Colonial America Read online

  This new, fourth edition broadens the topic still further, incorporating a multiplicity of perspectives on colonial America. While we have retained much of the book's original focus on the origins and development of the British colonies in North America, we show that their creation was the product of interactions between a variety of peoples and nations with distinct histories, interests, and objectives. The story told here is not so much about the planting of English seeds in North American soil and their growth into American institutions, as about the many different groups of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous North Americans who competed as well as cooperated to gain control of North American resources. Their interactions transformed traditional legal, political, and social institutions and created a dynamic New World unlike the worlds in which any of these peoples, or their ancestors, had lived.

  To make it easier for students to understand the implications of the new scholarship on colonial America, we have made some changes to the structure of the book. In Part I, to help students understand how transatlantic interactions between western Europeans, West Africans, and indigenous North Americans contributed to the creation of new societies in colonial America, we take a brief look at western European, African, and Native American societies before the fifteenth century Atlantic seagoing voyages that brought these three continents into sustained contact with one another. In Part II, we have sought to incorporate new findings about how Native American peoples influenced and responded to the colonizing process from the beginning. We chronicle their roles in shaping the earliest colonies, explore the origins and outcomes of major Indian wars and rebellions, and explain their roles in the various imperial wars fought on the continent before 1713. In addition, consistent with the broader geographical focus of recent scholarship, we have added new sections on the development of slavery in the British West Indies and the founding and expansion of New France.

  Part III provides a topical rather than a chronological account of the economic, social, cultural, and political changes that took place within (and on the borders of) British North America during the eighteenth century. Our own respective backgrounds, one as a scholar of political and military history and the other as a scholar of the history of gender and society, have informed our reframing of sections on Anglo-American women and families, and the section on the Seven Years War and the Indian wars that grew out of it. These chapters suggest that families' childbearing and economic decisions contributed to the growing North American demand for British goods that in turn helped convince the British government to invest in the defense of its North American possessions during the 1750s. We have extensively updated and rearranged chapters on Native Americans and the borderlands so as to highlight the roles played by Native Americans along with their French and Spanish allies in shaping the imperial contest for control over North America during the eighteenth century. We end the book not with the beginning of the American Revolution, but with the Seven Years War and the culmination of that long imperial contest in 1763.

  This edition, like previous ones, provides a number of pedagogical tools designed to help students understand history as an interpretive process. To show how historical inquiry evolves, chapters feature brief discussions not only of the kinds of interpretive questions historians have asked about the period or a topic but also of how approaches to these questions have changed. Footnotes have also been provided in order to highlight new research questions and explain the evolution of particular historical debates. To encourage students to consider the relationship between primary sources and historical interpretation, we have included 28 primary source excerpts, along with questions to provoke discussion and analysis. We include a timeline at the beginning of each chapter so as to reinforce students' understanding of relationships between events across time, illustrations to give students a visual sense of the world they are learning about, and a total of 26 maps to help students place the peoples of colonial North America into a geographical context. Finally, we have compiled a selected bibliography to provide students with suggestions for further reading on topics of current historical interest.

  Acknowledgments

  We would like to acknowledge the help of Peter Arnade, Jessie Cammack, and the anonymous reviewers of this book for their comments and suggestions on various drafts of this new edition, or portions thereof, and thank Paul Mapp for generously sharing his unpublished manuscript. We are also grateful to all the students who offered suggestions regarding the book's contents, particularly Patricia Manley and Craig Frame. The editorial staff at Wiley-Blackwell was immensely helpful and professional. We would especially like to thank Peter Coveney, Galen Smith, and Jacqueline Harvey.

  The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

  Document 2: From Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass., 1993), 13. Paper, 1E © 1993 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

  Document 5: From Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), 216–19. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture © 1975 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

  Document 8: From Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, edited by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), Vol. 2, 368, 370, 383–4. Copyright © 1936 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1964 by Lawrence Shaw Mayo. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Document 9: From Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass., 1993), 135. Paper, 1E © 1993 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

  Document 14: From Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, edited by Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), Vol. 2, 31–2, 34. Copyright ©1936 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1964 by Lawrence Shaw Mayo. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Document 16: From The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), Vol. 4, 225–34.

  Document 19: From The Adams Papers: Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Diary 1755–1770, edited by L. H. Butterfield, Leonard C. Faber, and Wendell D. Garrett (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Vol. 1, 54–5. Copyright © 1961 by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Document 20: From Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass., 1993), 454. Paper, 1E © 1993 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

  Document 22: From Warren M. Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), 160. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture © 1975 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

  Document 23: From Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Major Problems in American Colonial History: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass., 1993), 489. Paper, 1E © 1993 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  Part I

  Old and New Worlds Meet

  Chapter 1

  The Peoples of Eastern North America

  Societies in Transition

  30,000–11,000 BCE Indian peoples migrate to North America from Asia via the Bering Strait.

  11,000 BCE The land bridge disappears
as the climate warms.

  5000 BCE Agriculture begins to develop in Tehuacan Valley, Mexico.

  1200 BCE The first Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmecs, emerges.

  500 BCE Mayan civilization flourishes.

  500 BCE–400 CE Adena and Hopewell cultures develop in the Ohio Valley.

  600 CE The Mississippi mound builders emerge.

  1000 CE Eastern Woodlands societies adopt agriculture.

  1200 CE The city of Cahokia's population numbers around 30,000.

  1300 CE The “Little Ice Age” begins.

  1400 CE The Mississippi mound builders disappear. Warfare becomes common among the Eastern Woodlands peoples.

  1450 CE The Iroquois form the League of Five Nations.

  1 America Before Columbus and the Problem of History

  THE STORY OF the North American British colonies begins in America. For well over 12,000 years before Columbus made his accidental landfall in the Bahamas, people had been living on the North and South American continents, where they had created agricultural societies and complex cultures, developed political systems, fought wars, and formed alliances. When Europeans began to arrive, first in 1492 and then with increasing frequency during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was these indigenous American people who decided whether the newcomers would be welcomed to stay or forced to flee for their lives. Native Americans would make key decisions that shaped diplomatic relationships, influenced the kinds of colonial societies that could be built in North America, and changed the course of empires. To understand how they influenced the colonial process – to understand why they behaved as they did – we need to begin with their story.

  The problem for historians is how to tell that story. Unlike peoples who had developed a written language, the original Americans left no written records. Although surviving oral traditions can tell us a great deal about Native American origin stories and collective memories, they are far removed in time from the events they describe. Of course Europeans, once they arrived and began observing Native American peoples, produced all sorts of written records: descriptions, memoirs, pictures, maps, and other kinds of documents. All of these have provided historians with additional sources about Native American societies. But the testimony of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans about their encounters with indigenous Americans is deeply problematic as a source for twenty-first-century historians. Fifteenth-century Europeans had never imagined that the American continents existed, much less that there were people who had lived here for over 11,000 years. Thus when European observers like Christopher Columbus, Hernando de Soto, Jacques Cartier, and John White tried to understand who these people were and why they acted as they did, they were unable to comprehend this new world except in the context of their own experiences. The lens through which they viewed the Americas produced thousands of distortions and mistakes. Indeed the very term “Indian” was applied because Columbus was mistakenly convinced that he had arrived in Asia.1

  The inaccuracies that crept into the earliest European records of encounters with Native Americans in North America have persisted in shaping the way we imagine the past. For example, one of the most commonly asserted misrepresentations of Native American peoples in the early modern era was that they were simple primitives, people who had not yet been caught up in the historical processes that were transforming the rest of the world by the end of the fifteenth century.2 In the past many historians unwittingly contributed to this distortion by portraying the Indians as the helpless victims of European colonizers who had superior technology, broader worldly experience, and more lethal diseases.

  More recently, however, historians have used a range of sources that go beyond conventional written records to reconstruct the histories of indigenous American peoples in North America before the arrival of Europeans. Evidence about climate change has allowed historians to estimate the dates of various changes in the North American environment, while archaeological evidence has provided information about the kinds of societies indigenous peoples developed as they adapted to these changes. Evidence about the behavior of Native Americans after the arrival of Europeans has been re-examined alongside the oral traditions of contemporary Native American peoples and the findings of ethnographers so as to understand that behavior in the context of their own cultural traditions and experiences. These sources have enabled historians to understand that the economies, cultures, and political relationships of Native Americans on the eastern seaboard of North America had already undergone a wrenching historical transformation over the 500 years between approximately 1000 and 1500 CE. Well before Columbus arrived on American shores, millions of Native American peoples had been swept up by a saga of war, diaspora, relocation, and rebirth, decades before any contemporary European even dreamed that they existed.3

  2 The Americas in Ancient Times

  Scholars generally agree that the first Indian peoples came to North America from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait between 30,000 and 11,000 BCE when the Ice Age lowered sea levels, creating a huge land bridge between Asia and North America. Bands of nomadic hunters followed game from eastern Siberia to Alaska, eventually penetrating both North and South America.

  These first Paleo-Indian peoples were essentially hunter-gatherers, their largest quarry being mammoths, large-horned bison, musk ox, large antelope, caribou, and, ironically, horses. The rest of their diet consisted of berries, nuts, fruits, fish, birds, and wildfowl. Their material culture was simple but effective. Animals provided skins for clothing; crude shelters were found in caves, rock overhangs, or made from the branches and bark of trees; while simple canoes or even logs provided the means for crossing rivers. Flint knives and scrapers enabled food and other materials to be prepared, while fire was used for keeping warm and cooking.

  With the gradual warming of the earth's climate around 9000 BCE and the extinction of the larger mammals, the peoples of North and Central America were forced to adapt. First the mammoth disappeared, then the large-horned bison, followed by the horse. Although the people continued to live as hunter-gatherers, they became less migratory, confining their activities to smaller areas. Since the earth's warming had produced a rise in water levels which covered the original land bridge, people in the Americas were essentially cut off from further contact with Asia. Purely indigenous cultures developed. Different language groups became established, with a wide range of individual tongues within each group. By the time that Europeans began to arrive more than 10,000 years later, there were still more than 2,000 languages being spoken in the Americas.4

  The most momentous phase in the early development of North American societies was the horticultural revolution. The peoples of the Tehuacan Valley of central Mexico, with its warm climate and varied plant species, including a wild ancestor of maize, were the first to develop agriculture around 5000 BCE. Elsewhere, horticulture began with the growing of beans, squash, or gourds; but invariably maize or corn was added at some point. Initially all these crops were cultivated from wild plants, but in time selection of the best seeds or hybridization through cross-pollination produced better strains, giving higher yields. In contrast to Africa, Europe, and Asia, however, no animals except dogs and turkeys (and llamas in South America) could be domesticated, since most of the large mammals that had migrated to the continent had disappeared along with the game. In many ways the lack of livestock did not matter, since the cultivation of beans and maize ensured a high-protein diet, especially when supplemented by meat from hunting.

  Once a group of people began to rely on horticulture for their food, profound consequences followed. Cultures were radically altered as communities became more settled to allow the planting, harvesting, and protection of their crops. Horticulture also allowed the support of larger populations, which in turn permitted greater diversification and specialization. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of agriculture corresponded with the appearance of ceramics and the first advances in metallurgy. Specialized skills encouraged
trade and the growth of towns. These in turn required more complex administrative systems, which led to the emergence of temporal and religious elites.

  The eventual results in Central America and the Andean highlands were the highly complex, densely populated civilizations of the Olmecs, Mayas, Toltecs, Aztecs, and Incas. Each of them could lay claim to impressive technological achievements. In North America the Olmecs, who were active between 1200 and 500 BCE, built large temple mounds faced with stone. They also devised irrigation systems and carved huge heads from blocks of basalt, suggesting not only craftsmanship but sophisticated beliefs and organizational ability. The Mayas, who thrived from 500 BCE to 700 ce, wove elaborate cotton textiles, used gold and silver to fashion intricate jewelry, and constructed large stone buildings incorporating the corbeled vault. Equally impressive was their development of hieroglyphic writing carved in stone or painted on paper, invention of an elaborate calendar based on detailed observation of the solar system, and knowledge of mathematics. The Aztecs, recent arrivals to central Mexico from further north, managed by the fifteenth century to create an empire of six million people. At its height their capital city of Tenochtitlan had a population of more than 100,000. Built on an artificial island in the middle of a lake and joined to the mainland by stone causeways, Tenochtitlan contained numerous squares, paved streets, stone temples, and other buildings that astounded the Spanish on their arrival in 1519.

  North of the Rio Grande the pace of technological, social, and political development was slower, partly as a result of climatic conditions in the aftermath of the Ice Age and partly because it took time before plants bred for cultivation in southern latitudes could be adapted for cultivation much further north. In the Southwest, among the Hohokam and Anasazi pueblo peoples, new varieties of corn, squash, and beans, all originally Mesoamerican plants, began to be cultivated around 2000 BCE. Over time the Hohokam and Anasazi developed complex systems of irrigation to bring water to their crops in the arid climate of the Southwest. They built permanent towns in which they lived in structures made of adobe or stone, grew cotton which they wove into cloth, and developed extensive trade ties with people in Mesoamerica as well as further north by about 700 ce.