HISTORY 201 TEST 1
Iberians and the Treaty of Tordesillas
-People from the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. -During the Modern Era, they were the Portuguese and the Spanish. -The Portuguese were the first Europeans to "discover" Africa and they were among the first to claim territory in the New World. -In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag and discovered the New World and so the Spanish Crown claimed land there first, but the Portuguese quickly followed. The Portuguese already claimed important holdings in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and beyond. -Hence, the Spanish and Portuguese claimed the earliest empires in the New World. -They also established the initial models for New World settlement.
Salem Witchcraft Trials
-a hysteria that reflected the fear and tension. 1692 By the 1690s, the city of Salem, Massachusetts was divided between its urban town and the rural areas around it; and the two represented two different views of the world. One looked to the past while the other looked to progress. -With the quickening of trade and finance in the port, the urban center looked towards the future. -The rural folk who surrounded the town remained rooted in farming and subsistence, the communalist past. -The booming Salem town represented commercial activity, population growth, expansion, geographic and social dispersal, the wealth gap AND declension because opportunity did not include everyone. -The rural areas still represented tradition and the old theocratic Puritan values--as well as ignorance and superstition. Politically, the colony was in flux and without strong leadership for several years. -A new royal governor was appointed in 1684, but as late as 1692 he had not arrived to set up Massachusetts as a royal colony. -There was also a temporary preacher in the church in Salem. -In addition, a series of Indian panics and the usual deaths from disease and starvation fostered a kind of incipient and communal paranoia and fear. A group of young girls who were fanciful and superstitious began to embrace folk mysteries and search things like crystal balls where they said they could see bad omens. -When they saw eggs floating in water and other strange natural phenomenon, they were gripped in fear. -When his own daughter became one of those touched by this evil, the temporary minister chose to see an "Evil Hand" at work that was "afflicting" the young girls. -These afflictions continued to spread beyond the minister's house until three "witches" were accused and imprisoned. -The slave woman Tibuta and two local widows, Sarah Goode and Sarah Osborne, were all arrested, but the panic continued. -Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and Bridget Bishop were accused next, but with no established royal authority on the scene, there could be no trials. -Without resolution, the panic continued to spread until the prisons overflowed with accused witches. The first trials took place on June 10, 1692 and the hangings started. -The last one concluded on 17 September 1692--after 27 hangings. -All of the survivors of those accused would suffer that stigma down through the generations, but the general hysteria and panic subsided after the hangings. -The trials also marked a turning point for New England. -While the executions certainly represented the past, afterwards the region left behind the old Puritan moral ideals and embraced commerce and the liberal traditions of material success instead—progress instead of piety. -In Salem, a new preacher came and they built a new church/meeting house that was complete by 1702 and time marched on.
Great Migration
1630-1640 -The period when the greatest number of Puritans travelled to the New World. -During this initial time on the fringe of the wilderness, hundreds died of epidemic diseases, Indian wars and fatigue because the migration occurred during the starving time. -A significant percentage of the 20,000 people who came died upon landing—and yet they kept on coming. -The result was that they populated Massachusetts Bay and began to settle spin-off colonies. The Massachusetts Puritans would tolerate no dissenters during this time, however. -Instead, they set up the original Town Hall type of government as a theocracy. -and only church members could play a role in politics. -but they called it religious "freedom" -They cast out anyone (like Ann Hutchinson and Jonathon Edwards) who refused to practice the faith as dictated by the colonial government. Despite the challenge, the Puritans were able to settle in villages and to begin manufacturing and farming. They also engaged in limited trade with Indians and the scarce ships that came into port. As a result of that trade and the abundance of timber, the Massachusetts colonists created their own naval stores industry and produced tar, paint, pitch, barrel staves, ship masts, ships, turpentine, etc. -This type of trade and manufacturing would become the economic heart of the colony. -From the beginning in the direct violation of mercantilism. Frontier Exchange -The trade that took place on the North American frontier between natives and Europeans. -The Puritans traded the manufactured goods they brought from Europe (guns, ammunition, alcohol and pots, beads, blankets, textiles, etc.). -The Native peoples exchanged for commodities like food, skins, furs, naval stores, etc. -This trade marked the initial social, cultural, and economic connections between the two worlds. **Unlike in South and Central America, frontier trade afforded the Native Americans some power (for a limited time) over their European counterparts, but ultimately the process destroyed the world of the Natives. -Engaging in this type of international trade meant that the Natives decided to hunt and trap for a market over which they had no control. -Once they participated in commerce, they acquired an insatiable taste for goods that were detrimental to their own culture (guns and alcohol) -They met the demand by fishing and hunting out the streams and woods of their own land. -And the Natives lost self-sufficiency and independence to become reliant on European trade. -Frontier exchange also changed their landscape. -Frontier commodities brought more and more Europeans who then laid claim to the land. In the end, frontier exchange lasted as long as it was useful to the Europeans. Once the new arrivals achieved some other cash nexus (either domestic trade and manufacturing or cash crop production with slave labor), they dispensed with frontier exchange all together and removed the Natives, wholesale, off their lands and to the West. -This development often coincided with the end of the starving times. In Virginia, the Indian trade ended upon the discovery of tobacco. Then the Natives moved west, beyond the line of the settled plantations with the frontier. In Massachusetts, frontier trade would move westward with the edge of settlement where it lasted as much as several decades. In Canada, frontier exchange was more long-lived In Louisiana too, frontier exchange dominated the colonial economy for at least 100 years, from 1697 to the 1790s—and shaped a very different culture.
Based upon the _________ ____ ________ in 1494, the Pope divided their claims -Granted the Spanish all of Latin America except Brazil. -The Portuguese won control of all of the West African Coast and Brazil.
Treaty of Tordesillas
Maroon communities
-1720s until the Civil War -Consisted of escaped African captives and their offspring; runaway French soldiers, Natives and slaves -surrounded New Orleans and the network of wetlands in the 1730s for at least the next 100 years. French, Spanish and American records all document the hundreds and thousands of runaways in the maroons. -There, they cooperated with Indian tribes and traded with sawmill owners and others.
West Indies
-7000 islands in the Caribbean where they Iberians first settled. -They became primarily French, Dutch and British colonies—many conducting trade directly with the American and French colonists to the north. -The island of Hispanolia was the first of the West Indies "discovered" by Columbus. -Others included Jamaica, Cuba, Antigua, etc. -The West Indian colonies produced incredible wealth for Europe. -With long growing seasons and fertile land, the Indies became plantation economies that raised all the slave crops (indigo, tobacco, sugar, coffee and cotton). -St. Domingue, today's Haiti turned out enough exports to yield half the French economy. -and everything it produced went to France -The first majority in the New World: Africans developed first in the West Indies. -Those Africans had children who dwelled in the West Indies long before any of their descendants ever showed up in the USA. -The entire region was a vast market for the Triangular Trade. -These islands were also the setting for the many naval battles that marked this period of imperial competition among Europeans. Meanwhile...Back in Virginia, during the late 1600s.... -Between 1650-1675, over 2 million acres in headright grants used up the good land. -With no land left to distribute along the Tidewater, indentured servants had to settle away from the coast when they finished their terms of service. -With no land on the coast to, the recently-freed white labor moved into the frontier regions of the foothills and mountains; where the colony had designated the land for the Natives. As long as the majority of plantation labor remained white indentures, the Burgesses realized that the influx of freed-indentures would need to slow down. -It would take thirty years for the labor force of Virginia to fully transition to slavery, but the process began in the late 1600s when landless former indentures became a restless threat. Between 1700-1750, 45,000 persons of African descent were taken to Virginia -(most from the Caribbean and West Indies). **By 1750, there were 100,000 persons of African descent enslaved in perpetuity. They became the next labor force, after the Natives and then the indentures: the black majority.
Jamestown
-In 1606, King James I of England granted charters to two joint stock companies. -Charters were land grants, not unlike the ecomienda grants. -The two charters covered the Atlantic Coast of the present-day USA. -The Virginia Company of Plymouth held territory on the North -The Virginia Company of London held the southern portions of the same coast. -The holders of the Plymouth Charter would not act on the land grant for a while -The Virginia Company of London intended to begin to extract wealth right away. -They thought they could also forge a market to take advantage of world trade, but the gentry who went to Virginia actually did not expect to raise their own food. -They assumed the Indians of the New World would feed and support them. 6 These settlers were Anglican aristocrats (elite, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) from England who carried with them their own racial hierarchy. -They placed themselves at the top of a ladder that descended from the English royalty to the English poor with the Scottish hierarchy in the same manner and then down to other Europeans and the Irish last. -Then the hierarchy continued to descend down from the Gypsies and Eastern Europeans to include the darker-skinned peoples of the world. -Natives to Africans -The English gentry ranked each race in a hierarchy of skin color with the darkest ones as the least superior of all. This was an unseen but critical tool of exploitation and power -If a poor Englishman was poor, he could still look with pride at other races that were below him This view limited the likelihood of revolt vs. the elite like him. This was the root and source of racism, us vs. them -This was their worldview. -When they went to the New World, the English gentry fully expected the Native people they encountered would fall down in the rush to serve them out of respect for the inherent English superiority. -The reality they encountered was much different because the Natives expected respect from the English.... After a journey that lasted from December until April, they arrived in the Chesapeake Bay where they encountered the Powhatan Indians. The 107 members of the gentry class arrived and their servants did not expect they would have to procure food. None of them even knew how to farm. They could barely hunt. 7 -Immediately upon their arrival, the English intruders alienated the Indians. Powhatans were peaceful, well-supplied for, with a luxurious diet, culture, housing, schedule and family life. -They put the highest value on leisure and spent most of their tine at leisure. -The tribe of Pocahontas. -Springing themselves upon the peaceful Powhatan tribes they met, the English started out by attacking and killing those who did not want to be enslaved. -The Indian wars that followed led the English to construct a palisade that would keep them separate from the Natives. -The English also began to starve as they searched for food.
The Puritans
-Like the pilgrims, the Puritans arrived in family groups. -They also brought significant skills. -Their ranks included artisans, tradesmen of many types, farmers, hunters and professionals as well as managers and commercial agents. -Like the pilgrims, the Puritans were obsessed with their religious vision of a perfect theocracy. -Their view put community first, but they legally enforced moral values -They also rewarded individual inquisitiveness and encouraged wealth accumulation -Hence, they promoted a hierarchy that separated the ranks of true believers within the church. **And like the Pilgrims, the Puritans made the church the same as the state.
The Mayflower Compact
-One hundred Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower in 1619 and sailed to present-day Massachusetts. -As they reached the spot where they wanted to land, they concluded that they were outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company and so they decided to create their own system of leadership. -The Pilgrims drew up a new structure of government under the Mayflower Compact, a covenant that was taken among the men on board the ship. This was the second form of representative rule created in the New World (since the Virginia House of Burgesses had appeared the previous year). -The Compact granted every member of the church a vote for an elected governor. -In 1620 and still on board ship, the males of the church signed the Compact. -Then they elected William Bradford as the first governor of the Plymouth colony. -The pilgrims endured a starving time, but they also worked hard and traded fairly with the Indians. -They paid off their debt to the Company, but they remained separatists for another fifty years (two generations), and they always kept a very strict and demanding form of religious faith. -They engaged in some artisanal work and trade, but the pilgrims were primarily farmers.
Slave Codes (Code Noir, las sietes partidas)
-The laws that governed slavery in the New World. -The Spanish crown mandated theirs in the 1500s. -The English and French in the 1600-1700s. -The most common code in the colonies was like the ones mandated in Virginia in the 1690s. -They were to force social control in a society of a black majority. -The number one goal was to achieve total control over slaves through terror. -The codes were designed to brutalize and humiliate slaves so they would obey. -They were designed to psychologically regulate behavior because the codes in the American South outside of Louisiana gave all of the power to the master and they provided property, the slave, no recourse to the courts. -The codes allowed arbitrary violence, but also mandated public punishments. -They taught that slaves must never question their status. -Without restriction, owners could treat a slave the way you treat your car. -The state would not intervene between a man and his property.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
-The trade in African captives across the Atlantic Ocean to New World destinations. -The peak of the trade was from the 1600s-1830. -The Portuguese originally dominated in the 1500s until the British, Dutch and French became heavily involved and then dominated by the 1700s. In 1672, the Royal Africa Company institutionalized the English trade in slaves -By the 1700s, they were shipping 7000 slaves to the West Indies every year. The British abolished the trade in 1833, more than 150 years later
This Bacon's Rebellion was a significant event for several reasons:
1) It gave eastern planters and the Virginia Company good reason to avoid bringing more indentured servants to the colony. 2) It demonstrated that while the underclass might turn on the eastern gentry, they would also follow an aristocrat to fight against Indians. -Between 1676 and 1716, the Virginia colony converted entirely to slave labor. And the eastern leadership worked on converting the indentures to be their allies—instead of their enemies. ***By 1700, Virginia made the conversion to a labor force that was of African descent, a black majority that was bound in perpetuity.
Mercantilism
1500s to 1800s 5 -The philosophy that guided ALL European colonization (in Africa, the New World, Asia and the Pacific). -Originated with the Iberians who practiced it RUTHLESSLY. - caused the reality that still prevails today: First/Third Worlds. -Colonization must serve the mother country and not compete with those interests. -Under this philosophy, colonies were to supply raw materials for manufacture in Europe and then act as the markets for finished goods. -A series of laws and Navigation Acts of different kinds mandated this theory in all cases of trade between Europeans and their colonial possessions. -Colonists were required to produce extractive goods (gold, silver, raw timber, cash crops, etc) for the mother country to process. -The profit from the trade and the value of manufacturing went to the Old World -The New World also became the protected market for finished goods. -A purely mercantilist system also required colonies to limit all trade to the mother country; to only use ships and other goods produced by the mother country, etc.. The wealth and all of the benefit of industry went to the mother country. -Without any clear-cut benefit to the conquered peoples and lands.
Joint Stock Companies
1600 Queen Elizabeth I of England issued the first charter to the East India Company. -This was model forged the English, Dutch, and French empires in the New World. -The charter granted the power to the Company to sell stock with which to buy and sell goods, build trading posts and make war as necessary to protect Company interests anywhere in the world. -The East India Company raised over thirty thousand pounds by selling stock. -With that capital, the Company purchased five ships and loaded them with cargoes, sailed to the Orient and the Indies. -Three years later, in 1603, the ships returned with goods valued at more than 100 million pounds. -This was the profit that allowed for the colonization of the world. -In 1602, the Dutch set up their own version of this trade with the Dutch United East India Company. -The French would develop their trading companies in their turn. -Like the Company of the West that settled New Orleans in the 1720s
A brief chronology:
1620s - The Dutch and British settlers in NYC and Mass brought slaves with them. 1640s - the early shift to slavery in Virginia 1670s - Rice production in the Carolinas 1672 - The Royal Africa Company took over the British slave trade. -Sent 7000 a year into slavery, every year of the 1700s. -1720 - The first slaves were shipped to Louisiana directly from Senegal . -1795 - The cotton gin ensures the continuity of slavery in the New World -1808 - The United States ended the trade. -1833 - the British Emancipate their slaves.
The Great Awakening
1730s to 1760s -During the period of declension in New England, religious dissent flourished. -The concept of wider church participation also began to replace the strict spiritual purity of early colonial times. -Since everyone feared for their souls, this was very serious business. -Church leadership also matched political power in this theological system. -The Great Awakening refers to a period of sectarianism when new religions emerged from scratch. -People embraced Christianity by creating their own rules of worship. -It started in Boston in the 1730s when "New Light" preachers began to stand up in public and attack the traditional church hierarchy. They were "lay" leaders, religious figures who claimed divine power based on their own conversion experience, informal training, and a religion "of the heart," but these ministers claimed no formal training or affiliation with any existing religious institutions.be a public space where anyone could participate. -They held outdoor revivals and travelled from town to town to preach to meetings of thousands. -The message was delivered equally to women, men, youth, Africans, new immigrants, Indians and the wealthy. -It was an explosion of untamed religious spirit that opened salvation to the masses. -The message also translated religious rights in a political idiom that raised hope for a public voice in all things. -These preachers claimed people had a right to religious dissent. -They believed that factionalism in religion, sectarianism, would only bring more people into the church. -Truly advocating religious freedom, they brought a liberating message to the expanding population of New England. The movement also moved South. -By the 1750s, people in the Piedmont and as far south as Charleston were attending mass revivals. -Hymnals and music were central to this religious experience. -The preachers encouraged resistance and often would attack the wealthy and powerful. They created a spiritual brotherhood that allowed for popular participation. -For many, it was the first time they spoke in public. -It was the first time that women really entered the public sphere when they spoke up at these revivals. -This undermined the traditional church as an instrument of social control—as well as the power of the Puritan and Anglican church elders. --Entire meetings would break out with barking, speaking in tongues, trance-like states of mind, etc. -This religious awakening helped to move people towards a more modern attitude of public expression by creating religious and political expectations. Denominational politics, war, and the new British mercantilism that followed then connected the Great Awakening to the Revolution.
Peace of Paris
1763 Signed in Paris by the French, Spanish and British. Ended the Seven Years War The British dictated the terms. -Since they wanted and had already seized most of it, the British claimed present-day Florida plus Spanish West Florida—all the way along the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi River. -The British also took all of Canada. -The French were allowed to keep St. Domingue, but the British forced them to give up the frontier colony of Louisiana to Spain. -The British allowed the Spanish to have Louisiana because they were not concerned by any military and commercial threat from Spain. This Treaty set the stage for the Revolutionary Era in imperial history.
Three Caste System and the Code Noi
A unique racial pattern began under the French in the form of a three caste system when Bienville issued the first Code Noir in Louisiana in 1724. -Designed to keep order and divide the subjects of the crown, this French Code designated separate castes: the French, the slaves, and the gens de colour libres (free people of color). -While the Code Noir restricted the behavior permitted to each group and forbad intermarriage, the laws also granted certain privileges to slaves as well. -In French Louisiana, the slaves were expected to feed and tend to themselves, and so the codes governing their lives permitted them a day off and their own garden plot, tools, hunting and fishing implements, and the right to go to market—as well as the right to manumission. -The Code also required protection for the slave family and mandated that they have a right to all of the sacraments of the church. -Free people of color were not permitted to testify in court, but they could own, buy and sell property through an agent. -Indians were permitted no rights whatsoever. -The Code Noir banned all Jews from the colony. -While intermarriage between the castes was strictly forbidden, concubinage and miscegenation flourished anyway. *******Louisiana became a unique cultural diaspora.
Herrenvolk Democracy
After 1800, most of the American South would develop on the pattern of Virginia, a plantation society with a black majority, but the ruling ideology came forth much earlier. - the ideology of white supremacy taught that the poorest white person was still in the same class as the planters they so revered. - While society glorified the great slaveholder, the general promise to all white males was that they too enjoyed the same liberty and could own slaves; if they simply followed in lockstep along with the rest of the white master class. - The system cultivated white solidarity to diffuse class resentments that stemmed from the cost of planter rule. o Poor southern white people, for example, were rarely called upon to pay taxes after the late 1600s. o Instead, most public revenue came from taxes on slave property. o Non-slaveholders were the backbone of the slave patrol. By catching runaways, carrying out punishments, and otherwise serving the planter class, the European-descended people learned to value the power of white skin. o They also moved up the social ladder from poor overseers to planters. -The Quaker and Puritan-style ruling ideologies to the north (where there never was a black majority) shaped society in a different way. -We will discuss the northern views later. -For now we should understand that northern society was based on the role of the male church member, with his wife and children, workers and debtors all in a line in the hierarchy. -Both systems were organized as patriarchies.
New England Settlement Patterns
After the 1630s and with succeeding decades, the town meeting system spread As people moved towards the west in this area of settlement, they built new settlements The church and the town meeting were one in the same, the theocratic religious and government center of colonial life. Every (male) town member had a say in meetings and every church member had a say in the church, but not everyone in the community was part of the Elect. Each town could incorporate other towns, which meant that individuals could apply in their own town meetings for a charter to found a new town to their west. -Thus, settlement spread in the form of single families or groups of families gaining charters to move out and settle new territory. The towns along the coast developed into centers for trade and small manufacturing. -They produced naval stores and rope and practiced shipbuilding and food processing. -The early coastal economy would give way to finance, insurance and banking industries, but also retain its base in the artisanal trades. In the interior, small farming villages spread along the rivers with market towns connecting farflung rural areas back to the market in the coastal towns. Adjacent colonies like Rhode Island and Vermont won new charters from Massachusetts to settle all of New England in this pattern
Piedmont
As free land in Virginia became scarce after 1670, the ex-indentures were forced to move west if they wanted land. -Away from the coast, they entered the foothills and moved above the fall line (the waterfalls) and into the Piedmont. -This was the southern "Backcountry." Located in the mountainous areas to the south and west of the coast, it was the next Virginia frontier. -Culture and politics in the Piedmont developed in a way that reflected those conditions. While settlers to the Piedmont came from eastern, Tidewater Virginia, many also travelled south from the colonies of Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to settle this mountainous region. In general, they would make their livings based upon subsistence—that is, just enough to survive off the land. -People settled here usually without slaves and they often owned no land. -Society here developed in a way that was more egalitarian, but more violent -The Piedmont was a place of ready Indian warfare. -Yet, the settlers remained part of Virginia and they were required to pay their taxes in Jamestown in hard currency. -The land of the Piedmont was not as fertile as to the east. -The growing season was shorter and the people did not have the wealth to own slave labor. -Therefore there were few plantations, not much great wealth and few slaves. -The foodways, religion, politics, values and attitudes in the Piedmont would reflect the frontier more so than the Tidewater
Indentured Servants
Because of acute demand for labor on the tobacco plantations, the colonists were desperate for workers. As a result, the debtors of England would sell themselves into a term of servitude to a ship captain. In exchange for their debts and/or the cost of passage, the indenture would sell about seven years of labor. The ship captains would then deliver those "indentures" to Virgin where they were auctioned off with their labor contracts to a landholder. Strict rules governed these contracts. If the indenture committed any of a long list of infractions (theft, sickness or pregnancy for example), they would be forced to serve another term, seven years, before they could complete their indenture. Once they served out their entire contract, each individual servant was eligible for an automatic headright grant. These were the wages of whiteness. Unlike the black slaves who were brought to Virginia as well, the indentures always possessed the same rights as any English subject (in theory) and their children were not automatically born into servitude. Instead, the first indentures might become free property holders who could then ascend and become part of the colonial elite. They started out their lives in the New World often working side by side with black slaves, but by the time they had grandchildren, the original indentured servants were promulgating the laws that would keep their former peers enslaved.
LOUISIANA
Founded in 1697 by the French/Canadian Le Moyne Brothers -A French military and trade outpost at the center of the Atlantic World. -After starting as a military post, Louisiana became the property of the Company of the West until the Mississippi Bubble bankrupted France in 1730. -Frontier Exchange and Indian wars would prevail here for almost 100 years before the plantation and then the United States took over. -Africans, Native Americans and their descendants built the colony based on immigration from all over Europe. -The nature of the population and the slave codes forged a unique culture. -The Crown sent the two Le Moyne brothers on a military expedition to claim and defend the territory in 1697. -That same year, the French had acquired title to what would be their wealthiest sugar colony, St. Domingue (Haiti) in the Caribbean. -The king wanted to keep the British traders to the east from infiltrating the French territory of Louisiana. -A byproduct was that the new fort would connect the trade of the French Caribbean to the many fur-trading posts in Canada. -The starving time in Louisiana lasted about 70 years, 1690s-1770. -The first Africans arrived during the 1720s along with peasants from Germany and French soldiers, convicts and engages. Along with Natives, the Africans, engages and their descendants built the colony
Headrights
In 1618, the Virginia Company of London reorganized the method of making land grants to individuals. Under the new system, shares in the Company included a "headright" of land that the investor could keep, settle himself, and/or sell. Each headright was roughly 50 acres of good and arable land. The Company also offered a headright, free and clear, to every settler who took themselves to Virginia—including a headright for each man, woman, and child in a given family group along with the same ration of land for each servant and slave included. This method of land distribution attracted settlers and promoted the cash crop economy based upon tobacco production. The Company handed out so many headrights that the earliest settlers became wealthy from the profit they made in tobacco. They were also the ones to claim the best land before the supply ran out all together.
The Massachusetts Bay Company
In 1630, another group of dissenters won their own charter in overseas settlement/colonization as a new Company to sell and purchase stock. -They were Puritans who had always expected to reform the Anglican Church from within, until they ultimately decided that they must separate instead. -It took almost two decades after the Pilgrims first broke with the church, but the Puritans decided to forge their own colony abroad once they became separatists. -Like the Pilgrims, their vision was to fashion their own church and society based on their religious beliefs. -They expected to make their own religious laws and not have to conform to those of the King of England and the Anglican Church hierarchy any more. Since the Puritans had their own charter, they could make their own laws, government and profits; without having to hold any debt to a third party middle man. -Once they took their charter to the New World, they elected John Winthrop as the first governor of the colony.
The Native Born Elite
In New England, the wealthy were those who mastered the skills of trade and finance. The earliest families to arrive were also the ones who percolated to the top of the church and became the wealthiest, most dominant, members of society. In the South, the elite were those who acquired the most land and slaves to raise the most tobacco and then purchase more land to build more plantations. -These were also the ones who became members of the House of Burgesses who would decide where to lay out the towns and construct the courthouses. This was also true about the monied and powerful elite in the North: -They decided where to erect the bridges and the roads to connect them. -They controlled the militia and they ran the churches. -They won the support of other whites to help enforce laws and the slave codes. -They assigned the juries and the judges. -They intermarried with each other and handed down their ruling authority. -They increased their power and their wealth in every subsequent generation.
French, British and Dutch Colonies in North America
Located to the extreme north of the continent. -In present-day Canada, New England, the Atlantic Coast and Louisiana. Beginning in the 1500s, the French settled Canada. The first attraction was codfish and the second was the fur trade. Like the British, the French used the joint stock company model. -They established trading posts up and down the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1500s. -In 1604 and 1608 respectively, two joint stock companies founded Nova Scotia and Quebec. The English settled Jamestown and Massachusetts c. 1607-1630. The Dutch settled New Amsterdam in 1623 and held it until 1667 when the English took over the island of Manhattan and renamed it New York. English proprietors settled South Carolina in the 1660s, Maryland in the 1670s, and Georgia in the 1730s. Dutch proprietors settled Pennsylvania in the 1670s The French claimed and then initiated settlement in Louisiana in 1682 and then 1697 respectively. **You will not have to know all of these exact dates. Please just note that the French and British settled most of the Atlantic Coast between 1600-1700. -Setting up trading posts, they used a joint stock company model. -Diverse economic practices yielded trade, farming, manufacturing, commerce, cash crop production and finance. -All of these colonies established some degree of representative government. In the North, the economy relied upon trade, manufacturing and finance. In the South, the primary focus became staple crops like tobacco, rice and indigo After 1795, cotton and sugar became important in the Delta and deep South.
Columbian Exchange
Named after the first Conquistador 1492 - present. This term refers to the exchange of biological materials between the Old World and the New. 2 -Plant and animals, germs, and human beings. -This is discussed in Chapter 1 of the text, pp. 14-15. -Europeans came with germs like the common cold that proved debilitating in epidemic proportions in the New World. -The native peoples possessed no immunities to European and African diseases that could destroy entire populations. -germs spread without a white man to carry them. -triggering massive epidemics from South to North America. -Thus, most New World peoples experienced a kind of genocide before they even saw any Europeans, guns, horses and etc. -The peoples of the New World returned various venereal diseases like syphilis. - the direct result of wanton rape. -The Exchange produced a MUCH larger food supply, and a new worldwide surplus. -Old World plants and animals grew well in the New World environment. -Likewise, New World species thrived in the Old World. Please read about the details in the book. It is fascinating. The number one biological item "exchanged" in this transfer was human beings. - 75% of the humans in this exchange came from Africa until 1820. - In the first 300 years of the Columbian Exchange, 3 out of 4 were captives. -many also came from Europe as indentured labor.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system that organizes the population hierarchically, with the power and focus concentrated on the male breadwinner. In this system, the wife played a subsidiary role to her husband. He was responsible for the public life of the family and she managed the private life. On the frontier, wives played a more important role because of how much the family depended upon her contributions to their survival. -In a patriarchical system, women carried a more symbolic power and less real power. -Married women could own no property, for example. -on marriage, all of her property went to the husband. -Women could not hold public office and vote. -Less viewed as an active contributor, the wife was subordinate to her husband. -She was the mother and the private heart of the family who obeyed the patriarch in all things. -There was no law to protect a wife from rape by her spouse. -He went into the public sphere to work and conduct business and to represent the family in the church and to the state. She stayed at home. -At the top of a patriarchical system stood the wealthiest and most powerful male.
Louisiana Settlement Pattern
Rather than grant land in the interior for settlement, Bienville gave great strips of plantation lands to his family and cronies. -These concessions fronted on the Mississippi and the lesser rivers and bayous of Louisiana, but they all ran together into the back swamp at the other end of every strip of property. -Most of the population in Louisiana starved and lived by their wits in the wilderness and the fur trade while all the cash involved went back to France. -The history of concubinage and inter-marriage with African and Indian women sustained the settlement from 1697 until at least the 1760s when the colony became self-sufficient in food. -From the beginning, everyone travelled by boat. The first bridge across the Mississippi would not be constructed in Louisiana until 1935.
Triangular Trade
Roughly 1600s-1830 The trade started in European ports (like Lisbon, Liverpool, Caen). -Investors loaded their slaving ships with cheap manufactured goods (guns, ammunition, knives, metal pots, beads, mirrors and rotgut alcohol). -After purchasing these goods wholesale, European slavers sailed to African ports where they traded with royal families and networks along the coast. -Selling their highly-valued manufactured goods, they bought cargoes of African slaves that came cheaply because African captives were in less demand in Africa than manufactured goods **This was the secret to the massive profits in this trade. -The slavers bought cheaply and sold dearly at every stop along the way. -In the West Indies, the slavers traded the highly-sought Africans in exchange for colonial goods like sugar, coffee, molasses, tobacco, etc. -On the third leg of this trade, the slavers travelled to North America where they exchanged more slaves and cash crops from the West Indies for colonial goods and frontier commodities. -Slavers loaded their ships with codfish, fur pelts, naval stores, and skins in New England -Moving from Louisiana to Charleston and Virginia to New England. -All along the way, chief investors in the trade conducted finance, insurance, and other transactions. -Then the slave ships returned to Europe where colonial goods were in high demand. -The famous Triangle Trade was really a square, but the primary point is that the slavers increased their profit margin on every leg of the journey.
Bacon's Rebellion
Scattered among the westerners who settled the Piedmont were a few English gentry who were landholders with slaves. Nathaniel Bacon was one of these. He was actually a distant relative of Governor William Berkeley and he acquired a rather large property in the 1760s by a direct grant from the governor. -A real English "gentleman" based on his property status and compared to the rest of the settlers on the frontier, Bacon assumed a kind of leadership role among them. -He led attacks against the Indians after raids by the Indians against settlers. In the 1670s, Bacon won election to the House of Burgesses to represent his region. -In that position, he brought a series of demands on behalf of his constituents. -He requested a military commission to raise a local militia that could defend the Piedmont areas from Indians. -He wanted either less taxes or a better currency because he said his people could not pay in the expected tobacco or specie because they had neither. -He wanted services in the piedmont in exchange for the taxes the people there were forced to pay to the capital: roads, bridges, a courthouse, judges, a sheriff and laws, etc. etc. -In general, Bacon and his followers wanted to know why should they have to pay taxes for no services? -The Burgesses would address none of this. Bacon finally led his followers to march and surround Jamestown in 1676. -Their march on the town actually caused Governor Berkley to flee, but the rebellion collapsed at the moment of possible success when Bacon himself died. -Afterwards, Governor Berkeley was returned to power, but then he was recalled to England to face corruption charges. The trials in the aftermath of the uprising convicted around two dozen leaders of the rebellion and they were all hanged.
Pilgrims
The first Pilgrims arrived on Plymouth Rock in 1620 They came from England with a charter and a land grant from the Virginia Company. **In exchange for the charter and a cash advance, they promised to pay back to the Virginia Company of Plymouth half the returns from their "plantation" over the next 7 years. -They were Separatists, Protestants who rejected the Anglican Church. That meant they were not Catholic and not Anglican either, but Protestant dissenters from the state religious sect that prevailed in England. -They fled to Holland in 1607 because of persecution in England, but the Pilgrims found that they did not like the Dutch ways either. -They had feared for their own salvation in a corrupt Anglican church and so they left England behind. -but they found the Dutch no better than the English on these points. -They believed that God wanted his people to renounce material things and refrain from drunkenness, theft, murder, adultery, and breaches of the Sabbath; and the Dutch were guilty of all of these infractions to a degree that the Pilgrims did not like. -When they departed for the New World, the Pilgrims envisioned a utopian government, one that was divine and morally-inspired, a "City Upon A Hill" theocracy where obedience to a strict and angry God would be enforced by the state. -With their charter to settle, they established their theocracy in New England where they also practiced the belief that every person was predestined for either salvation or eternal torment. -Only those chosen to enter heaven, "the Elect" as they called them, could enter the Pilgrim's church--and therefore the community.
Ecomiendas
The original settlement pattern established by the Iberians in the New World. -The crown set up the legal system that governed the ecomiendas. -In this system, the ecomienda represented as land great of a specific territory. -Grants included the right to all the land and the Indian people who lived there. -The crown charged their ecomiendas with Christianizing the natives and taking command of their labor. -The Spanish accomplished this by stratifying the natives. -they converted the most promising ones to Christianity and made them the overseers, to serve as the drivers of all the rest. -Initially, the ecomiendas functioned like concentration camps where the natives built gold and silver mines to extract wealth; but they grew into plantations. Many tribes became permanently extinct because the people did not survive well in this system. -When the mineral wealth ran out, the ecomiendas converted to cash crops. -Once the peoples of the New World who built the first ecomiendas became extinct, the Spanish began to trade with the Portuguese for slaves from Africa. In this way, the Iberians dominated world trade for at least a century until around 1600 when the English, the Dutch and the French began to advance beyond them. All of Europe endured the religious Reformation and war in the 1500s. While the English and Dutch pioneered in manufacturing, trade and finance, however, the Iberians squandered the wealth of the New World,The Dutch and British excelled at shipping, weapons, tools and trade goods. They also competed directly with each other. -By the end of the 1500s, the Iberians were in decline in terms of their own role in world affairs while northern Europeans were on the rise. -The joint stock model, war and revolution would eventually remove the Iberians from world trade almost completely.
Tobacco
The struggling continued until 1617 when efforts at experimentation finally yielded the first harvest of tobacco. -This speaks to the character of these settlers. They were starving and yet they raised...tobacco? -In England, people had just discovered Turkish and Russian tobacco and they were smoking it for fun. -The demand for tobacco (especially as it turned out, the tobacco raised in Virginia) was insatiable already, but as more of the crop went up in smoke, the level of demand only increased. -Tobacco was an ideal product for Virginia. According to Edmund Morgan, "The salvation of Virginia came by pandering to a new vice," and tobacco became the nexus of economic activity in the Chesapeake. Tobacco thus became the tax nexus that saved Virginia. Once they had something to sell, the settlers could trade for foodstuffs and necessities and with the many good harvests that followed, the years 1619-1629 were boom ones for Virginia. -As new settlers poured in, tobacco fetched a huge profit and there was plenty of excellent land. -The mortality rate would continue to remain high, however, because the settlers continued to die from diseases and frontier conditions, but they were still drawn by the fortunes to be made in tobacco. The economic focus in Virginia therefore became agriculture. This was the number one difference between the Jamestown colony and those that would come forth to the north in New England where manufacturing, finance and trade would prevail
Conquistadors
These were the ship captains, soldiers and navigators who explored the world, discovered territory, and claimed those lands for Spain. -Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Hernando Cortez, Francisco Pizzaro and hundreds of others. -In 1492, Columbus discovered the New World for Spain. -In 1519, Magellan (a Portuguese) circumnavigated the globe for Spain. 3 -Between 1519-1542, Cortez conquered all of the Aztec empire for Spain. -In 1533, Pizzaro conquered the Inca Empire (mostly in modern-day Peru). -Conquistadors sought wealth (gold), adventure (glory) and souls. *****Collectively, they gave Spain a major head start in world trade
Virginia House of Burgesses
This was the first representative assembly in the New World. Created in 1619 by the Virginia Company, the idea was to offer self-rule on a local basis in order to attract more settlers. Each "burgess" was elected by his fellow landholders and the Company paid for the service by granting additional headrights. The burgesses made local laws, administered criminal affairs, and set up the system of courthouses in the new counties they laid out as settlement spread west. The House was always subject to the authority of a royally-appointed governor, but the system still became the first type of representative democracy in the New World. Because of the advantage that came with serving as a burgess, the power of this assembly gave many individuals the opportunity to amass great personal power and family wealth. By the end of the starving time, the settlers to Virginia had evolved into a certain type that that was unlike their counterparts to the north who settled Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s. The typical settler to Virginia in the early 1600s was either a poor indenture or an Anglican man of the gentry, but they all came without a wife and children at first. They were also without practical skills in that they never learned a trade before embarking for the New World. Instead, they came for material reasons, expecting to discover wealth and make their fortune, but always with the intention of returning back to England. In short, Virginia was originally settled by bound labor and the masters who expected to tear a fortune out of the land and then leave behind what they viewed as a throw-away territory.
French and Indian/Seven Years War
This was the first world war. -The results determined the British ascendancy over the French in world affairs. -War started in 1754 on the American frontier when the French along the Great Lakes fought against the British and the American colonists in the Ohio Territory. -George Washington and other Revolutionary War generals would get their experience in this conflict. -Because both sides had their own Indian allies, we have always called this the French and Indian War in the United States, but the Europeans have always called it the Seven Years War. In 1767, the war spread to the European Continent and raged in the Caribbean. The turning point came with the fall of the French citadel at Quebec to the British in 1759. A few years later, the French asked for peace. -By then, the war had destroyed the royal treasuries of both nations. In 1759, the Spanish joined on the side of the French and so they too lost in the final settlement.
Starving Time
This was the interval that happened in every colony in North America between the initial settlement year and all of those that followed until the colony became selfsufficient in food. -This time was always characterized by a high death rate and suffering. -In Virginia, the starving time lasted for almost 10 years (1607-1617). -In New England the period was similar. -In Louisiana, it took more than 60 years to reach self-sufficiency in food. The starving time roughly measures the "frontier" period in each settlement. In Jamestown, 1607-1617 were the lean and hungry years. -English gentlemen died of epidemic diseases and Indian wars, turned to cannibalism and starved to death. -They fought with the Indians, stole from them, inaugurated a war that led to raiding and many deaths, but the English never tried to plant a food crop. -They could not farm anyway, and they were poor hunters. -With at least a 40% mortality rate in the first decade, they resorted to cannibalism many a winter. -The chaos was so great that the crown took the colony back from the Company and imposed military rule in 1612. -Things improved slightly after that, but the colonists continued to seek a cash nexus -They struggled and died for at least another several yeas--until they finally discovered their first staple crop—but it was not food. -Instead, they discovered a crop that they could burn in smoke
The ______-_____ ________ was very different from any classical, middle-eastern, or ancient slavery for several reasons.
Trans-Atlantic trade 1) The sheer volume of the trade—millions over a period of 400 years dwarfs any other kind of slave trade going all the way back to Biblical times. 2) There was only the most limited path to freedom for those Africans sold into slavery via this trade. 3) Especially in the Anglo portions of the New World, the condition of slavery existed in perpetuity for almost all slave descendants. 4) Slavery in the New World placed a permanent racial identity and stigma on bondage. 5) This trade was on the rise in modern times (after 1500) when every other type of slavery in the world was in decline. 6) Slavery in the Atlantic was based on the demand for cash crops (tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton) and not a diversity of skills. 7) The Trans-Atlantic Trade spurred the development of warfare in Africa—to meet the demand
Declension
c. late 1600s- -The development that continued until the 1670s, led to a sharp decline in opportunity and a recession, and that economic slow-down caused declension in the 1670s-1690s. -Declension brought on social tension based on the massive gap that divided the very wealthy from the terribly poor. -The old consensual politics of compacts, covenants, the Burgesses and town meetings gave way to division, conflict and discord. -In Virginia, Bacon's Rebellion marked the start of the tension that is called declension. -The witchcraft trials of the 1690s demonstrated the stress of declension in New England. -This was a social phenomenon that was inevitable when economic opportunity dried up and the vast majority remained poor—but some of the population continued to grow wealthy. -In New England, as merchants and traders edged out the old church elders, they became the new "lay" leaders and this new form of government threatened the old intrinsic communal values. -Instead of the town and the church representing everyone, it seemed as if the wealthy were the only ones who mattered. -Many people felt threatened by the continued wealth gap while the most powerful always had a stake in it. -Some of the symptoms were the factionalism that divided churches and created new splinter groups, religious sects, and entire towns of dissenters. -The general tension was caused by social unrest and the age-old conflict between the "haves" and "have-nots," the starvation of the many in the face of the obnoxious wealth (and power) of the few. In New England, wealth and property would replace piety as the measure of character, but the process caused social tension and declension. -The process transformed society in New England from one of church members and Puritans to liberal individuals with increasing material possessions (or not) and the market economy. The same process transformed Virginia from a land of opportunity and headrights for all white men to a society of wealthy and slaveholding planters and often very poor whites without land. The tobacco plantations made slaveholding the measure of success in southern society the same way that pursuit of wealth and gentility replaced the old Puritan values in New England.