Settling the Chesapeake Region

HOW WERE THE FIRST ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS FOUNDED?

E Pluribus Unum

I. Early Spanish, French, & Dutch Land Claims

• Spain
• Ponce de Leon – Florida (1513)
• Cortes – Mexico (1520)
• Pizarro – Peru (1532)

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• France
• Cartier – St. Lawrence River
• Champlain – Quebec (1608)

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• Netherlands
• Hudson – Hudson River -> New Amsterdam (1609)

II. EARLY ENGLISH ATTEMPTS AT COLONIZATION

• John Cabot - Newfoundland
• Sir Humphrey Gilbert attempts to found a colony in Newfoundland, but fails and drowns on the ride home
• Sir Walter Raleigh sends men to Roanoke Island in Virginia (named for virgin Queen Elizabeth)—present-day NC—this eventually fails as second group of settlers disappears

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Table 2.1 p26

III. REASONS FOR ENGLAND’S DESIRE TO EXPAND TO AMERICA

• Economic Depression
• Enclosure System
• Population Explosion
• Primogeniture
• Competition for overseas colonies
• Defeat of Spanish Armada (1588)
• Joint-Stock Companies provide financial support
• Richard Hakluyt
• Empty prisons; put “idle men” to work
• Spread Christianity
• Claim natural resources
• Find NW Passage

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IV. SETTLEMENT OF JAMESTOWN

• Problems:
• (Kupperman article)
• Settled in 1607 on a marshland
• malaria
• “starving time”
• Powhatan Indians

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• Governor John Smith demanded that everyone work, but many English “gentlemen” resisted
• Replaced by Gov. William Berkeley

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V. Cultural Clashes in the Chesapeake

• In 1607 Chieftain Powhatan dominated the James River area.
• In 1610 Lord De La Warr arrived from England with orders to deal with the Indians.
• In 1614 the First Anglo-Powhatan War ended, sealed by Pocahontas’s marriage to colonist John Rolfe—the first known interracial union in Virginia.
• Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1644) was Indians’ last attempt to dislodge Virginians.
• The Powhatans’ misfortune was the three Ds: disease, disorganization, and disposability.

VI. The Indians’ New World

• Indigenous people’s destinies had changed.
• The shock of large-scale European colonization disrupted Native American life.
• Horses, diseases, trade, and the expanding Atlantic economy transformed Indian life.
• A new middle ground compelled both Europeans and Native Americans to accommodate each other.

VII. Virginia: Child of Tobacco

• In 1612 John Rolfe perfected tobacco culture.
• Virginia’s prosperity was built on this “bewitching weed,” but King Nicotine depleted the soil.
• Besides land, tobacco required lots of labor.
• In 1619 a Dutch warship landed at Jamestown and sold some twenty Africans, planting the seeds of North American slavery.

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p32

VII. Virginia: Child of Tobacco (cont.)

• In 1619 representative self-government was born in primitive Virginia.
• The House of Burgesses was an assembly or miniature parliament in the New World.
• James I grew increasingly hostile to Virginia.
• In 1624 he revoked the company’s charter and Virginia became a royal colony.

V. MARYLAND

• Proprietary colony – King granted charter to Lord Baltimore
• Catholic refuge
• Tobacco-based economy
• Conflict b/w Protestants and Catholics
• Maryland Act of Toleration
• Tolerated Christians but persecuted Jews and Atheists

Maryland Toleration Act (1649)

“That whatever person or persons within

this Province and the Islands belonging

to it shall from henceforth (now on)

blaspheme God, or deny that our Savior

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, or shall

deny that the holy Trinity is the unity of

the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or

shall use or utter any reproachful

speeches, words, or language

concerning the said Holy Trinity, or any

of the said three persons thereof, shall

be punished with death, and all his or

her lands and goods will be given to the

Lord Proprietary and his heirs.”

Map 2.2 p36

VI. The Carolinas and Georgia

• Carolinas
• Est. 1670 as a Royal Colony
• Had close economic ties w/ English West Indies (Barbados)
• Sugar
• Enslaved Indians
• Main exports: rice, tobacco
• N. Carolina separated in 1712
• More democratic, independent-minded; less aristocratic
• Georgia
• Est. in 1733 as a buffer colony b/w the S. Carolina and Spanish Florida
• Penal colony for English debtors

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VII. The Plantation Colonies

• England’s southern mainland colonies shared:
• Devotion to exporting agricultural products, mainly tobacco and rice
• Slavery
• Slow growth of cities
• Religious toleration
• A tendency to expand

VIII. The Tobacco Economy

• Chesapeake hospitable to tobacco growing:
• It quickly exhausted the soil.
• It created an insatiable demand for new land.
• Commercial growers moved farther up the river valleys, provoking Indian attacks.
• By 1630s the Chesapeake shipped 1.5 million pounds of tobacco, and by 1700 almost 40 million pounds.
• Overproduction depressed prices.

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p63

The Tobacco Economy (cont.)

• More tobacco required more labor, but from where?
• Natural population increase was too slow.
• Indians often died on contact with whites.
• African slaves were expensive.
• England still had a “surplus” of displaced workers and farmers desperate for employment.
• Virginia and Maryland used the headright system to encourage importation of laborers.

The Tobacco Economy (cont.)

• Chesapeake planters recruited some 100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700.
• These “white slaves” represented more than three-quarters of all European immigrants.
• Indentured servants led a hard life but looked forward to becoming free and acquiring land.
• After freedom, they often had to work for former masters at low wages because few received land as part of “freedom dues.”

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IX. Frustrated Freemen

• Impoverished freedmen were increasingly frustrated with broken hopes and failure to find single women to marry.
• 1670: Virginia assembly disfranchised most landless whites.
• Governor Berkeley faced Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) led by Nathaniel Bacon.

Bacon’s Rebellion (cont.)

• Because of Berkeley’s friendly policies toward Indians, he refused to retaliate against a series of brutal Indian attacks.
• Bacon and his frontier followers took matters into their own hands.
• After Bacon died from disease, Berkeley brutally suppressed the rebellion.
• Afterwards, planters sought a less troublesome source of labor for tobacco.

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X. Colonial Slavery

• In late 17^th century slavery expanded:
• 7 million brought to New World over 300 years.
• 400,000 came to North America, most after 1700.
• 1619: First Africans were brought to Jamestown.
• 1670: Africans = 7% of southern population.
• Colonists could not afford high prices for slaves.
• White servants were less costly initially, but less so by late 1600s and seemed more dangerous after Bacon’s Rebellion.

Colonial Slavery (cont.)

• Mid-1680s: More black slaves than white servants came into plantation colonies.
• 1698: Royal African Company lost monopoly.
• Thus Americans, especially Rhode Islanders, entered the lucrative slave trade.
• Most slaves came from west coast of Africa, present-day Senegal to Angola (see Map 4.1).
• Most came via gruesome middle passage.

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Colonial Slavery (cont.)

• In the early 1600s, the legal difference between African slaves and white servants was unclear, but that changed as the number of Africans greatly increased.
• 1662: Virginia statutes began to define the iron conditions of slavery for blacks.
• “Slave codes” marked blacks and their children as property (“chattels”) for life.

Colonial Slavery (cont.)

• Some colonies made it a crime to teach a slave to read or write.
• Not even conversion to Christianity could qualify a slave for freedom.
• As the 1600s ended, racial discrimination clearly molded the American slave system.
• Slavery then shaped race relations throughout the English colonies.

Colonial Slavery (cont.)

• Slavery, Race, and Economics
• Although slavery is adopted for economic reasons, it becomes justified on basis of race
• Slave Codes make racism official policy of all Colonial governments
• Ensure racial discrimination; slave status is inherited.
• By 1775, there were 500,000 Blacks in North America, 90% of whom were slaves in South

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Map 4.1 p67

p66

p67

p68

Estimates of Blacks as a Percentage of the Population, by Southern Colony, 1680-1770