American History

Chapter 2: The English “Transplantations”

Sources:
▪ Give Me Liberty!: An American History (Third Edition)
▪ America’s History (Eighth Edition)
▪ American Pageant (Fourteenth Edition)
▪ America: A Concise History (Fourth Edition)
▪ American Colonies: The Settling of North America

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Possible Contextualization for Chapters 1-2-3
Possible contextualization for
Chapters 1, 2, 3: REFORMATION
Columbus’s discovery of the
Americas narrowly preceded the
Reformation.

Religious hatreds were added to

intense national rivalries in the
ensuing 200 years, which
poisoned relations among the
powers that colonized America.
Attitudes about the Reformation
also affected patterns of
migration to the New World.
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 Jamestown, 1607

▪ Poor location, low and swampy, malaria

▪ Thick woods, difficult to cultivate
▪ Composed of adventurers, not laborers
▪ Too much time being greedy and looking for gold…not planting
or gathering food
▪ Inadequate diets contributed to vulnerability
▪ No women, little interest creating a family-centered community

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 From Company to Society
Key Concept 1.2: IIIB

▪ 1619: the House of Burgesses is the first elected assembly in

colonial America, establishing a political precedent that all
English colonies would eventually follow.

▪ 1619: the first African slaves arrive in Virginia

▪ 1622: Openchancanough’s Uprising, kills one-fourth of

Virginia’s settler population of 1,200. The unsuccessful uprising
fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the colony.

▪ Spanish colonizing efforts in North America (after the Pueblo

Revolt) saw an accommodation with some aspects of American
Indian culture; by contrast, conflict with American Indians
tended to reinforce English colonists’ worldviews on land and
gender roles.
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 Headright System and Indentured Servitude

▪ Headright system: Both Virginia and Maryland employed the

headright system to encourage the importation of indentured
servants. Under its terms, whoever paid the passage of a
laborer received the right to acquire fifty acres of land.
▪ Although the headright system increased the population of
colonies like Virginia, it also contributed to the expansion of
indentured servitude, the lower class, and slavery. After the
American Revolution, the system was no longer used.

▪ Indentured servants: represented between two-thirds and

three-quarters of all European immigrants to Virginia and
Maryland in the seventeenth century.
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 Tobacco Cultivation
Key Concept 2.1: II A

▪ The tobacco economy – with its profitability and its land and
labor demands – transformed Chesapeake society in
fundamental ways:
 territorial expansion: soil is exhausted easily, planters have
to keep moving west…
 recruiting more indentured servants: until the elite gets
scared by all the landless, ticked-off men wandering around…
 Increased demand for labor: but not more indentured
servants, import slaves from Africa instead…

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 Settling the Chesapeake
Key Concept 2.1: II A

▪ The increasingly profitable tobacco trade intensified the

settlers’ lust for land.

▪ To sustain their competitive advantage, the largest planters

bought up the most fertile land along the coast, thereby forcing
freed servants to become tenants or claim less fertile land
inland.

▪ In either case the tenants found themselves at a disadvantage.

They grew dependent upon planters for land and credit, and
small farmers along the western frontier became more
vulnerable to Indian attacks.

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 Significance of Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676

▪ It showed how unwilling the English settlers were to abide by

earlier agreements with the natives
▪ It showed how unwilling the Indians were to tolerate further
white movement into their territory
▪ It revealed the bitterness of the competition among eastern
and western landowners
▪ It unleashed the potential for instability in the population of
free, landless men
▪ The planter class began cutting back on the use of indentured
servants. Instead, planters imported thousands of African
laborers, and in 1705, legalized slavery
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 The Rise of Chesapeake Slavery
Key Concept 2.1: II A
▪ The abundance of land, a shortage of indentured servants, the
lack of an effective means to enslave native peoples, and the
growing European demand for colonial goods led to the
emergence of the Atlantic slave trade.
▪ Compared with indentured servants, slaves offered planters
many advantages.
 Slaves could not claim the protections of English common
law
 Slaves’ terms of service never expired (and they therefore
did not become a population of unruly landless men)
 Africans had encountered many diseases known in Europe
and developed resistance to them
 (Indians didn’t make good slaves, and most coastal Indians
had died from diseases)
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 Slavery and the Law
Key Concept 2.2 II B

▪ In the Americas, slavery was based on the plantation, and

chattel slavery would come to be associated with race, a
concept that drew a permanent line between whites and blacks.
▪ But prejudice by itself did not create North American slavery.
For this institution to take root, authorities had to be convinced
that importing African slaves was the best way to solve their
persistent shortage of labor.
▪ A major international business, slavery stood at the center of
the economic process.
▪ The law of slavery in English North America would become far
more repressive than in the Spanish empire, especially on the
all-important question of whether avenues existed by which
slaves could obtain freedom.
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 Historiography and Nathaniel Bacon
(an example of history “changing”)
Condemned as a rebel and a
traitor in his own time,
Nathaniel Bacon emerged in
the late eighteenth century as
an American hero, a harbinger
of the Patriots of 1776.

This is an excellent example of

how history can change, of
how the perception of a
person and/or event can take
different shapes over time.

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 New England Puritans
Key Concept 2.1: II B

▪ The first Puritan emigrants consisted of Separatists,

subsequently called Pilgrims. In 1620 they crossed the Atlantic
in the ship Mayflower to found a town named Plymouth.
▪ In 1630 a much larger Puritan emigration began under the
leadership of John Winthrop. Winthrop’s Puritans established
the Massachusetts Bay colony.
▪ Puritan values helped the colonists prosper in a demanding
land. In the process, they developed a culture that was both
the most entrepreneurial and the most vociferously pious in
Anglo-America. Contrary to the declension model promoted by
some historians, the increasing commercialism of New England
life at the end of the 1600s derived from Puritan values rather
than manifested their decay. (Material aspiration and the
pursuit of salvation were yoked together).
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 Mayflower Compact

▪ With the need to create a government based on civil consent

rather than divine decree, they all agreed to submit to the laws
drawn up by their duly elected officials. This civil covenant
would provide the basis for a secular government in America.
▪ Given the future course of New England and the United States,
there is a temptation to make more out of the Mayflower
compact than there actually was. In truth, the compact made
no attempt to propose that they now alter the form of local
government that existed in any town back in England. What
made the document truly extraordinary was that it applied to a
group of people who were three thousand miles from their
mother country. The Mayflower Compact represented a
remarkable act of coolheaded and pragmatic resolve.
- Mayflower (2006) by Nathaniel Philbrick
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 Compare and Contrast:
the New England and the Chesapeake Colonies
Key Concept 2.1: II A, B
▪ Most New England farmers had to rely on their own families for
the labor to build their especially demanding farms. That
reliance on family labor kept New England more egalitarian in
the distribution of property and power than was the case in the
richer Chesapeake, where an elite of great planters exploited
the labor of servants and slaves.

▪ Most of the New England colonists could pay their own way and
emigrated as family groups. In sharp contrast, most who
emigrated to the Chesapeake colonies were young single men
who sought regular meals in the short term and a farm in the
long term, and they gambled their lives as indentured servants
in the Chesapeake or the West Indies.
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 The Pequot War and King Philip’s War
Key Concept 2.1: III E

▪ Pequot War: (1637) The first major conflict between the New
English and the Indians, the war redefined the balance of power
in the region for decades to come. With the Pequot War, New
England Indians were introduced to the horrors of European-
style genocide. The indiscriminate slaughter of men, women,
and children contradicted Indian customs and shocked the
Indian allies. Warfare as they knew it had been destroyed.

▪ King Philip’s War: (1675) the deadliest conflict in American

history in terms of the proportion of casualties to total
population.
▪ Notice the contrast in between the Spanish and the English
regarding Indian relations at this time. Remember, the Pueblo
Revolt – although discussed in Chapter 1 – takes place in 1680.
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 King Philip’s War
Key Concept 2.1: III E

▪ Only lasting fourteen months, the war changed the face of New
England. A third of the hundred or so towns in New England
were burned and abandoned. In terms of percentage of
population killed, King Philip’s War was more than twice as
bloody as the American Civil War. In terms of the percentage of
population killed, the English had suffered casualties that are
difficult for us to comprehend today. During the forty-five
months of WWII, the U.S. lost just under 1% of its adult male
population; during the Civil war the casualty rate was
somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; during the fourteen
months of King Philip’s War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8% of
its men.
- Mayflower (2006) by Nathaniel Philbrick

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 Navigation Laws
Key Concept 2.2: I C

▪ Navigation Laws: (Navigation Acts is the same thing) designed

by England to regulate colonial commerce and trade more
strictly (making smuggling an increasingly common occupation),
these acts formed the legal basis of England’s mercantile system
in America for a century. The Navigation Law of 1660 would
have had a devastating effect on the American economy had
the British enforced the law.

▪ Glorious Revolution: Inspired by the challenge to the crown in

old England, many colonists seized the occasion to strike against
royal authority in America. The new monarchs relaxed the royal
grip on colonial trade, inaugurating a period of “salutary
neglect” when the much-resented Navigation Laws were only
weakly enforced.
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Chapter 2 Review: What did Massachusetts governor John
Winthrop mean when he said, “We shall be a city upon a
hill”?

A. He envisioned the Massachusetts Bay Company as becoming

the most economically successful British colony.
B. He hoped that the colony would become a holy society that
would serve as a model for people everywhere.
C. He was referring to Boston as the city where elite, wealthy,
and well-educated people would set an example for other
colonists.
D. He wanted the colony to provide public education for all
citizens.

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