HIS 201 3-4-14

The Planting of English America

1500-1733

a.) In the 1500’s England’s efforts to compete with the Spanish Empire were feeble and limited;
England took very little interest in establishing its own overseas colonies during this time; There was also
religious unrest during this time as King Henry VIII launched the English Protestant Reformation; There
was much war over this as Protestants battled Catholics for years; Elizabeth I took over the English
throne as a Protestant and the fighting with Catholic Spain took flight; Elizabeth I had the ability to bring
together the people of England; Through her leadership, English ships swarmed shipping lanes and
sought to take over Spanish ships, even though England and Spain were technically at “peace”; This
brought English sea travel to a fever pitch;

b.) The first English attempt of colonization was in Newfoundland; it collapsed when the leader
of this venture, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, died at sea in 1583; Gilbert’s half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh,
inspired by his brother, set out to try colonization again; Raleigh organized an expedition that landed at
North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, off the coast of Virginia; After several starts, the Roanoke colony
vanished; While England was struggling to get a colony going in the New World, Spain was extremely
prosperous in the attempt; Phillip II, the leader of Spain and a Protestant hating Catholic, was enjoying
the success Spain was having through colonization; Spain was making tons of profit from its colonies
during this time; Phillip II, being Catholic, and Elizabeth I, being Protestant, were bound to butt heads
with the religious tensions in Europe during this time; Phillip II used the profits from the New World and
built the “Spanish Armada” and prepared to invade England; In 1588, the Armada set out to invade
England and entered the English Channel; The ships of the Armada were large and did not maneuver as
well as the smaller English ships, which were also aided by the Dutch; The English inflicted heavy
damage on the Spanish Armada and scattered the fleet into the sea; To make matters worse, a
devastating storm hit the fleet of Spanish ships and crippled most of the fleet; The few remaining ships
returned to Spain completely defeated marking the turn of things for Spain and England; The defeat of
the Spanish Armada marked the beginning of the end for the Spanish;

c.) As the 1600’s begin, England population boomed from 3 to 4 million people; Landlords also
began closing off farms and croplands with fences putting an end to free-grazing; This forced many
famers off of land and led to major unemployment; Also, new laws only permitted eldest sons to be
eligible to inherit landed estates; this caused many to have to travel elsewhere to seek their fortunes
and livelihoods; In 1606, a joint-stock company known as the Virginia Company of London received a
charter from King James I for a settlement of the New World; The main attraction was the promise of
gold; In late 1606, the Virginia Company’s three ships reached the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where
Indians attacked them; They pushed up the bay and chose a location along a river, named the James
River in honor of King James; The site was easy to defend from intruders but it was infested by
mosquitoes and very unhealthy; On May 24, 1607 with about 100 settlers, all men, established the first
English colony at what they called Jamestown; the early years of Jamestown were a disaster; Forty of
the one hundred men died during the initial voyage; Another expedition in 1609 lost its leaders and
many of its supplies in a shipwreck off Bermuda; Once ashore in Virginia, the settlers died by the dozens
from disease, malnutrition, and starvation; The crazy thing is that the woods of the area were teaming
with wild game and the rivers were overflowing with fish, but many of the new settlers were
unaccustomed to fending for themselves and spent too much time searching for nonexistent gold when
they should have been trying to survive;

d.) In 1608, Captain John Smith took over as the leader in Virginia; He saved the colony by
setting down new rules and coining the phrase, “He who shall not work, shall not eat”; Still the people of
the colony died in droves and even resulted to cannibalism in some instances; Of the 400 settlers who
made it to Virginia by 1609, only 60 survived the “starving time” winter of 1609-1610; the remaining
colonists boarded ships in the spring of 1610 to return home, but were met by a relief party who made
them turn around and return to Jamestown; the relief party was under the command of Lord De La
Warr, who imposed harsh military action on the colony and also took aggressive military action against
the Indians; By 1625, there were around 1,200 survivors in the colony out of 8,000 who had tried to start
a new life in the colony;

e.) When the English landed in 1607 at Jamestown, Chief Powhatan was the leader of the native
people in the James River area; Relations between the Indians and the English were tense and that
tension grew even more when Lord De La Warr arrived in 1610; Warr’s troops raided Indian villages,
burned houses, confiscated provisions, and torched cornfields; A peace settlement ended the First
Anglo-Powhatan War in 1614, sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas, Powhatan’s daughter, to John
Rolfe-the first interracial marriage in Virginia; Peace lasted only for a while until the Indians, pressed by
land hungry whites, attacked the settlement in 1622; These attacks left 347 settlers dead, including John
Rolfe; The response from the Virginia Company was a calling for perpetual war without peace or truce;
This drove the native people further westward; And in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, the
Indians made one last effort to remove the settlers but were again defeated; the peace treaty of 1646
put down any thought of assimilating the native people of Virginia into society or peacefully coexisting
with them; The settlers banished the Chesapeake Indians from their ancestral lands and formally
separated Indian and white settlements; By 1685, the English considered the Powhatan’s people extinct;
Powhatan’s people were not only decimated by the English through fighting, but were also extremely
susceptible to European diseases; Smallpox and measles claimed many of the native lives as the diseases
ran rampant through the villages;

f.) The fate of the Powhatan’s foreshadowed the destiny of native tribes in North America;
European colonization disrupted Native American life on a vast scale; Some changes included the use of
horses, whether they were stolen, strayed, or bought from the Spanish helped the natives move further
west into the Great Plains; Disease was by far the biggest change as Old World diseases left Indians
defenseless; Diseases basically destroyed entire cultures and helped shape new ones; Trade also
transformed native life; Firearms gave natives a tremendous advantage to those who were able to buy
them from Europeans; Firearms gave tribes another way to hunt and also aided them in Indian on Indian
combat;

g.) John Rolfe, before his death, became the father of the tobacco industry and an economic
savior of the Virginia colony; By 1612, he had perfected methods of raising and curing the tobacco plant,
eliminating much of the bitter twang; Soon the European demand for tobacco was huge and a tobacco
rush swept over Virginia; Crops were planted in the streets of Jamestown and even between some
graves; Colonists began to press for more land in order to be able to grow more tobacco; Tobacco
eventually became the vital component to building a firm economic foundation for the colonists; The
downfalls to planting tobacco were that it depleted the soil when it was planted in back to back years
and it also required fresh labor; In 1619, the year before the Plymouth Pilgrims landed in New England,
some twenty slaves from Africa were sold to the Jamestown colonists by a Dutch warship; This planted
the roots of the North American slave system; At the time, blacks were too expensive for the new
colonists to buy so there were not many in North America for a few decades after this first transaction;
In 1650, there were only around 300 African slaves in Virginia, but by the end of the century Africans
made up almost 14 percent of the population; Also, in 1619 the Virginia Company authorized settlers to
summon an assembly known as the House of Burgesses marking the beginning of self-representative
government; This, among other things, made King James angry; He absolutely hated tobacco and didn’t
trust the House of Burgesses; In 1624, he revoked the charter of the Virginia Company which made
Virginia a royal colony directly under his control;

h.) Maryland was the second plantation colony but the fourth English colony to be planted in
North America; It was founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore of whom was from a prominent English
Catholic family; At this time Protestant England was still persecuting Catholics and during this time a
couple seeking to be married could not legally be married by a Catholic priest; This sparked Baltimore’s
move to the New World; Baltimore gave his relatives, all Catholics, huge estates and houses in the
Chesapeake region which angered most of the farmers in the area who happened to be mostly
Protestant; Resentment flared into open rebellion near the end of the century and for a time the
Baltimore family lost its land owning rights; Despite these tensions, Maryland prospered; Like Virginia, it
blossomed with acres upon acres of tobacco; Also like Virginia, it required labor for its crops and mostly
white servants were used to begin with; Toward the end of the century black slaves began to be
imported in large numbers; Lord Baltimore permitted the unusual freedom of religion from the
beginning of Maryland in hopes that his own fellow worshippers would be tolerated; The problem that
Lord Baltimore had was that there were far more Protestants than there were Catholics; The Protestants
were a threat to impose harsh conditions on the Catholics just as had been done in England; Sensing
this, the Catholics of Maryland threw support at the Act of Toleration which was passed in 1649 that
guaranteed toleration to all Christians; While the Act of Toleration was beneficial to all Christians, it gave
the death penalty to those that denied the divinity of Jesus, such as Jews and atheists; One result of this
act was that when the colonial period ended, Maryland was home to more Catholics than any other
English speaking colony in the world;

i.) While the English were planting fields of tobacco in the Chesapeake region, they were also
busy colonizing the West Indies; By the early 1600’s, Spain had relaxed its grip on much of the
Caribbean; By the mid 1600’s, England had secured claims to several West Indies islands including
Jamaica in 1655; Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indian economy; What tobacco was to the
Chesapeake region, sugar was to the West Indies; The one difference between the two crops was that
tobacco was considered a poor man’s crop while sugar cane was considered a rich man’s crop; Tobacco
could be planted easily and produced leaves within a year while sugar can had to be planted extensively
to yield commercial quantities of sugar; Extensive planting of sugar cane required extensive land clearing
and the elaborate process of refining the cane in a mill to get the sugar; Due to the process of sugar
cane labor on the plantations, slaves were imported at an enormous rate; After 1640, more than a
quarter of a million slaves were brought to the West Indies in five decades; By 1700, black slaves
outnumbered white settlers in the English West Indies by a count of four to one and the region has
remained predominantly black ever since; To control the large number of slaves, English settlers
adopted “slave codes” to help keep order; The notorious Barbados Slave Code of 1661 denied even the
most fundamental rights to slaves and gave masters the ability to inflict harsh punishment for the
smallest infractions; Constables were given the right to severely whip any slave that posed a problem to
any Christian on the first offense; On the second offense, the slave would be severely whipped, his nose
slit, and be burned on his face with a hot iron; It was also stated that if any slave died during these
beatings that no punishment would be given and no fine be placed;

i.) The sugar plantation system soon took over almost all agriculture in the West Indies; The
Caribbean islands depended on food from other plantations in the North American mainland; Smaller
English farmers began to migrate to the southern mainland colonies after being squeezed out by the
sugar plantations; In 1670, a group of displaced English settlers from the Caribbean arrived in Carolina;
They brought a few slaves with them as well as the Barbados Slave Code which eventually became the
way of governing slaves in the mainland colonies; Carolina adopted the Barbados Slave Code officially in
1696; The settlers of Carolina set up a huge slave trade operation; They even sought and captured local
natives and sent them to the Caribbean to work in the sugar cane plantations; The main crop that was
grown in Carolina turned out to be rice; Rice was fairly exotic to England during this time and much of
rice production came from Africa; This caused settlers from Carolina to pay premium prices for West
African slaves that had experience in rice fields; Their immunity from malaria and their ability to
cultivate rice made them ideal laborers for the hot and swampy rice plantations; By 1710, they made up
the majority of people in Carolina; Charlestown, named for King Charles, became the busiest seaport in
the South; It was a culturally diverse area that had an aristocratic flavor; Many flocked to Charlestown
due to the religious tolerance there including tolerance of Jews and Protestant refugees;

j.) The northern part of Carolina differed greatly from the rest of Carolina and also from Virginia;
Poverty stricken outcasts and religious dissenters had left Virginia and headed south; These people
raised their crops without legal right to the soil and mostly without the use of slaves; These people were
now caught in between the aristocratic ways of Virginia and that of the southern plantations in Carolina;
North Carolina was officially separated from South Carolina in 1712 and each became a royal colony;
North Carolina, along with Rhode Island, were the most democratic, most independent minded, and the
least aristocratic of the thirteen original colonies;

k.) Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies to be formally founded in 1733; It was founded
126 years after the first, Virginia, and 52 years after the twelfth, Pennsylvania; Georgia was founded to
serve as a buffer between the English colonies and the Spanish in Florida as well as the French in
Louisiana;