2.

American in the colonial period

French and Dutch exploration in the New World
England exploration:
why it took England so long to start colonization in North America.
Motivations for English colonization
The Lost Colony of Roanoke
Jamestown (Chesapeake Bay) (the South)
New England (the North)
The Middle Colonies
The Navigation Acts
The Enlightment
The Great Awakening
The consuming revolution

French and Dutch exploration in the New World

Overview
  Gold, silver, and furs attracted European exploration, colonization, and competition in the New
World.
 Rivalries between European nations were often rooted in religious or political feuds taking place
in Europe, yet these tensions played out in the theater of the New World.
 The Spanish lost their stronghold in North America as the French, Dutch, and British began to
explore and colonize the Northeast.

French exploration

Spanish successes in the Caribbean attracted the attention of other European nations. Like Spain,
France was a Catholic nation and committed to expanding Catholicism around the globe. In the early
sixteenth century, it joined the race to explore the New World and exploit the resources of the Western
Hemisphere.
In 1534, navigator Jacques Cartier claimed northern North America for France, naming the area
around the St. Lawrence River New France. Like many other explorers, Cartier made exaggerated
claims about the area’s mineral wealth and was unable to send great riches back to France or establish a
permanent colony.
Samuel de Champlain made great strides for French exploration of the New World. He explored the
Caribbean in 1601 and the coast of New England in 1603 before traveling farther north. In 1608 he
founded Quebec, and he made numerous Atlantic crossings as he worked tirelessly to promote New
France.
Unlike other imperial powers, France—through Champlain’s efforts—fostered especially good
relationships with native peoples as they expanded westward. He learned that becoming friendly with
the native people was essential to successful trade. Champlain explored the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay,
and eventually made it to the Mississippi River. The French made an alliance with the Hurons and
Algonquians; Champlain even agreed to fight for them against their enemy, the Iroquois.
The French were primarily interested in establishing commercially viable colonial outposts, so they
created extensive trading networks throughout New France. They relied on native hunters to harvest
furs, especially beaver pelts, and to exchange these items for French goods, like glass beads.
The French also dreamed of replicating the wealth of Spain by colonizing the tropical zones. After
Spanish control of the Caribbean began to weaken, the French turned their attention to small islands in
the West Indies; by 1635 they had colonized two, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Though it still lagged
far behind Spain, France now boasted its own West Indian colonies with lucrative sugar plantation sites
and African slave labor.

Dutch colonization

Dutch entrance into the Atlantic World is part of the larger story of religious and imperial conflict in
the early modern era. In the 1500s, Calvinism, one of the major Protestant reform movements, began
to take root in the Spanish Netherlands and the new sect desired its own state. Holland was established
in 1588 as a Protestant nation, but would not be recognized by Spain until 1648.
Determined to imperil Protestantism, King Philip of Spain assembled a massive force of over thirty
thousand men and 130 ships, and sent this giant navy, known as the Spanish Armada, towards
England and Holland. But the skilled English navy and a maritime storm destroyed the fleet in 1588.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada was only one part of a larger but undeclared war between
Protestantism and Catholicism.
Quickly, the Dutch inserted themselves into the Atlantic colonial race. They distinguished themselves
as commercial leaders in the seventeenth century, as their mode of colonization relied on powerful
corporations: the Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602 to trade in Asia, and the Dutch West
India Company, established in 1621 to colonize and trade in the Americas.
While employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1609, the English sea captain Henry Hudson
explored New York Harbor and the river that now bears his name. Like many explorers of the time,
Hudson was actually seeking a northwest passage to Asia and its wealth (that's why he was employed
by the Dutch East India Company instead of the Dutch West India Company), but the wealth of
coveted beaver pelts alone provided a reason to claim it for the Netherlands.
The Dutch named their colony New Netherlands, and it served as a fur-trading outpost for the
expanding and powerful Dutch West India Company. They expanded in the area to create other trading
posts, where their exchange with local Algonquian and Iroquois peoples brought the Dutch and native
peoples into alliance. The Dutch became a commercially powerful rival to Spain--Amsterdam soon
became trade hub for all the Atlantic World.

French and Dutch colonization in the Americans focused on the profitable fur trade. Depending on
Native Americans to hunt animals for their pelts, French and Dutch colonizers cultivated friendly
relationships with Native Americans through intermarriage and military alliances.

why it took England so long to start colonization in North America.

I think there's a strong argument to be made that England was the most powerful and successful
imperial nation of all time, but when you look back to the Age of Exploration, it becomes clear that
England was actually pretty late to the imperial game.

As we know, Christopher Columbus, backed by Spain, had arrived in Hispaniola in the New World in
1492. He was the first European to start a colony in the New World. England, by contrast, didn't
actually have a successful colonial venture in the New World until 1607 with Jamestown. Now from
this distance it doesn't look that far behind, but this is more than 100 years later than Spain's first
colonial ventures. So what was England up to? Why were they so late in the colonial game? Now I
think the biggest reason why England waited another 100 years to have a New World colony is that
England had its own problems, and we're talking about the 1500s here.

And the first of these was ongoing conflict between Catholics and Protestants in England. The trouble
started with Henry VIII, and Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church in Rome to start his own
church, the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church. Now this is a Protestant religion.
Now Henry had two daughters, Elizabeth who like him was a Protestant, and Mary, who was a
Catholic, and Mary occupied the throne for a number of years, but Elizabeth managed to wrest it away
from her and once Elizabeth was on the throne as Elizabeth I, England became a Protestant nation. So
it's hard to be involved in world affairs when you've got kind of a crisis of succession going on, so one
factor here is religious conflict.

Another reason why England is not headed over to the New World is that they have colonial problems
closer to home in Ireland. England is trying to, and will succeed at, subduing Ireland as one of its
colonies, and they're undertaking a very bloody and costly war, when of course what the Irish really
want is self rule and to be left alone, but they use very brutal tactics against the Irish.

Another issue England is dealing with is economic depression. The Crown doesn't have a lot of money
and there's a great deal of crime and poverty throughout the nation, so while the Crown can't actually
afford to sponsor colonial exploits the way that Spain sponsored Columbus, they still managed to get
some riches out of the New World by giving ship captains license to plunder Spanish ships coming
back with New World riches, and these were called privateers. The logic here was, why bother trying to
set up a colony here in Mexico or South America, the West Indies, and do all the work of setting up
housing and trying to tame laborers and mining, when instead you could just let the Spanish do all of
that and then put that gold on a ship and then use your awesome navy, to steal those riches. So
England doesn't have a strong incentive to do all the labor when they can just steal it from the ships
along the way. Alright, those are some of the reasons why it took England so long to start colonization
in North America.

Motivations for English colonization

Once the internal religious conflict has been sorted out, turning England into a Protestant nation, they
turn some of that animus outward to Spain, a Catholic nation, and they feel that they have to compete
with Spain for riches and for souls. So certainly, the Protestant nation of England doesn't wanna be
left behind anymore than it already has been by Spain, and they also don't wanna be one upped by the
Catholic nation of France. So there's clearly a lot to be had in the new world and a lot of Catholics to
triumph over in having it.

Another thing that allows England to join the imperial game in the New World is the invention of the
Joint Stock Company. Now, Joint Stock Companies were kind of the precursor to the modern day
corporation, what they did was kind of spread both the riches and also the risk of any kind of
entrepreneurial undertaking. people could buy shares in a Joint Stock Company, and those shares were
kind of divested from your personal wealth. So you could invest in something that, if it went belly up,
wouldn't necessarily ruin you 'cause you just had a few shares. So it's, you know, similar to the stock
market today, a very early version of that. So these Joint Stock Companies meant that adventurers,
people seeking wealth, could go out to the New World, for example, with many different backers, the
risk spread across all of them, and try to make profit for their investors. And so England issues
several charters to Joint Stock Companies that are still familiar names to us today. the one that plays
the most role in the early founding of the United States is the Virginia Company, and it's under the
auspices of the Virginia Company that explorers like John Smith head to Virginia and Virginia is
named for Elizabeth the First, Henry the Eighth's daughter, who never married, and therefore was said
to be the Virgin Queen, so a new land named after her was Virginia.

the last thing I wanna say about what prompted England to join the imperial game in the New World
was that England was having a serious economic depression and some real poverty. Now remember
that England was a highly classed society with aristocracy and gentry, and these were inherited roles,
right? You couldn't rise to be among these ranks, generally. So, you know, about 95% of the population
didn't belong to either of these groups, and a strong majority of those were in dire poverty in the 1500s
and early 1600s. The market for wool, which England, being a major textile producer, had collapsed, so
many people who had been wool producers were in dire straits. Well, in this time period, these great
English lords started to close off, enclose these common lands. So they'd fence them off. for very poor
people, this was a huge transition because now they didn't have a place to raise their livestock. They
didn't have a source of hunting, protein, so it made people who were already on the edge of poverty
extremely poor. And so, because of this Enclosure Movement and depression, crime rates are going up
in England,. English gentry, the people in Parliament, don't think in terms that say, "Alright, many
people are poor. "Maybe they're going to steal." Instead, they think of this as surplus population, say
there are too many people in England. so they start wondering. Maybe these people should go
elsewhere. Maybe they should go to colonies where maybe they can buy more goods, produce more
raw materials, and find a different place in the social structure and economy of England

The Lost Colony of Roanoke - background and first attempts

the first colonization attempt at Roanoke? The first expedition all starts in the late 1570s with a man
named Humphrey Gilbert, This is actually Sir Walter Raleigh Gilbert's half-brother as it turns out. So
Humphrey Gilbert, thinks that it might be possible to make your way to the Indies and fabulous riches
by going on top of North America. So he thinks there's a waterway here. So he convinces Queen
Elizabeth, to give him a charter to try to plant a colony somewhere on this side of North America.
They're looking for the Northwest Passage. They're hoping that they can find gold, and what they want
to do more than anything else is just mess up Spain's chances in the New World.

So unfortunately, Sir Humphrey Gilbert dies. He is lost at sea, then his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh
picked up his half-brother's contract, which said he had to get a colony in the New World within six
years of 1578. So he is under the gun to try to get something happening on the coast of North America
by 1584 at the latest.

So this is their first journey, and they go to North Carolina. They called it Virginia, because this whole
area they named after Queen Elizabeth. The Virgin Queen, and a lot of the things in this time period are
kinda named after her, because all of these fellows were trying to capture her heart. So they go, and
what's really interesting about this is that John White, an artist, shows us so much about what this area
was like. So they end up on the barrier islands of North Carolina, and this is where the colonists
will eventually settle here, Roanoke Island.

The major Native American groups in this area were Algonquian-speaking. Initially the English people
get along with them pretty well. They exchange skins, and food, lots of things. The English come back,
thinking this is a pretty good deal. Right, and they say, "This is a great place for us to settle." So then
they send a second expedition from England. This time with just soldiers. And they're hoping to kinda
get rich quick. They think maybe there are mountains nearby that might have gold or gems in them, or
perhaps, they're always asking that native people, "Do you have anything shiny? "Have you heard of
anything that's shiny nearby?" They're not thinking about long-term settlement, but they wereleft there
over the winter with the Secotan people, and this is just a bunch of rowdy soldiers who thought they
were gonna get rich quick, and they don't, because there is no gold in North Carolina, not like there is
in the south, that the Spanish do so well with. And they quickly come to grief with the Native
Americans.

The English steal the food of the Secotans, and they end up getting into a brawl over the possible theft
of a silver cup they think the Native Americans have stolen a silver cup from them. They demand it
back, the Native Americans say, "We don't know what you're talking about." And then the English kill
a bunch of people. But by the time that the supplies show up, because the English are sending supply
ships on a regular basis, Sir Francis Drake, of piracy fame, shows up with supplies, and a bunch of
these 100 men just get back on the ship and sail to England. I think a lot of it was that many of these
men, now and on later expeditions, are English veterans of the war in Ireland. So, they're veterans of
this really brutal Irish repression. And this is something that I think you see a lot with English people
when they first are meeting Native Americans, they treat them like they treated the Irish, which
is to say, very badly. They treat them as savages who are different religion, who need to be subject to
the English, and need to be taught early on that they need to obey the English.

The Lost Colony of Roanoke - settlement and disappearance

Sir Walter Raleigh and John White realized that a whole group of soldiers was probably not the right
group to send to the New World. Instead he thinks, alright, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna
send civilians. We're gonna send families. And say okay, you are going to start a colony and a
settlement in the New World. So it's not just a trading post.

But back up, like still on Roanoke Island next to the Native Americans that hate them? Is that where
they're still putting the colony?

Well, they were really hoping that they can actually head up to the Chesapeake Bay and make that their
place of operations.

Unfortunately, as the weather worked out, they couldn't make it farther than Roanoke Island. So they
are hanging out with what they hope are their friends, the Secotans, and right after they get there one of
the English colonists is murdered by probably a Secotan person, and it's because they say to their
translators, we don't have enough food, you're gonna steal more food and we just can't have you here.
It's obvious that they brought women and children, they're intending to stay, and the Native Americans
have decided that the English are not to be trusted.

Yeah, I think there are so many places here where ships get lost or they get grounded on the shoals
outside North Carolina so they can't get more supplies. Or later storms will prevent reinforcements.
Weather and a silver cup are kind of the things that keep the Roanoke Colony from succeeding.
So right away after this new group of colonists arrives, one of them is murdered and so they ask their
governor, John White, to go back to England and get them more supplies. John White, the artist and
he's now governor. He's the only one of the original Raleigh's 11 who's still part of this venture. So he's
now moved up in the ranks. So John White sails back to England, and then he runs into a big problem,
the Spanish. He goes back to England and he says, Sir Walter Raleigh, I need more reinforcements. But
all English shipping is cut off because of the threat of the Spanish. The Spanish Armada is coming to
England at this time period and so not a single ship can be spared to go try to bail out these colonists in
the New World. So they're alone and entirely isolated on this new continent among people that do
not like them because of stuff that people before them did. Because of the Spanish Armada it's not
until 1590 that John White can finally get. When he gets there this is all he finds, the word, Croatoan,
carved into a tree. Their town was completely abandoned. So it looks as if they'd left of their own
volition. Because it doesn't look like there was an attack there. And they had agreed beforehand that if
they decided to go somewhere else, they would leave traces, they would carve something in a tree to
say where they had gone. Unfortunately, another storm hit, and so John White was forced to leave and
go back to England without ever going to see the Croatoans, this other Native American tribe, along
with their town called, Croatoan

So John White never found out what happened, and technically we never found out what happened to
the Lost Colony at Roanoke, but there's some pretty good evidence about what might have happened to
them. so here's what we think may have happened. So there are about 130 people, right? Not all of
them could have gone to see and live with the Croatoans because they were a much smaller tribe than
that. So they could never have been all supported by these people. What we think happened is that
some of them went to live with the Croatoans who are along the coast. So if John White comes back
then they can connect up with him again. We also think that some of them went further inland to a
more stable environment around what is maybe called, Merry Hill. So about 15, oh sorry, about 50
miles inland from Roanoke Island. And we think some of them may have gone north.

But if I had to say that there's one thing that's really haunting about this Colony at Roanoke is just how
different things might have been had they chosen to be friendly about the theft of a silver cup, that may
or may not have happened, rather than angry and violent. We could be talking about the Colony of
Roanoke as the very first successful English Colony in the New World. So it shows us just how
important even the smallest events in history can be to the way that things turn out, and how much
people's choices really do matter

Early English settlements - Jamestown

So as late as 1585, England has still not successfully established a New World colony.

In 1607, when the Virginia Company received a charter for New World exploration from King James I,
who had now taken over for Queen Elizabeth. They wanted to find gold. They wanted to find a passage
to the Indies to get the luxurious materials like spices and silk. And, James in particular was hoping that
they could maybe get one up on the Spanish, who had been doing so well for more than 100 years in
the West Indies. No one who went to Virginia expected to set up a colony there. What they expected
was to go for a couple of years, mine tremendous amounts of gold, which they hoped were lying in
giant piles all over the ground.

So this Virginia Company expedition was intended to be short-term. They sailed in early 1607 into the
Chesapeake Bay, and they spent some time looking for what might be a good place to settle, and they
eventually chose a site here on what they'll name the James River, for King James, and in the town that
they'll call Jamestown for the same reason. It's hard to overstate how terrible the land that they chose at
Jamestown was, and it was terrible for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the soil isn't terrifically
good there. It's marshy, it's not great for growing subsistence crops, which you'll need to survive. And
more importantly, it's buggy, there are tons of mosquitoes, and mosquitoes carry diseases like yellow
fever, malaria, and those mosquito-borne diseases will have a tremendous effect, a huge death toll for
the early settlers at Jamestown.

The other thing I can't overstate about the colonists at Jamestown was just how incredibly unprepared
and unsuited they were to be colonists in the New World. Remember, this was essentially a get rich
quick scheme. Well, who are the sort of people who'd like to get rich quick? Investors, for the most
part. These were gentlemen, and the English definition of a gentleman is really someone who has title,
someone who has status, someone who does not work with his hands, and all through that first summer
when they probably should've been planting crops to try to survive through the winter, instead, these
gentlemen were busy looking for gold, which means that when winter rolled around, things got pretty
dire at Jamestown
Jamestown - John Smith and Pocahontas
Now, spoiler alert, there is no gold in Virginia. But then winter rolled around. Those who hadn't
already been killed by mosquito-borne illnesses, like malaria or yellow fever, were now subject to
starvation. And there the story gets even more complicated, because the English settlers, who were all
men, start to run afoul of local Native Americans. There were an Algonquian tribe living in the
Virginia tidewater, who were under the rule of this man here. His name was Powhatan, and the people
that he ruled, the Powhatans.

And as the English settlers realized that they had not put away enough for practically any stores to get
them through the winter, they started raiding the food supplies of the Powhatans. Then the Powhatans
kidnapped John Smith, and there's an engraving of him here. Uh, and they kinda tried to show him their
power. The daughter of Powhatan, Pocahontas intervened and kept her father from executing John
Smith, either out of the goodness of her heart or maybe because she had a crush on him. The fact of the
matter was that Pocahontas was probably about 13 years old at the time. And she will go on to marry
an Englishman, but not John Smith, John Rolfe.

It's also quite likely that Powhatan didn't actually intend to execute Smith. Instead, what he was doing
was kind of a ritual of power and mercy, So he says, you know, "I could kill you "because I'm a strong
leader, "but because I an also a merciful and just leader, "I will not."

So after his kidnapping, John Smith really kinda steps up as the savior of Jamestown, which probably
would have completely collapsed were it not for him. And in 1608, he takes over and says that, "He
who shall not work shall not eat." So you gotta pull your weight if you're gonna get supported by the
rest of the colonists. Nevertheless, the first years at Jamestown were pretty rough. In the winter of 1609
to 1610, which they called the starving time, the colonists were so hungry that they resorted to eating
vermin, and they resorted to eating each other. One man actually killed and ate his wife in one of the
few known examples of English cannibalism.

Jamestown - the impact of tobacco

And as they were just leaving the Chesapeake Bay, they met a ship with English reinforcements, who
ordered them back to Jamestown, and came bearing orders from England about a new strategy in
Jamestown. And these new orders were carried by a new commander, here this was Lord De La Warr.
And Lord De La Warr said, "Well, it's been great "that you've all been trying to get along "with these
Powhatans, but let's get rid of them." So he switched the English from their small amount of conflict
with the Native Americans over stealing food, to a pretty much all-out war of extinction against the
Powhatans. And De La Warr was a veteran of the Irish campaigns to subdue that colony. So he brings
his tactics of complete brutality and submission of the native population to the New World. And these
conflicts between the English colonists and the Native Americans living in this Virginia tidewater are
called the Anglo-Powhatan Wars. The first Anglo-Powhatan war ended in 1614 with a brief period of
peace, when this fellow here, John Rolfe married Pocahontas. As kind of a peace offering. But, by the
time that the second Anglo-Powhatan war was over in 1625, pretty much the entire Powhatan tribe had
either been killed, or driven from the area.
Now John Rolfe made another contribution to the colony, he discovered that tobacco was a perfect crop
for the kind of marshy Virginia soil. And tobacco was a commodity that was getting hotter and hotter
in Europe. And so, although the colonists at Jamestown didn't find the gold that they were hoping for,
they found a very different way to get rich, and that was through cultivating tobacco. As tobacco is an
incredibly labor-intensive crop, these English planters in Virginia will quickly look for ways to staff a
labor force in the New World. And one way that they will do this is through the importation of African
slaves.

Jamestown - life and labor in the Chesapeake (mostly indentured servants)

Now in the last video, I mentioned that the very first ship bearing enslaved Africans arrived in
Jamestown in 1619. So, just twelve years after Jamestown was founded Africans had been brought to
the area. So this shows that enslaved Africans were some of the very first people who weren't of native
origin in the new world and would help shape the English colonies pretty much from the very start. But
even though there were enslaved Africans in Virginia that early, the system of broad race-based slavery
that will really characterize the American South up until the Civil War didn't get started right away and
there were a couple of reasons for that. One was, as we mentioned many times, it was not particularly
healthy to live in this area. You can see here, this is pretty much all a giant swamp,. Slaves are pretty
expensive, and since it's such an unhealthy environment in this area, there is a reasonable chance that
any person that I purchase might die within a year or so, and then I'd lose my investment.

Now, my other option for help is to bring over white laborers from England and these are called
indentured servants. So, perhaps there is a young man living in London, he has lots of older brothers,
so he's not going to inherit anything, he doesn't have much in the way of economic opportunity, so he
thinks I could go for a new start, in the New World, but I don't have the money to pay my passage on a
ship across the Atlantic. So, what the planters would do, I will pay your fare across the Atlantic and in
exchange you will work for me for a period of, say three to seven years. And at the end of that three
years, you will get land of your own and I'll give you some tools and clothes. Things you need to
succeed. And then you can be your own planter. There's only one problem is that this is a swamp full of
mosquitoes and you are quite likely to die in Virginia.

So this actually turned out to be a pretty good deal for the planters because for every person that they
brought over from England, they got another 50 acres of land, meaning that if you had the money to
bring over quite a few servants, you could expand your landholdings very fast. And in early on in the
history of indentured servitude, very few of the servants, a pretty small percentage, actually lived to
finish their indenture and to make good on this promise of land for themselves and tools and clothes to
get started. So this very quickly, begins to build a social structure in Virginia, where there are few
planters, who are extremely wealthy, who own lots of land and then there's everybody else. There's a
large number of indentured servants, who've only been there for a couple of years, who may or may not
live to see out the end of their indenture.
Jamestown - Bacon's Rebellion ->> black slave
So in 1619, the Virginia Company established the first government in Virginia. It was called the House
of Burgesses. In a way, it's kind of like a parliament that was set up for Virginia so that they could
debate local issues

The other important factor here is just what it takes to grow tobacco. Tobacco is a labor-intensive crop,
we know, but it's also kind of a crop that is extremely hard on the soil. It depletes the soil fast. Which
means that there is a constant need for new soil. It means that land becomes relatively scarce pretty
fast. And it also means that as white settlers continue to move west, they are running up against more
and more anger and conflict with Native Americans. And now it's definitely in the interest of the House
of Burgesses, hoping to avoid conflict. And so their governor, Governor William Berkeley refuses to
take on another war of extinction against the Native Americans, which makes a lot of white servants
and white freeman pretty angry.

It's the late 1600s now, and more and more of these indentured servants are living to finish out their
terms of indenture. And they're finding it really hard to make a living because the planters don't want to
give quite so many rights. And now that they are, planters don't want to extend them things like a
promise of land, because land is already scarce. So when servants are finishing up their indentures,
they're finding it difficult to make a living. And one young man in particular was this fellow here,
Nathaniel Bacon, who was incensed at Governor Berkeley's refusal. And so he gets up a militia to
actually go after the Native Americans. Governor Berkeley wants them to stop. And instead of
stopping, they marched to Jamestown, the capital of Virginia, and set it on fire. And it's hard to know
where this would have ended, because Nathaniel Bacon himself died, so the rebellion kind of petered
out without his leadership.

But clearly this was a really scary moment for the House of Burgesses. And they started to think,
alright well maybe this indentured servitude thing isn't working out so well, because once these
indentures are up, we've got this whole set of landless free whites who technically have the rights of
Englishmen, but we have little work for them, we have little land for them, and it's going to end up with
constant rebellion. So maybe we should think about a different source of labor. One that will never get
its freedom.

Slavery in the British colonies

as you go farther south, the percentage of the population that was enslaved and African grew greater
and greater, but one thing to note here is that not any one of these colonies had zero enslaved people at
all. We frequently have the misconception that slavery only happened in the south. In fact, all British
colonies had some amount of slavery and all British colonies had some involvement in the institution of
slavery, whether that was bankrolling it as a financier, growing food that was intended for the slave
colonies in the West Indies that didn't want to spare even an acre of land to grow something other than
sugar, or shipping enslaved Africans by either owning or captaining the boats of the middle passage.

But despite this, the largest share of enslaved people were in the southern colonies, which focused on
plantation agriculture. So, Maryland, Virginia, and then even farther south into the British colonies in
the Caribbean. As the enslaved population in the colonies grew, colonial governments began passing
more and more restrictions on the lives of enslaved people and began codifying who was or was not a
slave. In Virginia in 1662, the government passed a law specifying that the children of enslaved women
would follow the condition of their mothers. Other laws prevented interracial relationships and defined
enslaved Africans as chattel slaves, which means personal property, and as the personal property of
slave owners, enslaved people had little to no legal rights. So, over the course of the 1600s, slavery
became stricter and more exclusively defined by race.

The experience of being enslaved was unimaginably physically and emotionally taxing. Since enslaved
people had no legal protections, owners could maim or even kill enslaved people with little to no
repercussion. For women, life in slavery also meant the constant threat and frequent reality of rape at
the hands of slave owners. Religion, dance, music, and family helped enslaved people deal with the
harsh realities of everyday life and enslaved people also developed both covert means of resisting
slavery, like, for example, breaking tools, which made it more difficult to work, or overt means of
resisting slavery, particularly in slave uprisings. One of these, the Stono Rebellion in 1739 in South
Carolina resulted in the deaths of about 42 whites and about 44 blacks. The South Carolina government
responded to the rebellion by making slave codes even harsher.

Society and religion in the New England colonies

Depending on where you grow up in the United States, you might hear a different story about the
founding of this country. Now, I grew up in Pennsylvania and the story that I heard was about the
Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. They were a group of deeply religious people, who had been
persecuted in England and were looking for a new world, where they could practice their religion
freely, but many of my friends grew up in Virginia and the story they heard was about the founding of
Jamestown, where a group of men from England, who were adventurers looking for gold and glory,
landed in the New World, hoping to make a profit.

And I think both of these stories tells us a little bit about the founding mythology of the United States.
Were the original settlers here looking for religious freedom or were they here looking to make a quick
buck? Well, I'd like to take some time to explore the New England colonies, the story of the people
who landed at Plymouth Rock and then later, at Boston, to begin the colony of Massachusetts Bay and
we'll see as we go along, just how different the settlers in Massachusetts Bay were from those at
Jamestown and also some of the ways in which they were quite similar. Now, there's no question about
who got here first. As you can see, Jamestown was founded in 1607, but it wasn't too much later that
the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and then they were followed by a much larger group
of Puritans, who landed at Boston and founded Massachusetts Bay in 1630.

So let's talk about Puritans. Puritans started in England. Puritans hoped that they could purify the
Church of England (the Anglican Church was very similar to the Catholic Church, except that instead
of being headed by the Pope, the Church of England was led by the king) from its many Catholic
influences. So that's where Puritan comes from, purify, and by this, they meant that there were too
many rituals, too much pomp and circumstance, and not enough focus on the Bible itself. So they kind
of wanted to strip away a lot of the fanciness of the Church of England. In the 1620s, the Puritans
began to face more persecution in England. If you're casting doubt on the church, you are then
casting doubt on the king and so the Puritans did not make themselves very popular in England and
sensing that they might be in trouble, many Puritans began to emigrate to the new world. They'd seen
lots of tracts about Virginia and how one could make a new life there and they thought that perhaps,
that they could set an example of what a righteous church and a righteous society would look like,
because they believed that the church and the society of England were becoming much too corrupt,
much too divorced from the principles of the Bible.

So in 1620, one group of Puritans set out for the new world and landed at Plymouth Rock and we
call them the Pilgrims, and then in 1630, a second group set out and they were just Puritans more
broadly. And over the course of the 1630s, about 14,000 Puritans emigrated from England to New
England, Massachusetts Bay, in what's called the great migration. So what was the difference between
these two groups, The Pilgrims and the Puritans? Well, the Pilgrims who arrived in 1620, they were
separatists and what that means is that they thought that the Church of England was so corrupt that
there was just no chance that they were going to be able to save it. So they wanted to separate from that
church altogether and live a completely separate life at Plymouth.But the group that came over in 1630,
the Puritans, they did not want to separate from the Church of England altogether. They wanted to
purify it and they hoped that by setting an example of a righteous society, they would actually convince
people back in England to adopt their ways, invite them back, and that all of England could become
like New England. Now, obviously the New England Puritans did not get their way, they were not
invited back to England to become the model of English society, but they did become the model of
society in Massachusetts Bay and New England, more generally, and I think a strong influence on
American culture, writ large.

So how did life in New England compare to life in Virginia? Well, a lot depended on the different
environment of the colony and the reasons that migrants came to New England. Because the
environment of New England was colder, the land was rockier, it was both a healthier place to live,
because tropical diseases couldn't flourish there the way that they could in the marshy areas of Virginia
and it was also the unsuitable place for large-scale plantation agriculture. So they couldn't grow the
kinds of crops that Virginia grew, like tobacco or even sugar in the West Indies. So that meant that in
New England, most of the industry was either family farming and fishing and also some trading, since
they were on the coast. And because most Puritans came over to help build this city upon a hill, they
came in family units, not as single men, like in Virginia, so there was a much more even ratio of men to
women. The families that came over tended to be well-off enough to pay their own passage across the
Atlantic, tended to be kind of middle-class, artisan types and so New England didn't have the kind of
influx of indentured servants that Virginia had, nor did it have an influx of enslaved Africans as
laborers, because most New Englanders were farmers and they were small farmers, so they relied on
their own family as labor.

So a major consequence of these motivations for emigrating and this environment, was that New
England society was relatively egalitarian. There were very few very wealthy landowners, like there
were in Virginia, and very few people who were completely at the bottom, like servants and enslaved
people. People who lived in Virginia had a life expectancy of up to 70 years, which was one of the
highest life expectancies in the world at this time and because reading the Bible so important to the
Puritans, New England also had one of the highest rates of literacy in the world at this time,
but for all of these positives, there were plenty of reasons why living in New England wasn't so much
fun. Most of them related to the strictness of the Congregational Church. Puritans canceled Christmas,
that they thought was too much of a pagan ritual and though you would think that their own experience
of religious intolerance in England would have led them to be more tolerant to dissidents, that was not
the case. Anyone who disagreed with a Puritan theology or leadership, was given the option to go
somewhere else or be executed. For example, Roger Williams, who questioned the Puritans' actions
toward Native Americans was expelled from Massachusetts Bay in 1636 and he went on to found the
colony of Rhode Island, where religious dissenters could find a place of refuge from Massachusetts
Bay, just as the people of Massachusetts Bay had found refuge from England.

Although the New England colonies differed from the Chesapeake colonies in their economies
and environments, both regions shared forms of government that were unusually democratic for
the time period, as well as a policy of excluding Native Americans from their societies.

Politics and native relations in the New England colonies

Another consequence of the unique environment and society of New England was that it was unusually
democratic for that era. Now, when the pilgrims first came over on the Mayflower, they agreed in what
was called the Mayflower Compact to kind of work together and hold each other in mutual esteem.
And some people say that this is one of the first founding documents showing democracy in the New
World.

New Englanders, like Virginians, were very far from the mother country and they had to fend for
themselves. So, English colonists learned to make decisions by themselves, 'cause asking for help from
across the ocean wasn't very easy and took a really long time. So, because England was so far away and
really not paying much attention to the American colonies at all, there was a tradition of self-
government among English colonists. But what was different about democracy in New England than
democracy in Virginia was that most people in New England were middle class. They were small
farmers. Most people were about the same social station and that meant that they were used to
having about the same amount of political power. So, in New England, most towns had town
meetings where the men of the town would gather to solve local problems. Now, this was, of course, a
very limited democracy where only white men have a say, but for the era of the 1600s, it was very
democratic indeed.

For all the ways that New England and Virginia were very different, there was one way in which they
were virtually identical and that was their treatment of Native Americans. New Englanders originally
cooperated with local Algonquian tribes like the Wampanoags or Narragansett Indians. But as English
demands for more land and more food began to disrupt Native ways of life, relationships soured and
cultural misunderstandings between the two groups soon led to outright war. When English settlers
made treaties with Native Americans asking for land, Native Americans thought that they were asking
for the rights to hunt on that land, not the rights to fence in that land and not allow Native Americans
on it. So, because English ideas of property did not align with Native ideas of property, soon, when
Native Americans went to hunt on their traditional lands, they found the English prosecuting them as
intruders. And because Algonquians practiced Three Sisters farming where corn, beans, and squash
were grown together, English people, who separated all their crops, didn't recognize that those fields
were actually Native agriculture and allowed their cattle and pigs to roam through them, destroying
Native crops. With so much pressure on their source of food, Native people began to lash out at English
people who thought of themselves as the victims of senseless Indian attacks.

By 1675, many tribes in the area decided to work together to oust the English led by a man named
Metacom. So, in 1675, Metacom and other groups began to attack English villages. But in 1676, the
English recruited Indian allies of their own and turned the tide, so that by the end of 1676, about 3,000
Native Americans had died to about 1,000 English. And those that were remaining, the English either
executed or sold into slavery. Metacom's war, like the Anglo-Powhatan Wars in Virginia, really
marked the end of Native American resistance to English colonization on the east coast. Survivors fled
further inland or north and joined other tribes that continued to resist the English for many decades to
come.

there are three real differences between New England and the Chesapeake, and two real
similarities. Now, one thing that was really different between them was just their environment.
Another major difference between the two regions was who came to each of these places and why. In
New England, settlers came for religious freedom for the most part. So, consequently, they were
middle class families who came as a family unit. They had a lot more women in New England. In the
Chesapeake, by contrast, most settlers were single men who were coming to seek their fortune, either
white men, often as indentured servants, or enslaved Africans who were forced to migrate to the
Chesapeake Bay to labor in tobacco plantations. So, there were fewer women and the kind of rate of
population growth really only depended on more and more people immigrating as the unhealthy
environment led to quite a bit of death from tropical disease. The last major difference I see is in the
labor systems of each of these regions and the kinds of class systems that they generated. In the
Chesapeake Bay, there was a great disparity of wealth. In comparison, people in New England had a
general equality of wealth, meaning that most people were small farmers getting by comfortably.

In both of these regions, local government was unusually democratic for the era. And although most of
these democratic institutions were dominated by elites, these elected assemblies were still considerably
more democratic than the monarchy of England. And the last way that New England and the
Chesapeake were quite similar to each other were in their attitudes toward Native Americans.

The Middle colonies
These colonies that were here kind of on the center of the eastern seaboard, south of Massachusetts and
north of the Southern Colonies of Virginia, particularly Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and this
little, tiny purple colony right here, Delaware. Now what's unique about the Middle Colonies compared
to the northern or southern colonies is not just that they were kind of in a central location, but also that
they were proprietary colonies, which means that they were the property of individual owners. So
unlike Jamestown, for example, which was founded by a company, the Virginia Company, the colony
of Pennsylvania was founded by one man, William Penn, who was granted his land by the king of
England in exchange for a debt that the king had owed his father.

So in the early years of these proprietary colonies, they were kind of the playgrounds of the people who
owned them. So let's look at the colony of Pennsylvania as an example. So Pennsylvania was founded
by William Penn, and Penn was a English aristocrat from a very good family who'd converted to the
Quaker religion. Like the Puritans, Quakers faced religious persecution in England because they did not
follow the Church of England. But in addition to the Quakers' strange ideas about religion, they also
had some strange ideas for the time period about social status. Quakers believed that all people had the
light of God in them and therefore were more or less equal in stature. So when William Penn converted
to the Quaker faith, Penn had a really rough time of it. So he came upon an idea that perhaps he could
make a haven for Quakers and for religious dissenters more broadly in the New World. So he
negotiated with the king who owed his father a debt, and in exchange for this debt, the king granted
Penn land in North America, which was named Pennsylvania. And Penn decided to extend his religious
tolerance not just to Quakers, but really to all people. All Protestants, no matter what their particular
sect, could have citizenship, run for office, vote, and Catholics and even Jews were welcome in
Pennsylvania, although they did not have the right to vote or hold office. This was incredibly radical
for the time period. Penn advertised for his new colony and particularly hoped that industrious people,
people with skills like carpentry or blacksmithing, would come to Pennsylvania and make it a
prosperous colony. And they did. The ease of getting citizenship, the religious tolerance, and the
plentiful and cheap land of Pennsylvania drew many settlers to the colony such that its principal city,
Philadelphia, was the largest city in North America before the Revolution, with about 40,000
inhabitants.

Because Quakers were pacifists, that is they did not believe in violence or war, they even lived
peacefully with Native Americans in the early years of Pennsylvania settlement. But as more
immigrants of different faiths came to Pennsylvania and began pushing west, that short era of peaceful
co-habitation ended.

Likewise, because Quakers believed in the innate equality of all human beings, they were not fond of
slavery. The environment in the Middle Colonies was not so cold as it was in the north, not so hot as it
was in the south, it was kind of middling. And so it was a very good place for farming, particularly
cereal crops like wheat. Pennsylvania had a lot of wood, so it was also a good place for timber. And the
excellent ports at Philadelphia and New York City made it an excellent place for trade. Because it was
such a good place to grow food, the Middle Colonies got the nickname the Breadbasket Colonies.

Since the soil was good, your average farmer owned more land than a New England farmer, but not as
much as a Virginia farmer who would've had many acres to grow tobacco. So much like the
environment, the farms in the Middle Colonies were middling in size. The Middle Colonies had a little
bit of both, unlike the Chesapeake and southern economies which were strongly agrarian. And unlike
the New England colonies who began manufacturing quite early.

Likewise, when it comes to the distribution of wealth in the Middle Colonies, There were plenty of
middling farmers, many indentured servants, and a handful of people who became quite wealthy. So
the Middle Colonies had a mixed economy of industry and farming, and a fairly balanced class
structure with people at many different levels, putting them smack dab in the middle.

But for all of the ways that the Middle Colonies were middling, there were also a few ways that they
were quite extraordinary. Well, we've already mentioned that the Middle Colonies had a level of
religious freedom that was virtually unmatched anywhere else in the world. The other extraordinary
aspect of these middle colonies was just the sheer amount of ethnic diversity there was. By the time of
the American Revolution, less than half, only about 49% of inhabitants were from England or had an
English background. The rest were German, French, Dutch, Scotch-Irish. And just a few Africans as
there was relatively little slavery. The people of the Middle Colonies spoke many languages, practiced
many faiths, and had a strong possibility of upward mobility economically since farms and businesses
prospered and the Middle Colonies grew rapidly in population.

The Navigation Acts
British law stipulated that the American colonies could only trade with the mother country. 

Overview

 The Navigation Acts were a series of laws passed by the British Parliament that imposed
restrictions on colonial trade.
 British economic policy was based on mercantilism, which aimed to use the American colonies
to bolster British state power and finances.
 The Navigation Acts inflamed the hostilities of American colonists and proved a significant
contributing event leading up to the revolution.

With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, the North American colonies’ supply lines to
metropolitan Britain were disrupted. This led the colonies to establish trade relations with the Dutch
and the French in order to encourage the flow of manufactured goods into North America. As the
English Civil War drew to a close, the British sought to reimpose control over colonial trade relations.
In 1651, the British Parliament, in the first of what became known as the Navigation Acts, declared that
only English ships would be allowed to bring goods into England, and that the North American
colonies could only export its commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, to England. This effectively
prevented the colonies from trading with other European countries.

The Enlightenment
The ideas of the Enlightenment, which emphasized science and reason over faith and superstition,
strongly influenced the American colonies in the eighteenth century. 

Overview

 The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized
reason and science.
 The British colonist Benjamin Franklin gained fame on both sides of the Atlantic as a printer,
publisher, and scientist. He embodied Enlightenment ideals in the British Atlantic with his
scientific experiments and philanthropic endeavors.
 Enlightenment principles guided the founding of the colony of Georgia, but those principles
failed to stand up to the realities of colonial life.

The Enlightenment

Using the power of the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Voltaire
questioned accepted knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation, and religious
tolerance throughout Europe and the Americas.
Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including rationalism, empiricism, progressivism,
and cosmopolitanism.
Rationalism is the idea that humans are capable of using their faculty of reason to gain knowledge.
This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing idea that people needed to rely on scripture or church
authorities for knowledge.
Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world.
Progressivism is the belief that through their powers of reason and observation, humans can make
unlimited, linear progress over time; this belief was especially important as a response to the carnage
and upheaval of the English Civil Wars in the 17th century.
Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’ view of themselves as actively engaged
citizens of the world as opposed to provincial and close-minded individuals. In all, Enlightenment
thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.

The founding of Georgia

The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep. In the 1730s, it even prompted the
founding of a new colony.
Having witnessed the terrible conditions of debtors’ prison, as well as the results of releasing penniless
debtors onto the streets of London, James Oglethorpe—a member of Parliament and advocate of
social reform—petitioned King George II for a charter to start a new colony.
George II, understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony standing as a buffer between South
Carolina and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and 20 like-minded proprietors in
1732.
Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age of Reason. He saw Georgia as a place
for England’s “worthy poor” to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave each male immigrant 50
acres of land, tools, and a year’s worth of supplies. In Savannah, the Oglethorpe Plan provided for a
utopia: “an agrarian model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal.”
Oglethorpe’s vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. However, colonists who relocated
from other colonies—especially South Carolina—disregarded these prohibitions. Despite its
proprietors’ early vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of slavery, by the 1750s,
Georgia was producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by enslaved people.

The Great Awakening
In the 1700s, a European philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason,
was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies. Enlightenment thinkers
emphasized a scientific and logical view of the world, while downplaying religion.

In many ways, religion was becoming more formal and less personal during this time, which led to
lower church attendance. Christians were feeling complacent with their methods of worship, and some
were disillusioned with how wealth and rationalism were dominating culture. Many began to crave a
return to religious piety.

The stage was set for a renewal of faith, and in the late 1720s, a revival began to take root as preachers
altered their messages and reemphasized concepts of Calvinism. (Calvinism is a theology that was
introduced by John Calvin in the 16th century that stressed the importance of scripture, faith,
predestination and the grace of God.)

Some of the major themes included:

• All people are born sinners

• Sin without salvation will send a person to hell

• All people can be saved if they confess their sins to God, seek forgiveness and accept God’s
grace

• All people can have a direct and emotional connection with God

• Religion shouldn’t be formal and institutionalized, but rather casual and personal

The consumer revolution
Shared literature, style, and consumption linked the British colonies with the home country. 

Overview

 The development of the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth centuries allowed American
colonists access to more British goods than ever before.
 The buying habits of both commoners and the rising colonial gentry fueled the consumer
revolution, creating even stronger ties with Great Britain by means of a shared community of
taste and ideas.

The colonial gentry

British Americans’ reliance on indentured servitude and slavery to meet the demand for colonial labor
helped give rise to a wealthy colonial class—the gentry—in the Chesapeake tobacco colonies and
elsewhere. To be genteel—a member of the gentry—meant to be refined, free of all rudeness. The
British American gentry modeled themselves on the English aristocracy, who embodied the ideal of
refinement and gentility.

The consumer revolution

One of the ways in which the gentry set themselves apart from others was through their purchase,
consumption, and display of goods. An increased supply of consumer goods from England that became
available in the eighteenth century led to a phenomenon called the consumer revolution.
Consumer products linked the colonies to Great Britain in real and tangible ways. Indeed, along with
the colonial gentry, ordinary settlers in the colonies also participated in the frenzy of consumer
spending on goods from Great Britain. Tea, for example, came to be regarded as the drink of the British
Empire, with or without fashionable tea sets.

Newspapers, pamphlets and novels in the consumer revolution

The consumer revolution also made printed materials more widely available. Before 1680, for instance,
no newspapers had been printed in colonial America. In the eighteenth century, however, a flood of
journals, books, pamphlets, and other publications became available to readers on both sides of the
Atlantic. This shared trove of printed matter linked members of the British Empire by creating a
community of shared tastes and ideas.
Cato’s Letters, by Englishmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, was one popular series of 144
pamphlets. These Whig circulars were published between 1720 and 1723 and emphasized the glory of
England, especially its commitment to liberty. However, the pamphlets cautioned readers to be ever
vigilant and on the lookout for attacks upon that liberty. Indeed, Cato’s Letters suggested that there
were constant efforts to undermine and destroy liberty.
Another very popular publication was the English gentlemen’s magazine the Spectator, published
between 1711 and 1714. In each issue, “Mr. Spectator” observed and commented on the world around
him. What made the Spectator so wildly popular was its style; the essays were meant to persuade and
to cultivate among readers a refined set of behaviors, rejecting deceit and intolerance and focusing
instead on the polishing of genteel taste and manners.
Novels, a new type of literature, made their first appearance in the 18th century and proved very
popular in the British Atlantic. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela:
Or, Virtue Rewarded found large and receptive audiences. Reading also allowed female readers the
opportunity to interpret what they read without depending on a male authority to tell them what to
think. Few women beyond the colonial gentry, however, had access to novels.