European Colonization North of Mexico

Index

Colonization

·  European Colonization North of Mexico

·  Spanish Colonization

·  English Colonization Begins

·  Life in Early Virginia

·  Slavery Takes Root in Colonial Virginia

·  Founding New England

·  The Puritans

·  The Puritan Idea of the Covenant

·  Regional Contrasts

·  Dimensions of Change in Colonial New England

·  The Salem Witch Scare

·  Slavery in the Colonial North

·  Struggles for Power in Colonial America

·  Diversity in Colonial America

·  The Middle Colonies: New York

·  Fear of Slave Revolts

·  The Middle Colonies: William Penn’s Holy Commonwealth

·  The Southernmost Colonies: The Carolinas and Georgia

American Independence

·  John Adams (1735-1826)

·  Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

·  Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

·  Alexander Hamilton (1755?-1804)

·  Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

·  James Madison (1751-1836)

·  Robert Morris (1734-1806)

·  Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

·  George Washington

Civil War

·  The Election of 1860

·  South Carolina Leaves the Union

·  Secession

·  Establishing the Confederacy

·  Last-Ditch Efforts at Compromise

·  Fort Sumter

·  Lincoln Responds to Secession

·  War Begins

·  Prospects for Victory

·  Why the Civil War Was So Lethal

·  Bull Run

·  A War for Union

·  The Anaconda Plan

·  Pressure for Emancipation

·  War in the West

·  A Will to Destroy

·  The Eastern Theater

·  Native Americans and the Civil War

·  War Within a War

·  Antietam

·  The Significance of Names

·  The Emancipation Proclamation

·  The Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation

·  The Home Front

·  The Death Toll

·  The Second American Revolution

·  The Confederacy Begins to Collapse

·  The New York City Draft Riots

·  Blacks in Blue

·  Fort Wagner

·  The Battle Against Discrimination

·  Towards Gettysburg

·  The Battle of Gettysburg

·  Vicksburg

·  The Thirteenth Amendment

·  Total War

·  Slaves' Role in Their Own Liberation

·  The 1864 Presidential Election

·  Grant Takes Command

·  A Stillness at Appomattox

·  'The President is murdered'

·  The War's Costs

Industrial Revolution

·  Labor in the Age of Industrialization

·  American Labor in Comparative Perspective

·  Sources of Worker Unrest

·  The Drive for Unionization

·  The Great Railroad Strike

·  The Molly Maguires

·  The Origins of American Trade Unionism

·  Haymarket Square

·  Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor

·  Homestead

·  Pullman

·  Labor Day

·  The Murder of Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg

·  Socialist and Radical Alternatives

·  Biographies

World War 1

·  Sgt. York

·  World War I

·  The Road to War

·  The Guns of August

·  The Lusitania

·  The United States Enters the War:

·  Over There: American Doughboys Go to War

·  Over Here: World War I on the Home Front

·  The Espionage and Sabotage Act

European Colonization North of Mexico

Period: 1600-1860

Prior to the seventeenth century, all European attempts to plant permanent colonies north of Mexico--with the exception of a Spanish fortress at St. Augustine in Florida and a small Spanish settlement in New Mexico--failed. Unprepared for the harsh and demanding environment, facing staunch resistance from the indigenous population, and lacking adequate financing and supplies, sixteenth-century French and English efforts to establish permanent North American settlements in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the St. Lawrence Valley, Florida, and Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina were short-lived failures.

During the early seventeenth century, however, national and religious rivalries and the growth of a merchant class eager to invest in overseas expansion and commerce encouraged renewed efforts at colonization. England established its first enduring settlement in Jamestown in 1607; France in Quebec in 1608; the Dutch in what would become Albany in 1614; and the Swedes a fur-trading colony in the lower Delaware Valley in 1638. As early as 1625, nearly 10,000 Europeans had migrated to the North American coast. But only about eighteen hundred were actually living on the continent in that year, due mainly to the staggering number of deaths from disease during the initial stages of settlement.

Seventeenth-century European settlement took sharply contrasting forms. Perhaps the most obvious difference was demographic. The English migration was far larger and more gender-balanced than that of the Dutch, the French, or the Spanish. The explanation for the rapid growth of England's North American colonies lies in the existence of a large "surplus" population. Early seventeenth-century England contained a large number of migrant farmhands and unemployed and under-employed workers. Most English migrants to North America were recruited from the lower working population--farm workers, urban laborers, and artisans--who were suffering from economic distress, including sharply falling wages (which declined by half between 1550 and 1650) and a series of failed harvests. Outside of New England, most English immigrants--perhaps as many as 70 percent or more--were indentured servants, who agreed to serve a term of service in exchange for transportation across the Atlantic.

Religious persecution was a particularly powerful force motivating English colonization. England allowed religious dissidents to migrate to the New World. Some 30,000 English Puritans migrated to New England, while Maryland became a refuge for Roman Catholics and Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Rhode Island, havens for Quakers. The refugees from religious persecution included Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a small number of Catholics, to say nothing of religious minorities from continental Europe, including Huguenots and members of the Dutch and German Reformed churches.

Europe's North American settlements differed markedly in their economies. While the Dutch, French, and Swedish settlements relied mainly on trade in fish and furs, English settlement took a variety of forms. In New England, the economy was organized largely around small family farms and urban communities engaged in fishing, handicrafts, and Atlantic commerce, with most of the population living in small compact towns. In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the economy was structured largely around larger and much more isolated farms and plantations raising tobacco, with an average of only about two dozen families living in a twenty-five square mile area. In the Carolinas and the British West Indies, economic life was organized around larger but less isolated plantations growing rice, indigo, coffee, cotton, and sugar.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population in Britain's North American colonies was growing at an unprecedented rate. At a time when Europe's population was increasing just 1 percent a year, New England's growth rate was 2.6 or 2.7 percent annually. By the early eighteenth century, the population was also growing extremely rapidly in the middle Atlantic and southern colonies, largely as a result of a low death rate and a sex ratio that was more balanced than in Europe itself.

By 1700, Britain's North American colonies offered an unprecedented degree of social equality and political liberty for white men. The colonies differed from England itself in the proportion of white men who owned property and were able to vote, as well as in the population's ethnic and religious diversity. Yet by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was also clear that colonial expansion involved the displacement of the indigenous population and that the colonial economy depended heavily on various forms of unfree labor, of which the most rapidly growing form consisted of black and sometimes Indian slaves, who could be found in every one of Britain's North American colonies.

Spanish Colonization
Period: 1600-1860

Conflict with Indians and the failure to find major silver or gold deposits made it difficult to persuade settlers to colonize the region. Spanish settlement was largely confined to religious missions, a few small civilian towns, and military posts intended to prevent encroachment by Russia, France, and England. It was not until 1749 that Spain established the first civilian town in Texas, a town that eventually became Laredo; and not before 1769 did Spain establish permanent settlements in California.

Fixated on religious conversion and military control, Spain inhibited economic development. Following the dictates of an economic philosophy known as mercantilism, aimed at protecting its own manufacturers, Spain restricted trade, prohibited manufacturing, stifled local industry and handicrafts, impeded the growth of towns, and prevented civilians from selling to soldiers. The government required all trade to be conducted through Veracruz and levied high excise taxes that greatly increased the cost of transportation. It exercised a monopoly over tobacco and gunpowder and prohibited the capture of wild horses. Still, Spain left a lasting imprint on the Southwest.

Such institutions as the rodeo and the cowboy (the vaquero) had their roots in Spanish culture. Place names, too, bear witness to the region's Spanish heritage. Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Tucson were all founded by the Spanish. To this day, the Spanish pattern of organizing towns around a central plaza bordered by churches and official buildings is found throughout the region. Spanish architectural styles--adobe walls, tile roofs, wooden beams, and intricate mosaics--continue to characterize the Southwest.

By introducing European livestock and vegetation, Spanish colonists transformed the Southwest's economy, environment, and physical appearance. The Spanish introduced horses, cows, sheep, and goats, as well tomatoes, chilies, Kentucky bluegrass, and a variety of weeds. As livestock devoured the region's tall native grasses, a new and distinctly southwestern environment arose, one of cactus, sagebrush, and mesquite. The Spanish also introduced temperate and tropical diseases, which reduced the Indian population by fifty to ninety percent.

It is equally important that in attitudes toward class and race Spanish possessions differed from the English colonies. Most colonists were of mixed racial backgrounds and racial mixture continued throughout the Spanish colonial period. In general, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry) and Indians were concentrated in the lower levels of the social structure.

Even in the colonial period, the New Spain's northern frontier served as a beacon of opportunity for poorer Mexicans. The earliest Hispanic settlers forged pathways that would draw Mexican immigrants in the future.

English Colonization Begins
Period: 1600-1860

During the early and mid-sixteenth century, the English tended to conceive of North America as a base for piracy and harassment of the Spanish. But by the end of the century, the English began to think more seriously about North America as a place to colonize: as a market for English goods and a source of raw materials and commodities such as furs. English promoters claimed that New World colonization offered England many advantages. Not only would it serve as a bulwark against Catholic Spain, it would supply England with raw materials and provide a market for finished products. America would also provide a place to send the English poor and ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English poor increased rapidly in number. As a result of the enclosure of traditional common lands (which were increasingly used to raise sheep), many common people were forced to become wage laborers or else to support themselves hand-to-mouth or simply as beggars.

After unsuccessful attempts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and at Roanoke, the famous "Lost Colony," off the coast of present-day North Carolina, England established its first permanent North American settlement, Jamestown, in 1607. Located in swampy marshlands along Virginia's James River, Jamestown's residents suffered horrendous mortality rates during its first years. Immigrants had just a fifty-fifty chance of surviving five years.

The Jamestown expedition was financed by the Virginia Company of London, which believed that precious metals were to be found in the area. From the outset, however, Jamestown suffered from disease and conflict with Indians. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian Indians lived in the region, divided into about 40 tribes. About 30 tribes belonged to a confederacy led by Powhatan.

Food was an initial source of conflict. More interested in finding gold and silver than in farming, Jamestown's residents (many of whom were either aristocrats or their servants) were unable or unwilling to work. When the English began to seize Indian food stocks, Powhatan cut off supplies, forcing the colonists to subsist on frogs, snakes, and even decaying corpses.

Captain John Smith (1580?-1631) was twenty-six years old when the first expedition landed. A farmer's son, Smith had already led an adventurous life before arriving in Virginia. He had fought with the Dutch army against the Spanish and in eastern Europe against the Ottoman Turks, when he was taken captive and enslaved. He later escaped to Russia before returning to England.

Smith, serving as president of the Jamestown colony from 1608 to 1609, required the colonists to work and traded with the Indians for food. In 1609, after being wounded in a gunpowder accident, Smith returned to England. After his departure, conflict between the English and the Powhatan confederacy intensified, especially after the colonists began to clear land in order to plant tobacco.

In a volume recounting the history of the English colony in Virginia, Smith describes a famous incident in which Powhatan's 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas (1595?-1617), saved him from execution. Although some have questioned whether this incident took place (since Smith failed to mention it in his Historie's first edition), it may well have been a "staged event," an elaborate adoption ceremony by which Powhatan symbolically made Smith his vassal or servant. Through similar ceremonies, the Powhatan people incorporated outsiders into their society. Pocahontas reappears in the colonial records in 1613, when she was lured aboard an English ship and held captive. Negotiations for her release failed, and in 1614, she married John Rolfe, the colonist who introduced tobacco to Virginia. Whether this marriage represented an attempt to forge an alliance between the English and the Powhatan remains uncertain.

Life in Early Virginia
Period: 1600-1860

Early Virginia was a death trap. Of the first 3,000 immigrants, all but 600 were dead within a few years of arrival. Virginia was a society in which life was short, diseases ran rampant, and parentless children and multiple marriages were the norm.

In sharp contrast to New England, which was settled mainly by families, most of the settlers of Virginia and neighboring Maryland were single men bound in servitude. Before the colonies turned decisively to slavery in the late seventeenth century, planters relied on white indentured servants from England, Ireland, and Scotland. They wanted men, not women. During the early and mid-seventeenth century, as many as four men arrived for every woman.