First Lecture Draft 1

Lecture One: Conquest and Colonization? The City on the Hill

  • Pre-contact populations: Up to about five years ago, conventional theories argued that the first people came to North America from Northeastern Asia probably about 20,000 years ago, during an ice-age when huge glaciers froze lots of water and exposed the relatively shallow bottom of what is now the Bering Sea between what is now Russia and Alaska. They crossed this landbridge and slowly made their way south along the Western part of the U.S. and then south and eastward. These people were Mongoloid types of North Asia, the direct ancestors of what are called today "Native" Americans. Spear points found in Clovis, NM, dated 11,000 years ago were evidence of the oldest human settlement in the New World. Show Clovis Map:

Recently this Clovis model has been challenged by the discovery of non-Asian skeletons from this period, including the Arlington Springs Woman from the Channel Islands off the Southern CA coast (10,960 yrs. old), with more European features; other ancient skulls found in the New World bear traits of South Asians, Polynesians, East Aians: in short, a racial melting pot from the Ice Age, so to speak.

The Clovis model is also challenged by evidence of even older settlements in places not predictable by the Clovis model: Monte Alegre, Brazil (11,000 old, Western side of continent) and Monte Verdeans, Chile (12,500 yrs. Old, eastern/southern tip of the continent), thousands of miles away from where the "first Americans" settled in Clovis. These people could not have walked down from the north that "fast" and so must have come by sea, probably hugging the western coast line of the American glaciers all the way from Alaska (rather than crossing the Atlantic.)

Closer to home, and to our quarter, is the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Avella, PA, evidence of human occupation that is 14,000-17,000 yrs. Old; Cactus Hill, VA, where tools have been discovere in layers 15,050 years old; etc. Since the middle of North America was still covered by glacier until about 11,500 yrs. ago, these people could not have crossed the continent. Speculation is now that these people came from the Solutrean culture of France and the Iberian Peninsula, roughly following the a northern route along the edge of a glacer past Greenland and down from Newfoundland, roughly the same route as Norseman Lief Erikson around 1,000 AD

  • [The point: we have a model of homgeniety and uniformity being replaced by one that stresses multiplicity or "diversity" in the specific sense that it inserts difference into the very origin or definition of a cultural entity called "American," thereby making sense--lending significance--to evidence that was previously discounted as mere "noise" or insignificant variation. You will see a similar shift when we study Crevecoeur and most of the other texts this term. You should ask yourself: this is a product of the evidence itself, or the perspective being taken on it.]
  • New England "natives" were probably descendants of nomadic hunters who arrived in the area about 10,000 year earlier (Nash 75; do map from his 8). Lived by hunting, fishing, and increasingly by 1600, agriculture. Estimates of as many as 10 million people living north of Mexico before contact with Europeans, divided into about 300 nations. Perhaps 500,000 lived along the coastal plan and piedmont region of Eastern N. America. About 100,000 lived in Southern New England where the British focused much of its colonizing interest.

(Jacobo found the following information in the book "Inventing America", by Jose Rabasa (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1993): "Demographic historians from the Berkeley School have calculated that world population in 1500 was 400 million, of which 80 million lived in the Americas. By the mid-1600s there were only 10 million. In Mexico alone, on the eve of the conquest, the population was about 25 million, and by 1600 it had fallen to 1 million." [p. 238] This is a note, followed by reference to several sources.)

  • Those natives had complicated and sophisticated political organizations and alliances. For example, around 1600, when Europeans encountered around New England, there were two large confederations or nations in the area who were bitter enemies: the Iroquois and the Algonquins. For example, the Iroquois confederation, probably formed in the late 1400s under the leadership of Hiawatha in part to fight the Algonquins, was called by the Europeans the"League of the Iroquois" or in Iroquoian, "Ganonsyoni," (literally "the Lodge Extended Lengthwise," or "that which spreads far"). The Ganonsyoni constituted what we would call an "ethnic group" today and included five tribes: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. There were about 10,000 "citizens" spread over an area that extended from the Adirondack Mountains to the Great Lakes, and from Northern NY to Penn.

I. European Occupation of North America (roughly 1550 to 1763) (NB Steven's reference to the Irish (St. Brendan), the Norsemen (Vikings) who made contact but did not establish permament settlements.)

A. The Four Major Players: Despite British explorations in the late 16th C., the British presence in North America lagged behind the Spanish occupation of North America (as well as France and Holland).

1. Spanish "occupation" of North America by 1600: from 1550s Spain claimed California south from San Francisco across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas all the way to Florida along the Gulf Coast, and maintained these claims until 1763, when it relinquished its claims on land east of the Mississippi.

2.France claimed Canada and everything south through the midwest and Louisiana from 1604-1763. They lost some land in 1713 at the treaty of Utrecht that concluded what the colonists called "Quen Anne's War (1701-1713), essentially the Hudson Bay area and up the eastern coast through Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. 1763 marked the end of the "Seven Years' War, a world war but focused between France and England [1756-63], known in the colonies as the "French and Indian War" because the French had many Indian allies against the British colonists, starting in 1754; in the treaty of Paris 1763, France gave up Canada and all French territory east of the Mississippi to England, and the rest of their North American holdings to Spain. (in 1800 Napoleon would get Louisana territory and New Orleans back from Spain, and President Thomas Jefferson would purchase it from him in 1803.) (Fifty years later, by 1853, the land area of what became the 48 contiguous states would be acquired through treaties [sometimes after wars] with Spain, Mexico, and Great Britan.)

3.Holland colonized New York-New Jersey area from 1614-1664 but then lost the colony to the British HOW

B. The fourth European nation in North America in large numbers was the British colonization of Eastern seaboard of North America. Apart from some early exploratory voyages by British adverturers, pirates, and speculators (such as John Smith), things got started for the British in Va.

Brits realized they were behind Spain and Portugal, who were close to siezing a monopoly on the New World by the mid-1500s. The English needed the new markets and new sources of raw materials.

Brits were in a bitter ideological and religious dispute with their Catholic neighbors after the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism in England after Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558. In 1588, the English defeated the Spanish in a famous sea battle known as "the Spanish Armada," and that cleared the way for overseas expansion.

1.First British colony in Jamestown "Virginia", i.e., named for the "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth-- 1607. Rough start because they spent more time searching for gold than planting, so they almost staved to death. Powhatan [POE ha tan, real name WaHUNsonacock], head of the powerful Powhatan confederacy of nations, gave them food that first winter and probably saved all their lives, but eventually (1622) waged war on the colonists when he recognized their colonial and expansionist plans. (One of the planters, John Rolfe, married Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, who had been kidnapped at 17 and held hostage by the English. After the marriage P. toured Europe with their son in 1615 as an exotic princess and died there of smallpox in 1617 at 22 yrs old. [Pocahontas is a nickname meaning "Frisky"; her real name was Matowaka.]) Rolfe became an important, maybe the first, tobacco planter in the colonies. Virginia would trade tobacco with Plymouth colony, who would trade it to the Dutch in New Netherland for goods (sugar, linen, etc.) until the Virginians contacted the Dutch and began trading directly.

(NB: an earlier unsuccessful attempt to establish a colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of N. Carolina in 1580s. When ships returned three years later to check on the settlers, everything was gone.)

2.First British colonies in New England:

a. Plymouth (William Bradford, Governor, (about 100 "Pilgrims") 1620 good map in the intro to Rowlandson text for Core; very good map in Nash 83. Met by Samoset who says "Welcome" in English (see Thomas Morton's account of this meeting in the Reader, p. 297. Morton represents this meeting as a formal contact between political units, with Samoset serving as an ambassador and translator, a go-between who had been captured and enslaved by the Sachem of the territory and promised freedom for his service. Note the typical characteristics of the go-between, like Malinche. The Pilgrims were also aided by another Indian, a Wampanoag they called "Squanto." More about him later. [NB: William Brandon says this person was Squanto, not Samoset (166). 500 Nations says it was SAMoset, as does William Bradford [Reader 270)

These were "Separatists" who wanted to separate entirely from the Church of England (the Anglican Church). They joined the New England Confederacy in 1643 and merged with Massachusetts Bay in 1684.

b. Masachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, Governor ( about 1,500 colonists in this colony, centered in Boston (1630). The "Puritans" who wanted to purify the church but remain part of it.

c. Native population: in 1600, 70,000-90,000 or 100,000 people in southern New England (Mass., Conn., RI). Four major nations comprised the Algonquin language-group: Wampanoag (in Plymouth colony); Narrangansett (in now Rhode Island); (in now conn.); Massachuset (in Massachusetts Bay). They did not always get along. For eg., one of the reasons the Wampanoag's tolerated and even encouraged the Pilgrims was probably to seek their alliance vs. the narrangansetts

3.British holdings expanded quickly; by the time of the Revolutionary War (1776), there were thirteen colonies along the eastern seabord claiming territory extending from Maine to Georgia and inland to the Alleghany Mountains; in 1783, when a treaty was signed with England ending the war, the newly-formed United States extended Westward to the Mississipi River file:///C|/HUMCOR~1/MYLECS/EurAmap.html

The population of the British colonies boomed during this period, from less than 250,000 in 1700 to over 2.5 million by the time the war was over. file:///C|/HUMCOR~1/MYLECS/ColPop.html

II.Colonization, Settlement, Expansion

A. British presence based on colonization rather than conquest, i.e., permanent settlement, farming and fishing: Get quote from John Smith about fishing, etc. in New World NB John Cotton's "God's Promise to his Plantations." There was an investment in the future presence of the British in North America that was different from occupying forces of the other three Euroean nations. Also a greater interest in expanding and occupying land itself, vs. the exploitation of its resources, that distinguished Brit. Colonization from the imperialism of the other three imperial powers. The result was devastating, because it meant that the Indians were not only "conquered," but usually displaced from their ancestral lands and pushed westward, resulting in the destruction of what we would call the infrastructure of their cultures, i.e., their physical place in the world, which usually possessed spiritual as well as political, agricultural, sustenance (hunting), and emotional significance for each nation and tribe.

B.British attitudes toward the natives differed from those of the Spanish (conquest and exploitation, conversion) and the French (economic cooperation, conversion).

1.Some interest in conversion, almost always measured vs. the materialistic interests of the Spanish associated with the "Black legend" of Columbus and the conquistadors that Prof. Topik mentioned in Week Two:

"The Southern colonies of the Spanish Nation have sent home from this American Continent, much gold and silver, as the Fruit and End of their Discoveries and Transplantations: that (we confess) is a scarce Commodity in this Colder Climate . . . [but this Bible represents] Fruits of our poor Endeavours to Plant and Propagate the Gospel here; which upon a true account, is as much better than Gold, as the Souls of men are more worth then the whole World. This is a Nobler Fruit (and indeed in the Counsels of All-disposing Providence, was an higher intended End) of Columbus his Adventure." (John Eliot, dedication to Charles II (King of England), from Eliot's translation of the Bible into the language of the Algonquin Indians, DATE)

John Phillips, tr., great in the intro to his tr of Las Casas's The Tears of the Indians on the compassion Puritans should feels towad the Indians: "the tears of Men can barely suffice; these are Enormities to make the Angels mourn and bewail the loss of so many departed souls, as might have been converted and redeemed to their eternal Mansions.

We read of old, of the Ten Persecutions wherein the Primitive Christians were destroy'd by the Cruelties of the Heathen Emperours: but we now read of Christians, the Professors of a Religion grounded upon Love and Charity, massacring, where there was no cause of Antipathy, but their own obstinate Barbarism" (15). . . .

[Note] the devilish Cruelties of those that called themselves Christians: had you seen the poor creatures [i.e., the Indians] torn from the peace and quiet of their own Habitations, where God had planted them to labour in a Tormenting Captivity, by many degrees worse than that of Algier, or the Turkish Galleys." (q'ed on 17).

Insert pictures of Indians pouring gold into spaniards' mouths, Spaniards torturing Indians, etc.

2.More typical was an interest in occupation and its justifications, as expressed by John Winthrop:

"What warrant have we to take that land, which is and hath been of long time possessed of others the sons of Adam?

Answer: [first] That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion or as they can prevail against their neighbors. And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their wastelands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manuered for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites? For God hath given to the sons of men a twofold right to the earth: there is a natural right and a civil right. The first right was natural when men held the earth in common, every man sowing and feeding where he pleased: then, as men and cattle increased, they appropriated some parcels of ground by enclosing andperculiar manurance, and this in time got them a civil right. . . . 2dly, there is more than enough for them and us. 3dly, god hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whreby the greater part of the country is left void of inhabitants. 4thly, We shall come in with good leave of the natives." (John Winthrop, Winthrop Papers 2, p. 120; q/ed in Segal and Steinback 50-51]

[I.e., they have no technology and hence no culture, as we remember from last quarter. Note the description of Indian lands as "wastelands and woods", the lack of permanent structures, etc. That will be an important distinction to Crevecoeur and a sign of the greater civilization of the European settlers.]

3.This last point was codified in the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: "come over and help us" file:///C|/HUMCOR~1/MYLECS/Masseal.html

C.Summary of British justifications for colonization according to Winthrop

1.We were invited by the natives.

2.There is plenty of room. NB the European legal principle vacuum domicilium, which gave them the right to settle unoccupied land.

3.There is room because God has emptied out the land for us through plagues.

4.We have a divine right to occupy the land and "civilize" it beyond the state of nature in which the Indians live. America will be an EXAMPLE (City on a Hill) and an EXCEPTION

III.Effects of Colonization on the indigenous people

A.The British often traded for or even bought land rather than seizing it, in part because the colonists did not have overwhelming military support as the Spanish usually did. They were settlers, not soldiers. The Indians did not really have much that the settlers or colonists were interested in (i.e., no gold), with one important exception that became increasingly important: LAND. In most cases, they tried to get along with the Indians, though usually ignoring them if possible when they were not making a few isolated attempts to convert them. That is why the early years of many British settlements are often peaceful and even genuinely cooperative with the indigenous people of that region. But as the settlement begins to expand, the Indians become aware of the theat to their land and tensions start. The increasingly close contact between British and native peoples led to growing violence and occasionally outright warfare.