1.4 English Colonization

Spain had a one-hundred-year head start on New World colonization, and a jealous England eyed the enormous wealth that Spain gleaned. The Protestant Reformation had shaken England, but Elizabeth I assumed the English crown in 1558. Elizabeth oversaw England’s so-called golden age, which included both the expansion of trade and exploration and the literary achievements of Shakespeare and Marlowe. English mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading system, created and maintained markets. The markets provided a steady supply of consumers and laborers, stimulated economic expansion, and increased English wealth.

England

However, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English population. The island’s population increased from fewer than three million in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century.¹  The skyrocketing cost of land coincided with plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose but wages stagnated. Moreover, movements to enclose public land—sparked by the transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock raising—evicted tenants from the land and created hordes of landless, jobless peasants that haunted the cities and countryside. One quarter to one half of the population lived in extreme poverty.²

New World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English fortunes among the wealthy, a tense Spanish rivalry, and mounting internal social unrest. But supporters of English colonization always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-interest. They claimed to be doing God’s work. Many claimed that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New World’s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon The History of the Kings of Britain, written by the twelfth-century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur’s conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest.³  Moreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New World American Indians would satisfy God and glorify England’s “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I, who was seen as nearly divine by some in England. The English—and other European Protestant colonizers—imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.

In his 1584 “Discourse on Western Planting,” Richard Hakluyt amassed the supposed religious, moral, and exceptional economic benefits of colonization. He repeated the Black Legend of Spanish New World terrorism and attacked the sins of Catholic Spain. He promised that English colonization could strike a blow against Spanish heresy and bring Protestant religion to the New World. English interference, Hakluyt suggested, might provide the only salvation from Catholic rule in the New World. The New World, too, he said, offered obvious economic advantages. Trade and resource extraction would enrich the English treasury. England, for instance, could find plentiful materials to outfit a world-class navy. Moreover, he said, the New World could provide an escape for England’s vast armies of landless “vagabonds.” Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring profit but also provide work for England’s jobless poor. A Christian enterprise, a blow against Spain, an economic stimulus, and a social safety valve all beckoned the English toward a commitment to colonization.⁴

This noble rhetoric veiled the coarse economic motives that brought England to the New World. New economic structures and a new merchant class paved the way for colonization. England’s merchants lacked estates, but they had new plans to build wealth. By collaborating with new government-sponsored trading monopolies and employing financial innovations such as joint-stock companies, England’s merchants sought to improve on the Dutch economic system. Spain was extracting enormous material wealth from the New World; why shouldn’t England? Joint-stock companies, the ancestors of modern corporations, became the initial instruments of colonization. With government monopolies, shared profits, and managed risks, these money-making ventures could attract and manage the vast capital needed for colonization. In 1606 James I approved the formation of the Virginia Company (named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen).

Privateering

Rather than formal colonization, however, the most successful early English ventures in the New World were a form of state-sponsored piracy known as privateering. Queen Elizabeth sponsored sailors, or “Sea Dogges,” such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, to plunder Spanish ships and towns in the Americas. Privateers earned a substantial profit both for themselves and for the English crown. England practiced piracy on a scale, one historian wrote, “that transforms crime into politics.”⁵  Francis Drake harried Spanish ships throughout the Western Hemisphere and raided Spanish caravans as far away as the coast of Peru on the Pacific Ocean. In 1580 Elizabeth rewarded her skilled pirate with knighthood. But Elizabeth walked a fine line. With Protestant-Catholic tensions already running high, English privateering provoked Spain. Tensions worsened after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic. In 1588, King Philip II of Spain unleashed the fabled Armada. With 130 ships, 8,000 sailors, and 18,000 soldiers, Spain launched the largest invasion in history to destroy the British navy and depose Elizabeth.

An island nation, England depended on a robust navy for trade and territorial expansion. England had fewer ships than Spain, but they were smaller and swifter. They successfully harassed the Armada, forcing it to retreat to the Netherlands for reinforcements. But then a fluke storm, celebrated in England as the “divine wind,” annihilated the remainder of the fleet.⁶ The destruction of the Armada changed the course of world history. It not only saved England and secured English Protestantism, but it also opened the seas to English expansion and paved the way for England’s colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark on its dominance over North America.

Colonization

English colonization would look very different from Spanish or French colonization. England had long been trying to conquer Catholic Ireland. Rather than integrating with the Irish and trying to convert them to Protestantism, England more often simply seized land through violence and pushed out the former inhabitants, leaving them to move elsewhere or to die. These same tactics would be deployed against Native Americans in North American invasions.

English colonization, however, began haltingly. Sir Humphrey Gilbert labored throughout the late sixteenth century to establish a colony in Newfoundland but failed. In 1587, with a predominantly male cohort of 150 English colonizers, John White reestablished an abandoned settlement on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island. Supply shortages prompted White to return to England for additional support, but the Spanish Armada and the mobilization of British naval efforts stranded him in Britain for several years. When he finally returned to Roanoke, he found the colony abandoned. White found the word Croatan carved into a tree or a post in the abandoned colony. The colonists, short of food, may have fled for a nearby island of that name and encountered its settled native population, and violence may have been a factor.  When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had yet established a permanent North American colony.

After King James made peace with Spain in 1604, privateering no longer held out the promise of cheap wealth. Colonization assumed a new urgency. The Virginia Company, established in 1606, drew inspiration from Cortés and the Spanish conquests. It hoped to find gold and silver as well as other valuable trading commodities in the New World: glass, iron, furs, pitch, tar, and anything else the country could supply. The company planned to identify a navigable river with a deep harbor, away from the eyes of the Spanish. There they would find an American Indian trading network and extract a fortune from the New World.

English Settlement

English claims to the New World stemmed from the mysterious voyage of Giovanni Caboto (or John Cabot), who sailed in service to King Henry VII. Cabot and his crew apparently reached Newfoundland in present day Canada in 1497, but no one can be sure where they landed. Cabot and his fleet disappeared without a trace on the return trip a year later.

Jamestown

After Cabot’s disappearance, nearly a century passed before John White’s attempted colony in Roanoke.⁷ Permanent English presence in North America would not occur until 1607 when 104 men and boys survived the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean onboard three ships named the Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed. The colonists settled along the James River on a peninsula. The thought was that the location offered an easy defense against both threats from Native Americans and European rivals, particularly the Spanish. Unfortunately, the area was swampy and very different from home which spelled disaster. Additionally, scientists have now determined that the settlers arrived in the middle of the worst drought in the history of the area.⁸ This meant that the settlers had difficulty cultivating crops and finding drinking water which led to starvation and disease.

As the American Yawp tells us, “Jamestown was a profit-seeking venture backed by investors. The colonists were mostly gentlemen and proved entirely unprepared for the challenges ahead. They hoped for easy riches but found none.”  Due to the death of several leaders appointed by the king during the voyage across the ocean, John Smith, an adventurer and military man, seized control of the colony during the first year. The colony was successful with the help of the Powhatan Confederacy, a group of Algonquin villages led by a leader called “Powhatan” though that was his title, not his name. Early on Powhatan viewed the colonists as allies and aided them in return for tools and weapons. The widely-known story of an incident where John Smith was taken captive by the Powhatan Confederacy and saved from execution by Powhatan’s young daughter, mistakenly called Pocahontas, is a combination of fabrication and misunderstanding of traditional native practices of surrender. Matoaka, a child, had no romantic interest in Smith. Her later marriage to John Rolfe, after an acculturation involving a name change to Rebecca, is often conflated with the misleading story around John Smith.

Smith’s insistence that the colonists must work to eat, no doubt helped the colony survive the first year, but he was generally disliked and after a mysterious gunpowder explosion in 1609, Smith returned to England and never set foot in Virginia again. His impact on the establishment of Jamestown is a controversial one today. He wrote a history of Virginia many years later that portrayed himself in a grandiose light and made the claim that if he had been present in Virginia during the “Starving Time” (the winter of 1609 to 1610) then the colonists wouldn’t have died. This is doubtful, but for at least a century this is the only history of the Jamestown colony that was available and Smith’s myth grew.

Pocahontas and Growth of Jamestown

A new influx of settlers would arrive and the colony continued, but it gained a reputation for death back in England. John Rolfe is responsible ultimately for saving the Jamestown colony with tobacco. In 1617, he was responsible for sending the first successful crop of tobacco back to England. Jamestown had found the one commodity that would grow plentifully in the area, albeit with enough difficulty as to drive labor demands that led to indentured servitude and eventually racial chattel slavery.

When the alliance with the Powhatan Confederacy weakened, probably due to greed and the ineptitude of the English gentlemen settlers, the colonists kidnapped Pocahontas. During her captivity, she adopted the English name, Rebecca. She then married the colonist John Rolfe. She subsequently went on a European tour with her husband, gave birth to her only child, and died in England of disease. She was buried in England in St. George’s, a place reserved for notable parishioners and clergy.¹²

Politically, Virginia was moving very slowly toward a representative local government. In 1611, King James had issued the third and final charter, of the Virginia Company. In this charter, James instructed for the creation of a House of Burgesses that would include two representatives from every settlement, plantation, and hundred (a form of settlement) in Virginia. Later, King James would come to regret this representative power he handed to the colonists, but at the time he didn’t have the monetary resources to retain a tight control of the colony and believed it was wiser for them to be able to make decisions expeditiously.

To encourage emigration, in 1617, the Virginia Company began promising 50 acres of land to every settler who paid his own way to the colony. Any investor who paid for a settler to be transported also received 50 acres. This promise of land was very attractive to many who had no hope of land ownership in England and led to an increased practice of indentured servitude. With the huge influx of settlers and the resulting impacts on native people seen across European colonization, the Powhatan Confederacy attempted to use force. On March 22, 1622, the American Indians coordinated attacks up and down the James River, massacring 347 men, women, and children. It was only the warning of several Native Americans who had converted to Christianity that allowed the fort to close its gates and saved it from destruction.

While there were several political factors also involved in the decision, the massacre provided King James with the ammunition he needed to seize control of the Virginia Company and dissolve it. By 1624, Virginia was no longer a private enterprise and was instead a crown colony. King James’ satisfaction at his victory was short-lived. He died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles. Charles allowed the colony to continue to govern themselves through their representative body, the House of Burgesses. This method of representative government would continue through the Revolutionary War, and many scholars argue that this was the first working model for the government of the United States to come.

New England

Meanwhile, Pilgrim Separatists who dissented from the religious practices of the Church of England, emigrated north of Virginia and began Plymouth Colony in 1620, followed soon by thousands of Puritans to Boston in Massachusetts Bay beginning in 1629. These settlers set about creating a utopian community, a “city upon a hill,” establishing orderly towns, self-sufficient agriculture, healthy families (due to the climate), and government directed by religion. “The Puritans did not seek to create a haven of religious toleration, a notion that they—along with nearly all European Christians—regarded as ridiculous at best and dangerous at worst.” ¹³ their utopian vision made them intolerant of diversity.

Due to the makeup of the settlers – largely families and entire towns – New England developed very differently from Virginia. They created small farms, and replicated their home environments. The geography and climate made large-scale plantations impractical, so the labor necessity of indentured servitude and slavery was less than in other English-speaking colonies in North America. As the American Yawp indicates: “There is no evidence that the New England Puritans would have opposed such a system were it possible; other Puritans made their fortunes on the Caribbean sugar islands, and New England merchants profited as suppliers of provisions and slaves to those colonies. By accident of geography as much as by design, New England society was much less stratified than any of Britain’s other seventeenth-century colonies.”¹⁴

As noted, New England was primarily founded on religious concerns. This differed from other English colonization. Puritan congregations became the key institutions in colonial New England, whereas religion did not play a key role in the development of Chesapeake colonies where the struggle was simply for survival. Nevertheless, as early as the 1630s, Massachusetts’ Puritans coped with dissenters. Banished clergyman Roger Williams founded Rhode Island and welcomed freethinkers, safe in the wilderness because he was more respectful of Native American rights.

But by 1675, Metacom’s War – often also known as King Philip’s War – erupted.  Metacom of the Wampanoag attempted to acculturate in the hopes his people and the arriving English settlers could coexist.  He took on the name Philip, learned English, completed the complex processes of conversion in a Puritan context, and even managed to navigate the unique New England court system.  Along the way he became a successful pig herder in the English fashion, something almost unheard of among native peoples whose basic form of agriculture came under existential assault from the hated animals protected by English coercive force.  Yet in a legal argument with an Englishman, Metacom came face to face with the reality that all his acceptance of the demands of the new people meant nothing if an English person could benefit from a native person’s losses.  Metacom was forced to a confrontational posture against the English, and later events – including a murder – triggered one the proportionally most devastating conflicts in the history of English-speaking societies in North America.  Yet despite the successes Metacom achieved, he was unable to set the squabbling English colonies against one another, and later events ensured the defeat of his people – to catastrophic effect.

Amidst this turmoil, citizens of Salem, Massachusetts followed a similar pattern from Europe and started to scapegoat their problems upon supposed witches among them.  These trials, which appear to have targeted the few women in this theocratic society to have some property or status, led to trials and execution.  After 1692, few people would associate openly with Puritan extremism, and the edifice of Puritan theocracy and even religious orthodoxy began to crumble. As Puritan descendants spread across the land, they became less rigid, and more independent and commercial. New Englanders now were called “Yankees” rather than Puritans, a reflection of this loosening of religious restriction.  And yet some of the core effects of now-faded ideas within Puritanism, and the early desire to create self-sufficient societies unlike the trade-dependent export agriculture systems of the emerging American South created a mercantile and business culture that would drive later American economic changes from surging successes to nightmarish conditions and impacts on peoples, biospheres, and culture.

For more information, please watch the following video:

WGBH Educational Foundation. English Settlement: New England and Virginia: A Biography of America. Produced by Annenberg Learner. 2000. Video, 24:11.

If you get an error saying the video can’t be authenticated, use this link: https://ccco.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://fod-infobase-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=151823&xtid=111494.

Notes

1. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 30.
2. John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 131–135.
3. Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 15.
4. Richard Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting (1584). https://archive.org/details/discourseonweste02hakl_0.
5. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 9.
6. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
7. College of William and Mary, “Extreme Droughts Played Major Role in Tragedies at Jamestown, “Lost Colony”,” Science Daily, accessed December 14, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/04/980428075409.htm.
8. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., “Chapter 2,” The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), V. Jamestown, at http://www.americanyawp.com/text/01-the-new-world/.
9. George Percy, “A True Relation of the Proceedings and Occurrents of Moment Which Have Hap’ned in Virginia,” quoted in Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, the First Decade, 1607–1617, ed. Edward Wright Haile (Champlain, VA: Round House, 1998), 505.
10. Eric A. Powell, “Chilling Discovery at Jamestown,” Archaeology (June 10, 2013). http://www.archaeology.org/issues/96-1307/trenches/973-jamestown-starving-time-cannibalism.
11. Locke, “Chapter 2,” IV. Jamestown.
12. St. George’s Church Gravesend, “Pocahontas,” St. George’s Church Gravesend, 2018, accessed December 14, 2018, https://stgeorgesgravesend.org/history/pocahontas/.
13. Locke, “Chapter 2,” VI. New England.
14. Locke, “Chapter 2,” VI. New England.