Origins and Early Formation of the 13 Colonies II Flashcards
Review - Timeline: Creating New Social Orders - Colonial Societies, 1500-1700
1565: Spanish establish St. Augustine in present day Florida (it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement within the borders of the continental United States). 1607: English settle Jamestown. 1609-1645: Jamestown colonists and Powhatan Indians fight Anglo-Powhatan Wars. 1610: Spanish establish Sante Fe in present day New Mexico. 1620: English Puritans draft Mayflower Compact and found Plymouth Colony. 1675-1676: King Philip (Metacom) wages war against Puritan colonies. 1676: Nathaniel Bacon leads armed rebellion against Virginia governor. 1680: Pope leads Pueblo Revolt in Santa Fe.
Protestantism
Protestantism, movement that began in northern Europe in the early 16th century as a reaction to medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. Along with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism became one of three major forces in Christianity. After a series of European religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, and especially in the 19th century, it spread throughout the world. Wherever Protestantism gained a foothold, it influenced the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the area.
North American Protestants: Pilgrims Vs. Puritans
(1.) Pilgrims and Puritans have a similar ancestry, shared history, and goals. The Puritans are the original group which aimed to bring back simplicity and virtue in Christianity. On the other hand, Pilgrims are the separatists who were once Puritans but were discontent at reforms. Both groups look to the scriptures as their final authority on religion and not the clergy. (2.) The Pilgrims came first to America and settled in Plymouth while the Puritans came later and settled in Massachusetts. (3.) John Foxe is the leader of the Puritans while Robert Browne is the Pilgrim’s founder. (4.) Pilgrims practiced a form of democracy in their community comprised of working men. On the other hand, Puritans were more socially stratified and authoritarian. They also practiced a theocracy form of governance.
The Northern Colonies
Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
The Northern Colonies - The Mayflower and the Plymouth Rock Settlement
In December 1620, the Mayflower arrived on the northeastern coast of America with a shipload of people now called Pilgrims. After landing outside the territory of Virginia, the colonists had no legal responsibilities or protection from the company. They wrote and signed the May flower Compact, a democratic government for the colony. Half of the colonists died their first winter while they remained aboard the ship, including their governor. Despite the advantage of building their new community in an abandoned Indian village, they still had trouble in the spring because they couldn’t get their own crops to grow in the New World. They were saved by an English-speaking Indian, named Squanto, who taught them how to survive in Plymouth. Then the new governor, William Bradford, signed a mutual-defense treaty with the local Wampanoag Indians. After their first harvest, they established the tradition of Thanksgiving. But as the colony grew, the settlers found themselves at war with many of the local tribes.
The Mayflower
The Mayflower was an English ship that transported the first English Puritans, known today as the Pilgrims, from Plymouth, England, to the New World in 1620. There were 102 passengers, and the crew is estimated to have been about 30, but the exact number is unknown. The ship has become a cultural icon in the history of the United States. The Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact prior to leaving the ship and establishing Plymouth Colony, a document which established a rudimentary form of democracy with each member contributing to the welfare of the community. There was a second ship named Mayflower, which made the London to Plymouth, Massachusetts, voyage several times.
The Pilgrims
The Pilgrims or Pilgrim Fathers were the first English settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownist Puritans who had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands. They held Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations needed to be separated from the English state church. They were also concerned that they might lose their cultural identity if they remained in the Netherlands, so they arranged with investors to establish a new colony in America. The colony was established in 1620 and became the second successful English settlement in America, following the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The Pilgrims’ story became a central theme in the history and culture of the United States.
Mayflower Compact
Knowing that their chances of survival depended on sticking together, they agreed to form a democracy in which all of the men could vote to create laws for the common good of the colony. Known today as the Mayflower Compact, this agreement acknowledged the King and God, but modeled a new concept called the consent of the governed, which means common people voluntarily agree to allow the government to have authority over them. Every man on board signed the Mayflower Compact, which functioned as the colony’s government for more than 70 years.
Plymouth Rock Settlement - William Bradford
William Bradford (1590-1657) was an English Puritan separatist originally from the West Riding of Yorkshire in Northern England. He moved to Leiden in Holland in order to escape persecution from King James I of England, and then emigrated to the Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower in 1620. He was a signatory to the Mayflower Compact and went on to serve as Governor of the Plymouth Colony intermittently for about 30 years between 1621 and 1657. His journal Of Plymouth Plantation covered the years from 1620 to 1657 in Plymouth.
Plymouth Rock Settlement - Wampanoag
The Wampanoag had lived in the Northeast for thousands of years. But their long history came to an abrupt end when they came in contact with Europeans. Sailors, traders, and fishermen had been exploring much of the coast for more a century before the Pilgrims arrived. One of their most important legacies was smallpox, which killed 90% of the coastal population. The weakened tribes were then attacked by stronger inland tribes, and most of the coastal villages were just abandoned. By the time the Pilgrims showed up, the Wampanoag were gone from the coast.
Squanto
Tisquantum (~1585-1622), more commonly known by the diminutive variant ‘Squanto’, was a member of the Patuxet tribe best known for being an early liaison between the native populations in Southern New England and the Mayflower Pilgrims who made their settlement at the site of Squanto’s former summer village.
The Northern Colonies - Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Winthrop
Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original English settlements in present-day Massachusetts, settled in 1630 by a group of about 1,000 Puritan refugees from England under Gov. John Winthrop. In 1629 the it had obtained from King Charles I a charter empowering the company to trade and colonize in New England. The grant was similar to that of the Virginia Company in 1609. However, the patentees decided to transfer the management and the charter itself to Massachusetts, which allowed for local management and made the charter a de facto political constitution. Among the communities that the Puritans established were Boston, Charlestown, Salem, Dorchester, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury, and Lynn.
The Puritans established a theocratic government with the franchise limited to church members. Winthrop and other leaders zealously sought to prevent any independence of religious views, and many with differing religious beliefs. By the mid-1640s Massachusetts Bay Colony had grown to more than 20,000 inhabitants. The charter of 1691 merged the Plymouth colony and Maine into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Northern Colonies - Rhode Island Colony, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson
The Rhode Island colony was formed in ~1638 by former Puritan Roger Williams after he escaped the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his progressive views (for the time). It was created as a safe-haven for people of all religious affiliations, as a response to Puritan persecution of other Christian sects. Anne Hutchinson was another outspoken progressive (for the time) and was banished from Massachusetts. She lived in Rhode Island for a time before being killed in an Indian attack while she was settling in New Netherland.
The Northern Colonies - Massachusetts Bay Colony - Expansion and Conflict and Thomas Hooker
Connecticut was settled by Thomas Hooker (1586-1647), who thought every man ought to be able to vote, as well as some Puritans who thought Massachusetts wasn’t strict enough. Despite being a tightly controlled settlement, Massachusetts grew exponentially, leading to the overflow colony of New Hampshire. This expansion strained the land’s resources and the colonists’ relation with the Indians. After crushing native resistance in the Pequot War (1636-1638), there was no resistance to continued English immigration to the New England colonies.
The Southern Colonies
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.
The Southern Colonies - Virginia
Virginia was started in 1607 by the English in order to establish a cash-crop industry around tobacco. Cultivating tobacco requires a lot of manpower and Virginia’s population through the 1620s was not adequate enough to meat demand for labor. A high surplus of entrepreneurship and labor was available from England to meet this demand. Edwin Sandy (1561-1629) proposed a solution called the ‘headright system’, which meant that anyone who paid for a trip to Virginia also received 50 acres. Rich entrepreneurs paid for poor people to come with them as servants. These servants were indentured to the landowner, typically for seven years. Only roughly 15% of servants survived their indenture and had almost nothing. As a result, as social divide of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ overtook Virginia. Wealthy planters owned the best land and controlled society. Though the House of Burgesses was an elected government, only landowning men could vote.
The Southern Colonies - Virginia - [Nathaniel] Bacon’s Rebellion and Slavery
(1676-1677) Under Nathaniel Bacon’s leadership, former indentured servants tried to defend themselves against Indian attacks, but turned their hostilities against Virginian leadership when they were ordered to stop. Bacon’s Rebellion alarmed the gentry, who purposely created a racial divide in society to weaken the power of the lower classes, composed of allied European indentured servants and Africans (many enslaved until death or freed). To weaken the power of the lower class, the House of Burgesses granted all free white men the right to vote, dividing society along color lines. Bacon’s Rebellion also helped turn planters away from indentured servitude and towards slavery, with the eventual passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.
The Southern Colonies - Maryland, Cecil Calvert, and Act of Religious Toleration
The Maryland colony was founded by Cecilius or Cecil Calvert (whose title was Lord Baltimore) to start a new American colony for Catholics. It resembled Virginia in many ways, including tobacco plantations, indentured servants and slave labor and high mortality. A settler in Maryland lived ten years less than someone in New England. Despite Calvert’s plan, Maryland had a Protestant majority, so he approved the ‘Act of Religious Tolerance’ in 1649 guaranteeing political rights to anyone practicing any form of Christianity. However, this same year the King of England was beheaded and Puritans took over the English government, which allowed this act to be overturned years later.
The Southern Colonies - The Carolinas
The Carolina colony was named after newly crowned Charles II decided to reward eight of his supporters by giving them a colony in 1663. The eight owners were called ‘proprietors’: The owner of a business or property. The colony eventually officially split into northern and southern colonies by the year 1729 because of major differences in culture and economics. The north had greater diversity, no exports and no cash crops, and was much less committed to the institution of slavery. The south became inhabited by poor and rich men from Barbados who invested in the hog and cash crop (rice) industries. Slavery became a major institution in the south once investors learned slaves imported directly from West Africa were already skilled in growing rice. By 1708, Africans became the majority of the population. The more money slaves made for their owners, the more the Southern elite were committed to slavery and its permanence.
The Southern Colonies - Georgia and James Oglethorpe
James Oglethorpe believed that even the worst people in society could succeed, given the same opportunity. So he asked the King for a charter to settle a colony of people from debtors’ prison. In one stroke, the King was able to buffer South Carolina from Spanish attack and create an obstacle for escaping slaves. In 1733, the colony of Georgia was settled. Oglethorpe intended for Georgia to be a utopia of hard work and social equality, so he outlawed slavery and large landholdings. As a result of these restrictions (and because England wouldn’t let its debtors out of prison), Georgia attracted very few settlers, and those who did come complained constantly about their situation. Colonists started moving to South Carolina, so within two decades, Oglethorpe lifted the restrictions, and his utopia turned into a society that looked very much like South Carolina with a plantation economy based on rice.
The Middle Colonies
New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The Middle Colonies - Major difference between Northern and Southern Colonies.
The Middle Colonies differ from the Northern and Southern Colonies in that their territory changed hands many times and many of the settlers came from different places for different reasons. This revolving leadership and ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity in the middle colonies led a French immigrant to observe that America was a great melting pot.
The Middle Colonies - New York
The Dutch West India Company founded New Netherland in 1624 to profit from the fur trade. The company gave large tracts of private land to Patroons, who could sponsor at least 50 families to come to the colony, in order to meet insufficient labor demands. Settlers came from all over Europe, from Brazil after the Dutch lost their colony there, and neighboring New Sweden after the Dutch obtained it. It was noted in 1641 that 18 different languages where spoken on Manhattan alone. Settlers in New Netherland could practice whatever religion they wanted as long as they did so privately. With this diverse, peaceful, well-fed population, the rulers turned their attention to developing urban areas, with New Amsterdam becoming the most important. England believed that John Cabot’s exploration in the 15th century gave them the rights to New Netherland and easily annexed the territory in 1664, renaming it New York.
The Middle Colonies - New York Culture
English immigrants arrived in New York after the Dutch had already developed a cultured and thriving community. They expected to maintain the lifestyle they had left behind in England. They paid for European imports, such as tea, fabrics, and books. A class structure developed with merchants at the top and sailors at the bottom. The more imported items the colonists purchased, the more power and money the merchants gained. In many important areas merchants owned the land, while those of lesser status rented. The elites were opposed to representative government, which further entrenched their power.
