{"id":32,"date":"2023-03-06T22:24:07","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T22:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-1-4\/"},"modified":"2023-04-26T17:48:26","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T17:48:26","slug":"module-1-4","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-1-4\/","title":{"raw":"1.4 English Colonization","rendered":"1.4 English Colonization"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Nicholas Nicholas Hilliard, The Battle of Gravelines, 1588.\u202f Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSpain 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\u2019s 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.\r\n

England<\/h2>\r\nHowever, wrenching social and economic changes unsettled the English population. The island\u2019s population increased from fewer than three million in 1500 to over five million by the middle of the seventeenth century.1<\/sup><\/a> \u202fThe skyrocketing cost of land coincided with plummeting farming income. Rents and prices rose but wages stagnated. Moreover, movements to enclose public land\u2014sparked by the transition of English landholders from agriculture to livestock raising\u2014evicted 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<\/sup><\/a>\r\n

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\u2019s work. Many claimed that colonization would glorify God, England, and Protestantism by Christianizing the New World\u2019s pagan peoples. Advocates such as Richard Hakluyt the Younger and John Dee, for instance, drew upon\u202fThe History of the Kings of Britain<\/em>, written by the twelfth-century monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, and its mythical account of King Arthur\u2019s conquest and Christianization of pagan lands to justify American conquest.3<\/sup><\/a> \u202fMoreover, promoters promised that the conversion of New World American Indians would satisfy God and glorify England\u2019s \u201cVirgin Queen,\u201d Elizabeth I, who was seen as nearly divine by some in England. The English\u2014and other European Protestant colonizers\u2014imagined themselves superior to the Spanish, who still bore the Black Legend of inhuman cruelty. English colonization, supporters argued, would prove that superiority.<\/p>\r\nIn his 1584 \u201cDiscourse on Western Planting,\u201d 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\u2019s vast armies of landless \u201cvagabonds.\u201d Expanded trade, he argued, would not only bring profit but also provide work for England\u2019s 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<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThis 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\u2019s 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\u2019s merchants sought to improve on the Dutch economic system. Spain was extracting enormous material wealth from the New World; why shouldn\u2019t 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).\r\n

Privateering<\/h2>\r\nRather 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 \u201cSea Dogges,\u201d 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, \u201cthat transforms crime into politics.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a>\u202f 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.\r\n\r\nAn 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 \u201cdivine wind,\u201d annihilated the remainder of the fleet.6<\/sup><\/a> 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\u2019s colonial future. By 1600, England stood ready to embark on its dominance over North America.\r\n

Colonization<\/h2>\r\nEnglish 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.\r\n\r\nEnglish 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\u2019s 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\u202fCroatan\u202fcarved 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. \u00a0When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, no Englishmen had yet established a permanent North American colony.\r\n\r\nAfter 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 Cort\u00e9s 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.\r\n

English Settlement<\/h2>\r\nEnglish 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.\r\n

Jamestown<\/h3>\r\nAfter Cabot\u2019s disappearance, nearly a century passed before John White\u2019s attempted colony in Roanoke.7<\/sup><\/a> 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<\/sup><\/a> This meant that the settlers had difficulty cultivating crops and finding drinking water which led to starvation and disease.\r\n\r\nAs the American Yawp tells us, \u201cJamestown 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.\u201d\u202f 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 \u201cPowhatan\u201d 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\u2019s 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.\r\n\r\nSmith\u2019s 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 \u201cStarving Time\u201d (the winter of 1609 to 1610) then the colonists wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s myth grew.\r\n
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\r\n\r\nFour hundred settlers arrived in 1609, but the overwhelmed colony entered a desperate \u201cstarving time\u201d in the winter of 1609\u20131610. Supplies were lost at sea. Relations with the American Indians deteriorated, and the colonists fought a kind of slow-burning guerrilla war with the Powhatan. Disaster loomed for the colony. The settlers ate everything they could, roaming the woods for nuts and berries. They boiled leather. They dug up graves to eat the corpses of their former neighbors. One man was executed for killing and eating his wife. Some years later, George Percy recalled the colonists\u2019 desperation during these years, when he served as the colony\u2019s president: \u201cHaving fed upon our horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs, cats, rats and mice . . . as to eat boots shoes or any other leather. . . . And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing was spared to maintain life and to doe those things which seam incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a>\u202f Archaeological excavations in 2012 exhumed the bones of a fourteen-year-old girl that exhibited signs of cannibalism.10<\/sup><\/a>\u202f All but sixty settlers would die by the summer of 1610.11<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nPocahontas and Growth of Jamestown<\/span>\r\n\r\nA 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.\r\n\r\nWhen 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\u2019s, a place reserved for notable parishioners and clergy.12<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nPolitically, 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\u2019t 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.\r\n\r\nTo 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.\r\n\r\nWhile 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\u2019 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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New England<\/h2>\r\nMeanwhile, 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 \u201ccity upon a hill,\u201d establishing orderly towns, self-sufficient agriculture, healthy families (due to the climate), and government directed by religion. \u201cThe Puritans did not seek to create a haven of religious toleration, a notion that they\u2014along with nearly all European Christians\u2014regarded as ridiculous at best and dangerous at worst.\u201d 13<\/sup><\/a> their utopian vision made them intolerant of diversity.\r\n\r\nDue to the makeup of the settlers \u2013 largely families and entire towns \u2013 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: \u201cThere 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\u2019s other seventeenth-century colonies.\"14<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nAs 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\u2019 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.\r\n\r\nBut by 1675, Metacom\u2019s War - often also known as King Philip's War - erupted.\u00a0 Metacom of the Wampanoag attempted to acculturate in the hopes his people and the arriving English settlers could coexist.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\r\n\r\nAmidst this turmoil, citizens of Salem, Massachusetts followed a similar pattern from Europe and started to scapegoat their problems upon supposed witches among them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u201cYankees\u201d rather than Puritans, a reflection of this loosening of religious restriction.\u00a0 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.\r\n

For more information, please watch the following video:<\/p>\r\n

WGBH Educational Foundation. English Settlement: New England and Virginia: A Biography of America. Produced by Annenberg Learner. 2000. Video,<\/a> 24:11.<\/p>\r\n