US History I

Lecture Notes

Copyright 1989, David F. Nalle


THE FIRST AMERICANS

North America: Empty Continent
    Abundant Game for hunting, such as the mammoth
    Many Rivers with fish
    Fertile soil for farming or gathering food
    Food virtually there for the taking at a time when much of Asia was
iced under

Ice Age: 30,000 years ago
    Water Level Lowered
    Ridge of land beneath Aleutian islands exposed, making land bridge
between Alaska and Siberia
    This connection lasted until about 15,000 years ago.

First Americans: nomads From central asia
    Asia and europe iced in, but after a long, cold passage on the land
bridge, america was full of fish, edible plants and game.
    from alaska they spread to canada, america, central america, the
carribean and south america. about 15,000 years ago they were cut off when
the ice receded and the water level rose.
    ancestors of the tribes met by europeans thousands of years later and
mistakenly called 'indians'

Native American Life
    Cut off from their asian and european cousins, the peoples of the
americas did not develope along the same cultural and technological lines.
    as much variety as in Europe, with hundreds of tribes and over 1200
languages and dialects.
    Central America: highly developed technologically, with cities like
Tenochtictlan, as large as those in Europe.  Skilled artisans, very
organized society.  Mayas advanced in science and math.  Aztecs more
warlike, well organized.
    South America: many primitives, but the Incas of peru very
sophisticated, great builders and engineers, huge pyramids, complex society
and advanced administrative and military system. Incas, believed to have
huge riches because of their worked gold items.
    North America: less advanced technologically, great travellers,
farmers, hunters and traders.  Tribal confederacies showed highly developed
political systems, like the Iroquois confederacy and at the time of
European arrival they were on the verge of creating nation states.
    No native americans had learned to use the wheel for transport or
succeeded in working hard metals like iron, though they produced great
artworks in softer metals like gold.  Not all had written languages, though
some had very sophisticated ones, but many had great oral literary
traditions.
    Culturally and politically well developed, but behind the europeans in
some key areas of technological development.     This a gave Europeans the
edge they needed to conquer two vast and populous continents, though they
came with much smaller numbers.

Although there were millions of indians in North and South america at the
time of the first European contacts, the European invasion was so complete
that today native americans make up only a very small part of the
population of the United States and almost all of our language and customs
are european in origin.  Native American society was destroyed so quickly
and changed so much by early contacts with Europeans that it is difficult
to get an accurate picture of what life was like before the white man,
except for what we can extrapolate from the traditions and lifestyles of
those native americans who were still around after europeans had changed
them from  being a threat to being a local oddity worthy of occasional
study.  15 thousand  years of american history are fated to remain a
mystery, but the last five hundred years of European settlement have left
an extensive record of people, ideas and events for us to study.
    
It is likely that the great seafaring nations of Europe and Asia were
aware of the americas from the earliest times.  Greek tales of Atlantis may
be the result of accidental landfalls in America, and the experimental
journeys of Thor Heyerdall show that even the Egyptians and Phoenicians
could have crossed the Atlantic, despite the great dangers involved.
Chinese and Celtic legends suggest knowledge of the americas well before
European discovery.  In the sixth century, irish legends tell of St.
Brendan who travelled to a magical western land beyond the atlantic, a land
of magical birds and animals, all conveniently christian.  Though this tale
is rather fantastic, it does hint at an awareness that there was a land
beyond the atlantic.  None of these early new-world connections are well
documented, and while they don't all present the new world as St. Brendan's
land of talking Christian birds, they remain more valuable as myth than as
history.


THE VIKINGS

Reliable accounts of trans-atlantic exploration really begin with the
vikings, growing out of the exploits of the seagoing adventurers who
followed Eirik the Red to Greenland, particularly his son Leif.  The
wanderlust of these 10th century explorers was not satisfied by the rocky
monotony of greenland, so they set out to go farther west and thus became
the true discoverers of the new world, as well as the first to attempt to
plant colonies there.

Bjarni Hjerolfson--986
    Leif' s expedition explored the coast of of far northern Canada, naming
the major first areas he came upon Markland, Helluland and the farthest
south and most attractive Vinland for the wild grapes he found growing
there.  It is generally believed that Vinland was an area near the mouth of
the St. Lawrence river, perhaps as far south as New England, but more
likely in Nova Scotia.  Leif and his men spent a winter in Vinland before
returning to Greenland.

Thorvald Erickson
    Further inland explorations were made by Thorvald Eirikson, Leif's
brother, who may have been responsible for stone carvings along the river
basins of the northern united states and canada.  The actual extend of his
exploration is not known, but he is the first to encounter the Skraelings,
indians who were probably the ancestors of the Algonquins, at whose hands
he died.

Thorfinn Karlsefni
    Thorfinn Karlsefni was perhaps the most ambitious of the Viking
adventurers.  Around the year 1020, he tried to establish a permanent
Vinland colony with three ships, 60 men, and livestock, on what is now the
eastern shore of what is now Labrador.  This colony was called Leifsbudir
after Leif Eirikson and despite the years and rough weather of the area its
archaeological remains of this colony have been identified and excavated
fairly recently.
    Contrary to tradition, Snorri Thorfinnson, son of Thorfinn and Gudrid
Karlsefni, born in the 1020s, was the first child born to white men in the
new world, not Virginia Dare.
     Because of too much conflict with the Skraelings, Karlsfeni abandonned
his settlement by 1025.

Leif's sister Freydis lead expedition in 1026 to punish the Skraelings.

In 1121 Pope Paschal II appointed Eric Gnupsson Bishop of Vinland,
assigning him the mission of converting the natives.  They were not
receptive to Christianity.  He never returned to Greenland.

After this occasional trips were made there by settlers on Greenland who
needed timber, but no further attempts at colonization were made

The Vinland colony failed to take hold because the vikings did not have the
technological advantages which later colonists were able to use to overcome
the more numerous native population.  Extended supply lines and the decline
of norse sea power made additional colonization impractical for the
vikings, though some contact with the new world continued until the end of
the greenland settlement in the late 1400s.


THE AGE OF EXPLORATION
    In the 15th century the European economy began to expand and merchants
became more ambitious.
    Great wealth coming overland from the east, silks and spices.  This
trade dominated by Venetians, Persians and Turks.
    European merchants wanted greater profits with more efficiency,
bypassing Italian and middle- eastern middle-men.  Began to look for new
routes to the far east.
    Improvements in naval technology during in the 15th century provided
small, reliable ships which were capable of facing the open ocean in
relative security.  Increased seaborn commerce eventually led to advances
in navigation and further improvements in shop design.  Travel by sea,
which had once been a gamble, became relatively safe and European merchants
and rulers realized that the sea might  be the easy road to the rich
cargoes to be found in India, China and Japan.
    1350s: French, Spanish and Italian ships had begun to explore the
coasts of Africa in search of a route east, finding some wealth in wood and
slaves in the process.
    1420s: Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal began a program of
exploration, mapping and catalogging in the Atlantic, collecting all of the
latest ideas in nautical technology and Atlantic geography at his research
institute at Sagres.  Prince Henry died in 1460, but he established a
tradition of Portuguese exploration and had set an example for the rest of
Europe to follow.
    1488: Bartholomeu Diaz, an explorer produced by the programs of Pr.
Henry, rounded the horn of Africa and was the first European to enter the
Indian Ocean, opening the first water route to the east.
    1499: Vasco da Gama took a fleet of four Portuguese ships to India,
proving that the sea lanes were viable for eastern trade.  This broke the
Italian and Turkish domination of the flow of oriental goods and marked the
beginning of the decline of the eastern mediterranean nations and the rise
to power of those european nations which had large merchant fleets.
    Although the sea route pioneered by Diaz and da Gama was a great step
forward, the horn of africa was beset by violent storms and travel to the
east by that route was time consuming and dangerous.  This left many
explorers hoping that there might be a faster, safer route to the orient.
Navigators and scientists had suspected that the world was round since
classical times, but it was not until this need arose that living on a
spinning ball of earth begain to have a practical value.  If the world was
round, it should be possible to reach a point on the other side of the
sphere by going west as easily as by going east.  It was in the proof of
this theory that Christopher Columbus set out to find a western route to
the orient.
    Christopher Columbus was an Italian from the city state of Genoa.  Late
in his career as a successful merchant captain he turned his efforts to
exploration and began to seek funding from the French, English and
Portuguese courts for an expedition to reach the indies by going west on
the assumption that the world was round.  For five years his plan was
considered too uncertain and he campaigned in vain, until he appealed to
Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of a newly unified spain.  After
expelling all the jews and moslems from Spain they were ready to look for
new heathens to oppress, so they provided Columbus with three ships, and
granted him the title of 'admiral in chief of the ocean sea and viceroy and
perpetual governor of all the lands and mainlands he should discover'.
    August of 1492: Columbus set out with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria,
arriving at a series of Islands three months later which he at first took
to be Japan, his chosen destination, though they were in fact part of the
Antilles in the Carribean.  It seems that Columbus overlooked the accurate
global dimensions which had been established by Greek mathematicians two
thousand years earlier and relied on a map more to his liking and his
needs, made by Paolo Toscanelli, who had underestimated the diameter of the
earth by at least a third.  This conservative estimate of the distances
involved made fundraising easier by making his voyages seem less ambitious.
Columbus was a brave explorer and a good fundraiser, but his math left
something to be desired.
    Columbus returned to Spain, taking with him a number of captured
natives who he called 'Indians' because he thought they were from Japan,
Japan then being thought to be a part of India.  Unfortunately these
natives died during the lengthy voyage.  However, the nuggets of gold he
seized and his reports of the rich lands he had claimed for spain were
enough to provide funding for several more trips.  In the next few years he
explored throughout the carribean and along the northern coast of South
America, searching for a passage through to the orient.  He never found his
passage, though he claimed a great deal of land for Spain, and although he
is sometimes credited as the discoverer of our continent, he never in fact
set foot on North American soil.
    1497:Amerigo Vespucci: Other Spanish explorers followed after Columbus,
among them was Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coasts of Mexico and
South America in 1497.  A few years later his name was given to the whole
region, though he never actually set foot in North America.
    1513: Juan Ponce de Leon: explored Florida, searching for fountain of
youth, as well as gold and riches of the new world.
    1521: Ferdinand Magellan: made the first trip around South America to
cross the pacific and reach the orient.
    Beginning in the 1520s the Spanish expeditions took on more of a flavor
of conquest than of exploration, with the misions of Hernan Cortes who
conquered the aztecs in Mexico in 1519 and Francisco Pizzaro who sibdued
the Incas in Peru in the 1530s.
    By the 1540s the Spanish had explored the coasts of both North and
South America and had sent expeditions throughout mexico and the southern
and southwestern parts of North America, going as far north as Kansas.
They had subdued the two most organized and powerful nations in the new
world and were already forcibly christianizing their new subjects while
diseases like smallpox and measles were destroying much of the native
population.  In only a few years these diseases which were unknown in the
new world had reduced the native population in Spanish held areas to 1/10th
of the numbers before their arrival.  In this early period Spanish
domination of Peru, Central America and the Carribean Islands was
unquestioned, and they quickly began to colonize and exploit these lands
for their mineral wealth, particularly gold and silver and later for their
agricultural products.
    The Portuguese had been the first great explorers, and as early as 1493
, in the Treaty of Tordesaillas, Pope Alexander VI had been asked to step
in and resolve conflicting claims to the new world.  He drew a line
dividing South America down the middle, and giving the western portion to
Portugal, and their main colonial efforts were centered there, with Buenos
Aires being founded in 1536 by Pedro de Mendoza.
    Although the Spanish had the oldest claim to the new world and the pope
had divided the lands between spain and portugal, neither of these powers
was paying much attention to the colder lands of North America. and that is
where the French, British and Dutch explorations and colonies were
concentrated.
    1497: John Cabot: explored the northern coast of North America for
England's King Henry VII, but England was still in the process of
establishing itself as a mercantile power, so although it had a claim to
this area, only seasonal hunters and fishermen were present in the English
claimed lands for more than a century.
    Later Sir Humphrey Gilbert was to claim Newfoundland for England.  It
was important as the land area nearest to the great banks, one of the best
areas for fishing in the world.  In 1577 it was reported that there were
150 French, 100 Spanish, 50 Portuguese and 15 English boats fishing there
during the summer, but by the end of the century the English had come to
dominate fishing on the Great Banks.
    1524: Giovanni da Verrazano: explored coast of North America for
France.
    1534: Jacques Cartier: was sent to North America to find a northwest
passage to the orient, because the route around South America was too
dangerous and time-consuming.  In the process he discovered the St.
Lawrence River and explored far inland, encountering friendly indians
called the 'Hochelga', establishing trading contacts and making detailed
and extensive maps.
    The french were extremely interested in the fur trade in the north and
established many settlements in the mid 1500s, including settlements in
Quebec, Montreal, New Orleans, Florida and South Carolina.  The French sent
some farmers, but mostly traders and fur trappers over and made many good
contacts with the indians and many traders married indian wives or went
native.
    Spanish: Sought Gold (incas and Aztecs): Disappointed eventually,
though they found silver
    French: sought furs, worked well with indians, never sent many
settlers.
    English: initially sought fishing wealth off Newfoundland, eventually
found other, greater sources of profit.

    Spanish started off dominant, but eventually England became the main
power in the new world as they increased their control of the seas,
beginning with their defeat of the Armada in 1588.

    1577: Sir Francis Drake: English pirate and explorer circumnavigated
the globe, robbed spanish ships and claimed California for England.  His
exploits and those of other 'Sea Hawkes', gentlemen adventurer-prirates,
like Richard Hakluyt, opened a new era of English merchant ventures in the
new world.

    Spanish exploration funded by crown.  English ventures were supported
by joint stock companies, like the Cathay Company which sent Martin
Frobisher to find the Northwest passage to the orient in the 1570s.  Other
men like Sir Humphrey Gilbert strengthened England's claim to North America
by establishing trading posts.
    The desire to settle the new world is clear in the writings of Richard
Hakluyt, one of the first sea hawks, who wrote a  book called 'Discourse on
Western Planting', stressing the advantages of forts in North America as an
annoyance to the Spanish and as a base for ships and a source for valuable
timber and a dumping ground for excess labor.
    The first attempt at a permanent English colony in the New world was
made by Walter Raleigh, the half brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
    1584: Raleigh explored the chesapeake bay looking for the Northwest
Passage and picked Roanoke Island in Albemarle Sound as a potential spot
for a colony.  Named the region Virginia after Q. Elizabeth.
    1587: Raleigh sent over 120 people, both men and women to settle the
island.  Because of war with spain support and supply ships were delayed.
    1590: Supply ship from England arrived at Roanoke to find the colony
gone with hardly a trace.
    Generally believed that the colonists were either killed or assimilated
by local indian tribes because they needed the assistance of the indians to
survive in the harsh climate without support from home.  Remains one of the
great mysteries of American history.
      The Roanoke disaster did not put a stop to English ambitions in the
new world.  In 1605 the Virginia Company of London was founded to colonize
Virginia, with the dual purpose of christianizing the natives and 'dig,
mine and search for all manner of gold, silver and copper.'  This company
established the first permanent English colony at Jamestown in 1607.


THE EARLY COLONIES

1562 1st Permanent colony est in N. America by French Huguenots lead by
Jean Ribaut.  Est colony on Parris Island in Port Royal Sound in what is
now SC.

1565 Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded 1st permanent white colony in N.
America at St. Augustine Fl.  Menendez wiped out French colony on Parris
Isl.

1587 English colony on Roanoke Isl, VA, est by Walter Raleigh.  Gone by
1591.  Cnverted Manteo, freindly local indian, to Christianity.  First such
convert.

1604 Sieur de Monts est 1st Northern French Colony at Mouth of St. Croix
River in Maine.

1607 Jamestown colony established by England/Virginia Company of London

1612 First Dutch colony established on Manhattan Island.  Area originally
explored by Henrik Hudson.  2 Ships, Tiger and Fortune sent to establish
trading post which eventually was made into a fort.

1613 French settlement established on Mt Desert Isl, ME.  Forced off by
English forces from jamestown led by Samuel Argall.

1614 Dutch establish Albany and Ft. Orange nearby


REASONS FOR ENGLISH EMIGRATION

   War with Spain ended 1604, encouraging english merchants to invest
overseas.
   James I was more hostile to religious minorities than Elizabeth had
been.  Puritanism was growing and James was very conservative, though he
was a protestant.
   England was overpopulated, sturdy beggars wandered countryside, robbing
people, etc.
   Under James I and his son Charles I, taxation in England was high, free
speech was limited and government was somewhat oppressive.
   Emigrants were the upper poor, rich enough or skilled enough to get to
the new world and ambitious enough to be desperate for a better lot.
   All of this was made possible by Joint Stock Companies.  These were
companies in which English merchants held shares, buying a portion of the
company to provide capital for its ventures and then receiving a share of
the profits in proportion to the money they had put up.  The Muscovy
Company had been very successful in trading in Russia, and the Cathay
company had done well in the Middle East.  Companies were chartered by the
king, which gave them a legal constitution of sorts and an official right
to be the sole company trading in their designated area.
    The main way for people to get to the new world, since ship passage was
very expensive, was to get there at the expense of the company or its
shareholders.  These people would sign contracts to work for a set number
of years in the colony, working for the company or for a shareholder, or
sometimes for someone actually owning land in the colony.  After their term
of service was up (usually 7 years) they would be expected to live in he
colony, would be given some cash and some land, and would become settlers.
Most of them started out working on large estates as farmers, working their
craft, or working in mines, and they ended up as small farmers, spread
throughout western VA.  They were called Indentured Servants.   Those who
came over in the first wave of settlers got 100 acres each.  Later ones got
50 acres each. Sort of like slavery, but for poor, skilled white men and
offering pretty good opportunities at the end.  Laws protected the rights
and safety of these Bondsmen, and they were under a legal contract.
Nonetheless, they were dissatisfied, wanted more, and did cause some
disturbances and uprisings in VA.


ESTABLISHMENT OF VIRGINIA

    James I was eager to raise money when he came to the throne.  Did this
by granting land in the New World to lords, merchants and companies.
    Much of the northeastern coastal areas of N. America were granted to
the Plymouth branch of the Virginia Company of London, under the
directorship of Sir Ferdinand Gorges.  He established colony at Sagadohoc
on Kennebec R. in Maine, in Spring of 1607, but it was abandonned after
less than a year because of the harsh winter.
    Same time, the London branch of the company sent out Captain
Christopher Newport in 1606 with the Susan Constant, Godspeed and
Discovery.  After four months they reached the Chesapeake bay, which had
been explored some years before by Sir Walter Raleigh and was the site of
the failed Roanoke colony of 1587.
    They established a town at the mouth of the James River, named after
JAmes 1.  It was called JAmestown.
    This was an easily defensible location, though it was somewhat exposed
to the elements.
    Capt. John Smith: military leader of the colony, energetic, iron
willed, a bit abrasive.  Responsible for keeping the colony together during
the hard first years, when he essentially took over as miliatry dictator.
    Powhatan: local indian chief, powerful leader of local tribal
confederacy.  Liked Smith and wanted to use the colonists as a tool in wars
with other local tribes.  Provided food in an effort to gain their loyalty
and make them essentailly part of his tribal confederacy.
    Powhatan's daughter, Matoaka (Pocohontos) toured europe as if she were
a visiting noblewoman.  She was perceptive, and commented that the coming
of the English was 'not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my
country'.  These were settled, territorial indians, not the foolish
pastoral nomads sometimes depicted.  They understood ownership of land, and
perceived the English threat fairly quickly.
    With Powhatan's help they were able to survive their first winter in
Virginia.
    Some unrest in this period, including a revolt against the governing
Council of Jamestown, which Smith put down, having leader, George Kendall
shot.
    Winter 1608-1609: 'Starving Time'.  Another ship of colonists had
arived.  Unable to raise viable crops, because of inexperience as farmers
and lack of interest in farming, the colony didn't have sufficient food to
survive.  Explorations inland had aroused Powhatan's suspicions and he lost
faith in Smith, so he did not provide food.  Smith's control and harsh
rules maintained order, deaths were minimized, but everyone was VERY
unhapy.  Again, Smith had to be harsh and a number were executed, including
a band who had gone cannibal out of hunger.
    Smith was injured in 1609 and left the colony for good.  On his return
he authored a number of books popularizing his own career as a mercenary
and the Virginia colony, including A MAP OF VIRGINIA in 1612, which
described the region and the colony, and made suggestions for how best to
carry on further colonization.
    In 1622 there was a major conflict with indians of the same confederacy
that Powhatan had led some years before.  In this conflict over 1/3 of the
settlers were killed, and whole villages were wiped out.  The English
retaliated, beginning a series of bloody conflicts, culminating in an
uneasy peace in 1646, when a firm border was set and a truce established
for more than 30 years.  This ended in the 1670s when Nathanial Bacon, led
a rebellion against the government of the colony and entered a private war
against the Susquehannok indians, massacring the tribe before his rebellion
fell apart.
    Of 200 original colonists, only 60 survived three years after the
colony was established.  Deaths mostly from starvation, internal violence,
exposure, conflict with indians, and disease.
    This pattern of extreme hazard continued.  By 1624 of 6000 who had been
brough over 19 years, only 1200 survived.  In response to this James I
revoked the charter and made it a crown colony.
    He did this at just the moment when a critical mass had been achieved,
so conditions were beginning to improve significantly.


NATURE OF THE FIRST VIRGINIANS

    From the start the whole approach to colonizing Virginia was wrong.
This is why, after 20 years, Virginia could still be considered a failure,
because so many had died, even though the colony survived.
    Although Raleigh and Hakluyt had written a number of books on the new
world and how best to colonize it, the Viriginia Company did not follow
their advice.
    They suggested sending farmers and craftsmen to establish a working
community and then proceed from here to get more of a hold on the new
world.  They saw the new lands of rich game and heavy forests to be
valuable in their own right, and thought that hunting, lumbering, farming
and trade with the indians would bring in great wealth, though the process
might be slow getting started.
    Instead of heeding this advice and excited by the successes of the
Spanish, the Virginia Company wanted to bring in quick profits to please
its shareholders.  The bondsmen and freemen they sent over were mostly
trained to look for easy wealth.  They were miners, heavy laborers,
jewelers, and idle gentlemen and adventurers good for nothing but seeking
out treasure.  Most of them were from cities like London, rather than
outlying farm regions more similar to Virginia.  They were looking for a
northwest passage to the orient (hoping the chesapeake would be it) or for
gold and silver like the spanish had found.  These people were neither
willing nor able to farm and raise food which the colony needed to survive,
and did nothing but cause trouble and refuse to do necessary work.  This
made it very difficult for smith and forced him to take harsh measures.
Instead of farmers he had been given diletantes and this was no way to run
a colony, as he made very clear in his writings later.  He was particularly
upset with the Company and his criticism was probably a major factor in the
revocation of their charter, since he had become a romantic and well liked
popular figure.
    In fact, the VA Co. Didn't even send women over, so the chance of the
colony lasting as a serious settlement were pretty slim.  Fortunately, all
this changed in 1624.


THE GROWTH OF VIRGINIA

    Once under control of the crown, Virginia began to do much better.
Royal interest was more in settlement and competition with French and
Spanish than in instant wealth, and the hard times had already been dealt
with.
    One great benefit to the colony was the discovery that Virginia was an
ideal climate for growing Tobacco, which began in 1612.  It was introduced
there by John Rolfe, who later married Matoaka (Pocohontas). The English
market for tobacco was growing rapidly, so despite reservations about the
undesirability of the habit of smoking, it became the primary cash crop in
Virginia.  In 1618 Virginia shipped 30,000 pounds to England.  In 1627 they
shipped 500,000 pounds.
    Tobacco depleted the fertility of the soil, so tobacco fields were good
for only about 4 years.  The greater amount of land made virginia a logical
place to grow tobacco, since it had more arable land than the already well
established island colonies of the carribean, which had been the primary
source of tobacco before that time.
    One of the problems of Tobacco was that it was grown most efficiently
on large plantations, and these growing estates pushed smaller farmers who
were generally former Bondsmen, into the less desirable uplands areas of
western Virginia, creating some disconent and a somewhat divided society.
The estate owners in the river and coastal valleys became the 'Tidewater
Aristocracy' and were much resented by the smaller farmers.  This problem
of the conflict between the classes in Virginia can be seen as early as
1619 when laws were enacted requiring specific types of dress depending on
social rank.
    Another effect of tobacco was an increase in the need for labor to work
in the fields.  This created a need which could not really be adequately
met by the system of indentured servitude, and as the tobacco market grew,
the need grew, and this led to the beginning of slave importation into the
Virginia colony.  The first slaves arrived in the summer of 1619, and these
20 who were brought on a Dutch ship were just the first in a growing flow
of slaves to the southern colonies which changed forever the economic and
social structure of that part of the United States.


THE NEW ENGLAND COLONY

    While most settlers in VA came because they were poor and displaced or
were looking for wealth in a new world, the first settlers in New England
came because they had chosen to leave England  because their religious
beliefs were too radical.  Rather than have their children corrupted by
English religion and Education, and rather than face prejudice from the
more conservative English church and government, they first went to
holland, which also proved to be inhospitable, and then at their own
expense, financed several missions to make settlements in the new world.
    While settlers in early VA were mostly men, sent over in indenture, all
of the settlers in New England were freemen, most of them bringing wives
and children with them, generally with the specific intention of owning and
farming their own land, rather than working for someone else as the
settlers in VA were forced to do.  They hoped to establish a society much
like rural English society, but based on certain religious principles, with
society and government centering around their churches.  They did not
believe in freedom of religion, just in their freedom from the form of
religion dominant in England.  They were religious extremists, against the
established church, called Puritans.  Strict followers of the teachings of
John Calvin.
    The puritan movement in England had been strong since the split with
rome under Henry VIII.  It eventually reached its height in the period of
the English Civil War of the 1640s.  The Puritans were hard to get along
with.  They were unwilling even to conform outwardly to the English church,
scornful of those who did, and generally not liked in England, which they
saw as a corrupt environment anyway/

Many misconceptions about puritans.

Not all puritans wore drab clothes, some drank...'wine is from god,
drunkenness from the devil'...against doing things immoderately

believed in predestination believed very strongly that they were right.
sort of insufferable somewhat nosy, concerned about welfare of others.

They knew they were chosen by god, so they were impatient with anyone who
stood in their way, including English government and Indians who lived in
their new promised land.  Also willing to be somewhat underhanded because
anything they did was justified by god.


MASS BAY COLONY

Groups of Puritan Separatists.  Denounced English church as corrupt and
were hounded out of England as a result.  Fled to holland in 1614 where
they weren't much better lkiked.  They got backing for a new world colony
from merchants in England who formed a Joint Stock Company to raise the
capital.

1620 35 Pilgrim families set out for NEw England in the Mayflower.  Also
coming with them were 60 'strangers', craftsmen, soldiers and more general
colonist types.

Were led by William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish (leader of the
strangers).

Originally headed for Virginia, but decided to settle on Cape Cod, which
they sighted first, because they attributed this to god.

Picked out Plymouth, on Mass Bay.  41 adult men signed a written compact of
govenment...the Mayflower Compact established a contract-based,
pseudo-democratic govenrment, providing for the governor to be elected by
the Adult males.

They barely knew anything about farming or hunting or fishing, being mostly
of a more urban background, though they valued the rural, simple life very
highly, having never experienced it.

Disease carried by European fishermen had pretty much wiped out the local
indians, and though half the pilgrims died in their first winter, the
indians who survived were fairly friendly and supportive and they survived.
A great help in this was a local indian named Squanto, who had been to
England, and acted as their liaison...they described him as 'a special
instrument sent by god'. The colony quickly became self-sufficient, through
great determination and hard work, and did well with lumber and fur which
it exported to England, so that in 1626 they were able to buy out the
merchants who had funded their expedition out of their profits.

Although early relations with the Naragansett, from which tribe Squanto
came, were good, they had clashes with many other indians, who they
generally viewed as an impediment to their holy mission.

When Smallpox killed several thousand indians in the area, John Winthrop
said 'The Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess'.  Not very
sympathetic.

They made surprisingly little effort to convert the Indians, and seemed to
wish they would just disappear.  In fact, no missionary work was done until
the mid 1630s, 13 years after the first settlement, and Indians were
forbidden from even entering the puritan settlements.

In 1637 they allied with the freindly Naragansetts to attack the
neighboring Pequot tribe, which they massacred.

The Naragansetts thought that their way of war was 'too furious and slays
too many men', and in the next major conflict they sided with a large
confederacy led by Chief Metacom of the Wampanoags which made a last stand
against the settlers in King Philips war in 1675 and 1676.  The indians
eventually lost this war, but not before destroying twelve puritan
settlements and killing a larger percentage of the white population than
was killed in any American conflict before or since.

While the Virginia economy was based on agriculture, particularly tobacco,
the New England economy which began as farm oriented, quickly became based
on trade, starting with the trade in fur and lumber from the indians to
Europe, and then moving into international shipping, particularly taking
slaves from Africa to the carribean, though few were brought back to New
England.  Fishing and smuggling also became major sources of revenue, and
ports like Boston and Salem were eventually to become famous for the
excellence of their shipwrights.  Eventually the merchants of boston were
as rich and powerful an elite as the tidewater aristocracy of Virginia.

Unique aspects of this colony were elective elements of government, with an
elected council and governor, plus the fact that instead of leaving charter
in England they took it with them, and since they landed outside of the
Virginia area where they were supposed to land, they were essentially
outside of British authority for some years.  Not necessarily by accident.
Eventually, as they were only the first of many new england colonies, they
were absorbed into the Commonwealth of Massachutsets, but their democratic
and religious legacy continued.


THE GROWTH OF VIRGINIA

From John Rolfe's first planting of Tobacco in 1612, the economy of
Virginia was based on tobacco.

At first an effort was made to grow a variety of crops in Virginia,
including grapes, silk, indigo, cotton, oranges, olives and sugar, but
although all of these things grew well there, it was tobacco which Virginia
grow and profit from Tobacco and later from other crops.  Production
increased quickly, with yearly production going from 2500 pounds in 1616 to
500 thousand in 1627 to 30 million pounds by 1700, roughly 400 pounds for
every man woman and child in VA.

Tobacco grew most efficiently on large plantations, and those plantations
required a lot of labor to harvest their tobacco, and slaves were the
cheapest source of that labor

With the consolidation of land in the hands of the 'Tidewater Aristocracy'
they also gained political power.  They restricted voting rights in
Virginia to those who held large amounts of land or property, so that the
House of Burgesses, which had originally been a unique elective council,
came to be dominated by their faction.

Smaller planters living in the mountain foothills of Virginia suffered the
most in indian raids and conflicts, and acted as a buffer state protecting
the planters.  In Bacon's rebellion in 1676 Nathanial Bacon gathered 500
small planters from the fringes of virginia and led them in raids against
the indians, wiping out the Susquehannocks, all against the will of the
Royal Governor, Sir William Berkeley.  Berkeley was a member of the 'Green
Springers' or Tidewater Aristocracy and had ruled Virginia for 30 years,
supported by his cabal of rich land owners.  He called Bacon and his men
'rabble of the basest sort' and declared Bacon a traitor and placed a price
on his head.  Berkeley marched his men to Jamestown and forced Berkeley to
recognize him as a military authority in the colony.  Berkeley rescinded
this and sent to England for troops when Bacon took his men away from the
capital to kill more indians.  Bacon returned and burnt Jamestown to the
ground, forcing Berkeley to flee to Maryland.  Before a detachment of 1100
british troops arrived, Bacon had already died from dysentry, a common
disease in he colony, and his forces dissipated.  Although Bacon was of
aristocratic background, most of his followers were the dispossessed of the
colony, and the rebellion is a symbol of the resentment felt by small
farmers to Virginia's aristocracy.

Rebelliousness and discontent were not the only problems in early Virginia.
The climate was discovered to  be unhealthy for many, and new immigrants
had to survive what came to be called 'The Seasoning Time', a period of
sickness which most encountered, a result of the hot, moist climate.
During this seasoning victims would at the least experience fevers and at
the worst catch malaria or dysentry, which would debilitate or kill.

Life remained precarious in the Chesapeake area.  In the 1700s a man of 20
in Middlesex County, VA, could expect 25 more years of life.  Much of the
disease in the area would not have been fatal if proper care and nursing
were available, but with so many sick and the life so generally hard, it
was difficult for people to take time out to care for each other. Another
problem was the shortage of women.  Even in the early 1700s the ratio was 3
women for each man.  This was great for widows, who found it easy to
remarry.  Many men remained single for their entire lives.  Others married
indian women and were adopted into indian society.  Many went native or
reverted to very primitive ways of living.

In 1728 William Byrd tells of a couple living in the region who lived in 'a
bower, vover's with Bark, after the Indian Fashion, which in that mild
situation protected them pretty well from the weather...as for raiment, he
depended mostly on the length of his bears, and she on the length of her
hair, part of which she brought decently forward and the rest dangled
behind, quite down to her rump'.

For some the rigorous life of the plantation or the small farm lost its
appeal when the alternatives of living off the abundant land or becoming
part of the simpler, healthier and easier-going indian community were a
powerful lure.

Violence in the White community was common, and those who did not overcome
and rise to the top of Virginia society were quickly demeaned and deprived
of their rights and priveleges.

As has already been mentioned, most early colonists came to Virginia as
indentured servants, with their ultimate reward including a grant of land.
When the colony went under crown control in 1624 this program was changed
somewhat, to a 'Headright' system, where it became the right of each
immigrant to have 50 acres of land, if he staked a claim to it and paid a
small fee called a Quitrent to the government of the colony.  To establish
his claim he was expected to mark out the boundries of his land, plant a
crop and build a shelter of some sort.  This system encouraged Europeans to
come to the new world as settlers, but since many could not afford it, they
indentured themselves, or else they struck a deal with a Virginia merchant
to trade all or part of their land for their passage to the new world.  As
time went by this led to new immigrants having less and less land or land
of less quality, and more and more land coming under the control of the
monied classes, widening the social and economic gaps in Virginia society.

Slavery was also a major factor in the growth and development of Virginia.
While the first few Blacks may have come to Virginia as indentured
servants, it is clear that by 1640 at least a fair portion of the black
population were slaves, and by 1660 the vast majority were slaves.
Prejudice was a strong factor in the enslavement of blacks, with all manner
of justifications, from associating them with African apes, to pointing out
(as a pamphlet did in 1704) that 'Black is the color of night, frightful,
dark and horrid.'  The spanish and portuguese had also set precedents for
slavery elsewhere in the new world.  However, almost certainly, the true
motivation  behind all the excuses and justifications was how much more
profitable it was to work land with slaves than with wage laborers or even
indentured servants.  The growth of the black popultion was slow but
steady, from 300 in 1650 to 2000 in 1670.  After 1670 the real influx of
slaves began  because improving conditions in England made emmigration less
desirable.  In addition, the formation of the Royal African Company
legitimized the exportation of slaves from Africa to the New World, and
from that point the slave trade was unchecked.

As it grew with the wealth of tobacco, the labor of slaves and the
political power of the Tidewater Aristocracy, Virginia became a major power
in the colonies and in the growing British Empire, with this strength
continuing into the period after the revolution, so that Virginia produced
many of the major colonial leaders, including George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, four of the first five
presidents of the US, plus other major leaders like George Mason and John
Marshall.  All of these leaders were part of the Tidewater Aristocracy.


MASSACHUTSETTS

The puritan settlement at Plymouth was the model for many other groups
which joined them in Massachutsetts and other parts of new England.  Many
of these settlers also came for religious reasons and to form new societies
based on faith, including the settlement at Salem which was founded by
Puritans from Dorchester, who established the Massachutsetts Bay Company in
1629, and took control of the New England colony under royal authority.
Unlike the separatists of Plymouth, they were less extreme and willing to
practice their religion in the protection of the colonies, while remaining
part of the English government and empire.  Later migrations associated
with the Salem settlement brought thousands more settlers, both puritans
and those just looking for a new life, and they established further major
settlements, including Boston.  By 1640, over 10,000 immigrants had come to
Massachutsetts, including all of the officers and investors involved in the
Massachutsets Bay Company and their leader John Winthrop, who in his speach
'A Model of Christian Charity', described the settlement in the new world
as being like a 'city upon a hill', an example for others to follow, a
communityseparated from the corruption of the rest of the world.

Winthrop, as head of the company was made Governor of the colony.  Under
his leadership an elected legislature and a general court were established.
At first election was fairly open, with voting done by all adult male
church members, though in the 1640s larger numbers who were not part of the
puritan church began to come to the colony and they were excluded from
voting  because they were not of the right faith or sect.

The colony prospered and didn't have many of the difficulties which
continued in Virginia, because there was less disease and economic
divisions were less extreme, or at least took much longer tobecome
pronounced.  There was a high birthreate, more than three times the modern
rate, and a low mortality rate.  Marriage was late and there was a good
balance between the sexes.  Family life was strict, and based on biblical
principles, but children were well cared for and generally disciplined but
not abused.

By the end of the 17th century there were more than 500 towns in
massachutsets, and the government which developed to govern them was well
organized and very paternalisti and governed with little interference from
England.  Laws were harsh and showed the peculiar prejudices of the ruling
puritans.  Church attendance was required by law.  Ministers were paid by
taxes.  The unpopular Quaker sect of protestantism was banned.  The death
penalty was the punishment for adultery and for blasphemy.  There were
fixed prices and wages, and even laws dictating how people should dress.
All of these repressive measures were done in the name of protecting the
people and the church from sin and corruption, but for those who did not
want to live in compliance with all aspects of this puritan society they
were an unwelcome burden and there was no recourse.  Despite all this, the
government remained relatively representative for the first few
generations, until additional laws passed in the 1670s added a requirement
of property ownership to be able to vote.

As time went by church membership also became more restrictive, and the
government went more and more into he hands of an elite who controlled the
church and the state.  It was only possible to get full membership in the
church through proving that you were saved and destined for heaven.  In
time this became harder and those in power became more sceptical of the
miracles of conversion which people claimed, so they admitted fewer people
to full membership in the church.  In successive generations this
increasing number of people who were not allowed full membership in the
church or participation in government led to unrest in Massachutsetts, and
eventually the government of the colony had to be reformed by the English
Crown.

The first attempt at reform in Massachutsetts came in 1684 when the Crown
under Charles II annuled the charter of the colony and sent Edmund Andros
to govern there.  He attempted to enforce religious toleration, established
some anglican churches.  He abolished many of the local assemblies and
attempted to restructure the colony on more English lines.  When James II
was expelled as King of England in 1691 Andros was recalled and 1000 armed
colonists led by a contingent of ministers forced him to flee the colony.
The old laws, systems and assemblies were restored and a new charter issued
which allowed them freedom of government, but still insisted on Religious
Toleration, which had become a cornerstone of the English system of
government.

Economic prosperity continued in the New England colonies.  All of their
farm goods were grown for domestic use, since the same crops could be grown
in England, so other routes to profit had to be found.  There were laws
against lending money for profit and for selling goods for too much profit,
so other sources of wealth had to be found.  There were attempts to start
industry and develope independent from English manufactured goods, but
these were not very successful.

Mercantile success eluded NEw Englanders until the late 1640s when they
began exporting fish to Europe.  Out of this trade and the trade in wine
and manufactured goods from Europe to New England, a healthy trade began to
grow.  Soon New England merchants were carrying all manner of goods all
over the Atlantic.  Eventually these merchants discovered that the greatest
profit was to be found in the slave trade, and despite their religious
background they had no scruples about buying or capturing blacks in africa
and selling them to their neighbors in the carribean colonies and virginia.

Mercants trading in Boston, Portsmouth, Salem, Newport and New Haven became
the driving force of the Massachutsetts economy, and their growth and
prosperity soon brought about the breakdown of the religious domination of
Massachutsets.  Boston was the third largest city in the Birtish Empire in
1720, second only to London and Bristol.  Life in Boston and the other
towns was not nearly as centered on faith as it was in the smaller villages
and by the 1720s it was the merchants rather than the puritan elders who
were coming to dominate the government and society.  Though religious
leaders saw city life as corrupt and sinful, they were force to maintain an
uneasy peace in the colony because the merchants held the purse strings of
government and had the support of the crown.


THE DISSIDENTS OF RHODE ISLAND

One of the results of this repressive system in the early years of the
Massachutsets colony was that dissidents who held slightly different
beliefs or were not happy with the system had to either stay quiet or leave
the colony.

One prive ecample is that of Roger Williams, a popular minister among the
first Pilgrims at Plymouth.  He was described by William Bradford, leader
of that colony as possessed of 'many precious parts, but very unsettled in
judgement'.  Hew was an extreme separatists and had a church in Salem, but
he felt that establishing a church based government in Massachutsetts was a
mistake and that the government would corrupt the church and that the two
should be separate.  He felt that 'forced religion stinks in God's
nostrils.'  He also believe that it was a 'national sinne' to take control
of land from the Indians without paying a fair price.  He was essentially a
libertarian and believed in free action and civil rights for everyone.  He
refused to follow the advice of pilgrim leaders that he should moderate his
views, and after he lost much of the support of his church, he was given
six weeks by the General Court to leave the colony.

In 1636 he travelled south to the head of Naragansett bay, wher he made a
deal with local indians and founded the town of Providence.  He got
acharter from parliament in 1644 and established the colony of Rhode Island
and Providence Plantations.  The government was democratic, tolerated all
religions and kept church and state separate.

Another dissenter was Anne Hutchinson, who was a very strong woman, mother
of 15 children, and a midwife.  She discussed religious and political
issues with the women in he community, and criticized the ideas of soime of
the ministers, especially a fellow named John Wilson.  She disagreed with
the principle that those who were saved by predestination had to lead pure
lives as a model for the unsaved.  She believed that those who were saved
were not obligated to follow social rules of good behavior or even the laws
of the commonwealth.  She was tried for defaming the clergy, and rejected
even the bible, because she said that if one received direct revelation
from god, that was more important than biblical writ.  She admitted to
talking to god regularly and was promptly exiled for blasphemy.

With her large family and a group of followers she moved to Rhode Island in
1637.  After her husband died in 1642 she moved on to the Dutch colony of
New Netherland which also practiced religious toleration.  Unfortunately,
she and all but her youngest daughter were killed by indians there.

The fact that Massachutsets could not tolerate these two progressive,
free-thinkers indicates that those controlling the society in Massachutsets
were afraid that it could not survive even such small dissension,
indicating that they realized that it was a weak and fragile experiment,
ultimately doomed to failure.


BRIDGE

In addition to the major English colonies, in the early period there were a
number of non-English colonies in the midst of the English lands.  New
France was along the St. Lawrence river, with the towns of Montreal and
Quebec.  New Netherlands was on the Hudson bay and along the Hudson River,
with major settlements at Ft. Orange (Albany) and New Amsterdam (New York).
It was captured by the English under the Duke of York in the 1660s and
renamed New York.  Another notable foreign colony was New Sweden, a Swedish
colony established in 1631 by Peter Minuit on the Delaware river with its
capital at Ft. Christiana (Wilmington).  It was taken over by the Dutch in
1655.

Although Virginia and New England were the largest and earliest colonies, a
number of other English colonies were established a bit later on the
Eastern Coast.  While Virginia and New England were colonized by
corporations, most of the other colonies were established by individuals or
limited partnerships who obtained charters from the crown.  These colonies
were called proprietary colonies because they were essentially privately
owned, at the approval of the king.  Once the first colonies had proven
that colonization was possible and could be profitable everyone wanted to
stake a claim in the new world, and in the 1630s a great period of
migration began.


MARYLAND

George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, had been on the boards of both the New
England Council and the London Company and had attempted to establish a
colony in Newfoundland.  He was aclose friend of Charles I, and applied to
him for a charter to create a colony as a refuge for fellow catholics in
the new world.  George Calvert died a month before the charter was granted,
but his son Cecilius took over for him in this project.

The first settlers arrived in 1634, founding St. Mary's just north of the
potomac river.  The existence of the nearby Virginia Colony across the
Chesapeake was a great help and they soon capitalized on the profitable
tobacco crop as well, though there was some conflict over land rights in
the border between Virginia and Maryland.

Lord Calvert was given rights in Maryland equivalent to those of a lord in
the old world, with the right to establish feudal manors and underlords,
hold people in serfdom, establish his own courts and make his own laws.
However, this sort of feudal set-up did not appeal to settlers and he found
that to attract a population he had to give them a stroing say in their own
government.  Lord Baltimore wisely decided to allow many legal freedoms,
and Because many of the settlers were protestant, he permitted religious
freedom to all Christians in the Toleration Act of 1649.  He made a fortune
from the maryland colony and maintained control there until the revolution.


THE CAROLINAS

The Carolinas were originally established in the 1660s as a proprietary
colony, with a huge grant of land being given to eight lords with colonial
interests, including the Earl of Clarendon, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, and
Sir William Berkeley, the former governor of Virginia.  They planned to
colonize with settlers from some of the more populous colonies to the north
and from the west indies and base the economy on a variety of agriculture,
like wine, silk, oil and olives.

The charter was like that of Maryland, granting extensive power to the
lords, but they established a Fundamental Constitution, with the help of
the philosopher John Locke, which established a hereditary nobility and a
feudal system of peasants.  Everyone wanted to be a lord, but no one wanted
to be a peasant, and eventually a compromise was reached, similar to that
in Virginia and Maryland.  The first settlers came in 1670, mostly from
Barbados. Charleston was established in 1680.  A division developed between
the fur and food exporters of the Charleston area and the poorer farmers of
the Albemarle settlement to the south and in 1712 the areas were divided
into North and South Carolina.

As the colony developed they found that it was too cold a climate for fruit
and many other vegetables and too warm for tobacco, but it was just right
for rice, and it became the staple crop of the Carolinas and a source of
great wealth.  Rice, like tobacco needed much labor, so a demand for slaves
brought a large black population to the Carolinas.

There was consideable resentment of proprietary rule in the Carolinas,
which were not managed as liberally as MAryland was, and in the 1720s both
North and South Carolina were made crown colonies under royal governance.


PENNSYLVANIA

Pennsylvania was also a proprietary colony, but rather than being given to
an English lord, it was given to the son of an English Admiral to pay off a
16 thousand pound debt to his father from king charles 2.  This man was
William Penn, and he was a Quaker.

The Quakers were protestant extremists who many regarded as dangerous
radicals.  They believed in missionary and charitable work, and did not
believe in ministers or organized churches.  They dressed plainly and would
not follow social conventions.  They were also resolved pacifists.  Earlier
in the 17th century many had been jailed in England and some were even
hanged or burnt in new england, but by 1681 when Pennsylvania was
established they had become a bit more accepted.  They had originally
started a small Quaker colony in New Jersey, but under Penn they turned
their main colonial efforts to the more desirable lands to the West.

Penn gave the right to vote in his colony to all landholders or taxpayers
and kept his own role to a minimum, giving settlers as much freedom as
possible, including freedom of religion.  He was an honest and liberal
minded man, and when colonists objected to his two-house pennsylvania
legislature, he instructed them to design a better system for themselves,
and in 1701 they issued the Charter of Liberties, which made a single-house
legislature, the only legislature in the colonies not modeled on the
English parliament.  It also provided for a separate assembly for the
Delaware region, which later separated completely from Pennsylvania.
Control of the colony remained in Quaker hands for many years, but
eventually the democratic system there spread power throughout the
population.

The colony was very successful, growing in population faster than almost
any other, though it did not have the potential of Virginia for
agricultural profit or of Massachutsets for commercial profit.  In 1685
there were 9,000 pennsylvanians, and in 1700 there were almost 20,000.  The
first settlers were English and Welsh Quakers, but Penn also advertised in
Germany and a large German population came to the colony.

Penn's preparations and planning of cities and communities made
Pennsylvania one of the healthiest and most successful colonies, with a
stable mixture of agriculture, industry and commerce and a fairly balanced
population of free men.

Penn also dealt openly and honestly with the Indians and Pennsylvania
suffered very little at their hands until after Penn's death when
non-Quaker colonists came into conflict with them.

Unfortunately, though pennsylvania became one of the most prosperous of the
early colonies, Penn himself spent time in debtors prison in England and
died in poverty, because he never attempted to take any part in the profits
made in his colony in the way that other proprietary lords did, which may
be why the colony was so successful.

ETHNIC IMMIGRATION

From the very start of the colonial period, North America was far from a
racially homogeneous society.  In addition to the English, Native American
and Negro populations, a number of different European groups settled in the
new world and made a significant contribution to the culture and political
development of the colonies.

The most notable ethnic influx was obviously that of Africans through the
slave trade.  In the colonial period more than half a million Africans made
the passage from the 'slave coast' of Africa to North America.  These
500,000 were only 5% of those exported to the New World as a whole, the
vast majority going to South America and the English colonies in the
carribean.  All told, only 5% of the Africans in the New World came to what
would later be the United States.

However, none of the immigrations to the United States were very large, and
the 500,000 Slaves brought to North America in the colonial period
represented a very sizeable ethnic group, since  migrations of other
non-english groups were generally less than 250,000 persons over that same
period.

In the protected environment of the plantations African slaves retained
much of their culture, language and religion, and though they were
conquered and enslaved they remembered their homeland and heritage, and
many reflections of their old lives in Africa carried over to the new
world.

Dutch, French and Swedish populations existed in the new world as a legacy
of colonies established before Britain came to dominate the entire Eastern
seaboard.  Of these, the Dutch in New York were the most numerous, with the
Swedes in Delaware being rapidly assimilated and the French in Acadia
eventually being removed to join the French colonies on the Mississipi.

The three major groups to come into the new world after the colonies were
well established in English control were the Germans, the Scotts-IRish and
the Scotts.  In the 17th century the English had atempted to deal with
problems in mostly Catholic Ireland by settling Ireland with protestant
lowland Scotts who were of the equally troublesome presbyterian sect.
After poor harvests and poorer treatment in Northern Ireland, the Scotts
Irish emigrated to the new world, lured by reports that they could purchase
large amounts of land for very low prices.  All told 250,000 of them
emigrated, and though much of the land they evenually settled on was in the
less fertile highlands of the southern and central states, it was as good
as or better than the lands they had left in Ireland and Scotland.  The
Scotts-Irish lived in isolated ethnic communities, and this aroused some
resentment among their English neighbors, leading to some prejudice and
persecution.  Major Scotts-Irish concentrations were in Western
Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. (Mention ancestors in Pittsburgh
Area).  In general, they preferred to go into the rougher, less civilized
land and live fairly close to nature in surroundings much like Ireland and
Scottland.

The Second largest ethnic group to come to the new world was made up of
Germans belonging to a variety of extremist protestant sects like the
Menonites and Moravians.  These sects were unpopular in their homelands in
the Rhine Valley and migrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s.  They
settled in central and Western pennsylvania in tight-knit communities,
which retain many of their german traditions and their german language
today.  Their descendants are known as the Pennsylvania Dutch.  All told
100,000 emigrated to the new world over an extended period.

Also noteworthy were the Scots who emigrated to the new world, or were
transported there as punishment.  After the Scots rebellions against the
English in 1715 and 1748 many Scots either fled the British Isles or were
forced out by the English.  These settlers, mostly highland scotts, settled
in North and South Carolina.  While they were not as large as some of the
other migrations, they played a significant role in the revolutionary war
because of their martial traditions and opposition to the English.

Anothe noteworthy group which came to the new world because of persecutioin
were the French Huguenots, protestants who were persecuted in France, but
had been under the protection of the crown until 1685 when the Edict of
Nantes was revoked.  Many of them fled to the new world, settling in
Massachutsetts, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia and South
Carolina, where many of them were assimilated fairly easily, though some
Huguenot settlements still survive on the eastern shores of Maryland and
Virginia.

With all this migration, the population of the colonies grew at an
astounding rate, with the total population going from less than 25,000 in
1630 to 250,000 in 1700, to 2,150,000 in 1770, approximately increasing
ten-fold every 70 years, though after the end of the colonial period this
trend was to slow.  This sort of unchecked growth in population from
massive immigration and high birth rates made it inevitable that the
English colonies should prosper and eventually expand westward across the
continent.


SOUTHERN CULTURE

Life in the southern colonies centered around the plantation or the
household of the smaller farmers.  Most of the towns were fairly small,
with the sole exception of Charleston, with most of the population living
well spread out, in relative isolation.  Of the five major cities in the
colonies, only Charleston was in the south.  As a result gathering for
social, religious and intellectual activities was impractical.

The plantation became a community within itself, with artisans like
carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors and cobblers present to provide for the
needs of the community of slaves, masters and indentured servants.  Guests
were often invited into plantation homes and there was a fair amount of
contact with neighboring plantations through roads and rivers.  While
plantations were never the melting pots of ideas and cultures that the
larger cities in the north became, they did provide a fairly comfortable
lifestyle for those with access to their services, which eventually
included many of the small farmers who came to depend on the larger
plantations as markets for their excess produce, sources of support in lean
times, so that they eventually began to take a role as clients or
satellites of the large plantations.

Although the south produced men of great drive and ambition, southern
culture remained closely tied to England.  The wealthy planters of the
south looked to England for clothes, china, furniture, books and all manner
of luxuries.  They even sent their children abroad to be educated.

Although William and Mary College was established in 1693, there were
almost no primary or secondary schools in the south.  The rural nature of
the societies made private tutors the common source of education for the
upper classes, while what little learning came to the poorer farmers was
carried on in the home.  Tutors advertised in urban papers and sometimes
they were hired by a group of plantation families to educate their children
as a group in small, private schools.  For many smaller farmers and for the
entire slave population, education was not a possibility.  As for
literature and other intellecutal endeavors, printing and publishing were
outlawed in Virginia in 1682 by Governor Berkeley, who commented tht he
'thanked god that there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we
shall not have them these three hundred years.'  Not a great patron of the
arts.

The anglican church dominated religion in the south.  Attendance at
anglican services was compulsory in Virginia from 1619, and though the
proprietors in Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas attempted to
maintaian religious freedom and diversity, eventually Anglicans came to
dominate and were recognized as the official religion by the British
supported governors and assemblies in those colonies, though this was not
until the early 1700s in those colonies.

Despite this, the scattered southern population made organized religion as
impractical as organized education.  In addition, the Anglican church in
England paid little attention to the American parish and there was not even
an Anglican bishop for the colonies until 1783 after the Revolutionary war,
when the Episcopalian church, the American branch of the Anglican church
elected its first bishop to fill that void.  For the most part the English
pastors who came to the largely Anglican southern colonies were
second-raters who couldn't get decent positions in England.  Colonial
congregations were naturally displeased with this.

Just as the Puritans migrated to New England, later in the colonial period
a number of dissenting christian sects also sought refuge in the South.
The Presbyterians and Baptists settled the foothills of the southern
colonies and achieved significant numbers in South Carolina, though they
remained devout minorities in isolated communities in most of the south.

Southern culture focused on isolation and was extremely limited because of
the divisions of class and geography.  Opportunities for education and
intellectual exercise were limited, and though advancement was possible
through skill and ambition, the southern legacy of the colonial period
leans mostly towards military and administrative leaders like washington,
rather than the more abstract thinkers of the northern colonies, like
Franklin, Adams and Hamilton.


NORTHERN CULTURE

The society of the north centered much more closely on its towns and
cities, with Boston, Newport, Philadelphia and New York leading trend
towards urbanization.  These port cities grew as large as major European
cities, and were surrounded by smaller satellite settlements, linked by
roads and regular routes of overland trade.
Only 5% of the colonial population lived in cities.  In the north the
proportion was slightly higher, but the vast majority still lived in
smaller agricultural towns, communities of farmers and tradesmen surrounded
by the farms where they worked, with the towns providing services and a
marketplace for farm produce.

These smaller northern towns were based very much on a traditional English
model which really existed far more typically in the New World than it ever
had in England.  The New England town was sort of an idealized combination
of the English ideas of Borough (an incorporated, chartered town), Parish
(the community centered on a church) and Village (a farm-supported
community).

Life on the farms of the north was in many ways as isolated as it was in
the south, but in the north the towns offered larger, extended communities,
and the church acted as a regular focal point for the lives of the
settlers, especially in the early period when puritan zeal was at its
strongest.  Great emphasis was placed on the family, and the support of the
family was thought to  be second only to faith in god in avoiding sin and
corruption.

The existence of major cities was what really separated the north and
south.  Cities like Boston and Philadelphia were large enough even in this
early period to generate culture and industry of their own so that
colonists in the north soon  became fairly independent of English fashions
and English imports of clothing, china, books and other luxuries and
amusements.

Industry and commerce in these cities were so successful that it was not
long before many products were being produced which were cheaper and
better than those imported from England.  Ships, navigational instruments
and clocks were all made excellently in the colonies, and american
craftsmen could duplicate and improve on the latest English fashions in
apparel and furnishings.

The northern cities were also the breeding ground of the first American
intellectuals.  Among the craftsmen of these cities were printers and they
served a growing body of writers and artists.  At first much of the
publishing in New England dealt with religious tracts and pamphlets, or
with books of sermons.  The first book published in North America was The
Bay Psalm Book, published in Cambridge in 1640.  In fact, in the 1660s
there were censorship laws in New England, restricting those books that
might 'open the doors to heresy', but the fascination of the written word
soon overcame this and publishers branched out into fiction, poetry,
political philosophy and eventually even newspapers and other periodicals.
The first newspaper published was Benjamin Harris' PUBLICK OCCURANCES in
Boston in 1690, though it was shut down after 4 days because it had been
published without a permit.  The BOSTON NEWS-LETTER founded in 1702 by John
Campbell was continually published until the revolution, and led a rash of
newspaper growth.  By 1750 every major city had at least one newspaper
reporting news from at home and abroad.  Many major european books were
reprinted in american editions, very soon after their first appearance in
Europe, and a growing body of American literature also began to develope.
This created an intellectual environment which produced men of ideas and
made sure that their words reached a receptive, literate audience.

Education went hand in hand with literature.  Harvard, the first college in
north america, was established in 1636 in Cambridge, only 6 years after the
first Puritan settlements.  It started as a theological seminary, but
quickly added a full curriculum of maths, arts and sciences.  It was joined
by Yale (1701), Princeton (1746) and many others.  Tuition rates were low
enough to allow students of the middle classes to attend, and the general
spread of education in the northern colonies was greater than in England
and other european counries.  In addition, the first public school in
America, the William Penn Charter School, was established in 1689 by
William Penn in Philadelphia, with tuition charged only to those who could
afford it.  This emphasis on education shows how different the intellectual
environments of north and south were and how much more aware northerners
were of their culture, their world and their heritage.

The northern colonies led the intellectual development in the new world,
with education and imagination flourishing because of the economic
prosperity and urban proximity which made such luxuries possible.
Newspapers, books and schools which did so well in the north and were
virtually unknown in the south show how different the attainments and
natures of the two major parts of the american colonies were.


WITCHCRAFT AT SALEM

It has already  been shown fairly clearly how the dedicated, devout and
single-minded society of Puritan New England led to a fair amount of social
and political repression.  Although at its inception the Puritan experiment
seemed like a novel and creative project, it quickly became mired down in
the realities of politics and commerce in the new world and as the New
England colonies prospered and urban merchants became more successful, the
power and influence of the Puritan clergy began to wane and the entire
puritan intellectual system became weak and diluted.

In the 1680s and 1690s, under the leadership of men like Cotton Mather, a
great preacher and writer in Massachutsetts, puritan leaders attempted to
make a comeback, restoring the strength and purity of their faith, fighting
against a heretical tendancy called 'Armenianism', which had invaded many
of the churches, spreading the belief that good works and a devout life
could lead to heaven.

Cotton Mather followed in the footsteps of his father, Increase Mather, 6th
president of Harvard College, and promoted a mystical brand of revised
Puritanism which became very popular.  He wrote a number of books.  The
most famous of these is probably WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD (1692), a
defense of the belief in witchcraft and its threat to the faithful.
Although he had a reputation as a natural scientist, his interest in the
supernatural could be seen as early as 1688 when he declared it to be a
'year of miracles' because of a bizarre cabbage discovered in Boston with
three branches, which he described: 'one of them exactly resembling a
cutlass, another of them, as exactly resembling a rapier, and a thrid,
extremely like to a club used by the indians in their barbarous
executions'.  He also claimed that there had been a red snow that winter
and that a flaming sword had blazed in the sky in october of 1689, all
evidences of supernatural power in the world.  WONDERS˙˙OF THE INVISIBLE
WORLD in part chronicled and interpreted this sort of phenomenon.

Mather's belief in witchcraft and the supernatural was typical of beliefs
of the time, even among the best educated in the community.

Before the colonial period Europe had experienced what has been called 'The
Great Witch Craze', a period of widespread paranoia about witches an
witchcraft which lasted from the 15th to the 17th century, dying out in the
1650s.  Many economic and social explanations are given for this crisis,
but in the 1690s, conditions in the decaying world of Puritan New England
led to a brief and very famous resurgence of that craze after it had pretty
much died out in Europe.

The Witch Craze in Europe reached its height in the 15th century, with the
publication of the famous manual for witch hunters, the MALLEUS
MALEFICARUM, but Springer and Weyer.  England had its most active witch
hunts in the 1640s, under the leadership of self-appointed with-finder
Matthew Hopkins, and his book DISCOVERY OF WITCHCRAFT had been circulated
and widely read in the colonies after its publication in 1647.

Cotton Mather expressed the attitude of Puritan leaders towards witchcraft
when he said 'So horrid and hellish is the crime of witchcraft, that were
god's thoughts as our thoughts, or god's way as our ways, it could be no
other but unpardonable.'  He also commented that 'Witchcraft is the most
nefarious of high treason against the Majesty on high.  A witch is not to
be endured in heaven or on earth'.  While he was the most eloquent in
expressing these views, his position was typical of the puritan leadership,
and as they felt their hold on the people and their ability to control the
government slipping away, these puritan leaders became unusually
susceptible to to claims and accusation regarding witchcraft.  Mather was
not personally involved in most of the witchcraft trials in New England,
but more than anyone else he was the apologist and spokesman for those who
brought the witches to trial and punishment.

The most famous and most outrageous of the New England witchcraft trials
took place at Salem, Massachutsetts in 1692.

In 1692 the status of the New England colony was uncertain.  Taxes were
high, the government was in the midst of change, the french were
threatening from the north, there was a smallpox epidemic, a hard winter
and threats of piracy at sea.

To the mind of many puritans these problems all shared a common
source...the devil.

The Salem Witch Crisis began with a group of young women who gathered at
the house of Reverend Samuel Parris to listen to West Indian myths and lore
from his slave Tituba.  Tituba was a negro slave from the island of
Barbados, and clearly had considerable knowledge of the vodoo and magical
practices which had originated in africa and were flourishing in the black
population of the Carribean.  The two youngest girls, Elizabeth Parris and
Abigail Williams were so overcome by these tales that they literally went
into fits, though to a great extent these resembled the misbehaving of
petulant spoiled brats more than any demonic influence.  They threw bibles
around the house, shouted out in church, and generally acted outrageous.

Seeing the attention all this was getting the younger girls, the older
girls soon took up many of the same activities, though clearly from
calculation rather than hysteria.  Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary
Walcott, Mary Warren, Elizabeth Proctor, Susan Sheldon, Elizabeth Booth and
Mercy Lewis were all in their late teens, but they began to carry on as if
possessed as well.  As the situation developed, Ann Putnam, the youngest
afflicted, became the clear leader of the girls, testifying in all but one
trial, and using her strong imagination to lead the other girls in their
seizures and later accusations.

The first victims named by the girls were the obvious outsiders, Tituba,
Sarah Good (a beggar woman) and Sarah Osborne (a crippled widow).  A court
was formed in Salem and Sarah Good was charged with practicing 'certain
detestable arts called witchcraft and sorceries'.  Those others accused
were 'tortured, afflicted, pinned, consumed, wasted and tormented.'  All in
order to get a confession.  Lengthy series of tricky questions would be
alternated with torture, and when the girls were confronted with the
accused women they would go into fits and blame them on the accused.

Eventually, those first accused had no recourse but to accuse more people
in the community, picking on old enemies or those who had few friends and
allies, though eventually even prominent landholders like John Proctor and
Giles Corey were accused.  Perhaps the most surprising is that George
Burroughs, the former minister of the Salem congregation was among those
accused and hanged.

Some of the older women in the community, like Mrs Thomas Putnam, mother of
one of the girls and Sarah Bibber, joined in as well, and while they did
not affect fits, they claimed to have seen apparitions and the spirits of
witches sent out to do torments.

The trials proceeded despite the fact that 2 of the original 8 girls
confessed to their fraud, though one was frightened into changing her mind
and the other, Mary Warren, was herself accused of being a witch and
hanged.  Fourteen years later, Ann Putnam, one of the ringleaders gave a
full confession of the fraud, indicating that it had all been done, at
first for 'sport' and that it had later turned into viciousness and
revenge.

The scope of the trial was amazing.  At first it was restricted to the main
Salem settlement, but accusations eventually spilled over into outlying
regions and neighboring towns.  As the frenzy spread, those accused, seeing
the fate of death in jail or under torture which others suffered, would
confess as soon as they were accused and spread their own accusations.

The breadth of accusations was so great, partly because the judges, under
the leadership of Judge Hathorne would ask leading questions and give the
accused the names of people, asking if they had seen them in visions or at
coven meetings, and it was easier to answer yes than to deny and explain
and face torture again.

As it progressed, those who confessed early in the trials were spared
because they accused others of witchcraft, while those who held out and
honestly denied their guilt were tortured and then hanged as unrepentant
witches.  Of 150 accused, 55 confessed, 31 were condemned to death or
prison.  All in all, 19 were hanged, two died in prison and the aged Giles
Corey died under torture while being pressed beneath stones.

Eventually, pressure from people in Boston and from the government caused
the trials to come to an end.  Objections were particularly strong to
spectral evidence, claims to see visions which none but the accuser could
see.  In a speach at the time Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, the
main apologist for the trials, stated that 'It were better that ten
suspected witches should escape than that one honest person should be
condemned...I'd rather judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge and
honest woman as a witch.'  This sentiment of outrage at the extremities of
the trials spread, and soon public sentiment was so much against them that
the trials could not continue.

In an observation after the fact, Governor Hutchinston of Massachutsetts
pointed out that their behavior so exactly imitated that of cases of
possession earlier in that century that it was unquestionable that they had
read accounts of those possessions and were basing their actions upon them.

There is no real evidence that any of those accused had ever practiced any
form of witchcraft or magic.  In fact, the only witchcraft practiced in the
area had been practiced by the young accusers, who, under the leadership of
Ann Putnam, had made poppets, or dolls in which to stick pins to afflict
people, as well as charms and magic brews, all under the unwilling tutelage
of Tituba who revealed secrets of Aftican magic to them under threat of
being revealed as a witch to her master.

As a final note, it is interesting that most of the accusations seem to
have come from the members of the somewhat poorer, agricultural community
along the road to Ipswich, those who were part of the congregation of
Sammuel Parris.  The accused seem to have been mostly the family and
friends of John Proctor who had been at odds with Parris for some time, or
members of the wealthier merchant community in the heart of the town.
While these social and economic differences may not have been the conscious
cause of any of the accusations, they form a clear trend which is worth
considering.  While the trials seem primarily to be symptoms of misdirected
zeal, they also reflect an attempt to establish order and resist change in
a time when the puritan grip on society was crumbling.

After 1692 the hold of Puritanism on government in New England was over and
many had lost their confidence in the faith which had brought their fathers
and grandfathers to the new world.  New Englanders were aware that the
Salem trials had been an embarassing moment of madness and the next few
years saw welcome reform and improvement in the colony.

Ironically, it was not until 1957 that the State of Massachutsetts finally
reversed the conviction of those executed at Salem and exonerated them of
any crimes.

NATIVE AMERICAN LIFE

From the first, English settlers had a highly romanticized view of the
indian.  They saw him at once as something ennobled by being closer to
natiure than the European, while at the same time weaker and therefore to
be patronized, manipulated and brushed aside because he lacked the
sophistication of european society.  An oft quoted description of the
Indians made by early settlers was that they were 'of a tractable, free and
loving nature, without guile and treachery'.  This image was reinforced by
the failure of some indians to understand the nature of the Europeans.  One
chieftan in the early Virginia colony is quoted as asking 'why should you
take by force from us that which you can obtain by love'.  This inability
to undersand the settlers motivations did not stop the Indians from
resisting their active expansion.  They may not have understood why the
settlers wanted there land, but they knew better than to give it away
without a fight.  They saw the intentions of the English quite clearly, and
were aware, as Matoaka stated, that the English came 'not for trade, but to
invade my people and possess my country.'  It is clear that it was not
necessary for indians to know the Europeans very well before they realized
the plans they had for the new world and that there was no real role in
those plans for the indians.

Despite the european image of the 'Noble Savage', indians were far from the
innocents they appeared to be, and the fact that colonists were able to
prey upon them and conquer them was due more to luck and the fact that
native americans had no immunity to Smallpox and Measles than it was to any
innate European cultural superiority or higher level of greed and
aggressiveness.

Native Americans, though from a non-european culture, were still human.
Cruelty, war and betrayal existed in america long before the arrival of the
first settlers.  Their cultures and political systems were diverse, and
they lived about as harmoniously as the various nations of Europe did,
always warring, making and breaking alliances, and attempting to conquer
neighbors to build empires.  Every chief dreamed of being a 'chief of many
tribes', being warleader of a confederation of tribes, or subjecting
neighboring tribes to his will.  Before the arrival of the first Europeans,
major tribal empires had risen and fallen, and the added catalyst of
European incursion caused the rise of many more.

To get an idea of the way that indians lived and the fact that there was
history and that great events took place in N. America before the first
settlers, it is only necessary to look briefly at the histories of some of
the most successful tribes, some of whom had their rise and fall well
before the coming of the white man.

Ironically, much less is known about the tribes of the Eastern seaboard
than is known about western tribes like the Dakota and Sioux, because their
contact with Europeans began earlier and was much more destructive.  In
most cases, for every 1000 coastal indians in 1600, fewer than 10 were
alive at the start of this century.

Most of the tribes of the Eastern Seaboard were descended from the original
Algonquin tribes, which had broken up into many linquistic sub-divisions
some centuries before European settlement.  The exception to this were the
Iroquois, who were conquering invaders who had come from the Southwest in
about the year 1000, dominating many of the more settled tribes and driving
many of them north into canada, while carving themselves a powerful empire
by the 16th century.

Some of the most significant tribes in the first areas colonized were:

Iroquois (real adders/bad snakes) Lived in Upper and central lake region of
New York and n. Pa. Conquered and dominated tribes from Maine to Missisipi
    Sub Tribes- Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca.  These tribes
were directly part of the confederacy.  Others under their control included
Tuscarora, Delaware, Tutelo, Saponi, Nanticoke, Conoy, Huron, Erie,
Andaste.  These others were conquered and of lesser status.
    Controlled more than 300 Villages.  Actual population was around 35,000
in US and Canada in 1600s.  At their height, controlled areas might have
had closer to 100,000 indians.
    Around 1570 the five waring Iroquois tribes were united by Dekanawida
and Hiawatha into a federal state.  They unified all the neighboring
tribes, and when the dutch came into thea area as traders in the early
1600s they quickly took to guns and proceeded to conquer everything up and
down the coast.  Sided with the English in the French and Indian War and
were probably why they won.  Highest level of government of any tribe north
of Mexico.

Pequot (destroyers) Located in Rhode Island Very warlike, allied with
Mohegans, fought against Naragansett.  An Algonquin tribe, linguistically
In 1635 their chief ruled over 26 sub-chiefs, called Sachems, controlled
most of Rhode Island and Connecticut Their main village, Mystic, had a
population of 600 people

Narraganset (people of the small point) Algonquin tribe Chief and 8
sub-chiefs, 8 villages, 4000 people. Mostly in Rhode Island, tribe from
which Squanto came

Mohegan (wolf people) Algonquins in N. New York Led by Uncas of 'Last of
the Mohegans' at one point. 21 villges under Uncas, pop of about 2500.

Wappinger (easterners)
    Algonquin tribe.
    Divided into 17 sub-chiefdoms, with over 100 villages, mostly in
connecticut.  Highest population about 5000.
    Warred with the dutch.  Highly organized, kingdom like.

Abnaki (easterners) also Delawares
    Another Algonquin tribe, mostly in new york, Pa and NJ.
    Three sub-tribes, Munsee (5 Sub-Divisions) , Unalachtigo (16
Sub-Divisions)  and Unami (17 Sub- Divisions).  Over 150 villages, total
population around 10,000.
    Conquered by Iroquois, but later broke from them and joined with French
agains them and their English allies.

Powhatan (falls in a current of water)
    Main tribal union in coastal Virginia.  Algonquin background.
    30 sub-tribes, 200 villages, total population of around 15,000 at 1600,
150 at 1700.
    Chief, Wahunsonacock (called Powhatan) dealt with English at Jamestown.
His successor, Opechancanough led war against English in 1622 and 1644.
Wiped out all but Jamestown and nearest settlements.  Main rivals for power
in east with Iroquois.

While the indians of the Great Plains, like the Sioux and Dakotas subsisted
mostly by hunting and were therefore nomadic, the tribes of the
Northeastern coast depended a great deal on agriculture, and were therefore
more settled.  This is particularly true of those tribes who came to be
part of the Iroquois confederacy, either by choice or by force.

The climate of the coastal woodlands was temperate, and their hunting,
fishing and farming skills were well developed.

The main/staple crop in the region was Maize, which had originated in
Mexico and been traded from tribe to tribe, until it had spread throughout
the Americas (Maize is what we now know as corn).  To a large degree it was
the introduction of this crop to the first settlers which made their
survival possible.

Agricultural techniques were fairly simple.  Digging sticks were used to
break ground and create mounds in which the seeds were planted.  Women and
children weeded and tended the fields.  There was abundant land and crop
rotation was practiced.  Every few years new land would be cleared and old
fields abandonned for as much as 20 years before being replanted, a luxury
not available to European farmers.

The main form of dwelling was the Wigwam, not the tent of the plains
indian.  This was a long house with a frame of wooden arches covered with
bark and hides.  Roofs were as much as 20 feet high, and width was
generally 20 feet.  Screens of woven reeds or hides separated the wigwam
into family apartments, each with its own fireplace and smokehole.  Wigwams
were often over 100 feet long, making them, in effect, small apartment
buildings.

Many of the villages were quite large, often with half a dozen buildings,
though some of the largest had many more than this, as is shown in a dutch
report of an Iroquois village of some 20 large wigwams, presumably housing
close to 1500 people.

Until it was imported from Europe, there were no horses in north America.
Travel was by foot, with goods carried in backpacks, or on the many rivers
and lakes of the northeast, using light canoes made of birch bark, which
could be portaged through regions of mountain or forest to get from one
river to another.  Extensive trading routes were established which brought
goods from Mexico and the west all the way to Maine, trading pottery,
beads, furs, food, carved wood and shell.

The Iroquois were certainly the most significant of the northeastern tribe
and they have left behind the greatest legacy.  Their confederation was
formed in about 1500 when Hiawatha, the chief of the mohawks, met with the
councils of the chiefs of the Iroquois and convinced them to band together
for mutual protection, end their inter-tribal wars and work to eventually
unite all of the tribes of North America.  The system of military
organization and internal management through a system of councils of
'Sachems' or sub-chiefs which developed under the leadership of Hiawatha
and later Dekanawida was perhaps the most flexible and sophisticated
political system in the americas at that time.  While it was not a
democratic system it had many republican elements, with the leaders holding
power with the assent and support of the people and expected to serve the
interests of their local constituencies in the greater council of the
Iroquois.

Although the Iroquois had no real written language, they had a strong oral
tradition and well developed legends and history.  They were by no means
innocent of sophisticated beliefs, and though they were not christians,
they were strongly religious and viewed the world around them in ways which
were mystical, yet strangely logical.

Tribal history was maintained through the use of mnemonic objects, usually
strings or belts of wampum, colored shell strung together and used like
notes to key the memories of tribal historians trainined to know their
interpretation.  Wampum strings were also used as trade goods and had
universally accepted value based on the length of the belt and the type of
shell used.  Wampum was also used to convey messages from place to place
approach to the world around them.

In religion, the Iroquois were dualists.  They believed that life was a
struggle between light and darkness, good and evil.  This type of division
of good and evil is generally a characteristic of fairly advanced
societies, and does not clearly emerge even in Europe until the end of the
Roman Empire.

This good/evil duality was embodied in the twins Tsentsa and Taweskare,
sons of the earth mother spirit.  Tsentsa would create good things and then
rest, and then while he rested Taweskare would undo them.  Thus, Tsentsa
made nice, smooth fish and Taweskare put scales on them.  Tsentsa made nice
bushes with berries and Taweskare put thorns on them.  This belief shows
the balances which they saw in nature and in life in their world.

Iroquois belief also included ancestral spirits and spirits of nature, as
well as several underworlds or afterlives.  Offerings were made to the
spirits and they were said to visit people in dreams to give advice.  Above
all these spirits was the Great Manitou, not so much a god as a force of
nature, the spirit of time and existence, the motive force behind all life
and change.  The Iroquois observed a number of seasonal holidays,
surprisingly similar in timing and ritual to those observed by other
agricultural societies, including those in Europe.

The beliefs and lifestyle of the Iroquois and the other settled tribes of
the Northeast are in clear contrast to those of the other major group with
whom European settlers had contact.  Most of the other indians in the
Eastern part of the new world were of Algonquin background, belonging to
one of a number of large and disorganized tribes, like the Cree, Chippewa
or Nascopie.  These tribes had occupied the Eastern seaboard before the
arrival of the Iroquois peoples, and maintained an older indian lifestyle.

The Algonquin peoples were nomadic hunters, living primarily in the forests
and along the rivers, moving with the fish or herds according to the
season.  They supplemented their diet of deer, beaver and fish with berries
and breads made from wild grain.  They were usually organized in small
multi-family bands, and would only meet in tribal council once or twice a
year at a traditional location, though sometimes these meetings had as many
as 10,000 people in attendance

In the period of European settlement the Cree were probably the dominant
Algonquin tribe, but they had mostly migrated into Canada, while those who
had stayed behind in the coastal region had to some degree adopted Iroquois
ways and had settled and become farmers.

When these Algonquin tribes began to settle down, they borrowed many
practices from their neighbors, but maintained their mobility through the
practice of having two locations for their villages, one for summer hunting
and farming and one convenient to fishing in the winter.

Algonquin religion focused much more closely than Iroquois religion on the
worship of ancestral and animal spirits, and what more sophisticated
concepts of greater spirits and good and evil were clearly late borrowings
from other tribes.  Also significant in their culture was an oral tradition
of heroic tales of popularcharacters like the Trickster Wisagatcak and the
hero Gluskap who created the world.

As they explored farther inland, European settlers would eventually come
into contact with other powerful indian nations with very different
cultures and societies, but few of these had the sophistication and
determination to make them a serious threat to European invasion.  It was
the Iroquois and Algonquin tribes which had the ability and the oportunity
to keep the English from gaining a foothold in the new world, and after
their destruction through disease and treachery the fate of the native
population of N. America was sealed.

It is clear that in the period prior to the arrival of the English settlers
on the east coast the Indian confederations of settled Iroquois and
Algonquin tribes were the beginning of a major advancement in Indian
political and social sophistication.  Had contact with Europeans been
delayed and not changed native american culture so completely, it is likely
that in a few generations a genuine Indian nation or nations might have
emerged, with the ability to meet the English dipomatically as equals and
alter the course of their conquest of a continent.  As a legacy, it seems
likely that the political system of the Iroquois, which was much admired by
18th century political thinkers may have had a strong influence on the
formation of our government.

When the Europeans arrived Indian culture was ready for change, and they
replaced change that was starting from within with changes imported from
abroad.  The Iroquois were clever warriors and politicians and could never
have passed up the guns that the dutch wanted to trade for furs.  They were
ready to learn.  From the axes of English woodsmen they learned to make
tomahawks.  From the Spanish they got the horse.  From the french they
learned to take scalps and sell them for money.  Just as the Indians had no
immunity to European diseases, they also had no immunity to the appeal of
European technology and ideas.  In return they gave the European invaders
maize and the techniques to live in the new land, plus, ultimately and
unwillingly, the land itself.

The questions remains of why Indians were not prepared to face and deal
with the threat of a much smaller body of Europeans, especially once they
had acquired guns and other weapons to help them compete.

One of the reasons is certainly that at the very first they were not fully
aware of the territorial ambitions of the settlers.  Because all of their
early contacts with europeans had been with temporary trading posts or
summer settlements of hunters and fishermen, they didn't immediately
realize that the first English settlers were planning to stay.

Once they realized this, they fell prey to the old principle of divide and
conquer.  For much of this period the French and the English were competing
for North America, and by providing arms and other support they managed to
convince indian tribes to join in that competition.  By showing them favor
and arming them, the Dutch and later the English were able to get the
Iroquois to do much of their military dirty-work for them in the New World.
In response to this the French supported many of the Algonquin tribes to
rebel against the Iroquois, and in this way the two European powers brought
their conflict from the Old World to the New World and ultimately the
Indian TRibes were its victims.  By taking advantage of old resentments and
rivalries the European powers played out their own struggle with reduced
risk and at the same time redirected the Indian threat away from their own
colonies.  More will be said about the French and Indian war in another
lecture.

Of course, the effects of disease cannot be overlooked.  Certainly of all
factors, disease was the key that opened the door to European conquest.
Estimates of indian deaths are as high as 95% in some areas, and while
things were not as bad in North America as they were in South America, the
Smallpox epedemic of 1617 which killed thousands of Indians in coastal
Massachutsets, certainly opened the way for settlers in that area.  In
addition, deaths of that magnitude from apparently natural causes led many
indians who had great faith in the spirits of nature to believe that their
spirits had turned against them and with the loss of their belief system
many lost their confidence and determination, perhaps even their will to
survive.  It should be pointed out that the European settlers had little in
the way of advanced medicine, so they were not aware of the fact that they
brought disease to the indian.  Many just thought of the indians as
unhealthy, a major reason why they did not suffer the fate of the black
slave, or they believe that these deaths were the result of a biblical type
plague visited by god.  Later, in the 18th century, when the King appointed
Lord Jeffry Amherst to clear out some troublesome Indians in
massachutsetts, the connection had been made, and he deliberately proposed
giving them smallpox infected blankets as a gift, and though this plan was
not approved, a subsequent epidemic indicates that he liked it so much that
he did it anyway.

Europeans had some very strange notions about the indian, romanticizing and
despising him at the same time.  Some believed that the indians were the
lost tribes of israel and that they were purer than other peoples and
others saw them as little more than beasts.  What was clear to everyone was
that the Indians were DIFFERENT and most Europeans saw difference as
equivalent to inferiority.  In 1622 one wrote 'Indians do but run over the
grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts...so it is lawful now to take
land, which none useth, and make use of it.'  With this attitude it is not
surprising that most settlers had few compunctions about eliminating or
removing the indians by force or about using them to advance their own
causes.

In the end, Indian movements towards unity had not advanced far enough and
their cultures were too open to European influences, and falling under
those influences, they lost their identity and their ability to perceive
the one enemy all tribes shared in common, the white man.


ENGLISH VS. FRENCH

By the mid 1600s the French and the English had eliminated all the other
powers competing for dominance in N. America, though Portugal and Spain
still had presences in S. and Central America and the Dutch remained in the
Carribean.

The French were less populous, concentrated mostly along the St, Lawrence
River, the Great Lakes and the Western and Northern Lands they gave access
to.  There were many more English, all in the narrow strip of land between
the Appalachian Mtns and the Atlantic coast.  The land which the French
claimed was much larger, and they had the initial force to claim it, and
while the English claimed less land, they had greater military potential,
though their colonies were less stable and had internal problems.

All told, 1.5 Million English to 90K French by the middle of the 18th
century.

Conflict began very early in the 1600s on the Great Banks, off
Newfoundland.  The English controlled most of the fishing there, and the
French wanted fishing rights there.  This led to naval conflict between the
fishing fleets of the two nations, and led to French resentment of the
English.

In North America the French had early on established a close relationship
with some of the major Algonquin tribes, especially the Huron and Miami in
the midwest.  These contacts allowed them to dominate the fur trade as much
as the English dominated fishing.  They guarded theircontacts and their
territorial trading rights jealously, and English merchants in the colonies
and in London wanted more access to that trade.

European demand for furs was always growing, and the more the French and
their Algonquin friends hunted, the fewer beavers and bear and otter and
other fur-bearing creatures there were to be found in the western lands
they had staked their claim to.  In search of more pelts, they began to
hunt in lands which had traditionally been held by the Iroquois.  In doing
this, they effectively awakened the sleeping giant.

War broke out between the French and the Iroquois as early as 1609, when
the Dutch chose to support the Iroquois in hopes that they would get access
to furs from them.  From that point on the Iroquois harassed, attacked and
conquered the Algonquin tribes, capturing furs and trading them for guns so
that theycould be even more successful.  As Dutch power faded, the growing
English colonies took over for them, providing guns and support in exchange
for furs and the harassment of the French and their indian allies.

This went on for many years, sporadic conflicts in which the
English-supported Iroquois were very successful in separating the French
from what they thought of as 'their furs', a situation which made them very
unhappy.

Very few English or French colonists were actually involved in this early
conflict, with most of the fighting  being done by the indians competing
for their dominant position as hunters in the fur trade, but it brought out
harsh feelings among the colonists towards each other.

France blamed England for inciting Iroquois raids on Frend colonies.
England blames France for inciting Algonquin raids on English colonies.

In addition, the English began to see the French claim to all of the lands
west of the appalachias as an attempt to box them in and cut off their
inevitable expansion, and this feeling became more acute when the French
began to build forts along this western border.


EUROPEAN CONFLICTS

In Europe there had been a tradition of conflict between England and
France, and to some degree this mood spilled over into the new world as
tensions there increased.

In the 14th and 15th centuries the English had almost conquered France in
the 100 Years War.  In the 16th century the French had supported the Scotts
in a number of uprisings which developed into the Anglo-Scottish Wars.  In
the 1540s these carried on into the Anglo-French Wars, a series of battles
and attempted invasions of France under Henry VIII.  In the 1580s the
French supported Mary Queen of Scots in her attempt to raise Scotland
against Queen Elizabeth.

In the first half of the 17th century relations between France and England
were relatively calm, because of the English Civil War and Stuart ties to
France, as wmll as the threat of the Thirty Years War in Germany in the
1640s.

In the 1620s, under the Duke of Buckingham, the English made a number of
attempts to take and hold key towns on the French coast, particularly La
Rochelle and St. Martin, as well as to defend and expand the territory
around Calais, which they had traditionally controlled.  In these conflicts
the English were supporting French Huguenots, Protestants who were
rebelling against the French crown.

But, with the accession of William and Mary to the English throne, the old
rivalries between Protestant England and Catholic France were revived.  In
the 1690s The French attempted to support the Stuart claim to the throne
against the recently crowned monarchs, backing James Stuart, the 'Old
Pretender'.  King William III defeated them in a series of Battles in
Northern France, effectively winning what was called King Williams War or
the War of the English Succession.  This sort of carried over into Queen
Anne's War in the early 1700s, a series of battles between those who
defended the claim of Queen Anne and her designated Hanoverian successors
and French supported counter-claims.

In the 1740s the English allied with the Germans to fight the French and
Spanish in the War of the Austrian Succession, one of the earliest wars
which could be called a 'World War', because it involved so many nations.
In the colonies this was known as 'King George's War', as he was the
English king at the time.

Although every major European conflict was reflected in the new world as
interference in trade and border hostility, King George's War was the first
one in which colonists took a really serious interest because of the
potential threat to the colonies from the French and the possible
opportunities the uncertain situation offered for expansion in the west.

As the War of the Austrian Succession led into the Seven Years War in
Europe, King George's War led very quickly into the Great War for the
Empire in the New World, and it is in this war, also called the French and
Indian War, that real battle on a European scale first came to the English
colonies.


OHIO: KEY TO THE WEST

In the 1740s, during King George's War, the English colonists in Virginia
and Pennsylvania began to look westward in the hopes of expanding trade and
starting new inland colonies of their own.

Because of the geography of the Appalachian mountains, the best route west
was through the valley of the Ohio River.  Unfortunately, that land and all
the land to the west was claimed by the French.  This was only a small
deterrent to determined colonists.

In the mid 1740s George Croghan, a Pennsylvania Merchant, led a group of
traders west through Ohio to contact the Miami and Huron indians and
establish trade.  He was able to convince them to trade with him rather
than with the French, and in 1748 he built Ft. Pichawillany as a trading
post in western part of the Ohio valley.  In 1752 the French overran Ft.
Pichawillany and reestablished their claim to Ohio, chasing the merchants
out, but this had whetted the appetities of the English for western trade.

In 1747 a group of Virginia merchants led established the Ohio Co. of VA, a
joint stock company similar to those which opened up the colonies, but
established in the New World for expanding colonial merchant interests.
The purpose of this company was to make use of Ohio for trade and
settlement, and the government of Virginia granted them 200,000 acres of
land in Ohio, land that was claimed by Pennsylvania and by the French.

In 1751 Robert Dinwiddie was appointed governor of Virginia, and he became
very interested in westward expansion and a major investor in the Ohio
Company.  Under his direction George Washington, then only 23 years old,
was sent to Ohio to scout out the area and report on French activity.  The
report was that in response to the Pennsylvanian incursion, the French
under the command of Celeron de Bienville, were fortifying their border,
with three forts, Ft. Presque Isle, Ft. Le Boeuf and Ft. Venago already
built.  Plus, they were in the process of bulding a new fort, Ft. Duquesne.
He reported that when he had talked to the commander of Fort Le Boeuf about
the Virginian claims in Ohio, he had said that 'it was their absolute
design totake possession of the Ohio, and by God theywould do it.'

In 1754 Gov. Dinwiddie instructed Washington, then a Colonel in the
militia, to take 150 militia men and stop the construction of Ft. Duquesne.
Washington was militarily inexperienced, but managed to ambush a French
patrol.  He hastily retreated as the main body of French troops pursued
him, but he could not escape, and made a stand at a makeshift fort he
called Ft. Necessity.  His choice of location was poor and the French
quickly surrounded him and captured him and his men.

Because England and France were not at war, Washington and his men were
disarmed and released, but not before they were tricked into signing a
document in French, which none of them could read, in which Washington
confessed to assassinating the captain of the patrol he had ambushed.

Despite this shameful defeat, Washington was greeted as a hero in Virginia
for striking the first blow in a much hoped for war with France for the
west.


THE GREAT WAR FOR THE EMPIRE

Embarking on a war in the colonies the British were at a distinct
disadvantage.  The British had far greater number of colonists, but they
were militarily disorganized and unprepared for a serious war, compared to
the French who ran their small colony much like a military outpost.
Although there were large numbers of colonial militia, the British soon
discovered that they had a tendancy to disappear when the fighting got
serious, so they would have to rely on regular troops, who were excellent,
but in much demand elsewhere.

Since war seemed to be starting, 1400 British Redcoats (Regulars) were sent
into Ohio under General Edward Braddock, an unimaginative general who was
ambushed and routed by a much smaller French and Indian force.  Washington,
who was with him as a civilian guide with 100 or so Militiamen, led the
retreat and narrowly avoided death, saving the troops, and he gained much
further renown for this.

Other early English expeditions also did poorly.  They failed to take Ft.
Niagara in New York, and also Crown Point near Montreal.  The French also
encouraged the Algonquin tribes to raid English settlements in the west,
causing much bloodshed.  The very able French general Montcalm captured a
number of British border forts, including Ft. Oswego and Ft. William Henry.

By 1757 the war was going so badly that King George II was forced to give
over command of the war effort to William Pitt, leader of the political
opposition.

Pitt was a great organizer and realized the value of North America.  He
poured great numbers of men and militaryaid into the colonies, betting the
future of England on success in the New World.  He used the British navy to
cut the French in Canada off from France.  He allied with the Iroquois in
the west to neutralize the Algonquin threat.  Most importantly he broke
with British tradition to appoint generals based on competence rather than
seniority and influence.

His two great discoveries were the young generals James Wolfe and Jeffrey
Amherst, both in their 30s.  Together they captured the French fort at
Louisbourg in 1758 and began a string of victories across the north.

Ft. Duguesne fell and was renamed Ft. Pitt.

Ft. Niagara and Crown Point fell to Amherst, while Wolfe sailed up the St.
Lawrence to besiege the French General Montcalm at Quebec.  Wolfe defeated
Montcalm and took Quebec, and though he and Montcalm both died in that
battle, British troops took Montreal in 1760 and the French abandonned
Canada to them.

At the same time the British were fighting a war with France in Europe, the
Carribean and in India, and through superior leadership and Naval support
(moving supplies and troops and stopping french troop and supply shipments)
they were able to win on these three fronts as well.


THE TREATY OF PARIS

All of these Anglo-French conflicts around the world were settled in the
treaty of Paris in 1763.  It was this treaty and the victories which led to
it, more than anything else, which turned the British colonial efforts from
simple efforts of expansion into a true and lasting world-wide empire.

France surrendered all of Canada and all land East of the Mississipi to
England.  All of their other North American land went to Spain who hardly
deserved it, having pretty much also lost the war.  Spanish Florida also
went to England.

England returned the carribean islands of Guadalupe and Martinique to
France and Cuba and Manila to Spain.

Farther abroad, England gained conrol over almost all of India, except for
a few trading posts.

The British victory was overwhelming, s was their gain in north america.

As the historian Francis Parkman said, 'Half a continent had changed hands
with the scratch of a pen'.

FAITH VS. REASON

The era before 1700 had been one of great faith.  Faith had brought many to
the new world, first Catholic zeal to convert the heathen and later
Protestant desire to be free from the fleshpots of Europe.

Yet, at the same time that many Europeans were moving away from Catholicism
towards more 'pure' forms of protestant Christianity, many others were
abandonning traditional religion altogether and embarking upon the study
and exaltation of reason.  The inquisitive minds of this period were not
satisfied with Catholic doctrine and sought new answers.  Some turned to
new interpretations of Christianity, becoming puritans, while others found
their answer in the mind of man and became rationalists.

This trend had really begun in the renaissance, but the fascination with
reason and the role of man in nature and the systems which governed the
physical and philosophical world really came to their greatest prominence
at about the same time that Puritanism reached its height in the 1650s.

The so-called 'Age of Reason' was characterized by advancements in both
science and philosophy.  Men like Copernicus, Gallileo  and Kepler had
redefined the nature of the solar system and the stars in the 16th and 17th
centuries.  Sir Isaac Newton built on their specific work to define more
general laws of nature, learning about how the world worked and the systems
which governed all life in the world.

Reason presented a new order to the universe, with God as a remote figure
who designed a perfect, functioning system and then set it in motion.  Man
was the most significant single element in this system because he alone had
the capacity to reason.  Thus, it was natural that the proper study for
scientists and philosophers was man and his place in nature.

In the 1690s the English philosopher John Locke proposed that the goal of
man was to grow in knowledge and that the best means to do this was to see,
hear, feel and taste the world through observation and experimentation.
Locke also established that man should govern himself in accordance with
the laws of nature and that these laws should be the basis for the laws and
structure of human government.  Chief among these he place the rights to
life, liberty and property.

The 18th century, which became a time ruled by Reason, was known as the
Enlightenment, and nowhere were the new ideas of this era felt more clearly
than in America.  In Europe natural law and reason were popular themes for
parlor discussions among the intellectual elite, but in America education,
literacy and intellectual curiosity were more widespread and such elevated
themes could  be heard discussed on streetcorners, at markets and in common
taverns as well.

In the new world men of science made advances of many sorts in pursuit of
pure reason.  David Rittenhouse built the first American Orrery, a model of
the movements of the solar system, Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston
discovered inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox, and Benjamin
Franklin discovered much about electricity, including isolating positive
and negative charges and inventing the lightning rod.

Scientific advancement went hand in hand with philosophical inquiry, and
beginning with the Cartesian system of Rene Descartes in the early 1600s
European and later American philosophers used reason to understand man's
place in the universe and to try to understand and improve the human
condition.  The ideas of these philosophers found their ideal climate in
the emerging culture of the new world and America, more than any society
before it, became a land where ideas as well as practical reality were a
basis for action and government.


THE GREAT AWAKENING

Despite the rise of reason, faith had neighter vanished nor been forgotten.
In the 1740s there was a resurgence of religion in the American colonies.
Although Puritanism had been debased and discredited, the desire for faith
was still strong.

In 1741 a travelling English preacher named George Whitefield came through
the colonies, preaching fire-and-brimstone calvinism in a very dramatic
fashion.  Nathan Cole, who heard Whitefield preach sayd that he 'put me
into a trembling fear...for he looked as if he was cloaked with the
authority from the great god...and my hearing him preach gave me a heart
wound, by gods blessing, and my old foundation wa broken up."  His style
and showmanship were so effective that many people were converted on the
spot and as he travelled in the colonies his audiences grew.

Many Colonial ministers saw how successful this hellfire preaching was and
began to follow his lead, some going to great excess to outdo Whitefield's
showmanship.

However, this new style of preaching did bring many new converts into
churches which had been shrinking since the decline of puritan zeal, so
many in the new world embraced it.

The leader of the movement as it developed in America was Jonathan Edwards.
He was the most talented theologian and preacher that the new world had
ever produced, and his strict interpretation of doctrine and his forceful
presence and preaching style was exceptionally effective.  He lived by a
strict moral code similar to that of the puritans and expected purity and
morality of his followers.  He said 'I intend to live in continual
mortification, and never to expect or desire any worldly ease or pleasure.'

The success of Edwards and others in awakening the spirits of the people
led to old churches being abandonned and new more rigorously devout
congregations being established.  The collapse of many traditional churches
and the intensity of worship of these new congregations with shouts and
shrieks and running about, led many of the traditional religious leaders to
fear the emotionalism and irrationality of this new brand of christianity.
They cried that faith should be tempered with reason, and in this mood they
reexamined traditional beliefs and began to form a new version of
protestantism based on reason and logic, which eventually led to such
faiths as Unitarianism, Universalism and eventually Deism, where the
importance of god and the church in everyday life was minimized, though
Christian principles remained important.

In fact, many of the leaders of the revolution and most of the members of
Americas intellectual community were followers of an extremely abstract
version of Christianity called Deism, which believed in a remote god who
had created the world, set it in motion and then left it alone.  Deism was
the most reasonable of all forms of religion, based entirely on logic,
leaving as little credit as possible to god, and giving as much freedom as
possible to man.  Benjamin Franklin expressed the Deist creed when he wrote
'I believe in one god, creator of the universe.  That he governs it by his
providence.  That he ought to be worshipped.  That the most acceptable
service to render to him is doing good to his other children.  That the
soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life
respecting its conduct in this.'...Deism was a sort of generic
christianity, practiced mostly in the mind, without churches, or ministers
or services, the ideal faith for the Rational man of the time.

Those who followed the new, evangelical forms of Christianity came to be
called the 'New Lights', while those who followed the more rational
outgrowths of traditional beliefs were known as 'The Old Lights'.  These
two conflicting approaches to religion were able to coexist in the new
world, and both the enthusiasm of evangelical preachers and the rationality
of traditional ministers contributed to the intellectual climate at the
time of the American Revolution.


THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT

The political philosophies of enlightenment in Europe were one of the
greatest influences on American politics and culture in the 1700s.
Philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and
Burke examined human society and the world