Colonization and Settlement,1585– 1763

Colonization and Settlement,1585– 1763

1. THE PEOPLING OF NORTH AMERICA

   • Portugal and Spain launched the Age of Discovery at the end of the 15th century
     • the Puritan founders of Massachusetts were strongly bent on converting native “savages”
       • Virginia was founded in 1607, it was a cog in the commercial system of empire. They failed their quest for gold and their attempts to raise silk, citrus products, and other potentially lucrative cash crops.
         • Tobacco exhausted soil fertility so rapidly that individual planters felt obliged to engross large quantities of land simply in order to maintain consistent levels of production;
           • Other European groups were joining the settlement process: the French in what is now Canada, the Dutch in New Netherlands the Spanish in Florida and also in the far southwest
             • English men and women constituted more than 90% of seventeenth­century colonists.
               • There were also Indians, the land’s original occupants. This group 10 million strong, continent ­wide, when the first European settlers stepped ashore would play an ambivalent role in colonization. On the one hand, Indians often served as helpers and teachers of the struggling, sometimes overmatched, newcomers. On the other, Indians were quick to realize the threat posed by settlement to their lives and livelihoods.

2. DEVELOPING THE LAND

   • the problem of transforming a “wild” countryside into a “pleasant garden.” Land and other resources were present in great abundance (especially whenever and wherever Indians were not found standing in the way).
     • Forests must be cleared. Fences and walls lined out. Housing constructed. Boats and wagons prepared for use
       • There were, moreover, other difficulties that worked to cramp productive effort. Cash, in particular, was hard to come by. As a result the colonial American economy remained deeply in the thrall of the mother country; in present­ day terms, it was a sphere of underdevelopment.

3. THE SETTLEMENT PROCESS

   • At the outset the settlers faced stark odds of survival. They arrived, in many cases, weakened by illness or sheer fatigue after their long sea journey. The supplies they brought were barely enough to last through their first months
     • The forests of their homeland had largely disappeared many years before—hence the American “wilderness” was bound to strike them as darkly menacing. Nor were they much familiar with human difference
       • They had to endure psychological stress as well as physical privation. Some gave up: retreated into private despair, failed to look after themselves, and died, as one report put it, “of melancholy.” But most managed to cope, by adjusting their lives as best they could
         • The very names they gave their surroundings expressed this impulse: Boston, Cambridge, Exeter, Portsmouth, Northumberland, Middlesex, and many others, all transferred from places they remembered and cherished in the mother country. It was, in effect, a strategy of denial; and, for the most part, it worked.

4. ORGANIZING THEIR LIVES AND COMMUNITIES

   • The very idea of creating new human communities in far-­off lands seemed strange and perplexing. Some colonies were designed and funded by joint­stock operations, others by wealthy groups.
     • All colonies were expected to be revenue producing ruled, top down fashion. The English monarchy left them largely to their own devices, offering high­sounding charters but little in the way of direct support and guidance.
       • Distance and the unforeseen difficulties of life on the colonial ground threw most of these founding plans off­track. Within a generation or two, effective governance had migrated, along with the settlers themselves, to scattered venues across the “new” continent.
         • Decentralization and local autonomy did not, however, mean democracy in any modern sense. Virtually everywhere the reins of power were held by elites.
           • The weakest point in this system was the position of the elites themselves—not in their authority over ordinary folk, but rather in their relation to each other. The process of settlement and community­building had created a certain openness at the topmost level.
             • Conflict among rival elites peaked in a sequence of violent events during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. A dozen years later a similar dynamic helped energize an uprising in New York, generally known as Leisler’s Rebellion. As with the Virginia case, this event took the name of its leader, Jacob Leisler, a wealthy merchant and militia officer who chafed at his exclusion from the highest levels of the colony’s government.
               • As one century yielded to the next, colonial society attained a more solid and settled shape. The position of the leaders seemed increasingly secure, within and without their own ranks.

5. NORTH AMERICA IN 1770

   • Thirteen separate English colonies in varying states of growth and development (The French had been ousted from their hold in Canada, while the Spanish remained thinly entrenched in Florida and the southwest.)
     • A white population of slightly more than two million, with about a quarter in New England, nearly half in the Chesapeake and Lower South, and the rest in the middle colonies and so­called back­country
       • An Indian population greatly reduced in size and pushed well back from the coast, but still a substantial presence through several inland regions—the Iroquois in central New York, the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws in the southeast
         • A rapidly growing, African­born (or derived) population of close to half a million, almost all of them slaves, and heavily concentrated in the Chesapeake and Carolina.
           • the colonial Americans, had not entirely come round to the same starting­point as countless generations of their forebears. And some parts of their lives were novel indeed.