Colonial America

by Richard Middleton, Anne Lombard

  Insecurity stunted the colony's growth. By 1730 the province still had only 500 Hispanic people, with perhaps another 1,000 Hispanicized natives. Economic prospects improved a little in 1749 when peace was agreed with the Apaches, which allowed more extensive ranching. The market, though, was only a local one, being restricted to the supply of food and other services to the military. This was not a recipe for growth. Even by 1760 the three principal settlements of San Antonio, Los Adaes, and La Bahia (near the mouth of the San Antonio River) had barely 1,200 Hispanic inhabitants. Like Florida and New Mexico, Texas was retained entirely as a defensive outpost. It was costly for the Spanish government to maintain and produced nothing in revenue.

  7 Significance for the British Colonies

  Despite their costs, the Spanish colonies, like the French, appeared to be in North America to stay. None was hugely profitable, although New France and Louisiana were self-sustaining. The Spanish and French governments were willing to provide support even for those colonies that continued to struggle, however, because of their strategic importance to imperial interests in North America. Spain needed a buffer to guard its valuable possessions in New Spain to the south. France had achieved effective control over the Mississippi River corridor, and hoped that in the future this control would guarantee its hegemony over the trans-Mississippi west, although with the yet undiscovered resources it must contain. In 1750, both powers were determined to retain control over their North American colonies long into the future.

  To the British colonists along the Atlantic coast, it did not really matter whether the Spanish and French colonies were cost-effective for their sponsors. What mattered was simply that the colonies were there. Both native-born and immigrant farmers in the British colonies wanted cheap land for their families, and eighteenth-century speculators hoped to profit by acquiring western land that could be sold to them. However, by 1750 the competition between Spain and France to control the Gulf of Mexico and the trans-Mississippi west had created a balance of power that effectively blocked the British colonies from expanding beyond the Allegheny Mountains. French alliances with thousands of Native Americans in the pays d'en haut and along the Mississippi River corridor had given them control over the center of the continent. Furthermore the French were determined to maintain their hegemony there, despite its considerable cost, because they believed it gave them a decisive geopolitical advantage in their imperial contests with Great Britain and Spain. By 1750, there was every reason for the British to expect that France would be a permanent rival to their west, limiting the geographical expansion of their own Atlantic seaboard colonies in North America for the imaginable future.

  1. Since there is in fact no water route across North America to the Pacific, historians have until recently discounted the historical significance of French and British attempts to find one. However, Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill, 2011), shows that expectations for a western water route were a key factor shaping French, British, and Spanish territorial objectives until the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.

  2. The borderlands, in other words the regions once claimed by Spain and France that later became part of the United States and Canada, have long been of interest to historians, though historians' approaches to the subject have changed. Early scholarship on both the Spanish and French borderlands sought to find points of comparison between the British and other European colonies and focused much attention on differences in imperial policy and administration. Francis Parkman, for example, contrasted French colonial policy and administration with that of the British colonies in France and England in America, rev. edn (1883), portraying the French as absolutist despots in contrast to the supposedly liberty-loving English. For the Spanish borderlands, the seminal work was Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, 1921). Today, much of the inquiry has shifted towards interactions between Indians and Europeans in both French and Spanish colonies. David J. Weber provides a synthesis of scholarship on the Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande in The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992). For a summary of more recent trends in the history of the Spanish borderlands, see David J. Weber, “The Spanish Borderlands: Historiography Redux,” History Teacher, 39 (2005), 43–56. An example of the new focus on interactions between Indians and Europeans is James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002), which argues that Spanish colonists became tied together in relationships of exchange with many groups of Indians in a complex economy based on trade, slavery, and kinship. Examples of historical works that show how interactions between the French and the Indians took shape and influenced the lives of both include Denys Delage, “L'alliance franco-amerindienne, 1660–1701” [The French–Indian Alliance, 1660–1701], Recherches amerindiennes au Québec, 19 (1989), 3–15, and Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). Some historians argue that the concept of Atlantic history (discussed in Chapter 2) perpetuates historians' excessive focus on the coastal British North American colonies and their relationship with Great Britain, calling instead for a “continental approach” to American history that focuses on the contest between Spanish, French, British, and Indian peoples to control the trans-Mississippi West. The critique is summarized in James A. Hijaya, “Why the West is Lost,” William and Mary Quarterly, 51 (1994), 276–92. Some recent examples of a continental approach to early American history are Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, Nebr., 2003); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); and Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West.

  3. The Point of Santa Elena had been the original choice of Philip II in 1557 for a military and naval base. Two attempts were made to establish the site in the years 1559–60; both failed.

  4. It is calculated that, by 1650, approximately 450,000 Spaniards had emigrated to the New World.

  5. Herbert Bolton, one of the earliest historians of the Spanish borderlands, proposed in The Spanish Borderlands that in its early years the Spanish mission system in Florida experienced a “golden age.” Bolton was endeavoring to counteract the “black legend” about the Spanish era as one of economic repression and religious intolerance, rather than one of reciprocity and self-sufficiency. Bolton's “golden age” thesis was subsequently challenged by Robert Allen Matter, Pre-Seminole Florida: Spanish Soldiers, Friars and Indian Missions, 1513–1763 (New York, 1990), who argued that the missions were far from successful, either spiritually or economically, since they merely hastened the extirpation of the Indian population. A similar view is taken by Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens, Ga., 1994).

  6. For a discussion of the population of the southeastern nations during this period, see Marvin T. Smith, “Aboriginal Depopulation in the Post Contact Southeast,” in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds, The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704 (Athens, Ga., 1994), 257–75.

  7. For further information on Mose, see Chapter 14, section 5.

  8. The question of whether the villages of the Zunis and Hopis actually accepted Christianity, or simply tolerated the friars to avoid military reprisals, is noted by Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 97–8.

  9. The argument is made by Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, 1991). For a critique, see Alison Freese, ed., “Pueblo Responses to Ramon Gutiérrez's When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 17 (1993), 141–77. F
reese and her coauthors, all of whom are Native Americans, suggest that contemporary Pueblo traditions contradict Gutiérrez's interpretation. In particular they deny that their ancestors would have seen the Spanish as possessing supernatural powers of any kind, or that precontact Pueblo cultures were as sexually uninhibited as Gutiérrez suggests.

  10. The reasons for Spanish deficiencies in trade were twofold. Spanish manufacturing was weak, and the mercantilist system restricted the flow of goods to its colonies. Historians have advanced many reasons for the economic decline of Spain: the expulsion of the Moors and Jews, the most dynamic elements in the population; the excessive dependence on bullion, which fueled inflation and undermined Spanish manufactures; a mercantilist system, which was totally designed for the benefit of metropolitan Spain; the Catholic Church, which laid insufficient stress on the work ethic; and a culture that glorified war and adventure at the expense of more mundane economic activity. See J. H. Elliot, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (New Haven, 1989).

  11. For a thorough exploration of this alliance and its evolution, see Richard White, The Middle Ground. The narrative presented here tracks White's argument. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, 2001), argues that the Catholic kinship communities forged by marriages between Native women and French men helped Native American communities around the Great Lakes persist, even with attempts to remove them during the nineteenth century.

  12. Paul Mapp, in The Elusive West, argues that historians have failed to understand the importance of the West to French intentions because the traditional perspective of colonial North American history was too narrow. Historians' focus on the British colonies on the east coast obscured the fact that French policy-makers wanted to control the Mississippi River corridor and Louisiana because this would give them control over the unexplored trans-Mississippi West.

  13. Kathleen DuVal in The Native Ground argues that the Indians in the Arkansas Valley retained the upper hand in their relationship with Europeans until the nineteenth century, controlling their “native ground” to a far greater extent than did the inhabitants of the Great Lakes region.

  14. This information is from Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992). Usner stresses the continuing interdependence between the French and their Indian allies, well into the eighteenth century.

  15. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2007), shows that the peoples of Texas, much like the peoples in the Arkansas Valley, dictated the terms of their relationship with Europeans rather than vice versa. They refused to adapt to Spanish cultural norms, insisting that the Spanish adapt to their customs instead.

  Chapter 16

  Native American Societies and Cultures, 1689–1760

  1675–78 Massachusetts and the Abenaki peoples are at war.

  1677 New York agrees the Covenant Chain with the Iroquois.

  1680s Delaware people sell some of their land to Pennsylvania. Shawnees begin to leave Ohio Valley, migrating to Pennsylvania and Carolina.

  1701 The Iroquois sign a treaty of neutrality with the French.

  1712 The Tuscarora people in North Carolina are defeated. Most migrate to Pennsylvania.

  1713 By the Treaty of Utrecht the British claim the eastern part of the Micmac homeland.

  1715 The Catawbas emerge in the South Carolina piedmont region.

  1717 The Yamasees are defeated in South Carolina and migrate to Florida.

  1720s Delaware and Shawnee peoples begin migrating to the Ohio Valley.

  1722 The Tuscaroras join the Iroquois League (and are granted full membership in 1750).

  1724 The Abenaki village at Norridgewock is destroyed. Many Abenakis migrate to St. Francis.

  1729 The Natchez people are defeated and join the Chickasaws.

  1737 Pennsylvania claims more land from the Delawares following the Walking Treaty Purchase.

  1744 The Iroquois force the Delawares to move to the upper Susquehanna.

  1751 A peace treaty is agreed at Albany between the Catawbas and the Iroquois.

  Map 19 Locations of major Indian peoples in eastern North America, circa 1750.

  1 Native American Societies in the Eighteenth Century

  BY THE EIGHTEENTH century the lives of Native American peoples in eastern North America had changed a great deal since their ancestors' first encounters with Europeans two centuries earlier. The challenges of trade with Europeans, environmental change, and competition over resources had transformed their world. Old World diseases had wrought untold devastation and populations had declined dramatically. Beginning in 1675 with King Philip's War and Bacon's Rebellion and ending with the Yamasee War from 1715 to 1717, a series of wars had produced catastrophic disruptions in virtually every Indian community east of the Appalachian Mountains. The Native American death rate in these wars was horrendous, typically far greater than casualties for whites since it was usually the Indians who were on the front lines of the fighting. To be captured and sold into slavery was another disaster, causing terrible damage not only to the individuals who had been enslaved and sent to the West Indies but to the families and clans who had been left behind.

  And yet Native Americans were still to play a central part in the unfolding story of the European colonization of North America. The total Indian population on the continent north of the Rio Grande very likely still outnumbered the colonial European population in the middle of the eighteenth century. Even more important, relationships between Native Americans and Europeans were no longer new. Two hundred years of shared history had taught the Indians what to expect from Europeans and given them new strategies for negotiating and maneuvering to protect their own interests. Although those Indians who had remained within the boundaries of British settlement by now had very little bargaining power in their relationships with the British, those who lived in or had moved to borderlands between two different European powers often had a great deal. In addition, by 1750 many Indian peoples had grown in political sophistication and acquired considerable savvy about how to protect their interests against the threats posed by colonizers.

  Even peoples whose societies had been devastated by warfare had considerable resilience, adopting a variety of strategies that enabled them to persist and to exert significant influences on events. Some stayed in villages under the jurisdiction of European American colonial governments. Others drifted north, west, and south from their traditional homelands and joined new communities. Some joined groups whose members spoke similar languages and included distant kin. Others placed themselves under the protection of more powerful forces, whether the Iroquois, the Creeks, the French, or the Spanish. Some were adopted into new tribes as captives and embraced new cultural practices, assimilating in order to survive. Still others found their way to settlements of refugees, like the peoples of the pays d'en haut. All of them struggled to regroup, learn the lessons of their experiences, and find new strategies for living in a world that had seemingly become dominated by conflict and catastrophe.

  Even as Native Americans reorganized themselves, patterns of culture were changing within the societies of which they were a part. Trade with Europeans had drawn a vast number of Indians into the Atlantic economy, as producers of furs and skins and as consumers of various manufactured goods, from guns to cloth to cooking pots. In some areas, the land they inhabited had been transformed by European cattle, pigs, and plows. In others, the forests were still thick with game, but competition for access to it had grown. Diplomatic alliances with Europeans had altered languages, religious practices, kinship patterns, and gender roles. Even the names by which people called themselves were often new.

  In the past, historians often viewed these changes as evidence of the destruction of Native American cultures. The use of consumer goods led to acculturation, and t
hus (it was argued) to the loss of traditional ways of life. Hunting for game led to overhunting in order to meet European demand, which led in turn to the degradation of the natural resources on which Indians' traditional ways of life depended. European missionaries destroyed traditional religions, just as European wars and diseases destroyed lives. The story these historians told was one of unmitigated tragedy.1

  More recently historians have argued that the cultures of the Eastern Woodlands peoples in the eighteenth century were evolving and changing, but not dying out. These historians would suggest that culture is not static or timeless; religions change as they are adapted to new circumstances, but that they are no longer “traditional” does not typically mean they have ceased to shape the worldviews of their adherents. In fact, various characteristics of many Native American cultures may have made them unusually open to innovation and persistence when challenged. Openness to trade allowed Native Americans to incorporate new goods into existing ways of life. The practice of adopting captured women and children into new tribes enabled Native Americans to revitalize their kin groups after members had been lost. The ability to relocate provided tribes with a mechanism for survival in case of war or environmental damage. Historians who emphasize evolution and change in Indian culture tell a story of heroic endurance.2