British North America
1607-1776
First a note about names: England and Britain are not the same thing.
“Britain” refers to a large island off the west coast of Europe which is home to three related nations: England, Scotland, and Wales. In the Sixteenth Century, Britain conquered Ireland (a smaller island a few miles to the west). In 1603, after the death of the English Queen Elizabeth I, King James IV of Scotland (a nephew of Elizabeth’s) became King James I of England as well, leading to the gradual unification of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland into a single “United Kingdom” or “Great Britain.” The Scots rebelled against unification with England several times, and there continue to be some tensions between the Scots and the English. The Irish never accepted union with Britain, and fought against it for much of the 19th and early 20th century. In 1923, most of Ireland broke free and became the Republic of Ireland. Five Irish counties in the north of Ireland remained (and still remain) part of Great Britain as “Northern Ireland.” In many ways, the conquest of Ireland by the English and Scots prepared the way for the British conquest of North America. The way the Irish were treated by the Scots and English was not much different from the way the Indians would be treated in their turn.
British America was settled by English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh colonists, along with a fair helping of Dutch, German, Swedish, and German settlers. Each group brought their own ways of thinking, living and working. In addition to these intentional settlers, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly transported and sold as slaves in North and South America and the Caribbean.
The first English settlement in America took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. This settlement—at Roanoke in what is now North Carolina—was a failure. The first successful English Colony was established during the reign of James I. It was called “Jamestown.”
The English had several reasons to want to stake a claim in North America. Their perennial enemies, the French and Spanish, seemed to be getting rich from their New World colonies, and while the Spanish claimed to own all of North America, they had not been able to make any settlements north of St. Augustine, Florida.
So, in 1585, with the support of Queen Elizabeth, several attempts were made by English settlers to establish a presence in the New World. The initial plan was to settle in the Chesapeake Bay, but the settlers had a tendency to die or be killed before accomplishing anything.
In 1587, a group of 150 colonists, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, but under the leadership of a gentleman and artist named John White, came ashore on Roanoke Island. (shown in pink near the middle of the map to the left) The timing could not have been worse. The colony was south of where it was supposed to be, and supply ships seemed not to be able to find it. People were getting hungry and the local Indians were getting annoyed. Finally, John White sailed for home promising to bring back supplies as quickly as he could—five or six months maybe. He was not eager to leave, since his daughter, son-in-lay and grandchild, were left behind. His grand daughter, named Virginia Dare, had been born on Roanoke Island.
What happened next remains one of the great mysteries of American history. White’s promises to return quickly with supplies ran up against political realities at home. The Spanish were at war with England, threatening invasion of the British Isles. England needed every ship it could find, and could spare neither ships nor sailors to rescue a tiny band of settlers at the edge of the world. It took White three years to return.
Map by John Smith
When he did, he found the settlement abandoned with only a few clues left behind as to what happened to the colonists. The word “Croatoan” had been carved into a tree, suggesting that the colonists had either moved across Hatteras Sound to the larger island of Croatoan, which is called Hatteras Island today. Or, possibly, they had gone to live with the local Croatoan Indians. Whatever they did, no signs of the Lost Colonists were ever found again.
Perhaps the English outpost was attacked and destroyed by Spanish warships, but if so, the Spanish left no record of doing so and the Spanish were more likely to have taken the English men, women and children prisoner than to have killed the lot of them. And there was no evidence of a fight. Possibly they were attacked and killed by Indians. English colonists tended to make very bad neighbors. Initially, the local Indians were generally happy to trade with colonists, but they only had so much corn stored away for the winter and the Roanoke colonists had few resources to trade. English colonists might have tried to steal food from the Indians and the Indians decided that enough was enough and wiped them out.
The next attempt to establish an English settlement—and therefore an English claim on North America—was more successful, but just barely so.
Elizabeth I died in 1603. Her successor, James I had many disadvantages as a monarch. He spoke poorly and, having ruled in Scotland for most of his life, had little understanding of English traditions and ways of doing things. But he was willing to approve of the efforts of some of his wealthy English subjects to take another shot at settling the New World with Englishmen and, eventually, English women.
So it was that in 1608 another group of adventurers set sail for America. This time they were looking to establish a colony in the Chesapeake Bay in what is today the state of Virginia. The Chesapeake is farther north, and not as vulnerable to Spanish attack as was the Roanoke colony, but given the general ignorance of North American geography at the time, most colonial settlements were kind of random.
This settlement, taking the name of the king, was called Jamestown. Although the Jamestown colonists died off in prodigious numbers during their first years there, they eventually established a profitable business, which was the point all along.
English colonialism was a business. Wealthy English investors, normally men who were friends of the monarch, formed joint stock companies which received charters from the monarch. A joint stock company is a way to invest money in a business that allows the risk to be shared among a larger group of investors. The cost of sending several hundred men and women on ships, along with many months worth of supplies, goods to trade with the Indians, and more, would be beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of men. However, a group of a dozen or a hundred investors could afford to put money into a promising enterprise like American settlement and hope to receive the profits of their colony for years to come. If the ships sank or the colony was lost, then as unfortunate as that was, each individual investor had lost only a small part of his fortune.
England, in the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries, was not all that wealthy. Great fortunes had been made in Italy, and the Spanish and Portuguese had found fabulous wealth in this period, but England was still a kingdom at the edge of the world, a long way from anywhere and not yet finding wealth in America.
But the times were changing. It would take almost a century for English investments in Virginia, New England, the Carolinas, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia to begin to pay off.
If you ever saw the Disney version of the story of Jamestown (Pocahontas), then you already know that the English went to America looking for gold. And, like De Soto before them, they didn’t find any. What they did find was an odd plant with pale green, fuzzy leaves that, when dried, could be chewed, ground into a powder and snuffled into the nose (snuff), or put into clay pipes and smoked. The Indians had been growing and smoking tobacco for many years. Europeans picked up on the habit almost immediately.
Tobacco had many properties that made it perfect for the Virginia colonists. It was native to the Americas and grew quite well in the fertile soil of the Chesapeake Bay. And although growing and processing tobacco required a lot of labor, once the leaves had been dried and packed into huge barrels called hogsheads, it could be transported and stored for several years.
Smoking, chewing, and snuffing tobacco is an acquired taste, but once acquired, it is extremely addictive. Once Englishmen, whether gentlemen or laborers, got into the habit of smoking, they could not stop. Coincidentally, the popularity of smoking coincided with the growing popularity of another product, coffee, which was even more addictive than tobacco. Suddenly it became fashionable for men to spend their evenings, not at home where they should have been, but in coffee houses where they smoked, drank coffee, and talked.
Businesses were begun in coffee houses. Deals were made. In one coffee house, Lloyds, people began making bets on whether a ship would safely return from its voyage. If the ship’s owners, who was already making a big bet that their voyage to America or India or Africa would return safely, then the gentlemen who gathered at Lloyds (eventually claiming their own tables), would promise, in exchange for more money, to pay the owners the cost of their investment if the ship sank, was attacked by pirates, or was simply never seen again. Thus the business of insurance was born.
King James I hated tobacco. He wrote a famous tract blasting the use of tobacco. It did no good. People were hooked. And what is more, James’ wealthiest subjects were making money from tobacco and the colonists who had settled in Virginia had to have something to make their colony profitable.
In the Caribbean and South America, a similarly addictive product, sugar, had caused similar problems and would result in an equally disastrous solution: slavery.
Read King James I “A Counterblaste to Tobacco.”
James is making several arguments against the use of tobacco. Summarize five of them in your own words.
What does this tell us about King James I? Did he seem to be concerned for the well-being of his subjects?
Was King James right about the use of tobacco being bad for people??
2. The following paragraph is from James Ramsey’s Essay on the Treatment an Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies,1784.
At four o'clock in the morning the plantation bell rings to call the slaves into the field.... About nine o'clock they have half an hour for breakfast, which they take into the field. Again they fall to work... until eleven o'clock or noon; the bell rings and the slaves are dispersed in the neighbourhood to pick up natural grass and weeds for the horses and cattle (and to prepare and eat their own lunch)... At two o'clock, the bell summons them to deliver in their grass and to work in the fields... About half an hour before sunset they are again required to collect grass - about seven o'clock in the evening or later according to season - deliver grass as before. The slaves are then dismissed to return to their huts, picking up brushwood or dry cow dung to prepare supper and tomorrow's breakfast. They go to sleep at about midnight.
What point is James Ramsey making about the treatment of slaves on a sugar plantation?
Who is his audience?
Is he leading his readers to a moral judgment? If so, what?
Not long after the Jamestown colonists had begun growing tobacco in hopes of making a profit on their adventure in the new world, another group of English settlers started a very different kind of colony far to the north in Massachusetts Bay.
Few events in American History are as well-known as the story of the Pilgrims who came to America from England in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. This small band of settlers stopped first on the northern edge of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. On this sandy spit of land, they washed their clothes and decided to keep looking. The soon found a natural harbor they named after a small town in England of the same name. We know them as the Pilgrims, and what they did is remarkable. Most of this small group had left England several years earlier to find a home in the Netherlands where their somewhat extreme religious beliefs were tolerated. The Pilgrims were Protestants, but unlike most English Protestants they rejected the ritual and authority of the Anglican Church—the official church of England. There were a lot of other Protestants in England who agreed with them on that. Many English Protestants were identified as Puritans because they wanted to purify the Church of England of many of the elements that resembled Roman Catholicism. The Pilgrims took matters a step further. They refused to consider the Church of England to be a real church. They wanted nothing to do with it. Facing persecution for their stance in England, they found a home with the much more tolerant Dutch—who were also Protestant. But the Puritans were also English, and they feared that, as much as they appreciated the hospitality of the Dutch, their children were likely to grow up speaking Dutch, wearing Dutch clothes, and marrying into Dutch families.
So they returned to England and, seeing how settlers were already flocking to Virginia, decided to begin their own, Puritan colony in New England, a region far to the north of Virginia. They secured investors, hired a ship—the Mayflower—and persuaded the Plymouth Company, a joint stock company like the Virginia Company—to grant them permission to settle in the New World. The Plymouth Company could not have cared less about the religion of the Pilgrims. Here was a chance to build a settlement and, eventually, make some money in the New World.
The Plymouth Colony was never very large, and in 1630 it was overshadowed by the much larger Puritan Settlement in Massachusetts Bay, a little to the North of Plymouth. In 1691, Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony were merged to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay, a royal colony.
The histories of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay are extremely important in American History, but they will not detain us here too much longer. It is going to be worth noting several important points:
Massachusetts and Plymouth were both dominated by Puritans. While the Plymouth Colony tended to be somewhat tolerant of diversity, the Massachusetts Bay colonists were not. Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews were unwelcome and, if they showed up anyway, were expelled. It was nothing personal. These non-Puritans were perfectly free to begin their own colonies somewhere else, as in fact many did. Rhode Island became a Baptist colony, Maryland welcomed Catholics, and Pennsylvania was settled initially by Quakers. Pennsylvania, and most of the Southern Colonies eventually welcomed Jews and other religious minorities as well. South Carolina’s lords proprietors recognized that tolerating religious diversity was good for business.
Puritans have a bad reputation, and they did a number of unpleasant things, like hanging Quakers and accused witches, but their goal was to build a godly commonwealth in America where justice and righteousness would prevail. The Puritan colony protected women and children from abuse and worked hard to make sure that everyone learned to read and write. Slavery existed in New England, but it was not common and played only a marginal role in the economy and was outlawed in the years after the American Revolution.
The Puritans would become extremely influential in American history. They settled the rest of New England (the colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut). Their descendants settled cities as far afield as Salt Lake City and San Francisco.
The New England economy was diverse. Because the soil was rocky and thin and the winters long, farming did not play as important a role as it did in the Southern or Middle Colonies. New England colonists did plant corn, beans and squash—copying the example of their Indian neighbors, but they also turned to the sea to make a living. Fishing boats brought in great quantities of codfish. More daring sailors, especially from Nantucket, hunted for whales whose blubber was boiled down into whale oil and burned in lanterns to give light on long winter evenings. Because Puritan theology emphasized the importance of the community, Puritans valued and honored labor. They emphasized education as well, establishing some of the first colleges in America including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton which served as models for many other American colleges.
The Middle Colonies are harder to describe than the Southern Colonies and the New England Colonies because they were so diverse. New York, the most important of the Middle Colonies, had been settled by the Dutch but taken over by the British. The northern corner of New Jersey had been settled by the Dutch as part of their colony of New Amsterdam while the southern section—long the Delaware River, had been settled by colonists from Sweden. The small colony of Delaware, was also settled by Dutch and Swedish pioneers before being taken over by the British. The Middle Colonies were also economically diverse. New York City, which enjoyed one of the best natural harbors in the world, became a center for commerce well before the Revolution (and was the capital city of the new United States for several years). But the real wealth of the region came from farming. The soil was rich, the climate moderate, and the policies of their colonial governments welcomed anyone willing to invest their money and their labor into farming or business.
Pennsylvania was given to its proprietor, William Penn, by King Charles II in 1681. The king used this enormous grant of land to pay off a debt. Penn was a Quaker and an idealist, establishing a colony in which everyone would be welcome. New Jersey and Delaware bounced back and forth between William Penn, Lord Proprietor of Pennsylvania, and Lord Calvert, Lord Proprietor of Maryland before becoming royal provinces in their own right.
Key Points:
Royal Charter: When the monarch granted land in America to an investor, or group of investors, who plan to encourage settlement.
Lord Proprietor: An individual or group of individuals who were granted power by the monarch to encourage settlement. In the case of Carolina Colony, eight lords proprietors received a royal charter to govern and collect rent from settlers.
Royal Colony: Most of the proprietary governments were ineffective and the lords proprietor, too interested in making money to invest in good government or the defense of their colonies. They were, therefore, taken over by an English monarch who appointed royal governors.. The colonists in South Carolina were quite happy to get rid of the lords proprietor and come under direct royal government.
Colonies: There were, eventually, thirteen British colonies in North America, but these were not the only colonies Britain had in the Americas. Canada had been a French colony for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, the French abandoned Canada to the British. Many American revolutionaries hoped that the Canadians would eventually join the United States (that was one goal of the War of 1812), but the Canadians were happy to remain part of the British Empire. Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean were far more valuable than her North American colonies. These included Barbados, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, and were valuable largely for the sugarcane that could be grown there.
Southern Colonies: These colonies came to depend on slave labor to produce their primary exports: tobacco, cotton, indigo, and rice. The Southern Colonies were Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. Early settlers were from England, but in the middle of the eighteenth century, waves of immigrants from Scotland and Northern Ireland (called Scots-Irish sometimes) moved to the Southern colonies and began to populate the back country, creating problems with the Indians who claimed these territories as their own.
Middle Colonies: These colonies depended on a mix of farming and trade, along with manufacturing. Slavery was less important (except in Delaware) to the economies. Middle Colonies included Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Settlers in the Middle Colonies came from many parts of Britain and Europe. It was not unusual to find settlers from France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands in the colonial middle colonies.
New England Colonies: Puritans, including the Pilgrims, founded the first colonies in New England, and the region retained their dedication to family, work, and community well after the Revolution. Because the soil did not lend itself to the kind of commodity farming that made planters in South Carolina wealthy, most New Englanders built small farms and worked them alone or with the help of a few hired laborers. New England Puritans valued education, hard work, and independence.