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History
SEVENTH EDITION
AMERICA
George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi
A NARRATIVE HISTORY
Volume One
� AMERICA
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D E TA I L O F E N G R AV I N G B A S E D O N
T H E C H A S M O F T H E C O L O R A D O
B Y T H O M A S M O R A N
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AMERICA
Seventh Edition
Volume One
G E O R G E B R O W N T I N DA L L
DAV I D E M O R Y S H I
W .
W .
N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y .
N E W Y O R K .
L O N D O N
A N A R R A T I V E H I S T O R Y
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FO R BRU C E A N D SU S A N A N D F O R BL A I R
FO R JA S O N A N D JE S S I C A
W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The Nortons soon expanded their program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, col- lege, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.
Copyright © 2007, 2004, 1999, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
Composition by TechBooks Manufacturing by Quebecor, Taunton
Book design by Antonina Krass Editor: Karl Bakeman
Manuscript editor: Abigail Winograd Project editor: Lory A. Frenkel
Director of Manufacturing, College: Roy Tedoff Editorial assistant: Rebecca Arata
Cartographer: CARTO-GRAPHICS/Alice Thiede and William Thiede
Acknowledgments and copyrights continue on page A104, which serves as a continuation of the copyright page.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the one-volume edition as follows:
Tindall, George Brown. America : a narrative history / George Brown Tindall,
David E. Shi.—7th ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92820-4 ISBN 10: 0-393-11087-7 1. United States—History. I. Shi, David E. II. Title.
E178.1 .T55 2006 2006047300 973—dc22
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92732-0 ISBN 10: 0-393-11087-7
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
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� C O N T E N T S
List of Maps • xv
Preface • xix
Part One / A N E W W O R L D
1 | THE COLLISION OF CULTURES 5
PRE-COLUMBIAN INDIAN CIVILIZATIONS 7 • EUROPEAN VISIONS OF
AMERICA 12 • THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 13 • THE VOYAGES OF
COLUMBUS 15 • THE GREAT BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE 18
• PROFESSIONAL EXPLORERS 22 • THE SPANISH EMPIRE 23 •
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 35 • CHALLENGES TO THE SPANISH EMPIRE 38
• FURTHER READING 43
2 | BRITAIN AND ITS COLONIES 45
THE ENGLISH BACKGROUND 46 • SETTLING THE CHESAPEAKE 50
• SETTLING NEW ENGLAND 61 • INDIANS IN NEW ENGLAND 72
• THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA 76 • SETTLING THE
CAROLINAS 77 • SETTLING THE MIDDLE COLONIES AND GEORGIA 83
• THRIVING COLONIES 94 • FURTHER READING 96
ix
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3 | COLONIAL WAYS OF LIFE 98
THE SHAPE OF EARLY AMERICA 99 • SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE
SOUTHERN COLONIES 107 • SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN NEW
ENGLAND 118 • SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES 131
• COLONIAL CITIES 134 • THE ENLIGHTENMENT 138 • THE GREAT
AWAKENING 141 • FURTHER READING 145
4 | THE IMPERIAL PERSPECTIVE 147
ENGLISH ADMINISTRATION OF THE COLONIES 148 • THE HABIT OF SELF-
GOVERNMENT 153 • TROUBLED NEIGHBORS 157 • THE COLONIAL
WARS 162 • FURTHER READING 173
5 | FROM EMPIRE TO INDEPENDENCE 174
THE HERITAGE OF WAR 175 • BRITISH POLITICS 176 • WESTERN LANDS 177
• GRENVILLE AND THE STAMP ACT 177 • FANNING THE FLAMES 184
• DISCONTENT ON THE FRONTIER 188 • A WORSENING CRISIS 189
• SHIFTING AUTHORITY 195 • INDEPENDENCE 202
• FURTHER READING 206
Part Two / B U I L D I N G A N A T I O N
6 | THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 213
1776: WASHINGTON’S NARROW ESCAPE 214 • AMERICAN SOCIETY AT
WAR 218 • 1777: SETBACKS FOR THE BRITISH 221 • 1778: BOTH SIDES
REGROUP 225 • THE WAR IN THE SOUTH 229 • NEGOTIATIONS 234
• THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION 235 • THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 239
• THE EMERGENCE OF AN AMERICAN CULTURE 246 • FURTHER READING 248
x • Contents
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7 | SHAPING A FEDERAL UNION 249
THE CONFEDERATION 250 • ADOPTING THE CONSTITUTION 263
• FURTHER READING 277
8 | THE FEDERALIST ERA 279
A NEW NATION 280 • HAMILTON’S VISION 285 • THE REPUBLICAN
ALTERNATIVE 293 • CRISES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC 295 • SETTLEMENT OF
NEW LAND 303 • TRANSFER OF POWER 307 • THE ADAMS YEARS 308
• FURTHER READING 319
9 | THE EARLY REPUBLIC 320
JEFFERSONIAN SIMPLICITY 322 • JEFFERSON IN OFFICE 324
• DIVISIONS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY 333 • WAR IN EUROPE 334
• THE WAR OF 1812 339 • FURTHER READING 351
Part Three / A N E X P A N S I V E N A T I O N
10 | NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM 357
ECONOMIC NATIONALISM 358 • “GOOD FEELINGS” 362 • CRISES
AND COMPROMISES 367 • JUDICIAL NATIONALISM 371 • NATIONALIST
DIPLOMACY 374 • ONE-PARTY POLITICS 376 • FURTHER READING 384
11 | THE JACKSONIAN IMPULSE 385
SETTING THE STAGE 387 • NULLIFICATION 389 • JACKSON’S INDIAN
POLICY 396 • THE BANK CONTROVERSY 400 • VAN BUREN AND THE NEW
PARTY SYSTEM 406 • ASSESSING THE JACKSON YEARS 412 • FURTHER
READING 414
Contents • xi
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12 | THE DYNAMICS OF GROWTH 416
AGRICULTURE AND THE NATIONAL ECONOMY 417 • TRANSPORTATION
AND THE NATIONAL ECONOMY 421 • A COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION 430
• THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 432 • THE POPULAR CULTURE 439
• IMMIGRATION 443 • ORGANIZED LABOR 449 • THE RISE OF THE
PROFESSIONS 452 • JACKSONIAN INEQUALITY 455
• FURTHER READING 456
13 | AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: RELIGION, ROMANTICISM, AND REFORM 458
RATIONAL RELIGION 459 • THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING 460
• ROMANTICISM IN AMERICA 466 • THE FLOWERING OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE 470 • EDUCATION 475 • ANTEBELLUM REFORM 479
• FURTHER READING 487
14 | MANIFEST DESTINY 489
THE TYLER YEARS 490 • THE WESTERN FRONTIER 492 • MOVING
WEST 501 • ANNEXING TEXAS 507 • POLK’S PRESIDENCY 511
• THE MEXICAN WAR 515 • FURTHER READING 524
Part Four / A H O U S E D I V I D E D
15 | THE OLD SOUTH 531
THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF THE OLD SOUTH 532 • WHITE SOCIETY IN THE
SOUTH 538 • BLACK SOCIETY IN THE SOUTH 543 • THE CULTURE OF THE
SOUTHERN FRONTIER 554 • ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENTS 556
• FURTHER READING 563
16 | THE CRISIS OF UNION 565
SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES 566 • THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 572
• FOREIGN ADVENTURES 580 • THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA CRISIS 581
xii • Contents
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• THE DEEPENING SECTIONAL CRISIS 591 • THE CENTER COMES
APART 599 • FURTHER READING 606
17 | THE WAR OF THE UNION 607
THE END OF THE WAITING GAME 608 • THE BALANCE OF FORCE 612
• THE WAR’S EARLY COURSE 614 • EMANCIPATION 629
• REACTIONS TO EMANCIPATION 630 • BLACKS IN THE MILITARY 632
• WOMEN AND THE WAR 634 • GOVERNMENT DURING THE WAR 635
• THE FALTERING CONFEDERACY 640 • THE CONFEDERACY’S DEFEAT 645
• A MODERN WAR 655 • FURTHER READING 657
18 | RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH 659
THE WAR’S AFTERMATH 659 • THE BATTLE OVER RECONSTRUCTION 664
• RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTH 673 • THE RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH 679
• THE GRANT YEARS 686 • FURTHER READING 698
GLOSSARY A1
APPENDIX A43
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE A45 • ARTICLES OF
CONFEDERATION A50 • THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A58
• PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS A80 • ADMISSION OF STATES A88
• POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES A89 • IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED
STATES, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2005 A90 • IMMIGRATION BY REGION AND
SELECTED COUNTRY OF LAST RESIDENCE, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2004 A92
• PRESIDENTS, VICE-PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE A99
CREDITS A104
INDEX A108
Contents • xiii
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� M A P S
The First Migration 6
Pre-Columbian Civilizations in Middle
and South America 8
Pre-Columbian Civilizations in North America 10
Norse Discoveries 12
Columbus’s Voyages 17
Spanish and Portuguese Explorations 23
Spanish Explorations of the Mainland 30
English, French, and Dutch Explorations 39
Land Grants to the Virginia Company 53
Early Virginia and Maryland 61
Early New England Settlements 64
The West Indies, 1600–1800 67
Early Settlements in the South 79
The Middle Colonies 88
European Settlements and Indian Tribes in Early America 92–93
The African Slave Trade, 1500–1800 113
Atlantic Trade Routes 124
Major Immigrant Groups in Colonial America 133
The French in North America 160
Major Campaigns of the French and Indian War 164
North America, 1713 170
North America, 1763 171
Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775 196
Major Campaigns in New York and New Jersey, 1776–1777 216
xv
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Major Campaigns in New York and Pennsylvania, 1777 222
Western Campaigns, 1776–1779 227
Major Campaigns in the South, 1778–1781 231
Yorktown, 1781 231
North America, 1783 236
Western Land Cessions, 1781–1802 253
The Old Northwest, 1785 254
The Vote on the Constitution, 1787–1790 275
Treaty of Greenville, 1795 300
Pinckney’s Treaty, 1795 303
The Election of 1800 317
Explorations of the Louisiana Purchase, 1804–1807 330
Major Northern Campaigns of the War of 1812 343
Major Southern Campaigns of the War of 1812 345
The National Road, 1811–1838 361
Boundary Treaties, 1818–1819 364
The Missouri Compromise, 1820 369
The Election of 1828 383
Indian Removal, 1820–1840 398
The Election of 1840 412
Population Density, 1820 420
Population Density, 1860 421
Transportation West, about 1840 422–423
The Growth of Railroads, 1850 428
The Growth of Railroads, 1860 429
The Growth of Industry in the 1840s 437
The Growth of Cities, 1820 440
The Growth of Cities, 1860 441
The Mormon Trek, 1830–1851 466
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 1842 492
Wagon Trails West 503
The Election of 1844 512
The Oregon Dispute, 1818–1846 516
Major Campaigns of the Mexican War 521
Cotton Production, 1821 534
Population Growth and Cotton Production, 1821–1859 535
The Slave Population, 1820 546
The Slave Population, 1860 547
xvi • Maps
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The Compromise of 1850 576
The Gadsden Purchase, 1853 582
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 584
The Election of 1856 590
The Election of 1860 603
Secession, 1860–1861 610
The First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861 615
Campaigns in the West, February–April 1862 621
The Peninsular Campaign, 1862 625
Campaigns in Virginia and Maryland, 1862 626
The Vicksburg Campaign, 1863 642
Campaigns in the East, 1863 643
Grant in Virginia, 1864–1865 649
Sherman’s Campaigns, 1864–1865 652
Reconstruction, 1865–1877 685
The Election of 1876 696
Maps • xvii
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� P R E F A C E
Just as history is never complete, neither is a historical textbook. We have
learned much from the responses of readers and instructors to the first six
editions of America: A Narrative History. Perhaps the most important and
reassuring lesson is that our original intention has proved valid: to provide a
compelling narrative history of the American experience, a narrative ani-
mated by human characters, informed by analysis and social texture, and
guided by the unfolding of events. Readers have also endorsed the book’s
distinctive size and format. America is designed to be read and to carry a
moderate price. While the book retains its classic look, America sports a new
color design for the Seventh Edition. We have added new eye-catching maps
and included new art in full color. Despite these changes, we have not raised
the price between the Sixth and the Seventh Editions.
As in previous revisions of America, we have adopted an overarching theme
that informs many of the new sections we introduce throughout the Seventh
Edition. In previous editions we have traced such broad-ranging themes as
immigration, the frontier and the West, popular culture, and work. In each
case we blend our discussions of the selected theme into the narrative, where
they reside through succeeding editions.
The Seventh Edition of America highlights environmental history, a rela-
tively new field that examines how people have shaped—and been shaped
by—the natural world. Geographic features, weather, plants, animals, and
diseases are important elements of environmental history. Environmental
historians study how environments have changed as a result of natural
processes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires,
droughts, floods, and climatic changes. They also study how societies have
used and abused their natural environment through economic activities such
as hunting, farming, logging and mining, manufacturing, building dams, and
xix
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irrigation. Equally interesting is how different societies over time have per-
ceived nature, as reflected in their religion, art, literature, and popular cul-
ture, and how they have reshaped nature according to those perceptions
through the creation of parks, preserves, and designed landscapes. Finally,
another major area of inquiry among environmental historians centers on
the development of laws and regulations to govern the use of nature and
maintain the quality of the natural environment.
Some of the new additions to the Seventh Edition related to environmen-
tal history are listed below.
• Chapter 1 includes discussions of the transmission of deadly infectious
diseases from Europe to the New World and the ecological and social im-
pact of the arrival of horses on the Great Plains.
• Chapter 3 examines the ways in which European livestock reshaped
the New World environment and complicated relations with Native
Americans.
• Chapters 5 and 6 describe the effects of smallpox on the American armies
during the Revolution.
• Chapter 12 details the impact of early industrialization on the environment.
• Chapter 17 describes the impact of the Civil War on the southern land-
scape.
• Chapter 19 includes new material related to the environmental impact of
the sharecrop-tenant farm system in the South after the Civil War, indus-
trial mining in the Far West, and the demise of the buffalo on the Great
Plains.
• Chapter 21 describes the dramatic rise of large cities after the Civil War
and the distinctive aspects of the urban environment.
• Chapter 24 surveys the key role played by sportsmen in the emergence of
the conservation movement during the late nineteenth century and de-
tails Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the nation’s natural re-
sources.
• Chapter 28 surveys the environmental and human effects of the “dust
bowl” during the Great Depression.
• Chapter 37 discusses President George W. Bush’s controversial environ-
mental policies and describes the devastation in Mississippi and
Louisiana wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
xx • Preface
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Beyond these explorations of environmental history we have introduced
other new material throughout the Seventh Edition. Fresh insights from im-
portant new scholarly works have been incorporated, and we feel confident
that the book provides students with an excellent introduction to the Amer-
ican experience.
To enhance the pedagogical features of the text, we have added Focus
Questions at the beginning of each chapter. Students can use these review
tools to remind themselves of the key themes and central issues in the chap-
ters. These questions are also available online as quizzes, the results of which
students can e-mail to their instructors. In addition, the maps feature new
Enhanced Captions designed to encourage students to think analytically
about the relationship between geography and American history.
We have also revised the outstanding ancillary package that supplements
the text. For the Record: A Documentary History of America, Third Edition, by
David E. Shi and Holly A. Mayer (Duquesne University), is a rich resource
with over 300 primary source readings from diaries, journals, newspaper ar-
ticles, speeches, government documents, and novels. The Study Guide, by
Charles Eagles (University of Mississippi), is another valuable resource. This
edition contains chapter outlines, learning objectives, timelines, expanded
vocabulary exercises, and many new short-answer and essay questions.
America: A Narrative History Study Space is an online collection of tools for
review and research. It includes chapter summaries, review questions and
quizzes, interactive map exercises, timelines, and research modules, many
new to this edition. Norton Media Library is a CD-ROM slide and text re-
source that includes images from the text, four-color maps, additional
images from the Library of Congress archives, and audio files of significant
historical speeches. Finally, the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank, by Mark
Goldman (Tallahassee Community College) and Steven Davis (Kingwood
College) includes a test bank of short-answer and essay questions, as well as
detailed chapter outlines, lecture suggestions, and bibliographies.
In preparing the Seventh Edition, we have benefited from the insights and
suggestions of many people. Some of these insights have come from student
readers of the text and we encourage such feedback. Among the scholars and
survey instructors who offered us their comments and suggestions are: James
Lindgren (SUNY Plattsburgh), Joe Kudless (Raritan Valley Community Col-
lege), Anthony Quiroz (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi), Steve Davis
(Kingwood College), Mark Fiege (Colorado State University), David Head
(John Tyler Community College), Hutch Johnson (Gordon College), Charles
Preface • xxi
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Eagles (University of Mississippi), Christina White and Eddie Weller at the
South campus of San Jacinto College, Blanche Brick, Cathy Lively, Stephen
Kirkpatrick, Patrick Johnson, Thomas Stephens, and others at the Bryan
Campus of Blinn College, Evelyn Mangie (University of South Florida),
Michael McConnell (University of Alabama – Birmingham), Alan Lessoff
(Illinois State University), Joseph Cullon (Dartmouth University), Keith Bo-
hannon (University of West Georgia), Tim Heinrichs (Bellevue Community
College), Mary Ann Heiss (Kent State University), Edmund Wehrle (Eastern
Illinois University), Adam Howard (University of Florida), David Parker
(Kennesaw State University), Barrett Esworthy (Jamestown Community Col-
lege), Samantha Barbas (Chapman University), Jason Newman (Cosumnes
River College), Paul Cimbala (Fordham University), Dean Fafoutis (Salisbury
University), Thomas Schilz (Miramar Community College), Richard Frucht
(Northwest Missouri State University), James Vlasich (Southern Utah Uni-
versity), Michael Egan (Washington State University), Robert Goldberg (Uni-
versity of Utah), Jason Lantzer (Indiana University), and Beth Kreydatus
(College of William & Mary). Our special thanks go Tom Pearcy (Slippery
Rock University) for all of his work on the timelines. Once again, we thank
our friends at W. W. Norton, especially Steve Forman, Steve Hoge, Karl Bake-
man, Neil Hoos, Lory Frenkel, Roy Tedoff, Dan Jost, Rebecca Arata, and Matt
Arnold, for their care and attention along the way.
—George B. Tindall —David E. Shi
xxii • Preface
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Part One
� A N E W W O R L D
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History is filled with ironies. Luck and accident often shape humanaffairs. Long before Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World in his effort to find a passage to Asia, the tribal peoples he mis- labeled Indians had occupied and shaped the lands of the Western Hemi- sphere. The first people to settle the New World were nomadic hunters and gatherers who had migrated from northeastern Asia during the last glacial advance of the Ice Age, nearly 20,000 years ago. By the end of the fifteenth century, when Columbus began his voyage west, there were mil- lions of Native Americans living in the Western Hemisphere. Over the centuries they had developed diverse and often highly sophisticated soci- eties, some rooted in agriculture, others in trade or imperial conquest.
The Native American cultures were, of course, profoundly affected by the arrival of peoples from Europe and Africa. Indians were exploited, enslaved, displaced, and exterminated. Yet this conventional tale of conquest over- simplifies the complex process by which Indians, Europeans, and Africans interacted. The Indians were more than passive victims; they were also trading partners and rivals of the transatlantic newcomers. They became enemies and allies, neighbors and advisers, converts and spouses. As such they fully participated in the creation of the new society known as America.
The Europeans who risked their lives to settle in the New World were themselves quite varied. Young and old, men and women, they came from Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and the various German states. A variety of motives inspired them to under- take the often harrowing transatlantic voyage. Some were adventurers and fortune seekers eager to find gold and spices. Others were fervent Christians determined to create kingdoms of God in the New World. Still others were convicts, debtors, indentured servants, or political or religious exiles. Many were simply seeking a piece of land, higher wages, and greater economic opportunity. A settler in Pennsylvania noted that “poor people (both men and women) of all kinds can here get three times the wages for their labour than they can in England or Wales.”
Yet such enticements were not sufficient to attract enough workers to keep up with the rapidly expanding colonial economies. So the Euro- peans began to force Indians to work for them. But there were never enough laborers to meet the unceasing demand. Moreover, captive Indians often escaped or were so rebellious that several colonies banned their use. The Massachusetts legislature did so because it claimed that Indians were of such “a malicious, surly and revengeful spirit; rude and insolent in their behavior, and very ungovernable.”
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Beginning early in the seventeenth century more and more colonists turned to the African slave trade for their labor needs. In 1619 white traders began transporting captured Africans to the English colonies. This development would transform American society in ways that no one at the time envisioned. Few Europeans during the colonial era saw the contradiction between the New World’s promise of individual free- dom and the expanding institution of race-based slavery. Nor did they reckon with the problems associated with introducing into the new society people they considered alien and unassimilable.
The intermingling of peoples, cultures, and ecosystems from the continents of Africa, Europe, and North America gave colonial American society its distinctive vitality and variety. In turn, the diversity of the environment and the climate led to the creation of quite different economies and patterns of living in the various re- gions of North America. As the original settlements grew into pros- perous and populous colonies, the transplanted Europeans had to fashion social institutions and political systems to manage growth and control tensions.
At the same time, imperial rivalries among the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch produced numerous intrigues and costly wars. The monarchs of Europe struggled to manage and exploit this fluid and often volatile colo- nial society. Many of the colonists, they discovered, had brought with them to the New World a feisty inde- pendence that led them to re- sent government interference in their affairs. A British official in North Carolina reported that the residents of the Piedmont region were “without any Law or Order. Impudence is so very high [among them], as to be past bearing.” As long as the reins of imperial control were loosely applied, the two parties maintained an uneasy partner- ship. But as the British authori- ties tightened their control dur- ing the mid–eighteenth century, they met resistance, which be- came revolt and culminated in revolution.
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The “New World” discovered by Christopher Columbus wasin fact home to civilizations thousands of years old. Until re-cently archaeologists had long assumed that the first humans in the Western Hemisphere were Siberians who some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago had crossed the Bering Strait on a land bridge to Alaska made accessible by receding waters during the last Ice Age. These nomadic hunters and their descendants had then drifted south in pursuit of grazing herds of large mammals: mammoths, musk oxen, bison, and woolly rhinoceroses. Over the next 500 years these people had fanned out in small bands across the entire hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Recent archaeological discoveries in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Chile, however, suggest that ancient humans may have arrived by sea much earlier (perhaps 18,000 to 40,000 years ago) from various parts of Asia—and some may even have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from southwestern Europe.
T H E C O L L I S I O N
O F C U L T U R E S
1
F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S
• What civilizations existed in pre-Columbian America? What were their origins?
• What were the goals of the European voyages of discovery and of the explorers who probed the shorelines of America?
• What were the consequences of the exchanges and clashes that accompanied European contact with the plants, animals, and people of the New World?
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6 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
When did people first cross the Bering Sea? What evidence have archaeologists and anthropologists found from the lives of the first people in America? Why did they travel to North America?
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P R E - C O L U M B I A N I N D I A N C I V I L I Z AT I O N S
The first humans in North America discovered an immense continent with extraordinary climatic and environmental diversity. Coastal plains, broad grasslands, harsh deserts, and soaring mountain ranges generated dis- tinct environments, social structures, and cultural patterns. By the time Columbus happened upon the New World, the native peoples of North America had developed a diverse array of communities in which more than 400 languages were spoken. Yet despite the distances and dialects separating them, the Indian societies created extensive trading networks that helped spread ideas and innovations. Contrary to the romantic myth of early Indian civilizations living in perfect harmony with nature and one another, the na- tive societies exerted great pressure on their environment and engaged in frequent warfare with one another.
E A R L Y C U LT U R E S After centuries of nomadic life, the ancient Indians settled in more permanent villages. Thousands of years after people first ap- peared in North America, climatic changes and extensive hunting had killed off the largest mammals. Global warming diminished grasslands and stimu- lated forest growth, which provided plants and small animals for human consumption. The ancient Indians adapted to the new environments by in- venting fiber snares, basketry, and mills for grinding nuts, and they domesticated the dog and the turkey. A new cultural stage arrived with the introduction of farming, fishing, and pottery making. Hunting now focused on faster and more elusive mammals: deer, antelope, elk, moose, and caribou. Already by about 5000 B.C., Indians of the Mexican highlands were consum- ing plant foods that became the staples of the New World: chiefly maize (corn), beans, and squash but also chili peppers, avocados, and pumpkins.
T H E M AYA S , A Z T E C S , C H I B C H A S , A N D I N C A S Between about 2000 and 1500 B.C., permanent farming towns appeared in Mexico. The more settled life in turn provided time for the cultivation of religion, crafts, art, science, administration—and warfare. From about A.D. 300 to 900, Mid- dle America (Mesoamerica) developed great city centers complete with gi- gantic pyramids, temples, and palaces, all supported by the surrounding peasant villages. Moreover, the Mayas developed enough mathematics and astronomy to devise a calendar more accurate than the one the Europeans were using at the time of Columbus.
In about A.D. 900 the complex Mayan culture collapsed. The Mayas had overexploited the rain forest upon whose fragile ecosystem they depended.
Pre-Columbian Indian Civilizations • 7
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As an archaeologist has explained, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Deforestation led to hillside erosion and a catastrophic loss of farmland. Overpopulation added to the strain on Mayan society. Unrelenting civil wars erupted among the Mayas. Mayan war parties destroyed one another’s cities and took prisoners, who were then sacrificed to the gods in theatrical rituals. Whatever the reasons for the weakening of Mayan society, it succumbed to the Toltecs, a warlike people who conquered most of the region in the tenth century. But around A.D. 1200 the Toltecs mysteriously withdrew.
8 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
A T L A N T I C
O C E A N
P A C I F I C
O C E A N SOUTH AMERICA
MIDDLE AMERICA
Tenochtitlán
Monte Alban
Teotihuacán
C A R I B B E A N S E A
G U L F O F M E X I C O
0 250
0 500 Kilometers250
500 Miles
CHIBCHAS
PRE-COLUMBIAN CIVILIZATIONS IN MIDDLE AND
SOUTH AMERICA
MEXICO
M A
Y A
S
A Z T E C S
IN C
A S
(Q U
E C
H
U A S )
A N
D E
S M
O U
N T
A I N
S
IS TH
M US
OF PANAMA
TOLTECS
What were the major pre-Columbian civilizations? What factors caused the demise of the Mayan civilization? When did the Aztecs build Tenochtitlán?
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The Aztecs arrived from the northwest to fill the vacuum, founded the city of Tenochtitlán (twenty-five miles north of what is now Mexico City) in 1325, and gradually expanded their control over central Mexico. When the Spanish invaded in 1519, the Aztec Empire under Montezuma II ruled over perhaps 5 million people—though estimates range as high as 20 million.
Farther south, in what is now Colombia, the Chibchas built a similar em- pire on a smaller scale. Still farther south the Quechuas (better known as the Incas, from the name for their ruler) controlled an empire that by the fif- teenth century stretched 1,000 miles along the Andes Mountains from Ecuador to Chile. It was crisscrossed by an elaborate system of roads and or- ganized under an autocratic government.
I N D I A N C U LT U R E S O F N O R T H A M E R I C A The Indians of the present-day United States developed three identifiable civilizations: the Adena-Hopewell culture of the Northeast (800 B.C.–A.D. 600), the Mississippian culture of the Southeast (A.D. 600–1500), and the Pueblo-Hohokam culture of the Southwest (400 B.C.–present). None of these developed as fully as the civilizations of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas to the south.
Pre-Columbian Indian Civilizations • 9
Mayan Society
A fresco depicting the social divisions of Mayan society. A Mayan lord, at the center, receives offerings.
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The Adena-Hopewell culture, centered in the Ohio River valley, left be- hind enormous earthworks and burial mounds—some of them elaborately shaped like great snakes, birds, or other animals. Evidence from the mounds suggests a complex social structure and a specialized division of labor. More- over, the Hopewell Indians developed an elaborate trade network that spanned the continent.
The Mississippian culture, centered in the Mississippi River valley, resem- bled the Mayan and Aztec societies in its intensive agriculture, substantial towns built around central plazas, temple mounds (vaguely resembling pyra- mids), and death cults, which involved human torture and sacrifice. The Mis- sissippians developed a specialized labor force, an effective government, and an extensive trading network. They worshipped the sun. The Mississippian
10 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
0
0 500 Kilometers
500 Miles
PRE-COLUMBIAN CIVILIZATIONS
IN NORTH AMERICA
P A C I F I C
O C E A N
A T L A N T I C
O C E A N
G U L F O F M E X I C O
N O R T H
A M E R I C A
R O
C K
Y M
O U
N T
A I
N S
Mesa Verde
ANASAZI
PUEBLO-HOHOKAM
M IS
SI SS
IP P
IA N
AD EN
A- HO
PE WE
LL
M IS
S IS
S IP
P I
V A
L L E
Y OH
IO V ALL
E Y
A P
P A
L A
C H
IA N
M O
U N
T A
I N
S
What were the three dominant pre-Columbian civilizations in North America? Where was the Adena-Hopewell culture centered? How was the Mississippian civi- lization similar to that of the Mayans or Aztecs? What made the Anasazi culture dif- ferent from the other North American cultures?
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culture peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and finally succumbed to diseases transmit- ted from Europe.
The arid Southwest hosted irrigation-based cultures, elements of which persist today and heirs of which (the Hopis, Zunis, and others) still live in the adobe pueblos erected by their ances- tors. The most widespread and best known of the cultures, the Anasazi (“enemy’s ancestors” in the Navajo language), developed in the “four corners,” where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet.
The Anasazis lived in baked-mud adobe structures built four or five sto- ries high. In contrast to the Mesoamerican and Mississippian cultures,
Pre-Columbian Indian Civilizations • 11
Mississippian Artifacts
Mississippian people produced finely made pottery, such as this deer-effigy jar.
Cliff Dwellings
Ruins of Anasazi cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.
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Anasazi society lacked a rigid class structure. The religious leaders and war- riors labored much as the rest of the people did. In fact, they engaged in war- fare only as a means of self-defense (Hopi means “Peaceful People”), and there is little evidence of human sacrifice or human trophies. Environmental factors shaped Anasazi culture and eventually caused its demise. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a lengthy drought and the pressure of new ar- rivals from the north began to restrict the territory of the Anasazis. Into their peaceful world came the aggressive Navajos and Apaches, followed two centuries later by Spaniards marching up from the south.
E U R O P E A N V I S I O N S O F A M E R I C A
The European discovery of America was fueled by curiosity. People had long imagined what lay beyond the western horizon. Norse expeditions to the New World during the tenth and eleventh centuries are the earliest
12 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
N O R T H
A M E R I C A
EUROPE
AFRICA
A T L A N T I C O C E A N
Norse settlements
NORSE DISCOVERIES
GREENLAND HELLULAND (Baffin Island)
IRELAND
ICELAND
SCOTLAND
ENGLAND
NORWAY
VINLAND (Newfoundland)
MARKLAND (Labrador)
L’Anse aux Meadows
FAROE ISLANDS
SHETLAND ISLANDS
CAPE COD
When did the first Norse settlers reach North America? What was the symbolic sig- nificance of these lands of the Western Hemisphere? How far south in North Amer- ica did the Norse explorers travel?
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that can be verified, and even they have dissolved into legend. Around A.D. 985 an Icelander named Erik the Red—the New World’s first real-estate booster—colonized the west coast of a rocky, fogbound island he deceptively called Greenland, and about a year later a trader missed Greenland and sighted land beyond. Knowing of this, Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, sailed out from Greenland about A.D. 1001 and sighted the coasts of Hellu- land (Baffin Island), Markland (Labrador), and Vinland (Newfoundland), where he settled for the winter. The Norse settlers withdrew from North America in the face of hostile natives, and the Greenland colonies vanished mysteriously in the fifteenth century. Nowhere in Europe had the forces yet developed that would inspire adventurers to subdue the New World.
T H E E X PA N S I O N O F E U R O P E
During the late fifteenth century, Europeans developed the maritime technology to venture around the world and the imperial ambitions to search for riches, colonies, and pagans to convert. This age of discovery coin- cided with the rise of an inquiring spirit; the growth of trade, towns, and modern corporations; the decline of feudalism and the formation of na- tional states; the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; and the resurgence of some old sins—greed, conquest, exploitation, oppression, racism, and slavery—that quickly defiled the fancied innocence of the New World.
R E N A I S S A N C E G E O G R A P H Y For more than two centuries before Columbus, the mind of Europe quickened with the so-called Renaissance— the rediscovery of ancient texts, the rebirth of secular learning, the spirit of inquiry, all of which spread more rapidly after Johannes Gutenberg’s inven- tion of a printing press with movable type around 1440. Learned Europeans of the fifteenth century held in almost reverential awe the authority of an- cient learning. The age of discovery was especially influenced by ancient con- cepts of geography. As early as the sixth century B.C., the Pythagoreans had taught the sphericity of the earth, and in the third century B.C. the earth’s size was computed very nearly correctly. All this was accepted in Renaissance universities on the word of Aristotle, and the myth that Columbus was try- ing to prove this theory is one of those falsehoods that will not disappear even in the face of evidence. No informed person at that time thought the earth was flat.
Progress in the art of navigation accompanied the revival of learning. In the fifteenth century, mariners employed new instruments to sight stars and
The Expansion of Europe • 13
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find the latitude. Steering across the open sea, however, remained a matter of dead reckoning. A ship’s captain set his course along a given latitude and cal- culated it from the angle of the North Star or, with less certainty, the sun, es- timating speed by the eye. Longitude remained a matter of guesswork since accurate timepieces were needed to determine it. Ship’s clocks remained too inaccurate until the development of more precise chronometers in the eigh- teenth century.
T H E G R O W T H O F T R A D E , T O W N S , A N D N AT I O N - S TAT E S The forces that would invade and reshape the New World found their focus in Europe’s rising towns, the centers of a growing trade that slowly broadened the narrow horizons of feudal culture. In its farthest reaches this commerce moved either overland or through the eastern Mediterranean all the way to east Asia, where Europeans acquired medicine, silks, precious stones, dye- woods, perfumes, and rugs. There they also purchased the spices—pepper, nutmeg, clove—so essential to the preserving of food and for enhancing its flavor. The trade gave rise to a merchant class and to the idea of corporations through which stockholders would share risks and profits.
The foreign trade was chancy and costly. Goods commonly passed from hand to hand, from ships to pack trains and back to ships along the way, sub- ject to tax levies by all sorts of princes and potentates. The Muslim world, from Spain across North Africa into central Asia, straddled the important trade routes, adding to the hazards. Muslims tenaciously opposed efforts to “Christianize” their lands. Little wonder, then, that Europeans should dream of an all-water route to the coveted spices of east Asia and the Indies.
Another spur to exploration was the rise of national states, ruled by kings and queens who had the power and the money to sponsor the search for foreign riches. The growth of the merchant class went hand in hand with the growth of centralized political power. Merchants wanted uniform currencies, trade laws, and the elimination of trade barriers. They thus be- came natural allies of the monarchs who could meet their needs. In turn, merchants and university-trained professionals supplied the monarchs with money, lawyers, and government officials. The Crusades to capture the Holy Land (1095–1270) had also advanced the process of international trade and exploration. They had brought Europe into contact with the Middle East and had decimated the ranks of the feudal lords. And new means of warfare—the use of gunpowder and standing armies—further weakened the independence of the nobility relative to royal power.
By 1492 the map of western Europe showed several united kingdoms: France, where in 1453 Charles VII had emerged from the Hundred Years’
14 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
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War as head of a unified state; England, where in 1485 Henry VII had emerged victorious after thirty years of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses; Portugal, where John I had fought off the Castilians to ensure na- tional independence; and Spain, where in 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon and Is- abella of Castile had ended an era of chronic civil war when they united two great kingdoms in marriage. The Spanish king and queen were crusading expansionists. On January 1, 1492, after nearly eight centuries of religious warfare between Spanish Christians and Moorish Muslims on the Iberian peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella declared victory at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold. They gave the defeated Muslims a desperate choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Soon thereafter the Christian mon- archs gave Sephardi, Jews from Spain or Portugal, the same awful ultima- tum: baptism or exile.
These factors—urbanization, world trade, the rise of centralized national states, and advances in knowledge, technology, and firepower—combined with natural human curiosity, greed, and religious zeal to create an outburst of energy, spurring the discovery and conquest of the New World. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Europeans set in motion the events that, as one historian has observed, bound together “four continents, three races, and a great diversity of regional parts.”
T H E V O YA G E S O F C O L U M B U S
It was in Portugal, with the guidance of King John’s son Prince Henry the Navigator, that exploration and discovery began in earnest. In 1422 Prince Henry dispatched his first naval expedition to map the African coast. Driven partly by the hope of outflanking the Islamic world and partly by the hope of trade, the Portuguese by 1446 had reached Cape Verde and then the equator and, by 1482, the Congo River. In 1488 Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip.
Christopher Columbus, meanwhile, was learning his trade in the school of Portuguese seamanship. Born in 1451, the son of an Italian weaver, Columbus took to the sea at an early age, making up for his lack of formal education by teaching himself geography, navigation, and Latin. By the 1480s, Columbus, a tall, white-haired, pious man, was an experienced mariner and a skilled nav- igator. Dazzled by the prospect of Asian riches, he developed an outrageous plan to reach the Indies (India, China, the East Indies, or Japan) by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus won the support of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs. They awarded him a tenth share of any pearls; gold, silver,
The Voyages of Columbus • 15
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or other precious metals; and valuable spices he found in any new territories. The legend that the queen had to hock the crown jewels is as spurious as the fable that Columbus set out to prove the earth was round.
Columbus chartered one seventy- five-foot ship, the Santa María, and the Spanish city of Palos supplied two smaller caravels, the Pinta and the Niña. From Palos this little squadron, with eighty-seven officers and men, set sail westward for what Columbus thought was Asia. The expedition stopped at the Canary Islands, the westernmost Spanish possessions, off the west coast of Africa. Early on Octo- ber 12, 1492, a lookout on the Santa
María yelled, “Tierra! Tierra! ” (Land! Land!) It was an island in the Bahamas east of Florida that Columbus named San Salvador (Blessed Savior). Columbus decided they were near the Indies, so he called the island people los Indios. He described the “Indians” as naked people, “very well made, of very handsome bodies and very good faces.” He added that “with fifty men they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.” The natives, Columbus wrote, were “to be ruled and set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary . . . and to adopt our customs.”
Columbus continued to search for a passage to the fabled Indies through the Bahamian Cays, down to Cuba (a place-name that suggested Marco Polo’s Cipangu [associated with modern-day Japan]), and then eastward to the island he named Española (or Hispaniola, now the site of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where he first found significant amounts of gold jewelry. Columbus learned of, but did not encounter until his second voy- age, the fierce Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. The Caribbean Sea was named after them, and because of their alleged bad habits the word cannibal was de- rived from a Spanish version of their name (Caníbal).
On the night before Christmas 1492, the Santa María ran aground off Hispaniola. Columbus, still believing he had reached Asia, decided to return home. He left about forty men behind and seized a dozen natives to present as gifts to Spain’s royal couple. When Columbus reached Palos, he received a hero’s welcome. The news of his discovery spread rapidly across Europe
16 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
Christopher Columbus
A portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, ca. 1519.
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thanks to the improved communications brought about by Gutenberg’s printing press. In Italy, Pope Alexander VI, himself a Spaniard, was so con- vinced that God favored the conquest of the New World that he awarded Spain the right to control the entire hemisphere so that its pagan natives could be brought to Christ. Buoyed by such support and by the same burn- ing religious zeal to battle heathens that had forced the Moors into exile or conversion, Ferdinand and Isabella instructed Columbus to prepare for a second voyage. The Spanish monarchs also set about shoring up their legal claim against Portugal’s pretensions to the newly discovered lands. Spain and Portugal reached a compromise agreement, called the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which drew an imaginary line west of the Cape Verde Islands and stipulated that the area west of it would be a Spanish sphere of exploration and settlement.
Columbus returned across the Atlantic in 1493 with seventeen ships, live- stock, and over 1,000 men, as well as royal instructions to “treat the Indians very well.” Back in the New World, Admiral Columbus discovered that the
The Voyages of Columbus • 17
1498
1502
1493
1492
N O R T H
A M E R I C A
S O U T H A M E R I C A
AFRICA
A T L A N T I C
O C E A N
PACIFIC OCEAN
COLUMBUS’S VOYAGES
ENGLAND
SPAIN
FRANCE
PORTUGAL
GULF OF
MEXICO
CARIBBEAN SEA
AZORES
BAHAMAS
SAN SALVADOR
JAMAICA HISPANIOLA
CUBA
TRINIDAD
LESSER ANTILLES
CANARY ISLANDS
CAPE VERDE ISLANDS
CENTRAL AMERICA
How many voyages did Columbus make to the Americas? What is the origin of the name for the Caribbean Sea? What happened to the colony that Columbus left on Hispaniola in 1493?
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camp he had left behind was in chaos. The unsupervised soldiers had run amok, raping native women, robbing Indian villages, and as Columbus’s son later added, “committing a thousand excesses for which they were mortally hated by the Indians.” The natives finally struck back and killed ten Spaniards. A furious Columbus immediately attacked the Indian villages. The Spaniards, armed with crossbows, guns, and ferocious dogs, decimated the natives and loaded 550 of them onto ships bound for the slave market in Spain.
Columbus then ventured out across the Caribbean Sea. He found the Lesser Antilles, explored the coast of Cuba, discovered Jamaica, and finally returned to Spain in 1496. On a third voyage, in 1498, Columbus found Trinidad and explored the northern coast of South America. He led a fourth voyage in 1502, during which he sailed along the coast of Central America, still looking in vain for Asia. Having been marooned on Jamaica for more than a year, he finally returned to Spain in 1504. He died two years later.
To the end, Columbus refused to believe that he had discovered anything other than outlying parts of Asia. Full awareness that a great land mass lay between Europe and Asia dawned on Europeans very slowly. By one of his- tory’s greatest ironies, this led the New World to be named not for its discov- erer but for another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to the New World in 1499. Vespucci landed on the coast of South America and re- ported that it was so large it must be a new continent. European mapmakers thereafter began to label the New World using a variant of Vespucci’s first name: America.
T H E G R E AT B I O L O G I C A L E X C H A N G E
The first European contacts with the New World began an unprece- dented worldwide biological exchange. It was in fact more than a diffusion of cultures: it was a diffusion of distinctive social and ecological elements that ultimately worked in favor of the Europeans at the expense of the na- tives. Indians, Europeans, and eventually Africans intersected to create new religious beliefs and languages, adopt new tastes in food, and develop new modes of dress.
If anything, the plants and animals of the two worlds were more different than the people and their ways of life. Europeans had never seen such crea- tures as the fearsome (if harmless) iguana, the flying squirrel, fish with whiskers like those of a cat, or the rattlesnake, nor had they seen anything quite like several other species: bison, cougars, armadillos, opossums, sloths,
18 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
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tapirs, anacondas, American eels, toucans, condors, and humming- birds. Among the few domesticated animals they could recognize the dog and the duck, but turkeys, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas were all new. Nor did the Native Americans know of horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and (maybe) chickens, which soon arrived from Europe in abundance. Yet within a half century whole islands of the Caribbean would be overrun by pigs.
The exchange of plant life between Old and New Worlds worked a revolu- tion in the diets of both hemispheres. Before Columbus’s voyage three staples of the modern diet were unknown in Europe: maize (corn), potatoes (sweet and white), and many kinds of beans (snap, kidney, lima, and others). The white potato, although commonly called Irish, actually migrated from South America to Europe and reached North America only with the Scotch-Irish immigrants of the early eighteenth century. Other New World food plants in- clude peanuts, squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, pineapples, sassafras, papayas, guavas, avocados, cacao (the source of chocolate), and chicle (for chewing gum). Europeans in turn soon introduced rice, wheat, barley, oats, wine grapes, melons, coffee, olives, bananas, “Kentucky” bluegrass, daisies, and dandelions to the New World.
The beauty of the exchange was that the food plants were more complemen- tary than competitive. Corn, it turned out, could flourish almost anywhere—in highland or low, in hot climates or cold, in wet land or dry. It spread quickly throughout the world. Before the end of the 1500s, American maize and sweet potatoes were staple crops in China. The nutritious food crops exported from the Americas thus helped nourish a worldwide population explosion probably greater than any since the invention of agriculture. The dramatic increase in the European populations fueled by the new foods in turn helped provide the surplus of people that colonized the New World.
Europeans, moreover, adopted many Native American devices: canoes, snowshoes, moccasins, hammocks, kayaks, ponchos, dogsleds, and tobog- gans. The rubber ball and the game of lacrosse have Indian origins. New words entered European languages: wigwam, tepee, papoose, tomahawk, succotash, hominy, moose, skunk, raccoon, opossum, woodchuck, chipmunk,
The Great Biological Exchange • 19
Unfamiliar Wildlife
A box tortoise drawn by John White, one of the earliest English settlers in America.
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hickory, pecan, and hundreds of others. And new terms appeared in transla- tion: warpath, war paint, paleface, medicine man, firewater. The natives also left the map dotted with place-names of Indian origin long after they were gone, from Miami to Yakima, from Penobscot to Yuma. There were still other New World contributions: tobacco and a number of other drugs, including coca (for cocaine), curare (a muscle relaxant), and cinchona bark (for quinine).
By far, however, the most significant aspect of the biological exchange was the transmission of infectious diseases from Europe and Africa to the New World. European colonists and enslaved Africans brought with them deadly pathogens that Native Americans had never experienced: smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, bubonic plague, malaria, yellow fever, and cholera. In dealing with such diseases over the centuries, people in the Old World had developed anti- bodies that enabled most of them to survive infection. Disease-toughened
20 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
Smallpox
Aztec victims of the 1538 smallpox epidemic are covered in shrouds (center) as two others lie dying (at right).
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adventurers, colonists, and slaves invading the New World thus carried viruses and bacteria that consumed Indians, who lacked the immunologic resistance that forms from experience with the diseases.
The results were catastrophic. Epidemics are one of the most powerful forces shaping history, and disease played a profound role in decimating the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Far more Indians died of contagions than from combat. Major diseases such as typhus and smallpox produced pandemics in the New World on a scale never witnessed in history. The social chaos caused by the European invaders contributed to the devas- tation of native communities. In the face of such terrible and mysterious diseases, panic-stricken and often malnourished Indians fled to neighboring villages, unwittingly spreading the diseases in the process. Unable to explain or cure the contagions, Indian chiefs and religious leaders often lost their stature. Consequently, tribal cohesion and cultural life disintegrated, and
The Great Biological Exchange • 21
Impact of European Diseases
This 1592 engraving shows a shaman in a Tupinamba village in Brazil (at left) using his rattle to attract benevolent spirits to heal the diseases brought by Europeans.
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efforts to resist European assaults collapsed. Over time, Native Americans adapted to the presence of the diseases and better managed their effects. They began to quarantine victims and infected villages to confine the spread of germs, and they developed elaborate rituals to sanctify such practices.
Smallpox was an especially ghastly and highly contagious disease in the New World. Santo Domingo boasted almost 4 million inhabitants in 1496; by 1570 the number of natives had plummeted to 125. In central Mexico alone, some 8 million people, perhaps one third of the entire Indian popula- tion, died of smallpox within a decade of the arrival of the Spanish. Small- pox brought horrific suffering. The virus passes through the air on moisture droplets or dust particles that enter the lungs of its victims. After incubating for twelve days, the virus causes headaches, backache, fever, and nausea. Vic- tims then develop sores in the mouth, nose, and throat. Within a few days gruesome skin eruptions cover the body. Death usually results from massive internal bleeding.
In colonial America, as Indians died by the thousands, disease became the most powerful weapon of the European invaders. A Spanish explorer noted that “half the natives” died from smallpox and “blamed us.” Many Euro- peans, however, interpreted such epidemics as diseases sent by God to pun- ish Indians who resisted conversion to Christianity.
P R O F E S S I O N A L E X P L O R E R S
Undeterred by new diseases and encouraged by Columbus’s discover- ies, professional explorers, mostly Italians, hired themselves out to look for the elusive western passage to Asia. They probed the shorelines of America during the early sixteenth century in the vain search for an opening and thus increased by leaps and bounds European knowledge of the New World.
The first to sight the North American continent was John Cabot, a Venetian sponsored by Henry VII of England. Cabot sailed across the North Atlantic in 1497. His landfall at what the king called “the new founde lande” gave England the basis for a later claim to all of North America. During the early sixteenth century, however, the English grew so preoccupied with internal divisions and conflicts with France that they failed to capitalize on Cabot’s discoveries. Only fishermen exploited the teeming waters of the Grand Banks. In 1513 the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean, having crossed the Isthmus of Panama on foot.
The Spanish were eager to find a nautical passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To that end, in 1519 Ferdinand Magellan, a haughty Portuguese
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seaman hired by the Spanish, discovered the strait that now bears his name at the southern tip of South America. Magellan kept sailing north and west across the Pacific Ocean, discovering Guam and eventually the Philippines, where he was killed by natives. Surviving crew members made their way back to Spain, arriving in 1522, having been at sea for three years. Their ac- counts of the global voyage quickened Spanish interest in exploration.
T H E S PA N I S H E M P I R E
During the sixteenth century, Spain created the most powerful empire in the world by conquering and colonizing the Americas. The Caribbean Sea
The Spanish Empire • 23
Congo River
Amazon River
Ves pu
cc i
M ag
el la
n
D ias
Prince Henry the Navigator
del Ca no (in
Mag ellan
’s sh ip)
Spanish
SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE EXPLORATIONS
Portuguese
S P
A IN
P O
R T
U G
A L
S P
A IN
P O
R T
U G
A L
AUSTRALIA
A S I AE U R O P E
A F R I C A
SOUTH AMERICA
NORTH AMERICA
INDIAARABIA
SPAIN PORTUGAL
CHINA
JAPANAZORES
MADAGASCAR
ZANZIBAR
SRI LANKA
PHILIPPINE ISLANDS
MOLUCCAS
CANARY ISLANDS
Line of Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494
Line of Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494
CAPE HORN
CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
Magellan Strait
Equator
ATLANTIC OCEAN
ATLANTIC OCEAN
PACIFIC OCEAN
INDIAN OCEAN
0
0 2,000 Kilometers
2,000 Miles
What is the significance of Magellan’s 1519 voyage? What was the controversy over the Treaty of Tordesillas? What biological exchanges resulted from these early explorations?
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served as the funnel through which Spanish power entered the New World. After establishing colonies on Hispaniola, including Santo Domingo, which became the capital of the West Indies, the Spanish proceeded eastward to Puerto Rico (1508) and westward to Cuba (1511–1514). Their motives were explicit. Said one soldier, “We came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.” Like the French and the British after them, the Spanish who ex- plored and conquered new worlds in the Western Hemisphere were willing to risk everything in pursuit of wealth, power, glory, or divine approval. The first adventurers were often larger-than-life figures. They displayed ambi- tion and courage, ruthlessness and duplicity, resilience and creativity, as well as crusading religiosity and imperial arrogance.
The European colonization of the New World was difficult and deadly. Most of those in the first wave of settlement died of malnutrition or disease. But the natives suffered even more casualties. A Spaniard on Hispaniola reported in 1494 that over 50,000 Indians had died from infectious diseases carried by the Europeans, and more were “falling each day, with every step, like cattle in an infected herd.” Even the most developed Indian societies of the sixteenth cen- tury were ill equipped to resist the European cultures invading their world. Disunity everywhere—civil disorder and rebellion plagued the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas—left the native peoples of the New World vulnerable to division and foreign conquest. The onslaught of men and microbes from Europe per- plexed and overwhelmed the Indians. Prejudices and misunderstandings had tragic consequences. Europeans presumed that their civilization was superior to those they discovered in the New World. And such presumed superiority justified in their minds the conquest and enslavement of Indians, the destruc- tion of their way of life, and the seizure of their land and resources.
A C L A S H O F C U LT U R E S The violent encounter between Spaniards and Indians in North America involved more than a clash between different peoples. It also involved contrasting forms of technological development. The Indians of Mexico had copper and bronze but no iron. They had domes- ticated dogs and llamas but no horses. Whereas Indians used dugout canoes for transport, Europeans sailed heavily armed oceangoing vessels. The Span- ish ships not only carried human cargo; they also brought steel swords, firearms, explosives, and armor. These advanced military tools struck fear into many Indians. A Spanish priest in Florida observed that gunpowder “frightens the most valiant and courageous Indian and renders him slave to the white man’s command.” Such weaponry helps explain why the Euro- peans were able to defeat far superior numbers of Indians. Arrows and tom- ahawks were seldom a match for guns and cannon.
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The Europeans enjoyed other cultural advantages. For example, the only domestic four-legged animals in North America were dogs and llamas. The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought with them horses, pigs, and cattle, all of which served as sources of food and leather. Horses provided greater speed in battle and introduced a decided psychological advantage. “The most essential thing in new lands is horses,” reported one Spanish soldier. “They instill the greatest fear in the enemy and make the Indians respect the leaders of the army.” Even more feared among the Indians were the grey- hound dogs that the Spaniards used to guard their camps.
C O R T É S ’ S C O N Q U E S T The first European conquest of a major Indian civilization on the North American mainland began on February 18, 1519, when Hernando Cortés, driven by dreams of gold and glory, set sail from Cuba with nearly 600 soldiers and sailors. Also on board were 200 Cuban na- tives, sixteen horses, and several cannons. When the invaders landed at Vera Cruz, on the Mexican Gulf coast, they were assaulted by thousands of Indian warriors. After defeating the native force, Cortés invited the warriors to join his advance on the Aztecs. He then burned all but one of the Spanish ships. There would be no turning back.
The Spanish Empire • 25
Cortés in Mexico
Page from the Tlaxcala Lienzo, a historical narrative from the sixteenth century. The scene, in which Cortés is shown seated on a throne, depicts the arrival of the Spaniards in Tlaxcala.
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Cortés’s expedition was unauthorized. His soldiers, called conquistadores, received no pay; they were military entrepreneurs willing to risk their lives for a share in the expected plunder and slaves. The ruthless Cortés had participated in the Spanish occupation of Cuba and had acquired his own plantations and gold mines. But he yearned for even more wealth and glory. Against the wishes of the Spanish governor in Cuba, who wanted the Aztec Empire for himself, Cortés launched the daring invasion of Mexico. The 200-mile march from Vera Cruz through difficult mountain passes to the magnificent Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (north of present-day Mexico City) and the subjugation of the Aztecs, who thought themselves “masters of the world,” constituted one of the most remarkable feats in history.
Tenochtitlán, with some 200,000 inhabitants, was the largest city in the Americas and was much larger than Seville, the most populous city in Spain. Graced by wide canals and verdant gardens and boasting beautiful stone pyramids and other buildings, the fabled capital seemed impreg- nable. But Cortés made the most of his assets. His invasion force had landed in a coastal region where the local Indians were still fighting off the spread of Aztec power and were ready to embrace new allies, especially those possessing strange animals (horses) and powerful weapons. By a combination of threats and deceptions, Cortés entered Tenochtitlán peacefully and made the emperor, Montezuma II, his puppet. Cortés ex- plained to Montezuma why the invasion was necessary: “We Spaniards have a disease of the heart that only gold can cure.” Montezuma mistook Cortés for a returning god.
After taking all the Aztec gold, the Spanish forced Montezuma to pro- vide Indian laborers to mine more. This state of affairs lasted until the spring of 1520, when disgruntled Aztecs, regarding Montezuma as a trai- tor, rebelled, stoned him to death, and attacked Cortés’s forces. The Spaniards lost about one third of their men as they retreated. Their 20,000 Indian allies remained loyal, however, and Cortés gradually re- grouped his men. In 1521, having been reinforced with troops from Cuba and thousands of Indians eager to defeat the Aztecs, he besieged the im- perial city for eighty-five days, cutting off its access to water and food and allowing a smallpox epidemic to decimate the inhabitants. An African slave infected with the virus spawned the contagion. As a Spaniard ob- served, the smallpox “spread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it. . . . They could not move; they could not stir.” The ravages of smallpox help explain how such a small force of determined Spaniards lusting for gold and silver was able to
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vanquish a proud nation of nearly 1 million people. Montezuma’s nephew led the final fierce assault by the desperate Aztecs. Some 15,000 died in the battle. After the Aztecs surrendered, a merciless Cortés ordered the leaders hanged and the priests devoured by dogs. He and his officers replaced them as rulers over the Aztec Empire. In two years the brilliant Cortés and his dis- ciplined army had conquered a fabled empire that had taken thirty centuries to develop.
Cortés and his army set the style for plundering conquistadores to follow, who within twenty years had established a sprawling Spanish Empire in the New World. Between 1522 and 1528 various lieutenants of Cortés’s conquered the remnants of Indian culture in the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala. In 1531 Francisco Pizarro led a band of soldiers down the Pacific coast from Panama toward Peru, where they brutally subdued the Inca Empire. From Peru, conquistadores had extended Spanish authority south through Chile by about 1553 and north, to present-day Colombia, by 1536 to 1538.
S PA N I S H A M E R I C A The Spaniards sought to displace the “pagan” civ- ilizations of the Americas with their Catholic-based culture. Believing that God was on their side in this cultural exchange, the Spaniards carried with them a fervent sense of mission that bred both intolerance and zeal. The conquistadores transferred to America a system known as the encomienda, whereby favored officers became privileged landowners who controlled Indian villages or groups of villages. As encomenderos, they were called upon to pro- tect and care for the villages and support missionary priests. In turn they could require Indians to provide them with goods and labor. Spanish Amer- ica therefore developed from the start a society of extremes: wealthy con- quistadores and encomenderos at one end of the spectrum and native peoples held in poverty at the other end.
What was left of them, that is. By the mid-1500s native Indians were nearly extinct in the West Indies, reduced more by European diseases than by Spanish brutality. To take their place, as early as 1503 the colonizers began to transport Africans to work as slaves, the first in a wretched traffic that eventually would carry over 9 million people across the Atlantic. In all of Spain’s New World empire, by one informed estimate, the Indian population dropped from about 50 million at the outset to 4 million in the seventeenth century and slowly rose again to 7.5 million by the end of the eighteenth century. Whites, who totaled no more than 100,000 in the mid–sixteenth century, numbered over 3 million by the end of the colonial period.
The Indians, however, did not always lack advocates. In many cases Catholic missionaries offered a sharp contrast to the conquistadores. Setting
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an example of self-denial, they ventured into remote areas, usually without weapons or protection, to spread the gospel—and often suffered martyrdom for their efforts. Among them rose defenders of the Indians, the most noted of whom was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest in Hispaniola and later a bishop in Mexico, author of A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1552).
From such violently contrasting forces, Spanish America gradually devel- oped into a settled society. The independent conquistadores were replaced by a second generation of bureaucrats, and the encomienda was succeeded by the hacienda (a great farm or ranch) as the claim to land became a more important source of wealth than the Spanish claim to labor. From the outset, in sharp con- trast to the later English experience, the Spanish government regulated every detail of colonial administration. After 1524 the Council of the Indies, directly under the crown, issued laws for America, served as the appellate court for civil cases arising in the colonies, and administered the bureaucracy.
The culture of Spanish America would be fundamentally unlike the English- speaking culture that would arise to the north. In fact, a difference already ex- isted among the pre-Columbian Indians with largely nomadic tribes to the north and the more complex civilizations inhabiting Mesoamerica. On the lat- ter world the Spaniards imposed an overlay of their own peculiar ways, but without uprooting the deeply planted cultures they found. Catholicism, which for centuries had absorbed pagan gods and transformed pagan feasts into such holy days as Christmas and Easter, in turn adapted Indian beliefs and rituals to its own purposes. The Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe Hidalgo, for instance, evoked memories of feminine divinities in native cults. Thus Spanish America, in the words of the modern-day Mexican writer Octavio Paz, became a land of superimposed pasts: “Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec city that was built in the likeness of Tula, the Toltec city that was built in the likeness of Teotihuacán, the first great city on the American continent. Every Mexican bears within him this continuity, which goes back two thousand years.”
S PA N I S H E X P L O R AT I O N S Throughout the sixteenth century no European power other than Spain had more than a brief foothold in the New World. Spain had the advantage not only of having sponsored the dis- covery but also of having stumbled onto those parts of America that would bring the quickest profits. While France and England struggled with domes- tic quarrels and religious conflict, Spain had forged an intense national unity. Under Charles V, heir to the throne of Austria and the Netherlands and Holy Roman emperor to boot, Spain dominated Europe as well as the
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New World. The treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas added to its power, but the easy reliance on American gold and silver also undermined the basic economy of Spain and tempted the government to live beyond its means. The influx of gold from the New World also caused inflation throughout Europe.
For most of the colonial period, much of what is now the United States belonged to Spain, and Spanish culture has left a lasting imprint upon American ways of life. Spain’s colonial presence lasted more than three cen- turies, much longer than either England’s or France’s. New Spain was cen- tered in Mexico, but its frontiers extended from the Florida Keys to Alaska and included areas not currently thought of as formerly Spanish, such as the Deep South and the lower Midwest. Hispanic place-names—San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Pen- sacola, and St. Augustine—survive to this day, as do Hispanic influences in art, architecture, literature, music, law, and cuisine.
The Spanish encounter with Native American populations and their di- verse cultures produced a two-way exchange by which the two societies blended, coexisted, and interacted. Even when locked in mortal conflict and riven by hostility and mutual suspicion, the two cultures necessarily affected each other. The imperative of survival forced both natives and conquerors to devise creative adaptations. In other words, the frontier world, while perme- ated with violence, coercion, and intolerance, also produced a mutual ac- commodation that enabled two living traditions to persist side by side. For example, the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest practiced two religious tradi- tions simultaneously, adopting Spanish Catholicism while retaining the essence of their inherited animistic faith.
The “Spanish borderlands” of the southern United States preserve many reminders of the Spanish presence. The earliest known exploration of Florida was made in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, then governor of Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Spanish explorers skirted the Gulf coast from Florida to Vera Cruz, scouted the Atlantic coast from Key West to Newfoundland, and established a short-lived colony on the Carolina coast.
Sixteenth-century knowledge of the North American interior came mostly from would-be conquistadores who sought to plunder the hinter- lands. The first, Pánfilo de Narváez, landed in 1528 at Tampa Bay, marched northward to Apalachee, an Indian village in present-day Alabama, and then returned to the coast near present-day St. Marks, Florida, where his party contrived crude vessels in the hope of reaching Mexico. Wrecked on the coast of Texas, a few survivors under Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca worked their way painfully overland and after eight years stumbled into a Spanish outpost in western Mexico.
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Hernando de Soto followed their example. With 600 men, as well as horses, and war dogs, he landed on Florida’s west coast in 1539, hiked up as far as western North Carolina and then moved westward beyond the Mississippi River and up the Arkansas River, looting and destroying Indian villages along the way. In the spring of 1542, de Soto died near Natchez; the next year the
30 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
A T L A N T I C
O C E A N
P A C I F I C O C E A N
SOUTH AMERICA
NORTH
AMERICA
Vera Cruz Santo Domingo
Cuzco
Tenochtitlán
Santa Fe
St. Augustine
C A R I B B E A N
G U L F O F M E X I C O
S E A
Narváez
N úñ
ez
de Ba
lbo a
P iz
ar ro
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Ponce de Léon
de So
to
C or
on ad
o
Ca bez
a de Vaca
N E
W
S P A I N
PUERTO RICO
CUBA
HISPANIOLA
0 250
0 500 Kilometers250
500 Miles
Ohi o Riv er
M is
si ss
ip pi
R iv
er
R io
G ra
nde
INCAS
MAYAS
AZTECS
Núñez de Balboa, 1513
SPANISH EXPLORATIONS OF THE MAINLAND
Ponce de León, 1513
Cortés, 1519
Narváez, 1528
Pizarro, 1531–1533
Cabeza de Vaca, 1535–1536
de Soto, 1539–1542
Coronado, 1540–1542
What were the Spanish conquistadores’ goals for exploring the Americas? How did Cortés conquer the Aztecs? Why did the Spanish first explore North America, and why did they establish St. Augustine, the first European settlement in what would become the United States?
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survivors among his party floated down the Mississippi, and 311 of the original adventurers found their way to Mexico. In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coron- ado, inspired by rumors of gold, traveled northward into New Mexico and northeast across Texas and Oklahoma as far as Kansas. He returned in 1542 without gold but with a more realistic view of what lay in those arid lands.
The Spanish established provinces in North America not so much as com- mercial enterprises but as defensive buffers protecting their more lucrative trading empire in Mexico and South America. They were concerned about French traders infiltrating from Louisiana, English settlers crossing into Florida, and Russian seal hunters wandering down the California coast.
Yet the Spanish settlements in what is today the United States never flour- ished. Preoccupied with a lust for gold, the Spanish never understood the signif- icance of developing a viable market economy. England and France eventually surpassed Spain in America because Spain mistakenly assumed that developing a thriving trade in goods with the Native Americans was less important than the conversion of “heathens” and the relentless search for gold and silver.
The first Spanish outpost in the present United States emerged in response to French encroachments on Spanish claims. In the 1560s French Huguenots (Protestants) established short-lived colonies in what became South Carolina and Florida. In 1565 a Spanish outpost, St. Augustine, became the first Euro- pean town in the present-day United States and is now its oldest urban center, except for the pueblos of New Mexico. Spain’s colony at St. Augustine in- cluded fort, church, hospital, fish market, and over 100 shops and houses—all built decades before the first English settlements at Jamestown and Ply- mouth. While other outposts failed, St. Augustine survived as a defensive base perched on the edge of a continent.
T H E S PA N I S H S O U T H W E S T The Spanish eventually established other permanent settlements in what is now New Mexico, Texas, and Califor- nia. Eager to pacify rather than fight the far more numerous Indians of the region, the Spanish used religion as an effective instrument of colonial con- trol. Missionaries, particularly Franciscans and Jesuits, established isolated Catholic missions where they taught Christianity to the Indians. After about ten years a mission would be secularized: its lands would be divided among the converted Indians, the mission chapel would become a parish church, and the inhabitants would be given full Spanish citizenship—including the privilege of paying taxes. The soldiers who were sent to protect the missions were housed in presidios, or forts; their families and the merchants accom- panying them lived in adjacent villages.
The land that would later be called New Mexico was the first center of mission activity in the American Southwest. In 1598 Juan de Oñate, the
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wealthy son of a Spanish mining family in Mexico, received a patent for the territory north of Mexico above the Rio Grande. With an expeditionary military force made up mostly of Mexican Indians and mestizos (sons of Spanish fathers and native mothers), he took possession of New Mexico, es- tablished a capital north of present-day Santa Fe at San Gabriel, and sent out expeditions to search for evidence of gold and silver deposits. He promised the Pueblo Indian leaders that Spanish dominion would bring them peace, justice, prosperity, and protection. Conversion to Catholicism offered even greater benefits: “an eternal life of great bliss” instead of “cruel and everlast- ing torment.”
Some Indians welcomed the missionaries as “powerful witches” capable of easing their burdens. Others tried to use the invaders as allies against rival tribes. Still others saw no alternative but to submit. The Indians living in Spanish New Mexico were required to pay tribute to their encomenderos and perform personal tasks for them, including sexual favors. Disobedient Indi- ans were flogged, by soldiers and priests.
Before the end of the province’s first year, the Indians revolted, killing several soldiers and incur- ring Oñate’s wrath. During three days of relentless fighting, the army killed 500 Pueblo men and 300 women and children. Survivors were enslaved. Pueblo males over the age of twenty-five had one foot severed in a public ritual in- tended to strike fear in the hearts of the Indians and keep them from escaping or resisting. Chil- dren were taken from their par- ents and placed under the care of a Franciscan mission, where, Oñate remarked, “they may attain the knowledge of God and the salva- tion of their souls.”
During the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, Span- ish New Mexico expanded very slowly. The hoped-for deposits of gold and silver were never found,
32 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
Cultural Conflict
This 1616 Peruvian illustration, from a manuscript by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, shows a Dominican friar forcing a native woman to weave.
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and a sparse food supply blunted the interest of potential colonists. The Span- ish king prepared to abandon the colony only to realize that Franciscan mis- sionaries had baptized so many Pueblo Indians that they could not be deserted. In 1608 the government decided to turn New Mexico into a royal province. The following year it dispatched a royal governor, and in 1610, as English settlers were struggling to survive at Jamestown, in Virginia, the Span- ish moved the capital of New Mexico to Santa Fe, the first permanent seat of government in the present-day United States. By 1630 there were fifty Catholic churches and friaries in New Mexico and some 3,000 Spaniards.
The leader of the Franciscan missionaries claimed that 86,000 Pueblo Indians had been converted to Christianity. In fact, however, resentment among the Indians increased with time. In 1680 a charismatic Indian leader named Popé organized a massive rebellion that spread across hundreds of miles. Within a few weeks the Spaniards had been driven from New Mexico. The outraged Indians burned churches; tortured, mutilated, and executed priests; and destroyed all relics of Christianity. The Pueblo revolt of 1680 was the greatest setback that the natives ever inflicted on European efforts to conquer and colonize the New World. It took fourteen years and four military assaults for the Spaniards to reestablish control over New Mexico. Thereafter, except for sporadic raids by Apaches and Navajos, the Spanish pacified the region. Spanish outposts on the Florida and Texas Gulf coasts and in California did not appear until the eighteenth century.
H O R S E S A N D T H E G R E AT P L A I N S Another major consequence of the Pueblo Revolt was the opportunity it afforded Indian rebels to acquire hundreds of coveted Spanish horses (Spanish authorities had made it illegal for Indians to own horses). The Pueblos in turn established a thriving horse trade with Navajos, Apaches, and other tribes. By 1690 horses were evident in Texas, and they soon spread across the Great Plains, the vast rolling grass- lands extending from the Missouri River valley in the east to the base of the Rocky Mountains in the west.
Horses were a disruptive ecological force in North America; they provided the pedestrian Plains Indians with a transforming source of mobility and power. Prior to the arrival of horses, Indians hunted on foot and used dogs as their beasts of burden, hauling their supplies on travois, devices made from two long poles connected by leather straps. But dogs are carnivores, and it was often difficult to find enough meat to feed them. Horses changed every- thing. They are grazing animals, and the endless grasslands of the Great Plains offered plenty of forage. Horses could also haul up to seven times as much weight as dogs, and their speed and endurance made the Indians much
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more effective hunters and warriors. In addition, horses enabled Indians to travel farther to trade and fight.
The ready availability of large numbers of horses thus worked a revolu- tion in the economy and ecology of the Great Plains. Such tribes as the Ara- paho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux reinvented themselves as equestrian societies. They left their traditional woodland villages on the fringes of the plains and became nomadic bison (buffalo) hunters. Using horses, they could haul larger tepees and more meat and hides with them, building temporary camps as they migrated year-round with the immense bison herds, wintering in sheltered glades along rivers. The once-deserted plains soon were a crossroads of activity. Indians used virtually every part of the bison they killed: meat for food; hides for clothing, shoes, bedding, and shelter; muscles and tendons for thread and bowstrings; intestines for con- tainers; bones for tools; horns for eating utensils; hair for headdresses; and dung for fuel. One scholar has referred to the bison as the “tribal department store.” The Plains Indians supplemented bison meat with roots and berries they gathered along the way. In the fall the nomadic tribes would travel
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Plains Indians
The horse-stealing raid depicted in this hide painting demonstrates the essential role horses played in Plains life.
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south to exchange hides and robes for food or to raid Indian farming villages.
In the short run the horse brought prosperity and mobility to the Plains In- dians. Horses became the center and symbol of Indian life on the plains. Yet the noble animal also brought insecurity, instability, and conflict. Indians began to kill more bison than the herds could replace. In addition, the herds of horses competed with the bison for food, often depleting the grass and compacting the soil in the river valleys during the winter. As tribes traveled greater distances and encountered more people, infectious diseases spread more widely.
Horses became so valuable that they provoked thievery and intensified intertribal competition and warfare. Within tribes a family’s status was deter- mined by the number of horses it possessed. Horses eased some of the physi- cal burdens on women but imposed new demands. Women and girls were assigned the responsibility of tending to the horses. They also had to butcher and dry the buffalo meat and tan the hides. As the value of the hides grew, male hunters began to indulge in polygamy: more wives could process more buffalo. The rising economic value of wives eventually led Plains Indians to raid farming tribes in search of captive brides as well as horses. The introduc- tion of horses into the Great Plains, then, was a decidedly mixed blessing. By 1800 a plains trader could observe that “this is a delightful country, and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”
T H E P R O T E S T A N T R E F O R M AT I O N
While Spain was building her empire in the Americas, a new movement was growing in Europe: the Protestant Reformation. It would intensify national rivalries and, by encouraging serious challenges to Catholic Spain’s power, pro- foundly affect the course of early American history. When Columbus sailed in 1492, all of western Europe acknowledged the supremacy of the Catholic Church and its pope in Rome. The unity of Christendom began to crack in 1517, however, when Martin Luther, a German theologian and monk, posted his ninety-five theses in protest against abuses in the church. He especially criticized the sale of indulgences, whereby priests would forgive sins in ex- change for money or goods. Sinners, Luther argued, could win salvation nei- ther by good works nor through the mediation of the church but only by faith in the redemptive power of Christ and through a direct relationship with God—the “priesthood of all believers.”
Lutheranism spread rapidly among the people and their rulers—some of them with an eye to seizing church property. When the pope expelled Luther
The Protestant Reformation • 35
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from the church in 1521, reconciliation became impossible. The German states erupted in conflict over religious differences; a settlement did not come until 1555, when they agreed to let each prince determine the religion of his subjects. Most of northern Germany, along with Scandinavia, became Lutheran. The principle of close association between church and state thus carried over into Protestant lands, but Luther had unleashed volatile ideas that ran beyond his control.
Other Protestants pursued Luther’s doctrine to its logical end and preached religious liberty for all. Further divisions on doctrinal matters led to the appearance of various sects, such as the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism and favored the separation of church and state. Other offshoots— including the Mennonites, Amish, Bretheren (Dunkers), Familists, and Schwenkfelders—appeared first in Europe and later in America, but the more numerous like-minded groups would be the Baptists and the Quakers, whose origins were English.
C A LV I N I S M Soon after Martin Luther began his revolt, Swiss Protestants also challenged the authority of Rome. In Geneva the reform movement looked to John Calvin, a French scholar who had fled to that city and brought it under the sway of his beliefs. In his great theological work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Calvin set forth a stern doctrine. All people, he taught, were damned by Adam’s original sin, but the sacrifice of Christ made possible their redemption. The experience of grace, however, was open only to those whom God had elected and thus had predestined to salvation from the beginning of time. Predestination was an uncompromising doctrine, but the infinite wisdom of God was beyond human understanding.
Calvin insisted upon strict morality and hard work, values that especially suited the rising middle class. Moreover, he taught that people serve God through any legitimate labor, and he permitted lay members a share in the governance of the church through a body of elders and ministers called the presbytery. Calvin’s doctrines became the basis for the beliefs of the German Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Presbyterians in Scot- land, some of the Puritans in England, and the Huguenots in France. Through these and other groups, Calvin exerted a greater effect upon reli- gious belief and practice in the English colonies than did any other single leader of the Reformation.
T H E R E F O R M AT I O N I N E N G L A N D In England the Reformation followed a unique course. The Church of England, or the Anglican Church, took form through a gradual process of integrating Calvinism with English
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Catholicism. In early modern England, church and state were united and mutually supportive. The government required citizens to attend religious services and to pay taxes to support the Church of England. The English monarchs also supervised the hierarchy of church officials: two archbishops, twenty-six bishops, and thousands of parish clergy. The royal rulers often in- structed the religious leaders to preach sermons in support of particular government policies. As one English king explained, “People are governed by the pulpit more than the sword in time of peace.”
Purely political reasons initially led to the rejection of papal authority in England. Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547), the second monarch of the Tudor dy- nasty, had in fact won from the pope the title of Defender of the Faith for re- futing Martin Luther’s ideas. But Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had produced no male heir, and to marry again he required an annulment. In the past, popes had found ways to accommodate such requests, but Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, king of Spain and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, whose support was vital to the church’s cause on the Conti- nent. So the pope refused to grant an annulment. Unwilling to accept the rebuff, Henry severed England’s connection with Rome, named a new arch- bishop of Canterbury, who granted the annulment, and married his mis- tress, the lively Anne Boleyn.
In one of history’s greatest ironies, Anne Boleyn gave birth not to the male heir that Henry demanded but to a daughter, named Elizabeth. The disap- pointed king later accused his wife of adultery, ordered her beheaded, and declared the infant Elizabeth a bastard. Yet Elizabeth received a first- rate education and grew up to be quick-witted and nimble, cunning and courageous. After the bloody reigns of her Protestant half brother, Edward VI, and her Catholic half sis- ter, Mary I, she ascended the throne in 1558 and over the next forty-five years proved to be the most remark- able female ruler in history. Her long reign over the troubled island king- dom was punctuated by political tur- moil, religious tension, economic crises, and foreign wars. Yet Queen Elizabeth came to rule over England’s golden age.
The Protestant Reformation • 37
Queen Elizabeth I
Shown here in her coronation robes, ca. 1590.
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Born into a man’s world and given a man’s role, Elizabeth could not be a Catholic, for in the Catholic view she was illegitimate. During her reign, there- fore, the Church of England became Protestant, but in its own way. The orga- nizational structure, centered on bishops and archbishops, remained much the same, but the doctrine and practice changed: the Latin liturgy became, with some changes, the English Book of Common Prayer, the cult of saints was dropped, and the clergy were permitted to marry. For the sake of unity, the “Elizabethan settlement” allowed some latitude in theology and other matters, but this did not satisfy all. Some Britons tried to enforce the letter of the law, stressing traditional Catholic practices. Many others, however, especially those under Calvinist influence, wished to “purify” the church of all its Catholic remnants. Some of these Puritans would leave England to build their own churches in America. Those who broke altogether with the Church of England were called Separatists. Thus, the religious controversies associated with the English Reformation so dominated the nation’s political life that interest in colonizing the New World was forced to the periphery of concern.
C H A L L E N G E S T O T H E S PA N I S H E M P I R E
The Spanish monopoly on New World colonies remained intact throughout the sixteenth century, but not without challenge from national rivals spurred by the emotion unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. The French were the first to pose a serious threat. Spanish treasure ships from the New World were tempting targets for French privateers. In 1524 the French king sent the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano in search of a passage to Asia. Sighting land (probably at Cape Fear, North Carolina), Verrazano ranged along the coast as far north as Maine. On a second voyage, in 1528, his life met an abrupt end in the West Indies at the hands of the Caribs.
Unlike the Verrazano voyages, those of Jacques Cartier, beginning in the next decade, led to the first French effort at colonization. On three voyages, Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence and ventured up the St. Lawrence River. Twice he got as far as present-day Montreal and twice wintered at or near the site of Quebec, near which a short-lived French colony appeared in 1541–1542. From that time forward, however, French kings lost interest in Canada. France after midcentury plunged into religious civil wars, and the colonization of Canada had to await the coming of Samuel de Champlain, “the Father of New France,” after 1600.
From the mid-1500s, greater threats to Spanish power arose from the grow- ing strength of the Dutch and the English. The provinces of the Netherlands,
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Challenges to the Spanish Empire • 39
Who were the first European explorers to rival Spanish dominance in the New World, and why did they cross the Atlantic? Why was the defeat of the Spanish Ar- mada important to the history of English exploration? What was the significance of the voyages of Gilbert and Raleigh?
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ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND DUTCH EXPLORATIONS
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which had passed by inheritance to the Spanish king and had become largely Protestant, rebelled against Spanish rule in 1567. A bloody struggle for inde- pendence ensued. Spain did not accept the independence of the Dutch repub- lic until 1648.
Almost from the beginning of the Dutch revolt against Spain, the Dutch “Sea Beggars,” privateers working out of English and Dutch ports, plundered Spanish ships in the Atlantic and carried on illegal trade with Spain’s colonies. The Sea Beggars soon had their counterpart in the English “sea dogges”: John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and others. While Queen Elizabeth steered a tortuous course to avoid open war with Catholic Spain, she en- couraged both Dutch and English captains to engage in smuggling and piracy. In 1577 Drake embarked on his famous adventure around South America, raiding Spanish towns along the Pacific and surprising a treasure ship from Peru. Continuing in a vain search for a passage back to the At- lantic, he spent seven weeks at Drake’s Bay in New Albion, as he called California. Eventually he found his way westward around the world and ar- rived home in 1580. Elizabeth knighted him upon his return.
T H E A R M A D A’ S D E F E AT The plundering of Spanish shipping by English privateers continued for some twenty years before open war erupted. In 1568 Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, ousted by Scottish Presbyterians in favor of her infant son, fled to England. Mary, who was Catholic, had a claim to the English throne by virtue of her descent from Henry VII and soon became the focus of Spanish-Catholic intrigues to over- throw the Protestant Elizabeth. In 1587, after the discovery of a plot to kill her and elevate Mary to the throne, Elizabeth yielded to the demands of her ministers and had Mary beheaded.
Seeking revenge for Mary’s execution, Spain’s king, Philip II, decided to crush Protestant England and so began to gather his ill-fated Armada, whereupon Admiral Francis Drake’s warships destroyed part of the Spanish fleet before it was ready to sail. Drake’s foray postponed for a year the depar- ture of the “Invincible Armada,” which set out to invade England in 1588. As the two fleets positioned themselves for the great naval battle, Elizabeth donned a silver breastplate and told the English forces, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a King of England too.” As the battle unfolded, the heavy Spanish galleons could not compete with the smaller, faster English vessels. Drake’s fleet harried the Spanish ships through the English Channel on their way to the Netherlands, where the Armada was to pick up an invasion force. But caught up in a powerful “Protestant wind” from the south, the storm-tossed
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Spanish fleet was swept into the North Sea instead. What was left of it finally found its way home around the British Isles, scattering wreckage on the shores of Scotland and Ireland.
Defeat of the Spanish Armada marked the beginning of English naval su- premacy and cleared the way for English colonization of America. The naval victory was the climactic event of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. England at the end of the sixteenth century was in the springtime of its power, filled with a youthful zest for new worlds and new wonders.
E N G L I S H E X P L O R AT I O N The history of the English efforts to colo- nize America begins with Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1578 Gilbert, who had long been a favorite of the queen’s, secured a royal patent to possess “heathen and barbarous landes countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.” Significantly, the patent guaranteed to settlers and their descendants in such a colony the rights and privileges of Englishmen “in suche like ample man- ner and fourme as if they were borne and personally residaunte within our
Challenges to the Spanish Empire • 41
The “Invincible Armada”
The fleet of the Spanish Armada in a contemporary English oil painting.
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sed Realme of England.” Their laws had to be “agreable to the forme of the lawes and pollicies of England.”
Gilbert, after two false starts, set out with a colonial expedition in 1583, intending to settle near Narragansett Bay (in present-day Rhode Island). He instead landed in Newfoundland and took possession of the land for Eliza- beth. With winter approaching and his largest vessels lost, Gilbert resolved to return home. While in transit, however, his ship vanished, and he was never seen again.
R A L E I G H ’ S L O S T C O L O N Y The next year, Sir Walter Raleigh per- suaded the queen to renew Gilbert’s colonizing mission in his own name. Sailing by way of the West Indies, the flotilla came to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and discovered Roanoke Island, where the soil seemed fruit- ful and the natives friendly. After several false starts, Raleigh in 1587 spon- sored an expedition of about 100 colonists, including women and children,
42 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
The Arrival of the English in Virginia
The 1585 arrival of English explorers on the Outer Banks, with Roanoke Island at left.
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under Governor John White. White spent a month in Roanoke and then returned to England for supplies, leaving behind his daughter Elinor and his granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. White’s return was delayed because of the war with Spain. When he finally landed, in 1590, he found Roanoke abandoned and pillaged.
No trace of the “lost colonists” was ever found. Hostile Indians may have destroyed the colony, or hostile Spaniards—who had certainly planned to attack—may have done the job. The most recent evidence indicates that the “Lost Colony” fell prey to the region’s worst drought in eight centuries. Tree- ring samples reveal that the colonists arrived during the driest seven-year period in 770 years. While some may have gone south, the main body of colonists appears to have gone north, to the southern shores of Chesapeake Bay, as they had talked of doing, and lived there for some years until they were killed by local Indians. Unless some remnant of the Roanoke settle- ment did survive in the woods, there was not a single English colonist in North America when Queen Elizabeth died in 1603.
Further Reading • 43
M A K I N G C O N N E C T I O N S
• The funding of the voyages of discovery by various European nations had implications for the settlement and control of the New World, as will be discussed in later chapters.
• The settlement pattern of the Spanish in the New World and the wealth they plundered will be contrasted in the next chapter with the patterns of English settlement and the English sources of wealth in the New World.
• The next chapter describes how the Reformation and religious controversies in Europe led various groups to found their own settlements in the New World, where they did not face religious discrimination and persecution.
F U R T H E R R E A D I N G
A fascinating study of pre-Columbian migration is Brian M. Fagan’s The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America, rev. ed. (2004). Alice B. Kehoe’s
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44 • THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)
North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 2nd ed. (1992) provides an encyclopedic treatment of Native Americans.
The conflict between Native Americans and Europeans is treated well in James Axtell’s The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1986) and Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (1992). Colin G. Calloway’s New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (1997) explores the ecological effects of Euro- pean settlement.
The most comprehensive overviews of European exploration are two vol- umes by Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500–1600 (1971) and The Southern Voyages A.D. 1492–1616 (1974).
The voyages of Columbus are surveyed in William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (1992). For sweeping overviews of Spain’s creation of a global empire, see Henry Kamen’s Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (2003) and Hugh Thomas’s Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (2004). David J. Weber examines Spanish colonization in The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992). For the French experience, see William J. Eccles’s France in America, rev. ed. (1990).
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The England that Queen Elizabeth bequeathed to the ScottishKing James I in 1603, like the colonies it would plant, was aunique blend of elements. The language and the people themselves mixed Germanic and Latin ingredients. The Anglican Church mixed Protestant theology and Catholic rituals. And the growth of royal power paradoxically had been linked to the rise of English liberties, in which even Tudor monarchs took pride. In the course of their history, the English people have displayed a genius for “muddling through,” a gift for the prag- matic compromise that defies logic but in the light of experience somehow works.
B R I T A I N A N D
I T S C O L O N I E S
2
F O C U S Q U E S T I O N
• What were the reasons for the founding of the different colonies in North America?
• How did the British colonists and the Native Americans adapt to each other’s presence?
• What factors made England successful in North America?
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T H E E N G L I S H B A C K G R O U N D
Dominated by England, the British Isles included the distinct king- doms of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. England, set off from continental Europe by the English Channel, had safe frontiers after the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. Such comparative isolation enabled the nation to develop institutions quite different from those on the Conti- nent. Unlike the absolute monarchs of France and Spain, the British rulers had to share power with the aristocracy and a lesser aristocracy, known as the gentry, whose representatives formed the bicameral legislature known as Parliament.
By 1600 the decline of feudal practices was far advanced. The great nobles, decimated by the Wars of the Roses, had been brought to heel by Tudor monarchs and their ranks filled with men loyal to the crown. In fact the only nobles left, strictly speaking, were those who sat in the House of Lords. All others were commoners, and among their ranks the aristocratic pecking order ran through a great class of landholding squires, distinguished mainly by their wealth and bearing the simple titles of “esquire” and “gentleman,” as did many well-to-do townsmen. They in turn mingled freely, and often intermarried, with the classes of yeomen (small freehold farmers) and merchants.
E N G L I S H L I B E R T I E S It was to these middle classes that the Tudors looked for support and, for want of bureaucrats or a standing army, local government. Chief reliance in the English counties was on the country gen- tlemen, who usually served as officials without pay. Government, therefore, allowed a large measure of local initiative. Self-rule in the counties and towns became a habit—one that, along with the offices of justice of the peace and sheriff, English colonists took along to the New World as part of their cultural baggage.
In the making of laws, the monarch’s subjects consented through repre- sentatives in the House of Commons. Subjects could be taxed only with the consent of Parliament. By its control of the purse strings, Parliament drew other strands of power into its hands. This structure of powers served as an unwritten constitution. The Magna Carta (Great Charter) of 1215 was a statement of privileges wrested by certain nobles from the king, but it be- came part of a broader assumption that the people as a whole had rights that even the monarch could not violate.
A further safeguard of English liberty was the tradition of common law, which had developed since the twelfth century in royal courts established to
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check the arbitrary power of local nobles. Without laws to cover every detail, judges had to exercise their own ideas of fairness in settling disputes. Deci- sions once made became precedents for subsequent decisions, and over the years a body of judge-made law developed, the outgrowth more of practical experience than of abstract logic. The courts evolved the principle that peo- ple could be arrested or their goods seized only upon a warrant issued by a court and that individuals were entitled to a trial by a jury of their peers (their equals) in accordance with established rules of evidence.
E N G L I S H E N T E R P R I S E English liberties inspired a sense of personal initiative and enterprise that spawned prosperity and empire. The ranks of entrepreneurs and adventurers were constantly replenished by the younger sons of the squirearchy, cut off from the estate that the oldest son inherited according to the law of primogeniture (or firstborn). At the same time the formation of joint-stock companies spurred commercial expansion. These entrepreneurial companies were the ancestors of the modern corporation, in which stockholders, not the government, shared the risks and profits, some- times for a single venture but more and more on a permanent basis. In the late sixteenth century some of the larger companies managed to get royal charters that entitled them to monopolies in certain areas and even govern- ment powers in their outposts. Such companies would become the first in- struments of colonization.
For all the vaunted glories of English liberty and enterprise, it was not the best of times for the common people. During the late sixteenth century the “lower sort” in Britain experienced a population explosion that outstripped the ability of the economy to support so many workers. An additional strain on the population was the “enclosure” of farmlands where peasants had lived and worked. For more than two centuries, serfdom had been on the way to extinction as the feudal duties of serfs were transformed into rents and the serfs themselves into tenants. But while tenancy gave people a degree of independence, it also allowed landlords to increase demands and, as the trade in woolen products grew, to “enclose” farmlands and evict the human tenants in favor of sheep. The enclosure movement of the sixteenth century, coupled with the rising population, gave rise to the great number of beggars and rogues who peopled the literature of Elizabethan times and gained im- mortality in Mother Goose: “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. The beggars have come to town.” The needs of this displaced peasant population, on the move throughout Great Britain, became another powerful argument for colonial expansion. The displaced poor migrated from farms to crowded towns and cities. London became a powerful magnet for vagabonds. By the seventeenth
The English Background • 47
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century the English capital was notorious for its filth, poverty, crime, and class tensions—all of which helped persuade the ruling elite to send idle and larcenous commoners abroad to settle new colonies.
PA R L I A M E N T A N D T H E S T U A R T S With the death of Elizabeth, who never married and did not give birth to an heir, the Tudor family line ran out and the throne fell to the first of the Stuarts, whose dynasty would span most of the seventeenth century, a turbulent time during which the English planted their overseas empire. In 1603 James VI of Scotland, son of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, and great-great-grandson of Henry VII, became James I of England—as Elizabeth had planned. A man of ponderous learning, James fully earned his reputation as the “wisest fool in Christen- dom.” Tall and broad-shouldered, he was bisexual, conceited, profligate, and lazy and possessed an undiplomatic tongue. He lectured the people on every topic but remained blind to English traditions and sensibilities. Whereas the Tudors had wielded absolute power through constitutional forms, James promoted the theory of divine right, by which monarchs answered only to God. Whereas the Puritans hoped to find a Presbyterian ally in their op- position to Anglican trappings, they found instead a testy autocrat who
48 • BRITAIN AND ITS COLONIES (CH. 2)
Stuart Kings
(Left) James I, the successor to Queen Elizabeth and the first of England’s Stuart kings. (Right) Charles I in a portrait by Gerrit van Honthorst.
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promised to banish them. He even offended Anglicans, by deciding to end his cousin Elizabeth’s war with Catholic Spain.
Charles I, who succeeded his father James, in 1625, proved even more stubborn about royal power. He disbanded Parliament from 1629 to 1640 and levied taxes by decree. In the religious arena the archbishop of Canter- bury, William Laud, directed a systematic persecution of Puritans but finally overreached himself when he tried to impose Anglican worship on Presby- terian Scots. In 1638 Scotland rose in revolt, and in 1640 Charles called Parliament to raise money for the defense of his kingdom. The “Long Parlia- ment” impeached Laud instead and condemned to death the king’s chief minister. In 1642, when the king tried to arrest five members of Parliament, civil war erupted between the “Roundheads,” who backed Parliament, and the “Cavaliers,” who supported the king.
In 1646 Royalist resistance collapsed, and parliamentary forces captured the king. Parliament, however, could not agree on a permanent settlement. A dispute arose between Presbyterians and Independents (who preferred a congregational church government), and in 1648 the Independents purged the Presbyterians, leaving a “Rump Parliament” that then instigated the trial and execution of King Charles I on charges of treason.
Oliver Cromwell, the tenacious commander of the army, operated like a military dictator, ruling first through a council chosen by Parliament (the Commonwealth) and, after forcible dissolution of Parliament, as lord pro- tector (the Protectorate). Cromwell extended religious toleration to all Britons except Catholics and Anglicans, but his arbitrary governance and his stern moralistic codes provoked growing public resentment. When, af- ter his death in 1658, his son proved too weak to carry on, the army once again took control, permitted new elections for Parliament, and in 1660 supported the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, son of the martyred king.
Charles II accepted as terms of the Restoration settlement the principle that he must rule jointly with Parliament. By tact or shrewd maneuvering, he managed to hold his throne. His younger brother, the duke of York (who be- came James II upon succeeding to the throne in 1685), was less flexible. He openly avowed Catholicism and assumed the same unyielding stance as the first two Stuarts. The people could bear it so long as they expected one of his Protestant daughters, Mary or Anne, to succeed him. In 1688, however, the birth of a son who would be reared a Catholic finally brought matters to a crisis. Leaders of Parliament invited Mary and her husband, William of Orange, a Dutch prince, to assume the throne jointly, and James fled the country.
The English Background • 49
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By this “Glorious Revolution,” Parliament finally established its freedom from royal control. Under the Bill of Rights, in 1689, William and Mary gave up the royal prerogatives of suspending laws, erecting special courts, keeping a standing army, or levying taxes except by Parliament’s consent. They further agreed to hold frequent legislative sessions and allow freedom of speech in Parliament, freedom of petition to the crown, and restrictions against exces- sive bail and cruel and unusual punishments. The Act of Toleration of 1689 extended a degree of freedom of worship to all Christians except Catholics and Unitarians, although dissenters from the established church still had few political rights. In 1701 the Act of Settlement ensured Protestant succession through Queen Anne (r. 1702–1714). And by the Act of Union in 1707, Eng- land and Scotland became the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
S E T T L I N G T H E C H E S A P E A K E
During these eventful years all but one of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies had their start. They began as corporations rather than new countries. In 1606 King James I chartered a joint-stock enterprise called the Virginia Company, with two divisions, the First Colony of London and the Second Colony of Plymouth. The London group of investors could plant a settlement between the 34th and 38th parallels, the Plymouth group between the 41st and 45th parallels, and either between the 38th and 41st parallels, provided they kept 100 miles apart. The stockholders expected a potential return from gold and other minerals; products—such as wine, cit- rus fruits, and olive oil—that would free England from dependence on Spain; trade with the Indians; pitch, tar, potash, and other forest products needed for naval use; and perhaps a passage to east Asia. Some investors saw colonization as an opportunity to transplant the growing number of jobless vagrants from Britain to the New World. Others dreamed of finding another Aztec or Inca Empire. Few if any foresaw what the first English colony would actually become: a place to grow tobacco.
From the outset the pattern of English colonization diverged significantly from the Spanish pattern, which involved conquering highly sophisticated peoples and regulating all aspects of colonial life. While interest in America was growing, the English were already involved in planting settlements, or “plantations,” in Ireland, which the English had conquered by military force under Queen Elizabeth. Within their own pale (or limit) of settlement in Ireland, the English set about transplanting their familiar way of life insofar as possible.
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The English would apply the same pattern as they settled North America, subjugating (and converting) the Indians there as they had the Irish in Ireland. Yet in America the English settled along the Atlantic seaboard, where the na- tive populations were relatively sparse. There was no Aztec or Inca Empire to conquer. The colonists thus had to establish their own communities in a largely wilderness setting. Describing the “settlement” of the Atlantic seaboard is somewhat misleading, however, for the British colonists who arrived in the seventeenth century rarely settled in one place for long. They were migrants more than settlers, people who had been on the move in Britain and continued to pursue new opportunities in different places once they arrived in America.
V I R G I N I A The London group of the Virginia Company planted the first permanent colony in Virginia, named after Elizabeth I, “the Virgin Queen.” On May 6, 1607, three tiny ships carrying 105 men reached Chesapeake Bay
Settling the Chesapeake • 51
“Ould Virginia”
A 1624 map of Virginia by John Smith, showing Chief Powhatan in the upper left.
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after four storm-tossed months at sea. They chose a river with a northwest bend—in the hope of finding a passage to Asia—and settled about forty miles inland, to hide from marauding Spaniards.
The river they called the James and the colony, Jamestown. The seaweary colonists began building a fort, thatched huts, a storehouse, and a church. They then set to planting, but most were either townsmen unfamiliar with farming or “gentleman” adventurers who scorned manual labor. They had come expecting to find gold, friendly natives, and easy living. Instead they found disease, starvation, dissension, and death. Ignorant of woodlore, they did not know how to exploit the area’s abundant game and fish. Supplies from England were undependable, and only some effective leadership and trade with the Indians, who taught the colonists to grow maize, enabled them to survive.
The Indians of the region were loosely organized. Powhatan was the pow- erful, charismatic chief of numerous Algonquian-speaking towns in eastern Virginia, representing over 10,000 Indians. The Indians making up the so- called Powhatan Confederacy were largely an agricultural people focused on raising corn. They lived along rivers in fortified towns and resided in wood houses sheathed with bark. Chief Powhatan collected tribute from the tribes he had conquered—fully 80 percent of the corn that they grew was handed over. Despite occasional clashes with the colonists, the Indians initially adopted a stance of nervous assistance and watchful waiting. Powhatan de- veloped a lucrative trade with the colonists, exchanging corn and hides for hatchets, swords, and muskets; he realized too late that the newcomers in- tended to expropriate his lands and subjugate his people.
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