements.
1632 Watertown's inhabitants protest over arbitrary taxation.
1634 Council members demand to see the Massachusetts charter.
1634–6 The first English settlements in the Connecticut River valley are founded.
1636 Roger Williams founds Providence in Rhode Island after being expelled from Massachusetts (1635).
1637 The Pequots are defeated in the Pequot War. New Haven is founded. Anne Hutchinson is banished from Massachusetts.
1642 The English Civil War begins.
1643 The United Colonies of New England are formed. Miantonomo is executed.
1644 Rhode Island is granted a charter by Parliament.
1646 Dr Robert Child protests about church membership.
1648 Book of General Laws: the Cambridge Platform is published.
1649 Charles I is executed. John Winthrop dies.
1656 The first Quakers arrive.
1660 Charles II is restored to the English throne. Mary Dyer is executed.
1 New England Before the English
MUCH LIKE PEOPLES further to the south, the Algonquian-speaking Indians who lived in what would become New England had already encountered European traders and explorers before the first English settlers arrived in 1620. Just as in Virginia, these early encounters would influence their behavior towards the English newcomers, and would in turn shape the future direction of the English colonies they established.
Native Americans in New England probably met their first Europeans when Verrazano explored their coasts in 1524. By the late
sixteenth century Indians in northern New England were experiencing yearly visits from European fishermen, who came by the hundreds every summer to the coasts of northern New England to fill their nets with cod. By 1600 the Micmacs and the Abenakis in what would later become Maine and New Hampshire had established relationships with French fur traders. Members of the Wampanoag, Massachusett, and Narragansett peoples had encountered English explorers Bartholomew Gosnold in 1603 and John Smith in 1614 (among others) along the coast of what would become Massachusetts. And the Pequots and the Mahicans had regular dealings with Dutch merchants beginning about 1608, along New England's southern coast as well as further inland.
Unlike the experience in the Chesapeake, however, early European–Indian interactions in New England had left the Indians weaker and more divided, instead of stronger and more unified. Here, just as further south, Europeans had shown themselves to be potentially untrustworthy. An English ship led by a Captain Edward Harlow had kidnapped five or six Indians and carried them back to London in 1611. One of John Smith's commanders, Thomas Hunt, kidnapped some 20 local Indians to be sold as slaves in Spain in 1614. However, unlike the Indians who lived in Virginia, the Indians in eastern New England had not become unified in a confederacy in order to protect themselves. The most significant outcome of their early contacts with Europeans seems instead to have been heightened rivalries (caused in part by competition over access to the trade goods which French and Dutch traders were supplying to their trading partners in exchange for furs) and a devastating epidemic of European origin which had swept across the region around Plymouth Bay between 1616 and 1618, killing as many as three-quarters of the local population. The death toll from this epidemic changed the balance of power within the region: the Pequots and the Narragansetts, who had not been much affected by the sickness, now had a numerical advantage over their newly weakened neighbors, the Wampanoags and the Massachusetts. The Pequots and Narragansetts, moreover, controlled much of the local supply of wampum, beads made of shells that were used as a medium of exchange between tribes, giving them an advantage in trade with the Dutch. Thus, instead of coming from a position of strength like the Powhatans in 1607, members of the smaller groups who inhabited southeastern New England were by 1620 feeling very vulnerable indeed.
The epidemic may have heightened rivalries even among former allies. In 1619 the Plymouth Company repatriated an Indian named Squanto, one of the men who had been kidnapped by Hunt in 1614. Before being dragged away from his homeland, Squanto had been a member of a small Wampanoag band called the Patuxet. Tragically, when he reached his village in 1619 after his long absence, it had been abandoned. All of his people were gone. Hoping for news of them, Squanto approached his former neighbors, the Pokanoket. Although both the Patuxet and the Pokanoket were Wampanoags, the Pokanoket greeted Squanto with suspicion rather than embracing him as a kinsman. They agreed to let him stay, but only as a subordinate (with the same status, essentially, as a captive) and not as a full member of their village. Devastation had left the peoples of southern New England uncertain and beset by rivalries. This was the changing and divided political world that the first permanent English settlers in New England were about to enter.
2 The Pilgrims
In the wake of the Virginia Company's successful promotional tour in 1617, a group of would-be emigrants had approached the company to express their interest in moving to North America. However, unlike the adventurers who had gone to Virginia in the early years, the members of this group were motivated more by their ideology than by a desire for easy riches. Calling themselves Pilgrims, they were members of a dissenting sect who wanted to separate completely from the Church of England believing that the established church was so corrupt it was beyond reform. Inevitably, their separatist views had brought them into conflict with the authorities, for whom uniformity was essential for the maintenance of national harmony. The Pilgrims now lived in Holland but were eager to move. Accordingly, they sought and obtained a patent from the Virginia Company to settle in Virginia. When a group of London merchants headed by Thomas Weston offered them financial help, they instead entered into negotiations with the Plymouth Company, which was in the process of reorganizing itself after the disastrous failure at Sagadahoc as the Council for New England. The Pilgrims agreed to bear a considerable share of the financial risks of the venture, promising to work for the merchants for seven years before they would begin to take a portion of the colony's profits. Under these terms the Pilgrims knew they were unlikely to grow rich in North America.
At this point the Pilgrims technically had a patent only from the Virginia Company, but they determined to set out despite the legal uncertainties. When one of their ships developed leaks, as many Pilgrims as possible along with their co-adventurers piled into the remaining ship, the Mayflower, and set sail on September 6, 1620. They totaled 101 persons plus crew. In contrast to the early shipments to Virginia, a number of women and children were on board in family groups, making them a relatively stable group.
Map 4 Seventeenth-century New England and New York.
Even so, the group became riven by conflict before the ship reached its destination. About half of the passengers belonged to the Pilgrims' congregation, while the rest were so-called “Strangers” with no connection to the church. When the ship came in sight of land near Cape Cod on November 11, 1620, it was well to the north of its planned destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. The captain's decision to stay in Cape Cod rather than sail south through dangerous coastal waters provoked a near mutiny by the Strangers. In order to minimize conflict, 41 of the male passengers drew up an agreement for the framing of “such just and equal laws, … as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.” This agreement formed the famous Mayflower Compact. Traditional accounts have glorified the compact as the beginning of American democracy, but its true intent was simply to minimize the kind of dissension that had nearly destroyed the Jamestown colony in its early years.
Document 7
The Mayflower Compact, November 1620, reprinted in W. Keith Kavenagh, Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), Vol. 1, 246
The compact was only a declaration of intent and said nothing about the actual institutions of government or the exercise of power. No women were among the 41 signatories. Questions to consider: How would this agreement have worked to prevent disagreements among the settlers? Why do you think that 11 of the signatories merited the title of “Mr” while the rest did not? What does the use of such a title tell you about these colonists' assumptions about social class differences?
In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain … and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and the honour of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do, by? these presents, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, to which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness thereof, we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November 1620.
By mid-December, the Pilgrims had decided upon a site for their settlement, which they were to call New Plymouth. On December 25, 1620, they began to erect their first dwellings around a crude palisade. After erecting a common store, each family labored on its own shelter; again, it was thought that this method would encourage greater endeavor and avoid the kind of disputes that had afflicted Jamestown and Sagadahoc. They were short of food, but survived in part by stealing dried corn which they found in a concealed storage bin belonging to local Indians
. The Indians, still weakened by the recent epidemic, made little effort to avenge the theft, instead watching the newcomers warily throughout the winter. By spring, nearly half the settlers had died, weakened by the long voyage, poor nutrition, and the difficulties of adapting to a new environment.
Despite their losses, the Pilgrims remained guardedly optimistic. Land near the settlement was clear enough that they would be able to plant their Indian corn relatively easily, and to hope for a successful harvest. Failing to understand that they were located next to recently abandoned Indian farmland, they merely considered their good fortune to be a sign of God's providence. As they began to sow their first crop of Indian corn they were completely astonished when an Indian named Samoset walked into the settlement, uttering a few words of English. Samoset then returned with another, more fluent speaker, Squanto, the Indian who was being held captive by the Wampanoags at Pokanoket. Squanto showed the settlers how to employ the Indians' complementary farming techniques, planting squashes between the rows of corn and fertilizing the land with fish offal. Serving as an intermediary, Squanto helped to negotiate a treaty of friendship and cooperation between the English and the Wampanoag chief, Massasoit. That treaty lasted unbroken until 1675.
While the Pilgrims understood these events as providential signs of God's favor towards them, historians have now given us a way to understand them from the Indians' point of view. Unlike the Indians in the vicinity of Jamestown, who could afford to antagonize the English, the native inhabitants near Plymouth were in a precarious position. The Wampanoags had been decimated by disease and were threatened by the neighboring Narragansett and Massachusetts peoples. Their political situation was so unstable that they regarded a friendly relationship with the English as their best hope to regain control over their own lives. Massasoit and his people could use trade goods from the English to gain prestige and bargaining power among other local Indian peoples, and the English might even offer them military assistance. Indeed, within two years Massasoit had talked the Pilgrims into making an unprovoked assault on the Massachusetts tribe, in which several were murdered after being invited to a feast. Squanto, for his part, apparently hoped that a friendship with the English would give him some much needed autonomy from Massasoit (and perhaps a chance to reunite his few surviving kinsmen from the village of Patuxet). As at Jamestown, the local Indians behaved in ways that furthered their local political interests, interests that varied from one place to another.1