Europeans Colonize North America, 1600–16401
Chapter 2
Europeans Colonize North America,
1600–1640
Learning Objectives
After you have studied Chapter 2 in your textbook and worked through this study guide chapter, you should be able to:
1.Discuss the characteristics of the permanent settlements established by Spain, France, and Holland on the North American mainland in the early seventeenth century.
2.Examine the seventeenth-century colonization efforts of France, Holland, and England in the Caribbean, and discuss the importance of sugar cane in those efforts.
3.Discuss the factors present in seventeenth-century England that led to colonization of the New World, and explain the goals and motives behind English colonization of the Chesapeake and New England areas.
4.Examine the relationship between the English settlers and American Indians of the Chesapeake and New England areas during the seventeenth century.
5.Assess the impact of the environment, tobacco, the headright system, and indentured servitude on the economic, social, political, and cultural development of the Chesapeake colonies.
6.Describe the beliefs of Congregationalist Puritans, and explain the impact of those beliefs on the economic, social, political, and cultural development of the New England colonies.
7.Discuss the similarities and differences in the lifestyles and in the patterns of family life of New England colonists, Chesapeake colonists, and New England Indians.
Thematic Guide
The theme of interaction among peoples of different cultures and between people and their environment begun in Chapter 1 continues in Chapter 2. In “New Spain, New France, and New Netherland,” we discuss the colonizing efforts of France and Holland in North America, the characteristics of the settlements they established, and the interactions between the settlers and Native Americans and between the settlers and their environment. In the next section (“The Caribbean”), the focus shifts to French, Dutch, and English efforts to gain control of the Lesser Antilles and the importance of sugar cane in those endeavors.
The third section, “English Interest in Colonization,” takes us from the general discussion of European colonization to the more particular case of England. A discussion of social, religious, economic, and political changes in seventeenth-century English society, changes that prompted masses of English citizens to move to North America in the seventeenth century, sets the stage for an explanation in section four of the means, motives, and problems associated with the Jamestown settlement. We then return to the important theme of interaction—in this case the interaction between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy. Here we see the development of the idea that the differences between these two cultures became the focal point of their interaction, with the economic evolution of Virginia and the subsequent spread of the tobacco culture finally leading to open warfare.
The next section, “Life in the Chesapeake,” is a more complete discussion of the development of Chesapeake society politically, socially, and economically. Important elements are the headright system, the emergence of representative assemblies, the practice of indentured servitude, and patterns of family life. These elements interacted to produce a distinctive Chesapeake-area lifestyle.
The last two sections of the chapter, “The Founding of New England” and “Life in New England,” do essentially the same thing for the New England area. Because the motives for settlement were mainly religious, the religious beliefs of the New England settlers are discussed. Examination of the impact of the interaction between settlers and Native Americans of the New England area is intertwined with a discussion of the political, social, and economic evolution of New England society. Finally, contrasts are offered between the lifestyle emerging in New England and the lifestyles of (1) the New England Indians and (2) the Chesapeake settlers.
Building Vocabulary
Listed below are important words and terms that you need to know to get the most out of Chapter 2. They are listed in the order in which they occur in the chapter. After carefully looking through the list, refer to a dictionary and jot down the definition of words that you do not know or of which you are unsure.
arduous
proselytize
lucrative
rhetoric
congenial
nominal
altruistic
impetus
unremitting
dissenter
infatuated
intermediary
omnipotence
paradox
predestined
piety
conformity
chronic
dissension
irrelevant
effeminate
gentry
consensus
unwavering
staple
diversified
rudimentary
transcendent
commonwealth
covenant
accommodate
acculturation
arduous
demographic
dowry
secular
presage
malign
Identification and Significance
After studying Chapter 2 of A People and a Nation, you should be able to identify fully and explain the historical significance of each item listed below.
1.Identify each item in the space provided. Give an explanation or description of the item. Answer the questions who, what, where, and when.
2.Explain the historical significance of each item in the space provided. Establish the historical context in which the item exists. Establish the item as the result of or as the cause of other factors existing in the society under study. Answer this question: What were the political, social, economic, and or cultural consequences of this item?
Fray Alonso de Benavides
Identification
Significance
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
Identification
Significance
Juan de Oñate
Identification
Significance
Quebec and Montreal
Identification
Significance
the Black Robes
Identification
Significance
New Netherland
Identification
Significance
Iroquois-Huron War
Identification
Significance
the Greater Antilles
Identification
Significance
the Lesser Antilles
Identification
Significance
sugar
Identification
Significance
English population boom
Identification
Significance
Henry VIII
Identification
Significance
Martin Luther and John Calvin
Identification
Significance
Puritans
Identification
Significance
the doctrine of predestination
Identification
Significance
the divine right of kings
Identification
Significance
the Virginia Company
Identification
Significance
joint-stock companies
Identification
Significance
Jamestown
Identification
Significance
Captain John Smith
Identification
Significance
the starving time
Identification
Significance
the Powhatan Confederacy
Identification
Significance
tobacco cultivation
Identification
Significance
headright system
Identification
Significance
House of Burgesses
Identification
Significance
Opechancanough
Identification
Significance
Maryland
Identification
Significance
Cecelius Calvert
Identification
Significance
indentured servitude
Identification
Significance
the “seasoning process”
Identification
Significance
Chesapeake families
Identification
Significance
Congregationalist Puritans
Identification
Significance
Separatists
Identification
Significance
Plymouth
Identification
Significance
Mayflower Compact
Identification
Significance
Massasoit
Identification
Significance
Squanto
Identification
Significance
the Massachusetts Bay Company
Identification
Significance
John Winthrop
Identification
Significance
the doctrine of the covenant
Identification
Significance
communal land-grant system of Massachusetts
Identification
Significance
Pequot War
Identification
Significance
John Eliot
Identification
Significance
codes of conduct in Puritan New England
Identification
Significance
Roger Williams
Identification
Significance
Anne Marbury Hutchinson
Identification
Significance
Organizing Information
Use the chart below to compare the cultural characteristics of one group, the Algonkians, to the two colonial societies it confronted along the eastern seaboard. The information in the Organizing Information section of Chapter 1 may be useful to you in completing this exercise.
Cultural Comparisons
Seventeenth-Century Algonkian Culture / Seventeenth-Century New England Culture / Seventeenth-Century ChesapeakeCultureEconomic Characteristics
Social Characteristics
Political Characteristics
Religious Characteristics
Interpreting Information
In this exercise, you will be dealing with pieces of information from Chapter 2 of your textbook, analyzing and organizing that information, creating a potential essay question based on that information, and writing a draft essay to answer the essay question.
Step 1
Each of the following citations comes from Chapter 2 of the textbook. In the space following each citation, write down the information contained in the citation in your own words. Be concise: you are taking notes, not copying. (The blank space preceding each citation will be used later.)
“With the hope of attracting settlers, the colony’s [New France’s] leaders gave land grants along the [St. Lawrence] river to wealthy seigneurs (nobles), who then imported tenants to work their farms. Even so, more than twenty-five years after Quebec’s founding, it had just sixty-four resident families, along with traders and soldiers.”
“One other important group composed part of the population of New France: missionaries of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), a Roman Catholic order dedicated to converting nonbelievers to Christianity. [They first arrived] in the colony in 1625.”
“The Jesuits, whom the Native Americans called Black Robes, initially tried to persuade indigenous peoples to live near French settlements and to adopt European agricultural methods as well as the Europeans’ religion. When that effort failed, the Black Robes learned Indian languages and traveled to remote regions of the interior, where they lived in twos and threes among hundreds of potential converts.”
“Using a variety of strategies Jesuits sought to undermine the authority of village shamans (the traditional religious leaders) and to gain the confidence of leaders who could influence others. Trained in rhetoric, they won admirers by their eloquence. Immune to smallpox (for all had survived the disease already), they explained epidemics among the Native Americans as God’s punishment for sin. Their arguments were aided by the ineffectiveness of the shamans’ traditional remedies against the new pestilence. Drawing on European science, the Jesuits predicted solar and lunar eclipses. Perhaps most important, they amazed the villagers by communicating with each other over long distances and periods of time by employing marks on paper. The Indians’ desire to learn how to harness the extraordinary power of literacy was one of the most critical factors in making them receptive to the missionaries’ spiritual message.”
“The Dutch sought beaver pelts. Because the Dutch were interested primarily in trade rather than colonization, New Netherland remained small. The colony’s southern anchor was New Amsterdam, a town founded in 1624 on Manhattan Island.”
“Because Puritans were challenging many of the most important precepts of the English church, the monarchs authorized the removal of Puritan clergymen from their pulpits. In the 1620s and 1630s a number of English Puritans decided to move to America, where they hoped to put their religious beliefs into practice unmolested by the Stuarts or the church hierarchy.”
“The English colonists kidnapped Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, holding her as a hostage in retaliation for Powhatan’s seizure of several settlers. In captivity, she agreed in 1614 to marry a colonist, John Rolfe.”
“English and Algonkian peoples had much in common: deep religious beliefs, a lifestyle oriented around agriculture, clear political and social hierarchies, and sharply defined gender roles.”
“Above all, the English settlers believed unwaveringly in the superiority of their civilization.”
“Opechancanough, Powhatan’s brother and successor, watched the English colonists steadily encroaching on the confederacy’s lands and attempting to convert its members to Christianity. Recognizing the danger, the war leader launched coordinated attacks all along the river on March 22, 1622. By the end of the day, 347 colonists (about one-quarter of the total) lay dead.”
“Maryland [was] given by Charles I to the George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, as a personal possession (proprietorship).…The Calvert family intended the colony to serve as a haven for their fellow Roman Catholics, then being persecuted in England. Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, became the first colonizer to offer freedom of religion to all Christian settlers; he understood that protecting the Protestant majority was the only way to ensure Catholics’ rights.”
“The New England Indians accommodated themselves to the spread of European settlement. They traded with the newcomers and sometimes worked with them, but for the most part they resisted acculturation or incorporation into English society.”
“Although the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay colony showed an Indian crying, ‘Come over and help us,’ most colonists showed little interest in converting the New England Algonkians to Christianity. Only a few Massachusetts clerics, most notably John Eliot, seriously undertook missionary activities. Eliot insisted that converts reside in towns, farm the land in English fashion, assume English names, wear European-style clothing and shoes, cut their hair, and stop observing a wide range of their own customs.… He understandably met with little success. At the peak of Eliot’s efforts, only eleven hundred Indians lived in the fourteen ‘Praying Towns’ he established.. . .”
“The Jesuits’ successful missions in New France contrasted sharply with the Puritans’ failure to win many converts.… Catholicism had several advantages over Puritanism.… The Catholic Church employed beautiful ceremonies, instructed converts that through good works they could help to earn their own salvation, and offered Indian women an inspiring role model—the Virgin Mary.…[P]erhaps most important, the Jesuits understood that Christian beliefs could be compatible with Native American culture. Unlike Puritans, Jesuits accepted converts who did not wholly adopt European styles of life.”
“Puritans objected to secular interference in religious affairs but at the same time expected the church to influence the conduct of politics and the affairs of society. They also believed that the state was obliged to support and protect the one true church—theirs. As a result, although they came to America seeking freedom to worship as they pleased, they saw no contradiction in their refusal to grant that freedom to others.”
“Roger Williams, a Separatist who immigrated to Massachusetts Bay in 1631 quickly ran afoul of… Puritan orthodoxy. He told his fellow settlers that the king of England had no right to grant them land already occupied by Indians, that church and state should be kept entirely separate, and that Puritans should not impose their religious beliefs on others. [Banished from Massachusetts], Williams founded the town of Providence.… [Because of Williams’ beliefs], Providence and other towns in what became Rhode Island adopted a policy of tolerating all religions, including Judaism.”
“Europeans killed Indians with their weapons and diseases and had but limited success in converting them to European religions.”
Step 2
Scan your notes and name the topic that you think covers most or all of the evidence from your textbook on which you have just been focusing. What is the subject of all that evidence?
Topic:
Does this topic sound like the basis for the kind of essay question your instructor might ask on your next text?
Step 3
In the short blanks preceding the citations found in Step 1, give all closely related pieces of information the same letter designation (A, B, C, D, etc.). When you finish, each citation that contributes to an understanding of the topic you named in Step 2 should have one of three or four possible letter designations. Once this is done, you will have produced three or four groups of very closely related bits of information (Groups A, B, C, and possibly D).
Step 4
Look over all the items you have put into Group A. Then, in the space under Group A, write one declarative sentence stating the significance of all the items in Group A. Do the same thing for each of the other groups (Group B, Group C, and, if you have a D group, Group D as well).
Group A
Group B
Group C
Group D
Step 5
What larger idea do your sentences all add up to? Write a single declarative sentence expressing one point suggested by the combination of all three (or four) of your sentences.
Step 6
Look at the topic you named in Step 2 and the statement you just wrote for Step 5. Compose an essay examination-type question for which the statement in Step 5 is the one-sentence answer. Write that question in the space below.
The statement you came up with in Step 5 should be a good thesis statement for a response to the essay question you just created.
Step 7
Write a draft essay answering the question in Step 6 above. You may include in your essay bits of information from the chapter and/or from your class notes in addition to the information in the notes you just took.
Begin with a one-sentence paragraph consisting of your statement of the significance of all the evidence collected (Step 5). This is your essay’s introduction or thesis paragraph.
Using the information you collected in Step 1, organize that information into three or four paragraphs that support your one-sentence answer (thesis statement). Each paragraph should focus on one of the groups of information you created in Step 3 and begin with the appropriate statement of the significance of that paragraph’s collection of evidence. These three or four paragraphs are the body of your essay.