Chapter 3 Creating New Social Orders Colonial Societies, 15

Chapter 3 | Creating New Social Orders: Colonial Societies,
1500–1700
63
CHAPTER 3
Creating New Social Orders:
Colonial Societies, 1500–1700

Figure 3.1 John Smith’s famous map of Virginia (1622)
illustrates many geopolitical
features of early colonization. In
the upper left, Powhatan, who governed a powerful local
confederation of Algonquian
communities, sits above other
local chiefs, denoting his authority. Another native figure,
Susquehannock, who
appears in the upper right, visually
reinforces the message that the English did not control the land
beyond a few
outposts along the Chesapeake.
Chapter Outline
3.1 Spanish Exploration and Colonial Society
3.2 Colonial Rivalries: Dutch and French Colonial Ambitions

3.3 English Settlements in America
3.4 The Impact of Colonization
Introduction
By the mid-seventeenth century, the geopolitical map of North
America had become a
patchwork of
imperial designs and ambitions as the Spanish, Dutch, French,
and English
reinforced their claims to
parts of the land. Uneasiness, punctuated by violent clashes,
prevailed in the
border zones between the
Europeans’ territorial claims. Meanwhile, still-powerful native
peoples waged war

to drive the invaders
from the continent. In the Chesapeake Bay and New England
colonies, conflicts
erupted as the English
pushed against their native neighbors (Figure 3.1).
The rise of colonial societies in the Americas brought Native
Americans, Africans,
and Europeans together
for the first time, highlighting the radical social, cultural, and
religious
differences that hampered their
ability to understand each other. European settlement affected
every aspect of the
land and its people,
bringing goods, ideas, and diseases that transformed the
Americas. Reciprocally,
Native American

practices, such as the use of tobacco, profoundly altered
European habits and
tastes.
64
1500–1700
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Identify the main Spanish American colonial settlements
of the 1500s and
1600s
• Discuss economic, political, and demographic
similarities and

differences between the
Spanish colonies
During the 1500s, Spain expanded its colonial empire to the
Philippines in the Far
East and to areas in
the Americas that later became the United States. The Spanish
dreamed of mountains
of gold and silver
and imagined converting thousands of eager Indians to
Catholicism. In their vision
of colonial society,
everyone would know his or her place. Patriarchy (the rule of
men over family,
society, and government)

shaped the Spanish colonial world. Women occupied a lower
status. In all matters,
the Spanish held
themselves to be atop the social pyramid, with native peoples
and Africans beneath
them. Both Africans
and native peoples, however, contested Spanish claims to
dominance. Everywhere the
Spanish settled,
they brought devastating diseases, such as smallpox, that led to
a horrific loss of
life among native peoples.
European diseases killed far more native inhabitants than did
Spanish swords.
The world native peoples had known before the coming of the
Spanish was further
upset by Spanish

colonial practices. The Spanish imposed the encomienda system
in the areas they
controlled. Under this
system, authorities assigned Indian workers to mine and
plantation owners with the
understanding that
the recipients would defend the colony and teach the workers
the tenets of
Christianity. In reality, the
encomienda system exploited native workers. It was eventually
replaced by another
colonial labor system,
the repartimiento, which required Indian towns to supply a pool
of labor for
Spanish overlords.
ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

Spain gained a foothold in present-day Florida, viewing that
area and the lands to
the north as a logical
extension of their Caribbean empire. In 1513, Juan Ponce de
León had claimed the
area around today’s
St. Augustine for the Spanish crown, naming the land Pascua
Florida (Feast of
Flowers, or Easter) for the
nearest feast day. Ponce de León was unable to establish a
permanent settlement
there, but by 1565, Spain
was in need of an outpost to confront the French and English
privateers using
Florida as a base from which

Figure 3.2
This OpenStax book is available for free at
https://cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3
1500–1700
65
to attack treasure-laden Spanish ships heading from Cuba to
Spain. The threat to

Spanish interests took
a new turn in 1562 when a group of French Protestants
(Huguenots) established a
small settlement they
called Fort Caroline, north of St. Augustine. With the
authorization of King Philip
II, Spanish nobleman
Pedro Menéndez led an attack on Fort Caroline, killing most of
the colonists and
destroying the fort.
Eliminating Fort Caroline served dual purposes for the
Spanish—it helped reduce the
danger from French
privateers and eradicated the French threat to Spain’s claim to
the area. The
contest over Florida illustrates
how European rivalries spilled over into the Americas,
especially religious

conflict between Catholics and
Protestants.
In 1565, the victorious Menéndez founded St. Augustine, now
the oldest European
settlement in the
Americas. In the process, the Spanish displaced the local
Timucua Indians from
their ancient town of
Seloy, which had stood for thousands of years (Figure 3.3). The
Timucua suffered
greatly from diseases
introduced by the Spanish, shrinking from a population of
around 200,000 pre-
contact to fifty thousand
in 1590. By 1700, only one thousand Timucua remained. As in
other areas of Spanish
conquest, Catholic

priests worked to bring about a spiritual conquest by forcing the
surviving
Timucua, demoralized and
reeling from catastrophic losses of family and community, to
convert to
Catholicism.
Figure 3.3 In this drawing by French artist Jacques le Moyne de
Morgues, Timucua
flee the Spanish settlers, who
arrive by ship. Le Moyne lived at Fort Caroline, the French
outpost, before the
Spanish destroyed the colony in 1562.

Spanish Florida made an inviting target for Spain’s imperial
rivals, especially the
English, who wanted to
gain access to the Caribbean. In 1586, Spanish settlers in St.
Augustine discovered
their vulnerability to
attack when the English pirate Sir Francis Drake destroyed the
town with a fleet of
twenty ships and one
hundred men. Over the next several decades, the Spanish built
more wooden forts,
all of which were burnt
by raiding European rivals. Between 1672 and 1695, the
Spanish constructed a stone
fort, Castillo de San
Marcos (Figure 3.4), to better defend St. Augustine against
challengers.
66

1500–1700
Figure 3.4 The Spanish fort of Castillo de San Marcos helped
Spanish colonists in
St. Augustine fend off marauding
privateers from rival European countries.
Click and Explore

Browse the National Park Service’s
multimedia
resources on Castillo de San
Marcos
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/castillo) to
see how the fort and gates have
looked throughout history.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
Further west, the Spanish in Mexico, intent on expanding their
empire, looked north
to the land of the
Pueblo Indians. Under orders from King Philip II, Juan de Oñate
explored the

American southwest for
Spain in the late 1590s. The Spanish hoped that what we know
as New Mexico would
yield gold and silver,
but the land produced little of value to them. In 1610, Spanish
settlers
established themselves at Santa
Fe—originally named La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San
Francisco de Asís, or
“Royal City of the Holy
Faith of St. Francis of Assisi”—where many Pueblo villages
were located. Santa Fe
became the capital of
the Kingdom of New Mexico, an outpost of the larger Spanish
Viceroyalty of New
Spain, which had its
headquarters in Mexico City.

As they had in other Spanish colonies, Franciscan missionaries
labored to bring
about a spiritual conquest
by converting the Pueblo to Catholicism. At first, the Pueblo
adopted the parts of
Catholicism that
dovetailed with their own long-standing view of the world.
However, Spanish priests
insisted that natives
discard their old ways entirely and angered the Pueblo by
focusing on the young,
drawing them away
from their parents. This deep insult, combined with an extended
period of drought
and increased attacks
by local Apache and Navajo in the 1670s—troubles that the
Pueblo came to believe
were linked to the

Spanish presence—moved the Pueblo to push the Spanish and
their religion from the
area. Pueblo leader
Popé demanded a return to native ways so the hardships his
people faced would end.
To him and
to thousands of others, it seemed obvious that “when Jesus
came, the Corn Mothers
went away.” The
expulsion of the Spanish would bring a return to prosperity and
a pure, native way
of life.
In 1680, the Pueblo launched a coordinated rebellion against the
Spanish. The
Pueblo Revolt killed over
four hundred Spaniards and drove the rest of the settlers,
perhaps as many as two
thousand, south toward

Mexico. However, as droughts and attacks by rival tribes
continued, the Spanish
sensed an opportunity to
regain their foothold. In 1692, they returned and reasserted their
control of the
area. Some of the Spanish
1500–1700
67

explained the Pueblo success in 1680 as the work of the Devil.
Satan, they
believed, had stirred up the
Pueblo to take arms against God’s chosen people—the
Spanish—but the Spanish, and
their God, had
prevailed in the end.
• Compare and contrast the development and character of
the French and Dutch
colonies

in North America
• Discuss the economies of the French and Dutch colonies
in North America
Seventeenth-century French and Dutch colonies in North
America were modest in
comparison to Spain’s
colossal global empire. New France and New Netherland
remained small commercial
operations focused
on the fur trade and did not attract an influx of migrants. The
Dutch in New
Netherland confined their
operations to Manhattan Island, Long Island, the Hudson River
Valley, and what
later became New Jersey.

Dutch trade goods circulated widely among the native peoples
in these areas and
also traveled well into
the interior of the continent along preexisting native trade
routes. French
habitants, or farmer-settlers, eked
out an existence along the St. Lawrence River. French fur
traders and missionaries,
however, ranged far
into the interior of North America, exploring the Great Lakes
region and the
Mississippi River. These
pioneers gave France somewhat inflated imperial claims to
lands that nonetheless
remained firmly under
the dominion of native peoples.

FUR TRADING IN NEW NETHERLAND
The Dutch Republic emerged as a major commercial center in
the 1600s. Its fleets
plied the waters of the
Atlantic, while other Dutch ships sailed to the Far East,
returning with prized
spices like pepper to be
sold in the bustling ports at home, especially Amsterdam. In
North America, Dutch
traders established
themselves first on Manhattan Island.
One of the Dutch directors-general of the North American
settlement, Peter
Stuyvesant, served from 1647
to 1664 and expanded the fledgling outpost of New Netherland

east to present-day
Long Island and for
many miles north along the Hudson River. The resulting
elongated colony served
primarily as a fur-
trading post, with the powerful Dutch West India Company
controlling all commerce.
Fort Amsterdam, on
the southern tip of Manhattan Island, defended the growing city
of New Amsterdam.
In 1655, Stuyvesant
took over the small outpost of New Sweden along the banks of
the Delaware River in
present-day New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. He also defended New
Amsterdam from Indian
attacks by ordering
African slaves to build a protective wall on the city’s

northeastern border, giving
present-day Wall Street
its name (Figure 3.5).
68
1500–1700
Figure 3.5 The Castello Plan is the only extant map of 1660
New Amsterdam (present-
day New York City). The line
with spikes on the right side of the colony is the northeastern
wall for which Wall
Street was named.

New Netherland failed to attract many Dutch colonists; by 1664,
only nine thousand
people were living
there. Conflict with native peoples, as well as dissatisfaction
with the Dutch West
India Company’s
trading practices, made the Dutch outpost an undesirable place
for many migrants.
The small size of
the population meant a severe labor shortage, and to complete
the arduous tasks of
early settlement, the
Dutch West India Company imported some 450 African slaves
between 1626 and 1664.
(The company
had involved itself heavily in the slave trade and in 1637
captured Elmina, the

slave-trading post on
the west coast of Africa, from the Portuguese.) The shortage of
labor also meant
that New Netherland
welcomed non-Dutch immigrants, including Protestants from
Germany, Sweden, Denmark,
and England,
and embraced a degree of religious tolerance, allowing Jewish
immigrants to become
residents beginning
in the 1650s. Thus, a wide variety of people lived in New
Netherland from the
start. Indeed, one observer
claimed eighteen different languages could be heard on the
streets of New
Amsterdam. As new settlers
arrived, the colony of New Netherland stretched farther to the
north and the west

(Figure 3.6).
1500–1700
69
Figure 3.6 This 1684 map of New Netherland shows the extent
of Dutch settlement.

The Dutch West India Company found the business of
colonization in New Netherland
to be expensive. To
share some of the costs, it granted Dutch merchants who
invested heavily in it
patroonships, or large tracts
of land and the right to govern the tenants there. In return, the
shareholder who
gained the patroonship
promised to pay for the passage of at least thirty Dutch farmers
to populate the
colony. One of the
largest patroonships was granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, one
of the directors of
the Dutch West India
Company; it covered most of present-day Albany and
Rensselaer Counties. This
pattern of settlement

created a yawning gap in wealth and status between the tenants,
who paid rent, and
the wealthy patroons.
During the summer trading season, Indians gathered at trading
posts such as the
Dutch site at Beverwijck
(present-day Albany), where they exchanged furs for guns,
blankets, and alcohol.
The furs, especially
beaver pelts destined for the lucrative European millinery
market, would be sent
down the Hudson River
to New Amsterdam. There, slaves or workers would load them
aboard ships bound for
Amsterdam.

Click and Explore
Explore an interactive map of New
Amsterdam in
1660
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/WNET) that
shows the
city plan and the locations of
various structures, including houses,
businesses,
and public buildings. Rolling over the
map reveals relevant historical details,
such as
street names, the identities of certain
buildings and businesses, and the names

of
residents of the houses (when known).
COMMERCE AND CONVERSION IN NEW FRANCE
After Jacques Cartier’s voyages of discovery in the 1530s,
France showed little
interest in creating
70
1500–1700

permanent colonies in North America until the early 1600s,
when Samuel de Champlain
established
Quebec as a French fur-trading outpost. Although the fur trade
was lucrative, the
French saw Canada
as an inhospitable frozen wasteland, and by 1640, fewer than
four hundred settlers
had made their
home there. The sparse French presence meant that colonists
depended on the local
native Algonquian
people; without them, the French would have perished. French
fishermen, explorers,
and fur traders made
extensive contact with the Algonquian. The Algonquian, in turn,
tolerated the
French because the colonists

supplied them with firearms for their ongoing war with the
Iroquois. Thus, the
French found themselves
escalating native wars and supporting the Algonquian against
the Iroquois, who
received weapons from
their Dutch trading partners. These seventeenth-century
conflicts centered on the
lucrative trade in beaver
pelts, earning them the name of the Beaver Wars. In these wars,
fighting between
rival native peoples
spread throughout the Great Lakes region.
A handful of French Jesuit priests also made their way to
Canada, intent on
converting the native

inhabitants to Catholicism. The Jesuits were members of the
Society of Jesus, an
elite religious order
founded in the 1540s to spread Catholicism and combat the
spread of Protestantism.
The first Jesuits
arrived in Quebec in the 1620s, and for the next century, their
numbers did not
exceed forty priests. Like
the Spanish Franciscan missionaries, the Jesuits in the colony
called New France
labored to convert the
native peoples to Catholicism. They wrote detailed annual
reports about their
progress in bringing the
faith to the Algonquian and, beginning in the 1660s, to the
Iroquois. These
documents are known as the

Jesuit Relations (Figure 3.7), and they provide a rich source for
understanding
both the Jesuit view of the
Indians and the Indian response to the colonizers.
One native convert to Catholicism, a Mohawk woman named
Katherine Tekakwitha, so
impressed the
priests with her piety that a Jesuit named Claude Chauchetière
attempted to make
her a saint in the
Church. However, the effort to canonize Tekakwitha faltered
when leaders of the
Church balked at
elevating a “savage” to such a high status; she was eventually
canonized in 2012.
French colonizers
pressured the native inhabitants of New France to convert, but
they virtually never

saw native peoples as
their equals.
1500–1700
71
DEFINING "AMERICAN"

A Jesuit Priest on Indian Healing Traditions
The Jesuit Relations (Figure 3.7) provide incredible
detail about
Indian life. For example, the 1636
edition, written by the Catholic priest Jean de Brébeuf,
addresses the
devastating effects of disease on
native peoples and the efforts made to combat it.
Figure 3.7 French Jesuit missionaries to New France
kept detailed
records of their interactions
with—and observations of—the Algonquian and
Iroquois that they

converted to Catholicism. (credit:
Project Gutenberg).
Let us return to the feasts. The Aoutaerohi is a
remedy which is
only for one particular kind
of disease, which they call also Aoutaerohi, from
the name of a
little Demon as large as the
fist, which they say is in the body of the sick man,
especially
in the part which pains him. They
find out that they are sick of this disease, by means
of a
dream, or by the intervention of some
Sorcerer. . . .

Of three kinds of games especially in use among
these Peoples,—
namely, the games of
crosse [lacrosse], dish, and straw,—the first two
are, they say,
most healing. Is not this worthy
of compassion? There is a poor sick man, fevered
of body and
almost dying, and a miserable
Sorcerer will order for him, as a cooling remedy, a
game of
crosse. Or the sick man himself,
sometimes, will have dreamed that he must die
unless the whole
country shall play crosse for
his health; and, no matter how little may be his
credit, you
will see then in a beautiful field,

Village contending against Village, as to who will
play crosse
the better, and betting against
one another Beaver robes and Porcelain collars, so
as to excite
greater interest.
According to this account, how did Indians attempt to
cure disease? Why
did they prescribe a game of
lacrosse? What benefits might these games have for the
sick?
72
1500–1700

• Identify the first English settlements in America
• Describe the differences between the Chesapeake Bay
colonies and the New
England
colonies
• Compare and contrast the wars between native
inhabitants and English
colonists in
both the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies
• Explain the role of Bacon’s Rebellion in the rise of
chattel slavery in
Virginia

At the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not
established a
permanent settlement in the
Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their
rivals. The English
encouraged emigration
far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch. They established
nearly a dozen
colonies, sending swarms of
immigrants to populate the land. England had experienced a
dramatic rise in
population in the sixteenth
century, and the colonies appeared a welcoming place for those
who faced
overcrowding and grinding

poverty at home. Thousands of English migrants arrived in the
Chesapeake Bay
colonies of Virginia and
Maryland to work in the tobacco fields. Another stream, this
one of pious Puritan
families, sought to
live as they believed scripture demanded and established the
Plymouth,
Massachusetts Bay, New Haven,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island colonies of New England (Figure
3.8).

1500–1700
73
Figure 3.8 In the early seventeenth century, thousands of
English settlers came to
what are now Virginia, Maryland,
and the New England states in search of opportunity and a
better life.
THE DIVERGING CULTURES OF THE NEW ENGLAND AND
CHESAPEAKE COLONIES
Promoters of English colonization in North America, many of
whom never ventured
across the Atlantic,

wrote about the bounty the English would find there. These
boosters of colonization
hoped to turn a
profit—whether by importing raw resources or providing new
markets for English
goods—and spread
Protestantism. The English migrants who actually made the
journey, however, had
different goals. In
Chesapeake Bay, English migrants established Virginia and
Maryland with a decidedly
commercial
orientation. Though the early Virginians at Jamestown hoped to
find gold, they and
the settlers in
Maryland quickly discovered that growing tobacco was the only
sure means of making
money. Thousands

of unmarried, unemployed, and impatient young Englishmen,
along with a few
Englishwomen, pinned
their hopes for a better life on the tobacco fields of these two
colonies.
A very different group of English men and women flocked to
the cold climate and
rocky soil of New
England, spurred by religious motives. Many of the Puritans
crossing the Atlantic
were people who
brought families and children. Often they were following their
ministers in a
migration “beyond the
seas,” envisioning a new English Israel where reformed
Protestantism would grow and
thrive, providing a

model for the rest of the Christian world and a counter to what
they saw as the
Catholic menace. While the
English in Virginia and Maryland worked on expanding their
profitable tobacco
fields, the English in New
England built towns focused on the church, where each
congregation decided what was
best for itself. The
Congregational Church is the result of the Puritan enterprise in
America. Many
historians believe the fault
lines separating what later became the North and South in the
United States
originated in the profound
differences between the Chesapeake and New England colonies.
74

1500–1700
The source of those differences lay in England’s domestic
problems. Increasingly in
the early 1600s,
the English state church—the Church of England, established in
the 1530s—demanded
conformity, or
compliance with its practices, but Puritans pushed for greater
reforms. By the
1620s, the Church of England
began to see leading Puritan ministers and their followers as
outlaws, a national
security threat because of

their opposition to its power. As the noose of conformity
tightened around them,
many Puritans decided
to remove to New England. By 1640, New England had a
population of twenty-five
thousand. Meanwhile,
many loyal members of the Church of England, who ridiculed
and mocked Puritans both
at home and in
New England, flocked to Virginia for economic opportunity.
The troubles in England escalated in the 1640s when civil war
broke out, pitting
Royalist supporters
of King Charles I and the Church of England against
Parliamentarians, the Puritan
reformers and their
supporters in Parliament. In 1649, the Parliamentarians gained

the upper hand and,
in an unprecedented
move, executed Charles I. In the 1650s, therefore, England
became a republic, a
state without a king.
English colonists in America closely followed these events.
Indeed, many Puritans
left New England and
returned home to take part in the struggle against the king and
the national
church. Other English men
and women in the Chesapeake colonies and elsewhere in the
English Atlantic World
looked on in horror
at the mayhem the Parliamentarians, led by the Puritan
insurgents, appeared to
unleash in England. The
turmoil in England made the administration and imperial

oversight of the Chesapeake
and New England
colonies difficult, and the two regions developed divergent
cultures.
THE CHESAPEAKE COLONIES: VIRGINIA AND
MARYLAND
The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland served a
vital purpose in the
developing seventeenth-
century English empire by providing tobacco, a cash crop.
However, the early
history of Jamestown did
not suggest the English outpost would survive. From the outset,
its settlers
struggled both with each

other and with the native inhabitants, the powerful Powhatan,
who controlled the
area. Jealousies and
infighting among the English destabilized the colony. One
member, John Smith, whose
famous map
begins this chapter, took control and exercised near-dictatorial
powers, which
furthered aggravated the
squabbling. The settlers’ inability to grow their own food
compounded this unstable
situation. They were
essentially employees of the Virginia Company of London, an
English joint-stock
company, in which
investors provided the capital and assumed the risk in order to
reap the profit,
and they had to make a

profit for their shareholders as well as for themselves. Most
initially devoted
themselves to finding gold
and silver instead of finding ways to grow their own food.
Early Struggles and the Development of the Tobacco Economy
Poor health, lack of food, and fighting with native peoples took
the lives of many
of the original Jamestown
settlers. The winter of 1609–1610, which became known as “the
starving time,” came
close to annihilating
the colony. By June 1610, the few remaining settlers had
decided to abandon the
area; only the last-
minute arrival of a supply ship from England prevented another

failed colonization
effort. The supply ship
brought new settlers, but only twelve hundred of the seventy-
five hundred who came
to Virginia between
1607 and 1624 survived.
1500–1700
75

MY STORY
George Percy on “The Starving Time”
George Percy, the youngest son of an English
nobleman, was in the first
group of settlers at the
Jamestown Colony. He kept a journal describing their
experiences; in
the excerpt below, he reports on
the privations of the colonists’ third winter.
Now all of us at James Town, beginning to feel
that sharp prick
of hunger which no man truly
describe but he which has tasted the bitterness
thereof, a world

of miseries ensued as the
sequel will express unto you, in so much that some
to satisfy
their hunger have robbed the
store for the which I caused them to be executed.
Then having
fed upon horses and other
beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make
shift with
vermin as dogs, cats, rats, and
mice. All was fish that came to net to satisfy cruel
hunger as
to eat boots, shoes, or any other
leather some could come by, and, those being spent
and devoured,
some were enforced to
search the woods and to feed upon serpents and
snakes and to dig

the earth for wild and
unknown roots, where many of our men were cut
off of and slain
by the savages. And now
famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every
face that
nothing was spared to maintain
life and to do those things which seem incredible
as to dig up
dead corpses out of graves and
to eat them, and some have licked up the blood
which has fallen
from their weak fellows.
—George Percy, “A True Relation of the
Proceedings and
Occurances of Moment which have
happened in Virginia from the Time Sir Thomas

Gates shipwrecked
upon the Bermudes anno
1609 until my departure out of the Country which
was in anno
Domini 1612,” London 1624
What is your reaction to George Percy’s story? How do
you think
Jamestown managed to survive after
such an experience? What do you think the Jamestown
colonists learned?
By the 1620s, Virginia had weathered the worst and gained a
degree of permanence.
Political stability came
slowly, but by 1619, the fledgling colony was operating under
the leadership of a
governor, a council,
and a House of Burgesses. Economic stability came from the

lucrative cultivation of
tobacco. Smoking
tobacco was a long-standing practice among native peoples, and
English and other
European consumers
soon adopted it. In 1614, the Virginia colony began exporting
tobacco back to
England, which earned it a
sizable profit and saved the colony from ruin. A second tobacco
colony, Maryland,
was formed in 1634,
when King Charles I granted its charter to the Calvert famil y for
their loyal
service to England. Cecilius
Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, conceived of Maryland as a
refuge for English
Catholics.
Growing tobacco proved very labor-intensive (Figure 3.9), and

the Chesapeake
colonists needed a steady
workforce to do the hard work of clearing the land and caring
for the tender young
plants. The mature leaf
of the plant then had to be cured (dried), which necessitated the
construction of
drying barns. Once cured,
the tobacco had to be packaged in hogsheads (large wooden
barrels) and loaded
aboard ship, which also
required considerable labor.
76
1500–1700

Figure 3.9 In this 1670 painting by an unknown artist, slaves
work in tobacco-
drying sheds.
To meet these labor demands, early Virginians relied on
indentured servants. An
indenture is a labor
contract that young, impoverished, and often illiterate
Englishmen and occasionally
Englishwomen signed
in England, pledging to work for a number of years (usually
between five and seven)
growing tobacco
in the Chesapeake colonies. In return, indentured servants
received paid passage to

America and food,
clothing, and lodging. At the end of their indenture servants
received “freedom
dues,” usually food and
other provisions, including, in some cases, land provided by the
colony. The
promise of a new life in
America was a strong attraction for members of England’s
underclass, who had few if
any options at home.
In the 1600s, some 100,000 indentured servants traveled to the
Chesapeake Bay. Most
were poor young
men in their early twenties.
Life in the colonies proved harsh, however. Indentured servants
could not marry,
and they were subject to

the will of the tobacco planters who bought their labor
contracts. If they
committed a crime or disobeyed
their masters, they found their terms of service lengthened,
often by several
years. Female indentured
servants faced special dangers in what was essentially a
bachelor colony. Many were
exploited by
unscrupulous tobacco planters who seduced them with promises
of marriage. These
planters would then
sell their pregnant servants to other tobacco planters to avoid
the costs of
raising a child.
Nonetheless, those indentured servants who completed their
term of service often

began new lives
as tobacco planters. To entice even more migrants to the New
World, the Virginia
Company also
implemented the headright system, in which those who paid
their own passage to
Virginia received fifty
acres plus an additional fifty for each servant or family member
they brought with
them. The headright
system and the promise of a new life for servants acted as
powerful incentives for
English migrants to
hazard the journey to the New World.

Click and Explore
Visit Virtual Jamestown
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/jamestown1) to access a
database of contracts of indentured
servants.
Search it by name to find an ancestor or
browse by occupation, destination, or
county of
origin.

1500–1700
77
The Anglo-Powhatan Wars
By choosing to settle along the rivers on the banks of the
Chesapeake, the English
unknowingly placed
themselves at the center of the Powhatan Empire, a powerful
Algonquian confederacy
of thirty native
groups with perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand people.
The territory of the
equally impressive

Susquehannock people also bordered English settlements at the
north end of the
Chesapeake Bay.
Tensions ran high between the English and the Powhatan, and
near-constant war
prevailed. The First
Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614) resulted not only from the
English colonists’
intrusion onto Powhatan
land, but also from their refusal to follow native protocol by
giving gifts.
English actions infuriated and
insulted the Powhatan. In 1613, the settlers captured Pocahontas
(also called
Matoaka), the daughter of a
Powhatan headman named Wahunsonacook, and gave her in
marriage to Englishman John
Rolfe. Their

union, and her choice to remain with the English, helped quell
the war in 1614.
Pocahontas converted to
Christianity, changing her name to Rebecca, and sailed with her
husband and several
other Powhatan to
England where she was introduced to King James I (Figure
3.10). Promoters of
colonization publicized
Pocahontas as an example of the good work of converting the
Powhatan to
Christianity.
Figure 3.10 This 1616 engraving by Simon van de Passe,
completed when Pocahontas

and John Rolfe were
presented at court in England, is the only known contemporary
image of Pocahontas.
Note her European garb and
pose. What message did the painter likely intend to convey with
this portrait of
Pocahontas, the daughter of a
powerful Indian chief?
Click and Explore
Explore the interactive exhibit Changing
Images of

Pocahontas
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/pocahontas)
on PBS’s
website to see the many ways
artists have portrayed Pocahontas over
the
centuries.
Peace in Virginia did not last long. The Second Anglo-Powhatan
War (1620s) broke
out because of
78
1500–1700

the expansion of the English settlement nearly one hundred
miles into the interior,
and because of the
continued insults and friction caused by English activities. The
Powhatan attacked
in 1622 and succeeded
in killing almost 350 English, about a third of the settlers. The
English responded
by annihilating every
Powhatan village around Jamestown and from then on became
even more intolerant. The
Third Anglo-
Powhatan War (1644–1646) began with a surprise attack in
which the Powhatan killed

around five
hundred English colonists. However, their ultimate defeat in
this conflict forced
the Powhatan to
acknowledge King Charles I as their sovereign. The Anglo-
Powhatan Wars, spanning
nearly forty years,
illustrate the degree of native resistance that resulted from
English intrusion
into the Powhatan
confederacy.
The Rise of Slavery in the Chesapeake Bay Colonies
The transition from indentured servitude to slavery as the main
labor source for
some English colonies

happened first in the West Indies. On the small island of
Barbados, colonized in
the 1620s, English planters
first grew tobacco as their main export crop, but in the 1640s,
they converted to
sugarcane and began
increasingly to rely on African slaves. In 1655, England
wrestled control of
Jamaica from the Spanish
and quickly turned it into a lucrative sugar island, run on slave
labor, for its
expanding empire. While
slavery was slower to take hold in the Chesapeake colonies, by
the end of the
seventeenth century, both
Virginia and Maryland had also adopted chattel slavery—which
legally defined
Africans as property and

not people—as the dominant form of labor to grow tobacco.
Chesapeake colonists also
enslaved native
people.
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery—
which did not exist in
England—had not
yet become an institution in colonial America. Many Africans
worked as servants
and, like their white
counterparts, could acquire land of their own. Some Africans
who converted to
Christianity became free
landowners with white servants. The change in the status of
Africans in the
Chesapeake to that of slaves

occurred in the last decades of the seventeenth century.
Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising of both whites and blacks who
believed that the
Virginia government was
impeding their access to land and wealth and seemed to do little
to clear the land
of Indians, hastened
the transition to African slavery in the Chesapeake colonies.
The rebellion takes
its name from Nathaniel
Bacon, a wealthy young Englishman who arrived in Virginia in
1674. Despite an early
friendship with
Virginia’s royal governor, William Berkeley, Bacon found
himself excluded from the
governor’s circle
of influential friends and councilors. He wanted land on the
Virginia frontier, but

the governor, fearing
war with neighboring Indian tribes, forbade further expansion.
Bacon marshaled
others, especially former
indentured servants who believed the governor was limiting
their economic
opportunities and denying
them the right to own tobacco farms. Bacon’s followers
believed Berkeley’s frontier
policy didn’t protect
English settlers enough. Worse still in their eyes, Governor
Berkeley tried to keep
peace in Virginia by
signing treaties with various local native peoples. Bacon and his
followers, who
saw all Indians as an
obstacle to their access to land, pursued a policy of
extermination.

Tensions between the English and the native peoples in the
Chesapeake colonies led
to open conflict.
In 1675, war broke out when Susquehannock warriors attacked
settlements on
Virginia’s frontier, killing
English planters and destroying English plantations, including
one owned by Bacon.
In 1676, Bacon and
other Virginians attacked the Susquehannoc k without the
governor’s approval. When
Berkeley ordered
Bacon’s arrest, Bacon led his followers to Jamestown, forced
the governor to flee
to the safety of Virginia’s
eastern shore, and then burned the city. The civil war known as
Bacon’s Rebellion,
a vicious struggle

between supporters of the governor and those who supported
Bacon, ensued. Reports
of the rebellion
traveled back to England, leading Charles II to dispatch both
royal troops and
English commissioners
to restore order in the tobacco colonies. By the end of 1676,
Virginians loyal to
the governor gained
the upper hand, executing several leaders of the rebellion.
Bacon escaped the
hangman’s noose, instead
dying of dysentery. The rebellion fizzled in 1676, but
Virginians remained divided
as supporters of Bacon
continued to harbor grievances over access to Indian land.

1500–1700
79
Bacon’s Rebellion helped to catalyze the creation of a system of
racial slavery in
the Chesapeake colonies.
At the time of the rebellion, indentured servants made up the
majority of laborers

in the region. Wealthy
whites worried over the presence of this large class of laborers
and the relative
freedom they enjoyed,
as well as the alliance that black and white servants had forged
in the course of
the rebellion. Replacing
indentured servitude with black slavery diminished these risks,
alleviating the
reliance on white
indentured servants, who were often dissatisfied and
troublesome, and creating a
caste of racially defined
laborers whose movements were strictly controlled. It also
lessened the possibility
of further alliances
between black and white workers. Racial slavery even served to

heal some of the
divisions between
wealthy and poor whites, who could now unite as members of a
“superior” racial
group.
While colonial laws in the tobacco colonies had made slavery a
legal institution
before Bacon’s Rebellion,
new laws passed in the wake of the rebellion severely curtailed
black freedom and
laid the foundation for
racial slavery. Virginia passed a law in 1680 prohibiting free
blacks and slaves
from bearing arms, banning
blacks from congregating in large numbers, and establishing
harsh punishments for
slaves who assaulted
Christians or attempted escape. Two years later, another

Virginia law stipulated
that all Africans brought
to the colony would be slaves for life. Thus, the increasing
reliance on slaves in
the tobacco colonies—and
the draconian laws instituted to control them—not only helped
planters meet labor
demands, but also
served to assuage English fears of further uprisings and
alleviate class tensions
between rich and poor
whites.
DEFINING "AMERICAN"
Robert Beverley on Servants and Slaves

Robert Beverley was a wealthy Jamestown planter and
slaveholder. This
excerpt from his History and
Present State of Virginia, published in 1705, clearly
illustrates the
contrast between white servants and
black slaves.
Their Servants, they distinguish by the Names of
Slaves for
Life, and Servants for a time.
Slaves are the Negroes, and their Posterity,
following the
condition of the Mother, according
to the Maxim, partus sequitur ventrem [status
follows the womb].
They are call’d Slaves, in
respect of the time of their Servitude, because it is
for Life.

Servants, are those which serve only for a few
years, according
to the time of their Indenture,
or the Custom of the Country. The Custom of the
Country takes
place upon such as have no
Indentures. The Law in this case is, that if such
Servants be
under Nineteen years of Age,
they must be brought into Court, to have their Age
adjudged; and
from the Age they are judg’d
to be of, they must serve until they reach four and
twenty: But
if they be adjudged upwards of
Nineteen, they are then only to be Servants for the
term of five

Years.
The Male-Servants, and Slaves of both Sexes, are
employed
together in Tilling and Manuring
the Ground, in Sowing and Planting Tobacco,
Corn, &c. Some
Distinction indeed is made
between them in their Cloaths, and Food; but the
Work of both,
is no other than what the
Overseers, the Freemen, and the Planters
themselves do.
Sufficient Distinction is also made between the
Female-Servants,
and Slaves; for a White
Woman is rarely or never put to work in the
Ground, if she be
good for any thing else: And

to Discourage all Planters from using any Women
so, their Law
imposes the heaviest Taxes
upon Female Servants working in the Ground,
while it suffers all
other white Women to be
absolutely exempted: Whereas on the other hand, it
is a common
thing to work a Woman
Slave out of Doors; nor does the Law make any
Distinction in her
Taxes, whether her Work
be Abroad, or at Home.
According to Robert Beverley, what are the differences
between servants
and slaves? What protections
did servants have that slaves did not?

80
1500–1700
PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
The second major area to be colonized by the English in the
first half of the
seventeenth century, New
England, differed markedly in its foundi ng principles from the
commercially
oriented Chesapeake tobacco
colonies. Settled largely by waves of Puritan families in the
1630s, New England

had a religious orientation
from the start. In England, reform-minded men and women had
been calling for
greater changes to the
English national church since the 1580s. These reformers, who
followed the
teachings of John Calvin and
other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their
insistence on
“purifying” the Church
of England of what they believed to be un-scriptural, especially
Catholic elements
that lingered in its
institutions and practices.
Many who provided leadership in early New England were
learned ministers who had
studied at

Cambridge or Oxford but who, because they had questioned the
practices of the
Church of England, had
been deprived of careers by the king and his officials in an
effort to silence all
dissenting voices. Other
Puritan leaders, such as the first governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, John
Winthrop, came from the
privileged class of English gentry. These well-to-do Puritans
and many thousands
more left their English
homes not to establish a land of religious freedom, but to
practice their own
religion without persecution.
Puritan New England offered them the opportunity to live as
they believed the Bible
demanded. In their

“New” England, they set out to create a model of reformed
Protestantism, a new
English Israel.
The conflict generated by Puritanism had divided English
society, because the
Puritans demanded reforms
that undermined the traditional festive culture. For example,
they denounced
popular pastimes like bear-
baiting—letting dogs attack a chained bear—which were often
conducted on Sundays
when people had
a few leisure hours. In the culture where William Shakespeare
had produced his
masterpieces, Puritans
called for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places
of decadence.

Indeed, the Bible itself
became part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who
headed the Church of
England. Soon after
ascending the throne, James commissioned a new version of the
Bible in an effort to
stifle Puritan reliance
on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John
Calvin and placed God’s
authority above the
monarch’s. The King James Version, published in 1611, instead
emphasized the
majesty of kings.
During the 1620s and 1630s, the conflict escalated to the point
where the state
church prohibited Puritan
ministers from preaching. In the Church’s view, Puritans
represented a national

security threat, because
their demands for cultural, social, and religious reforms
undermined the king’s
authority. Unwilling
to conform to the Church of England, many Puritans found
refuge in the New World.
Yet those who
emigrated to the Americas were not united. Some called for a
complete break with
the Church of England,
while others remained committed to reforming the national
church.
Plymouth: The First Puritan Colony
The first group of Puritans to make their way across the Atlantic
was a small
contingent known as the

Pilgrims. Unlike other Puritans, they insisted on a complete
separation from the
Church of England and
had first migrated to the Dutch Republic seeking religious
freedom. Although they
found they could
worship without hindrance there, they grew concerned that they
were losing their
Englishness as they saw
their children begin to learn the Dutch language and adopt
Dutch ways. In addition,
the English Pilgrims
(and others in Europe) feared another attack on the Dutch
Republic by Catholic
Spain. Therefore, in 1620,
they moved on to found the Plymouth Colony in present-day

Massachusetts. The
governor of Plymouth,
William Bradford, was a Separatist, a proponent of complete
separation from the
English state church.
Bradford and the other Pilgrim Separatists represented a major
challenge to the
prevailing vision of a
unified English national church and empire. On board the
Mayflower, which was bound
for Virginia but
landed on the tip of Cape Cod, Bradford and forty other adult
men signed the
Mayflower Compact (Figure
3.11), which presented a religious (rather than an economic)
rationale for
colonization. The compact
expressed a community ideal of working together. When a

larger exodus of Puritans
established the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, the Pilgrims at
Plymouth welcomed them and
the two colonies
cooperated with each other.
1500–1700
81

AMERICANA
The Mayflower Compact and Its Religious Rationale
The Mayflower Compact, which forty-one Pilgrim men
signed on board the
Mayflower in Plymouth
Harbor, has been called the first American governing
document,
predating the U.S. Constitution by over
150 years. But was the Mayflower Compact a
constitution? How much
authority did it convey, and to
whom?

Figure 3.11 The original Mayflower Compact is no
longer extant; only
copies, such as this ca.1645
transcription by William Bradford, remain.
In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are
underwritten, the
loyal subjects of our
dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of
God, of Great
Britain, France, and Ireland,
King, defender of the Faith, etc.
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and
advancements of the
Christian faith and honor
of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first

colony in
the Northern parts of Virginia,
do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the
presence of
God, and one another,
covenant and combine ourselves together into a
civil body
politic; for our better ordering, and
preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid;
and by
virtue hereof to enact, constitute,
and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances,
acts,
constitutions, and offices, from time to
time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient
for the
general good of the colony; unto
which we promise all due submission and

obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed
our names at Cape
Cod the 11th of
November, in the year of the reign of our
Sovereign Lord King
James, of England, France,
and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the
fifty-fourth,
1620
Different labor systems also distinguished early Puritan New
England from the
Chesapeake colonies.
Puritans expected young people to work diligently at their
calling, and all members
of their large families,

including children, did the bulk of the work necessary to run
homes, farms, and
businesses. Very few
migrants came to New England as laborers; in fact, New
England towns protected
their disciplined
82
1500–1700
homegrown workforce by refusing to allow outsiders in,
assuring their sons and
daughters of steady
employment. New England’s labor system produced remarkable
results, notably a

powerful maritime-
based economy with scores of oceangoing ships and the crews
necessary to sail them.
New England
mariners sailing New England–made ships transported Virginian
tobacco and West
Indian sugar
throughout the Atlantic World.
“A City upon a Hill”
A much larger group of English Puritans left England in the
1630s, establishing the
Massachusetts Bay
Colony, the New Haven Colony, the Connecticut Colony, and
Rhode Island. Unlike the
exodus of young

males to the Chesapeake colonies, these migrants were families
with young children
and their university-
trained ministers. Their aim, according to John Winthrop
(Figure 3.12), the first
governor of Massachusetts
Bay, was to create a model of reformed Protestantism—a “city
upon a hill,” a new
English Israel. The
idea of a “city upon a hill” made clear the religious orientation
of the New
England settlement, and the
charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated as a goal that
the colony’s people
“may be soe religiously,
peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie
Conversacon, maie

wynn and incite the
Natives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie
true God and Saulor
of Mankinde, and
the Christian Fayth.” To illustrate this, the seal of the
Massachusetts Bay Company
(Figure 3.12) shows a
half-naked Indian who entreats more of the English to “come
over and help us.”
Figure 3.12 In the 1629 seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
(a), an Indian is
shown asking colonists to “Come
over and help us.” This seal indicates the religious ambitions of
John Winthrop

(b), the colony’s first governor, for his
“city upon a hill.”
Puritan New England differed in many ways from both England
and the rest of Europe.
Protestants
emphasized literacy so that everyone could read the Bible. This
attitude was in
stark contrast to that
of Catholics, who refused to tolerate private ownership of
Bibles in the
vernacular. The Puritans, for
their part, placed a special emphasis on reading scripture, and
their commitment to
literacy led to the
establishment of the first printing press in English America in
1636. Four years

later, in 1640, they
published the first book in North America, the Bay Psalm Book.
As Calvinists,
Puritans adhered to the
doctrine of predestination, whereby a few “elect” would be
saved and all others
damned. No one could be
sure whether they were predestined for salvation, but through
introspection, guided
by scripture, Puritans
hoped to find a glimmer of redemptive grace. Church
membership was restricted to
those Puritans who
were willing to provide a conversion narrative telling how they
came to understand
their spiritual estate
by hearing sermons and studying the Bible.

1500–1700
83
Although many people assume Puritans escaped England to
establish religious
freedom, they proved
to be just as intolerant as the English state church. When
dissenters, including
Puritan minister Roger

Williams and Anne Hutchinson, challenged Governor Winthrop
in Massachusetts Bay in
the 1630s, they
were banished. Roger Williams questioned the Puritans’ taking
of Indian land.
Williams also argued for
a complete separation from the Church of England, a position
other Puritans in
Massachusetts rejected,
as well as the idea that the state could not punish individuals for
their beliefs.
Although he did accept
that nonbelievers were destined for eternal damnation, Williams
did not think the
state could compel
true orthodoxy. Puritan authorities found him guilty of
spreading dangerous ideas,
but he went on to

found Rhode Island as a colony that sheltered dissenting
Puritans from their
brethren in Massachusetts. In
Rhode Island, Williams wrote favorably about native peoples,
contrasting their
virtues with Puritan New
England’s intolerance.
Anne Hutchinson also ran afoul of Puritan authorities for her
criticism of the
evolving religious practices
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In particular, she held that
Puritan ministers in
New England taught
a shallow version of Protestantism emphasizing hierarchy and
actions—a “covenant of
works” rather

than a “covenant of grace.” Literate Puritan women like
Hutchinson presented a
challenge to the male
ministers’ authority. Indeed, her major offense was her claim of
direct religious
revelation, a type of
spiritual experience that negated the role of ministers. Because
of Hutchinson’s
beliefs and her defiance
of authority in the colony, especially that of Governor
Winthrop, Puritan
authorities tried and convicted
her of holding false beliefs. In 1638, she was excommunicated
and banished from the
colony. She went to
Rhode Island and later, in 1642, sought safety among the Dutch
in New Netherland.
The following year,

Algonquian warriors killed Hutchinson and her family. In
Massachusetts, Governor
Winthrop noted her
death as the righteous judgment of God against a heretic.
Like many other Europeans, the Puritans believed in the
supernatural. Every event
appeared to be a
sign of God’s mercy or judgment, and people believed that
witches allied themselves
with the Devil to
carry out evil deeds and deliberate harm such as the sickness or
death of children,
the loss of cattle, and
other catastrophes. Hundreds were accused of witchcraft in
Puritan New England,
including townspeople
whose habits or appearance bothered their neighbors or who
appeared threatening for

any reason.
Women, seen as more susceptible to the Devil because of their
supposedly weaker
constitutions, made up
the vast majority of suspects and those who were executed. The
most notorious cases
occurred in Salem
Village in 1692. Many of the accusers who prosecuted the
suspected witches had been
traumatized by the
Indian wars on the frontier and by unprecedented political and
cultural changes in
New England. Relying
on their belief in witchcraft to help make sense of their
changing world, Puritan
authorities executed
nineteen people and caused the deaths of several others.

Click and Explore
Explore the Salem Witchcraft Trials
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/salemwitch) to
learn more about the prosecution of
witchcraft in
seventeenth-century New England.
Puritan Relationships with Native Peoples

Like their Spanish and French Catholic rivals, English Puritans
in America took
steps to convert native
peoples to their version of Christianity. John Eliot, the leading
Puritan
missionary in New England, urged
natives in Massachusetts to live in “praying towns” established
by English
authorities for converted
84
1500–1700
Indians, and to adopt the Puritan emphasis on the centrality of
the Bible. In

keeping with the Protestant
emphasis on reading scripture, he translated the Bible into the
local Algonquian
language and published
his work in 1663. Eliot hoped that as a result of his efforts,
some of New
England’s native inhabitants
would become preachers.
Tensions had existed from the beginning between the Puritans
and the native people
who controlled
southern New England (Figure 3.13). Relationships deteriorated
as the Puritans
continued to expand their
settlements aggressively and as European ways increasingly
disrupted native life.
These strains led to King

Philip’s War (1675–1676), a massive regional conflict that was
nearly successful in
pushing the English out
of New England.
Figure 3.13 This map indicates the domains of New England’s
native inhabitants in
1670, a few years before King
Philip’s War.
When the Puritans began to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, local
Algonquian peoples
had viewed them as

potential allies in the conflicts already simmering between rival
native groups. In
1621, the Wampanoag,
led by Massasoit, concluded a peace treaty with the Pilgrims at
Plymouth. In the
1630s, the Puritans in
Massachusetts and Plymouth allied themselves with the
Narragansett and Mohegan
people against the
Pequot, who had recently expanded their claims into southern
New England. In May
1637, the Puritans
attacked a large group of several hundred Pequot along the
Mystic River in
Connecticut. To the horror of
their native allies, the Puritans massacred all but a handful of
the men, women,
and children they found.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritans had pushed their
way further into the
interior of New
England, establishing outposts along the Connecticut River
Valley. There seemed no
end to their
expansion. Wampanoag leader Metacom or Metacomet, also
known as King Philip among
the English,
was determined to stop the encroachment. The Wampanoag,
along with the Nipmuck,
Pocumtuck, and
Narragansett, took up the hatchet to drive the English from the
land. In the
ensuing conflict, called King
Philip’s War, native forces succeeded in destroying half of the
frontier Puritan
towns; however, in the end,

the English (aided by Mohegans and Christian Indians)
prevailed and sold many
captives into slavery
in the West Indies. (The severed head of King Philip was
publicly displayed in
Plymouth.) The war also
forever changed the English perception of native peoples; from
then on, Puritan
writers took great pains to
vilify the natives as bloodthirsty savages. A new type of racial
hatred became a
defining feature of Indian-
English relationships in the Northeast.

1500–1700
85
MY STORY
Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative
Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman whom Indian
tribes captured and
imprisoned for several weeks
during King Philip’s War. After her release, she wrote
The Narrative of

the Captivity and the Restoration
of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which was published in 1682
(Figure 3.14). The
book was an immediate
sensation that was reissued in multiple editions for over
a century.
Figure 3.14 Puritan woman Mary Rowlandson wrote her
captivity
narrative, the front cover of which is
shown here (a), after her imprisonment during King
Philip’s War. In her
narrative, she tells of her
treatment by the Indians holding her as well as of her
meetings with

the Wampanoag leader Metacom
(b), shown in a contemporary portrait.
But now, the next morning, I must turn my back
upon the town,
and travel with them into the
vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither. It
is not my
tongue, or pen, can express
the sorrows of my heart, and bitterness of my spirit
that I had
at this departure: but God was
with me in a wonderful manner, carrying me along,
and bearing up
my spirit, that it did not
quite fail. One of the Indians carried my poor
wounded babe upon
a horse; it went moaning

all along, “I shall die, I shall die.” I went on foot
after it,
with sorrow that cannot be expressed.
At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in
my arms
till my strength failed, and I fell down
with it. Then they set me upon a horse with my
wounded child in
my lap, and there being
no furniture upon the horse’s back, as we were
going down a
steep hill we both fell over the
horse’s head, at which they, like inhumane
creatures, laughed,
and rejoiced to see it, though
I thought we should there have ended our days, as
overcome with

so many difficulties. But
the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me
along, that I
might see more of His power;
yea, so much that I could never have thought of,
had I not
experienced it.
What sustains Rowlandson her during her ordeal? How
does she
characterize her captors? What do you
think made her narrative so compelling to readers?
86
1500–1700

Click and Explore
Access the entire text of Mary
Rowlandson’s
captivity narrative
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/captivenarr)
at the
Gutenberg Project.

• Explain the reasons for the rise of slavery in the
American colonies
• Describe changes to Indian life, including warfare and
hunting
• Contrast European and Indian views on property
• Assess the impact of European settlement on the
environment
As Europeans moved beyond exploration and into colonization
of the Americas, they
brought changes to
virtually every aspect of the land and its people, from trade and
hunting to
warfare and personal property.
European goods, ideas, and diseases shaped the changing
continent.

As Europeans established their colonies, their societies also
became segmented and
divided along religious
and racial lines. Most people in these societies were not free;
they labored as
servants or slaves, doing the
work required to produce wealth for others. By 1700, the
American continent had
become a place of stark
contrasts between slavery and freedom, between the haves and
the have-nots.
THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY
Everywhere in the American colonies, a crushing demand for
labor existed to grow
New World cash

crops, especially sugar and tobacco. This need led Europeans to
rely increasingly
on Africans, and after
1600, the movement of Africans across the Atlantic accelerated.
The English crown
chartered the Royal
African Company in 1672, giving the company a monopoly over
the transport of
African slaves to the
English colonies. Over the next four decades, the company
transported around
350,000 Africans from their
homelands. By 1700, the tiny English sugar island of Barbados
had a population of
fifty thousand slaves,
and the English had encoded the institution of chattel slavery
into colonial law.
This new system of African slavery came slowly to the English

colonists, who did
not have slavery at
home and preferred to use servant labor. Nevertheless, by the
end of the
seventeenth century, the English
everywhere in America—and particularly in the Chesapeake Bay
colonies—had come to
rely on African
slaves. While Africans had long practiced slavery among their
own people, it had
not been based on race.
Africans enslaved other Africans as war captives, for crimes,
and to settle debts;
they generally used their
slaves for domestic and small-scale agricultural work, not for
growing cash crops
on large plantations.

Additionally, African slavery was often a temporary condition
rather than a
lifelong sentence, and, unlike
New World slavery, it was typically not heritable (passed from
a slave mother to
her children).
The growing slave trade with Europeans had a profound impact
on the people of West
Africa, giving
prominence to local chieftains and merchants who traded slaves
for European
textiles, alcohol, guns,
tobacco, and food. Africans also charged Europeans for the
right to trade in slaves
and imposed taxes on

1500–1700
87
slave purchases. Different African groups and kingdoms even
staged large-scale
raids on each other to
meet the demand for slaves.
Once sold to traders, all slaves sent to America endured the
hellish Middle
Passage, the transatlantic
crossing, which took one to two months. By 1625, more than
325,800 Africans had

been shipped to the
New World, though many thousands perished during the voyage.
An astonishing number,
some four
million, were transported to the Caribbean between 1501 and
1830. When they reached
their destination
in America, Africans found themselves trapped in shockingly
brutal slave societies.
In the Chesapeake
colonies, they faced a lifetime of harvesting and processing
tobacco.
Everywhere, Africans resisted slavery, and running away was
common. In Jamaica and
elsewhere,
runaway slaves created maroon communities, groups that

resisted recapture and eked
a living from the
land, rebuilding their communities as best they could. When
possible, they adhered
to traditional ways,
following spiritual leaders such as Vodun priests.
CHANGES TO INDIAN LIFE
While the Americas remained firmly under the control of native
peoples in the first
decades of European
settlement, conflict increased as colonization spread and
Europeans placed greater
demands upon the
native populations, including expecting them to convert to
Christianity (either

Catholicism or
Protestantism). Throughout the seventeenth century, the still-
powerful native
peoples and confederacies
that retained control of the land waged war against the invading
Europeans,
achieving a degree of success
in their effort to drive the newcomers from the continent.
At the same time, European goods had begun to change Indian
life radically. In the
1500s, some of the
earliest objects Europeans introduced to Indians were glass
beads, copper kettles,
and metal utensils.
Native people often adapted these items for their own use. For
example, some cut up
copper kettles and

refashioned the metal for other uses, including jewelry that
conferred status on
the wearer, who was seen
as connected to the new European source of raw materials.
As European settlements grew throughout the 1600s, European
goods flooded native
communities. Soon
native people were using these items for the same purposes as
the Europeans. For
example, many native
inhabitants abandoned their animal-skin clothing in favor of
European textiles.
Similarly, clay cookware
gave way to metal cooking implements, and Indians found that
European flint and
steel made starting

fires much easier (Figure 3.15).
Figure 3.15 In this 1681 portrait, the Niantic-Narragansett chief
Ninigret wears a
combination of European and
Indian goods. Which elements of each culture are evident in this
portrait?
The abundance of European goods gave rise to new artistic
objects. For example,
iron awls made the
creation of shell beads among the native people of the Eastern
Woodlands much
easier, and the result
88

1500–1700
was an astonishing increase in the production of wampum, shell
beads used in
ceremonies and as jewelry
and currency. Native peoples had always placed goods in the
graves of their
departed, and this practice
escalated with the arrival of European goods. Archaeologists
have found enormous
caches of European
trade goods in the graves of Indians on the East Coast.
Native weapons changed dramatically as well, creating an arms
race among the

peoples living in
European colonization zones. Indians refashioned European
brassware into arrow
points and turned axes
used for chopping wood into weapons. The most prized piece of
European weaponry to
obtain was a
musket, or light, long-barreled European gun. In order to trade
with Europeans for
these, native peoples
intensified their harvesting of beaver, commercializing their
traditional practice.
The influx of European materials made warfare more lethal and
changed traditional
patterns of authority
among tribes. Formerly weaker groups, if they had access to
European metal and

weapons, suddenly
gained the upper hand against once-dominant groups. The
Algonquian, for instance,
traded with the
French for muskets and gained power against their enemies, the
Iroquois.
Eventually, native peoples also
used their new weapons against the European colonizers who
had provided them.
Click and Explore
Explore the complexity of Indian-
European

relationships
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/NHC) in the
series
of primary source documents on the
National Humanities Center site.
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES
The European presence in America spurred countless changes in
the environment,
setting into motion
chains of events that affected native animals as well as people.
The popularity of
beaver-trimmed hats
in Europe, coupled with Indians’ desire for European weapons,

led to the
overhunting of beaver in the
Northeast. Soon, beavers were extinct in New England, New
York, and other areas.
With their loss came
the loss of beaver ponds, which had served as habitats for fish
as well as water
sources for deer, moose, and
other animals. Furthermore, Europeans introduced pigs, which
they allowed to forage
in forests and other
wildlands. Pigs consumed the foods on which deer and other
indigenous species
depended, resulting in
scarcity of the game native peoples had traditionally hunted.
European ideas about owning land as private property clashed

with natives’
understanding of land use.
Native peoples did not believe in private ownership of land;
instead, they viewed
land as a resource to be
held in common for the benefit of the group. The European idea
of usufruct—the
right to common land use
and enjoyment—comes close to the native understanding, but
colonists did not
practice usufruct widely in
America. Colonizers established fields, fences, and other means
of demarcating
private property. Native
peoples who moved seasonally to take advantage of natural
resources now found areas
off limits, claimed
by colonizers because of their insistence on private-property

rights.
The Introduction of Disease
Perhaps European colonization’s single greatest impact on the
North American
environment was the
introduction of disease. Microbes to which native inhabitants
had no immunity led
to death everywhere
Europeans settled. Along the New England coast between 1616
and 1618, epidemics
claimed the lives of
75 percent of the native people. In the 1630s, half the Huron
and Iroquois around
the Great Lakes died

1500–1700
89
of smallpox. As is often the case with disease, the very young
and the very old
were the most vulnerable
and had the highest mortality rates. The loss of the older
generation meant the
loss of knowledge and
tradition, while the death of children only compounded the

trauma, creating
devastating implications for
future generations.
Some native peoples perceived disease as a weapon used by
hostile spiritual forces,
and they went to war
to exorcise the disease from their midst. These “mourning wars”
in eastern North
America were designed
to gain captives who would either be adopted (“requickened” as
a replacement for a
deceased loved one)
or ritually tortured and executed to assuage the anger and grief
caused by loss.
The Cultivation of Plants

European expansion in the Americas led to an unprecedented
movement of plants
across the Atlantic. A
prime example is tobacco, which became a valuable export as
the habit of smoking,
previously unknown in
Europe, took hold (Figure 3.16). Another example is sugar.
Columbus brought
sugarcane to the Caribbean
on his second voyage in 1494, and thereafter a wide variety of
other herbs,
flowers, seeds, and roots made
the transatlantic voyage.

Figure 3.16 Adriaen van Ostade, a Dutch artist, painted An
Apothecary Smoking in an
Interior in 1646. The large
European market for American tobacco strongly influenced the
development of some of
the American colonies.
Just as pharmaceutical companies today scour the natural world
for new drugs,
Europeans traveled to
America to discover new medicines. The task of cataloging the
new plants found
there helped give birth
to the science of botany. Early botanists included the English
naturalist Sir Hans
Sloane, who traveled to
Jamaica in 1687 and there recorded hundreds of new plants
(Figure 3.17). Sloane

also helped popularize
the drinking of chocolate, made from the cacao bean, in
England.
90
1500–1700
Figure 3.17 English naturalist Sir Hans Sloane traveled to
Jamaica and other
Caribbean islands to catalog the flora
of the new world.
Indians, who possessed a vast understanding of local New
World plants and their

properties, would have
been a rich source of information for those European botanists
seeking to find and
catalog potentially
useful plants. Enslaved Africans, who had a tradition of the use
of medicinal
plants in their native land,
adapted to their new surroundings by learning the use of New
World plants through
experimentation
or from the native inhabitants. Native peoples and Africans
employed their
knowledge effectively within
their own communities. One notable example was the use of the
peacock flower to
induce abortions:
Indian and enslaved African women living in oppressive
colonial regimes are said to

have used this herb
to prevent the birth of children into slavery. Europeans
distrusted medical
knowledge that came from
African or native sources, however, and thus lost the benefit of
this source of
information.
1500–1700
91

Key Terms
headright system a system in which parcels of land were granted
to settlers who
could pay their own
way to Virginia
indenture a labor contract that promised young men, and
sometimes women, money and
land after they
worked for a set period of years
Jesuits members of the Society of Jesus, an elite Catholic
religious order founded

in the 1540s to spread
Catholicism and to combat the spread of Protestantism
maroon communities groups of runaway slaves who resisted
recapture and eked a
living from the land
Middle Passage the perilous, often deadly transatlantic crossing
of slave ships
from the African coast to
the New World
musket a light, long-barreled European gun
patroonships large tracts of land and governing rights granted to
merchants by the

Dutch West India
Company in order to encourage colonization
repartimiento a Spanish colonial system requiring Indian towns
to supply workers
for the colonizers
Timucua the native people of Florida, whom the Spanish
displaced with the founding
of St. Augustine,
the first Spanish settlement in North America
wampum shell beads used in ceremonies and as jewelry and
currency
Summary

In their outposts at St. Augustine and Santa Fe, the Spanish
never found the fabled
mountains of gold they
sought. They did find many native people to convert to
Catholicism, but their zeal
nearly cost them the
colony of Santa Fe, which they lost for twelve years after the
Pueblo Revolt. In
truth, the grand dreams of
wealth, conversion, and a social order based on Spanish control
never came to pass
as Spain envisioned
them.

The French and Dutch established colonies in the northeastern
part of North
America: the Dutch in
present-day New York, and the French in present-day Canada.
Both colonies were
primarily trading posts
for furs. While they failed to attract many colonists from their
respective home
countries, these outposts
nonetheless intensified imperial rivalries in North America.
Both the Dutch and the
French relied on native
peoples to harvest the pelts that proved profitable in Europe.

The English came late to colonization of the Americas,
establishing stable
settlements in the 1600s after
several unsuccessful attempts in the 1500s. After Roanoke
Colony failed in 1587,
the English found more
success with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth
in 1620. The two
colonies were very
different in origin. The Virginia Company of London founded
Jamestown with the
express purpose
of making money for its investors, while Puritans founded
Plymouth to practice
their own brand of

Protestantism without interference.
92
1500–1700
Both colonies battled difficult circumstances, including poor
relationships with
neighboring Indian tribes.
Conflicts flared repeatedly in the Chesapeake Bay tobacco
colonies and in New
England, where a massive
uprising against the English in 1675 to 1676—King Philip’s
War—nearly succeeded in
driving the intruders

back to the sea.
The development of the Atlantic slave trade forever changed the
course of European
settlement in the
Americas. Other transatlantic travelers, including diseases,
goods, plants,
animals, and even ideas like the
concept of private land ownership, further influenced life in
America during the
sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The exchange of pelts for European goods including
copper kettles,

knives, and guns played a
significant role in changing the material cultures of native
peoples. During the
seventeenth century, native
peoples grew increasingly dependent on European trade items.
At the same time, many
native inhabitants
died of European diseases, while survivors adopted new ways of
living with their
new neighbors.
Review Questions
1. Which of the following was a goal of the
5.
Which religious order joined the French

Spanish in their destruction of Fort Caroline?
settlement in Canada and tried to convert the
A. establishing a foothold from which to battle
natives to Christianity?
the Timucua
A. Franciscans
B. claiming a safe place to house the New
B. Calvinists
World treasures that would be shipped
C. Anglicans
back to Spain
D. Jesuits
C. reducing the threat of French privateers

D. locating a site for the establishment of Santa
6.
How did the French and Dutch colonists differ
Fe in
their religious expectations? How did both
compare to Spanish colonists?
2. Why did the Spanish build Castillo de San
Marcos? 7.
What was the most lucrative product of the
A. to protect the local Timucua
Chesapeake colonies?
B. to defend against imperial challengers
A. corn
C. as a seat for visiting Spanish royalty
B. tobacco

D. to house visiting delegates from rival
C. gold and silver
imperial powers
D. slaves
3. How did the Pueblo attempt to maintain their
8.
What was the primary cause of Bacon’s
autonomy in the face of Spanish settlement?
Rebellion?
A. former indentured servants wanted more
4. What was patroonship?
opportunities to expand their territory
A. a Dutch ship used for transporting beaver

B. African slaves wanted better treatment
furs
C. Susquahannock Indians wanted the
B. a Dutch system of patronage that
Jamestown settlers to pay a fair price for
encouraged the arts
their land
C. a Dutch system of granting tracts of land in
D. Jamestown politicians were jockeying for
New Netherland to encourage colonization
power
D. a Dutch style of hat trimmed with beaver
fur from New Netherland

1500–1700
93
9. The founders of the Plymouth colony were:
12. What
was the Middle Passage?
A. Puritans A. the
fabled sea route from Europe to the Far

B. Catholics East
C. Anglicans B. the
land route from Europe to Africa
D. Jesuits C. the
transatlantic journey that African slaves
made
to America
10. Which of the following is not true of the
D. the
line between the northern and southern
Puritan religion?
colonies
A. It required close reading of scripture.
B. Church membership required a conversion
13. Which

of the following is not an item
narrative. Europeans
introduced to Indians?
C. Literacy was crucial. A.
wampum
D. Only men could participate. B.
glass
beads
C.
copper kettles
11. How did the Chesapeake colonists solve their
D. metal
tools
labor problems?
14. How did

European muskets change life for
native
peoples in the Americas?
15. Compare
and contrast European and Indian
views on
property.
Critical Thinking Questions
16. Compare and contrast life in the Spanish, French, Dutch,
and English colonies,
differentiating between
the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies. Who were the
colonizers? What were
their purposes in

being there? How did they interact with their environments and
the native
inhabitants of the lands on
which they settled?
17. Describe the attempts of the various European colonists to
convert native
peoples to their belief
systems. How did these attempts compare to one another? What
were the results of
each effort?
18. How did chattel slavery differ from indentured servitude?
How did the former
system come to replace
the latter? What were the results of this shift?

19. What impact did Europeans have on their New World
environments—native peoples
and their
communities as well as land, plants, and animals? Conversely,
what impact did the
New World’s native
inhabitants, land, plants, and animals have on Europeans? How
did the interaction
of European and
Indian societies, together, shape a world that was truly “new”?
94
1500–1700

Chapter 4 | Rule Britannia! The English Empire, 1660–1763
95
CHAPTER 4
Rule Britannia! The English Empire,
1660–1763

Figure 4.1 Isaac Royall and his family, seen here in a 1741
portrait by Robert
Feke, moved to Medford,
Massachusetts, from the West Indian island of Antigua, bringing
their slaves with
them. They were an affluent British
colonial family, proud of their success and the success of the
British Empire.
Chapter Outline
4.1 Charles II and the Restoration Colonies
4.2 The Glorious Revolution and the English Empire
4.3 An Empire of Slavery and the Consumer Revolution
4.4 Great Awakening and Enlightenment
4.5 Wars for Empire
Introduction
The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of Great Britain
(after the union of

England and Scotland
in 1707) and the expansion of the British Empire. By the mid-
1700s, Great Britain
had developed into
a commercial and military powerhouse; its economic sway
ranged from India, where
the British East
India Company had gained control over both trade and territory,
to the West African
coast, where British
slave traders predominated, and to the British West Indies,
whose lucrative sugar
plantations, especially
in Barbados and Jamaica, provided windfall profits for British
planters. Meanwhile,
the population rose
dramatically in Britain’s North American colonies. In the early
1700s the
population in the colonies had
reached 250,000. By 1750, however, over a million British
migrants and African
slaves had established a
near-continuous zone of settlement on the Atlantic coast from
Maine to Georgia.

During this period, the ties between Great Britain and the
American colonies only
grew stronger. Anglo-
American colonists considered themselves part of the British
Empire in all ways:
politically, militarily,
religiously (as Protestants), intellectually, and racially. The
portrait of the
Royall family (Figure 4.1)
exemplifies the colonial American gentry of the eighteenth
century. Successful and
well-to-do, they
display fashions, hairstyles, and furnishings that all speak to
their identity as
proud and loyal British
subjects.
96

• Analyze the causes and consequences of the Restoration
• Identify the Restoration colonies and their role in the
expansion of the
Empire
When Charles II ascended the throne in 1660, English subjects
on both sides of the
Atlantic celebrated
the restoration of the English monarchy after a decade of living
without a king as
a result of the English
Civil Wars. Charles II lost little time in strengthening England’s
global power.
From the 1660s to the 1680s,
Charles II added more possessions to England’s North American
holdings by
establishing the Restoration
colonies of New York and New Jersey (taking these areas from
the Dutch) as well as
Pennsylvania and

the Carolinas. In order to reap the greatest economic benefit
from England’s
overseas possessions, Charles
II enacted the mercantilist Navigation Acts, although many
colonial merchants
ignored them because
enforcement remained lax.
CHARLES II
The chronicle of Charles II begins with his father, Charles I.
Charles I ascended
the English throne in
1625 and soon married a French Catholic princess, Henrietta
Maria, who was not well
liked by English
Protestants because she openly practiced Catholicism during her
husband’s reign.
The most outspoken
Protestants, the Puritans, had a strong voice in Parliament in the
1620s, and they
strongly opposed the
king’s marriage and his ties to Catholicism. When Parliament
tried to contest his
edicts, including the

king’s efforts to impose taxes without Parliament’s consent,
Charles I suspended
Parliament in 1629 and
ruled without one for the next eleven years.
The ensuing struggle between the king and Parliament led to the
outbreak of war.
The English Civil War
lasted from 1642 to 1649 and pitted the king and his Royalist
supporters against
Oliver Cromwell and
his Parliamentary forces. After years of fighting, the
Parliamentary forces gained
the upper hand, and in
1649, they charged Charles I with treason and beheaded him.
The monarchy was
dissolved, and England
Figure 4.2

97
became a republic: a state without a king. Oliver Cromwell
headed the new English
Commonwealth, and
the period known as the English interregnum, or the time
between kings, began.
Though Cromwell enjoyed widespread popularity at first, over
time he appeared to
many in England to
be taking on the powers of a military dictator. Dissatisfaction
with Cromwell grew.
When he died in 1658
and control passed to his son Richard, who lacked the political
skills of his

father, a majority of the English
people feared an alternate hereditary monarchy in the making.
They had had enough
and asked Charles II
to be king. In 1660, they welcomed the son of the executed king
Charles I back to
the throne to resume the
English monarchy and bring the interregnum to an end (Figure
4.3). The return of
Charles II is known as
the Restoration.
Figure 4.3 The monarchy and Parliament fought for control of
England during the
seventeenth century. Though
Oliver Cromwell (a), shown here in a 1656 portrait by Samuel
Cooper, appeared to
offer England a better mode of
government, he assumed broad powers for himself and

disregarded cherished English
liberties established under
Magna Carta in 1215. As a result, the English people welcomed
Charles II (b) back
to the throne in 1660. This portrait
by John Michael Wright was painted ca. 1660–1665, soon after
the new king gained
the throne.
Charles II was committed to expanding England’s overseas
possessions. His policies
in the 1660s through
the 1680s established and supported the Restoration colonies:
the Carolinas, New
Jersey, New York, and
Pennsylvania. All the Restoration colonies started as proprietary
colonies, that
is, the king gave each
colony to a trusted individual, family, or group.
THE CAROLINAS
Charles II hoped to establish English control of the area
between Virginia and
Spanish Florida. To that end,

he issued a royal charter in 1663 to eight trusted and loyal
supporters, each of
whom was to be a feudal-
style proprietor of a region of the province of Carolina.
These proprietors did not relocate to the colonies, however.
Instead, English
plantation owners from the
tiny Caribbean island of Barbados, already a well-established
English sugar colony
fueled by slave labor,
migrated to the southern part of Carolina to settle there. In
1670, they
established Charles Town (later
Charleston), named in honor of Charles II, at the junction of the
Ashley and Cooper
Rivers (Figure 4.4).
As the settlement around Charles Town grew, it began to
produce livestock for
export to the West Indies.
In the northern part of Carolina, settlers turned sap from pine
trees into
turpentine used to waterproof
wooden ships. Political disagreements between settlers in the
northern and southern

parts of Carolina
escalated in the 1710s through the 1720s and led to the creation,
in 1729, of two
colonies, North and South
Carolina. The southern part of Carolina had been producing rice
and indigo (a plant
that yields a dark blue
dye used by English royalty) since the 1700s, and South
Carolina continued to
depend on these main crops.
98
North Carolina continued to produce items for ships, especially
turpentine and tar,
and its population
increased as Virginians moved there to expand their tobacco
holdings. Tobacco was
the primary export of
both Virginia and North Carolina, which also traded in
deerskins and slaves from
Africa.

Figure 4.4 The port of colonial Charles Towne, depicted here on
a 1733 map of North
America, was the largest in
the South and played a significant role in the Atlantic slave
trade.
Slavery developed quickly in the Carolinas, largely because so
many of the early
migrants came from
Barbados, where slavery was well established. By the end of the
1600s, a very
wealthy class of rice planters
who relied on slaves had attained dominance in the southern
part of the Carolinas,
especially around
Charles Town. By 1715, South Carolina had a black majority
because of the number of
slaves in the colony.

The legal basis for slavery was established in the early 1700s as
the Carolinas
began to pass slave laws
based on the Barbados slave codes of the late 1600s. These laws
reduced Africans to
the status of property
to be bought and sold as other commodities.
Click and Explore
Visit the Charleston Museum’s
interactive exhibit
The Walled City
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/charleston)
to
learn more about the history of
Charleston.

As in other areas of English settlement, native peoples in the
Carolinas suffered
tremendously from
the introduction of European diseases. Despite the effects of
disease, Indians in
the area endured and,
following the pattern elsewhere in the colonies, grew dependent
on European goods.
Local Yamasee and
Creek tribes built up a trade deficit with the English, trading
deerskins and
captive slaves for European
guns. English settlers exacerbated tensions with local Indian
tribes, especially
the Yamasee, by expanding
their rice and tobacco fields into Indian lands. Worse still,
English traders took
native women captive as
payment for debts.
The outrages committed by traders, combined with the
seemingly unstoppable

expansion of English
settlement onto native land, led to the outbreak of the Yamasee
War (1715–1718), an
effort by a coalition of
local tribes to drive away the European invaders. This native
effort to force the
newcomers back across the
99
Atlantic nearly succeeded in annihilating the Carolina colonies.
Only when the
Cherokee allied themselves
with the English did the coalition’s goal of eliminating the
English from the
region falter. The Yamasee

War demonstrates the key role native peoples played in shaping
the outcome of
colonial struggles and,
perhaps most important, the disunity that existed between
different native groups.
NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY
Charles II also set his sights on the Dutch colony of New
Netherland. The English
takeover of New
Netherland originated in the imperial rivalry between the Dutch
and the English.
During the Anglo-Dutch
wars of the 1650s and 1660s, the two powers attempted to gain
commercial advantages
in the Atlantic
World. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667),
English forces gained control
of the Dutch fur
trading colony of New Netherland, and in 1664, Charles II gave
this colony
(including present-day New

Jersey) to his brother James, Duke of York (later James II). The
colony and city
were renamed New York
in his honor. The Dutch in New York chafed under English rule.
In 1673, during the
Third Anglo-Dutch
War (1672–1674), the Dutch recaptured the colony. However, at
the end of the
conflict, the English had
regained control (Figure 4.5).
Figure 4.5 “View of New Amsterdam” (ca. 1665), a watercolor
by Johannes Vingboons,
was painted during the
Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1660s and 1670s. New Amsterdam was
officially
reincorporated as New York City in 1664,
but alternated under Dutch and English rule until 1674.
The Duke of York had no desire to govern locally or listen to
the wishes of local

colonists. It wasn’t
until 1683, therefore, almost 20 years after the English took
control of the
colony, that colonists were able
to convene a local representative legislature. The assembly’s
1683 Charter of
Liberties and Privileges set
out the traditional rights of Englishmen, like the right to trial by
jury and the
right to representative
government.
The English continued the Dutch patroonship system, granting
large estates to a
favored few families.
The largest of these estates, at 160,000 acres, was given to
Robert Livingston in
1686. The Livingstons
and the other manorial families who controlled the Hudson
River Valley formed a
formidable political
and economic force. Eighteenth-century New York City,
meanwhile, contained a
variety of people and
religions—as well as Dutch and English people, it held French

Protestants
(Huguenots), Jews, Puritans,
Quakers, Anglicans, and a large population of slaves. As they
did in other zones of
colonization, native
peoples played a key role in shaping the history of colonial New
York. After
decades of war in the 1600s,
the powerful Five Nations of the Iroquois, composed of the
Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga, and
Seneca, successfully pursued a policy of neutrality with both
the English and, to
the north, the French in
Canada during the first half of the 1700s. This native policy
meant that the
Iroquois continued to live in
their own villages under their own government while enjoying
the benefits of trade
with both the French
and the English.
100

PENNSYLVANIA
The Restoration colonies also included Pennsylvania, which
became the geographic
center of British
colonial America. Pennsylvania (which means “Penn’s Woods”
in Latin) was created in
1681, when
Charles II bestowed the largest proprietary colony in the
Americas on William Penn
(Figure 4.6) to settle
the large debt he owed the Penn family. William Penn’s father,
Admiral William
Penn, had served the
English crown by helping take Jamaica from the Spanish in
1655. The king personally
owed the Admiral
money as well.

Figure 4.6 Charles II granted William Penn the land that
eventually became the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in
order to settle a debt the English crown owed to Penn’s father.
Like early settlers of the New England colonies, Pennsylvania’s
first colonists
migrated mostly for religious
reasons. William Penn himself was a Quaker, a member of a
new Protestant
denomination called the
Society of Friends. George Fox had founded the Society of
Friends in England in the
late 1640s, having
grown dissatisfied with Puritanism and the idea of
predestination. Rather, Fox and
his followers stressed
that everyone had an “inner light” inside him or her, a spark of
divinity. They
gained the name Quakers
because they were said to quake when the inner light moved
them. Quakers rejected
the idea of worldly
rank, believing instead in a new and radical form of social

equality. Their speech
reflected this belief in
that they addressed all others as equals, using “thee” and “thou”
rather than terms
like “your lordship” or
“my lady” that were customary for privileged individuals of the
hereditary elite.
The English crown persecuted Quakers in England, and colonial
governments were
equally harsh;
Massachusetts even executed several early Quakers who had
gone to proselytize
there. To avoid such
persecution, Quakers and their families at first created a
community on the sugar
island of Barbados.
Soon after its founding, however, Pennsylvania became the
destination of choice.
Quakers flocked to
Pennsylvania as well as New Jersey, where they could preach
and practice their
religion in peace. Unlike
New England, whose official religion was Puritanism,
Pennsylvania did not establish
an official church.
Indeed, the colony allowed a degree of religious tolerance found
nowhere else in

English America. To help
encourage immigration to his colony, Penn promised fifty acres
of land to people
who agreed to come to
Pennsylvania and completed their term of service. Not
surprisingly, those seeking a
better life came in
large numbers, so much so that Pennsylvania relied on
indentured servants more than
any other colony.
One of the primary tenets of Quakerism is pacifism, leading
William Penn to
establish friendly
relationships with local native peoples. He formed a covenant of
friendship with
the Lenni Lenape
(Delaware) tribe, buying their land for a fair price instead of
taking it by force.
In 1701, he also signed a
treaty with the Susquehannocks to avoid war. Unlike other
colonies, Pennsylvania
did not experience war
on the frontier with native peoples during its early history.

101
As an important port city, Philadelphia grew rapidly. Quaker
merchants there
established contacts
throughout the Atlantic world and participated in the thriving
African slave trade.
Some Quakers, who
were deeply troubled by the contradiction between their beli ef
in the “inner light”
and the practice of
slavery, rejected the practice and engaged in efforts to abolish it
altogether.
Philadelphia also acted as a
magnet for immigrants, who came not only from England, but

from all over Europe by
the hundreds of
thousands. The city, and indeed all of Pennsylvania, appeared to
be the best
country for poor men and
women, many of whom arrived as servants and dreamed of
owning land. A very few,
like the fortunate
Benjamin Franklin, a runaway from Puritan Boston, did
extraordinarily well. Other
immigrant groups in
the colony, most notably Germans and Scotch-Irish (families
from Scotland and
England who had first
lived in Ireland before moving to British America), greatly
improved their lot in
Pennsylvania. Of course,
Africans imported into the colony to labor for white masters
fared far worse.
AMERICANA
John Wilson Offers Reward for Escaped Prisoners

The American Weekly Mercury, published by William
Bradford, was
Philadelphia’s first newspaper. This
advertisement from “John Wilson, Goaler” (jailer) offers
a reward for
anyone capturing several men who
escaped from the jail.
BROKE out of the Common Goal of Philadelphia,
the 15th of this
Instant February, 1721, the
following Persons:
John Palmer, also Plumly, alias Paine, Servant to
Joseph Jones,
run away and was lately
taken up at New-York. He is fully described in the
American
Mercury, Novem. 23, 1721. He
has a Cinnamon coloured Coat on, a middle sized
fresh coloured
Man. His Master will give a
Pistole Reward to any who Shall Secure him,
besides what is here
offered.
Daniel Oughtopay, A Dutchman, aged about 24
Years, Servant to Dr.
Johnston in Amboy. He

is a thin Spare man, grey Drugget Waistcoat and
Breeches and a
light-coloured Coat on.
Ebenezor Mallary, a New-England, aged about 24
Years, is a
middle-sized thin Man, having
on a Snuff colour’d Coat, and ordinary Ticking
Waistcoat and
Breeches. He has dark brown
strait Hair.
Matthew Dulany, an Irish Man, down-look’d
Swarthy Complexion, and
has on an Olive-
coloured Cloth Coat and Waistcoat with Cloth
Buttons.
John Flemming, an Irish Lad, aged about 18,
belonging to Mr.
Miranda, Merchant in this City.
He has no Coat, a grey Drugget Waistcoat, and a
narrow brim’d Hat
on.
John Corbet, a Shropshire Man, a Runaway Servant
from Alexander
Faulkner of Maryland,

broke out on the 12th Instant. He has got a double-
breasted
Sailor’s Jacket on lined with red
Bays, pretends to be a Sailor, and once taught
School at Josephs
Collings’s in the Jerseys.
Whoever takes up and secures all, or any One of
these Felons,
shall have a Pistole Reward
for each of them and reasonable Charges, paid them
by John
Wilson, Goaler
—Advertisement from the American Weekly
Mercury, 1722
What do the descriptions of the men tell you about life
in colonial
Philadelphia?
Click and Explore

Browse a number of issues of the
American Weekly
Mercury
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/philly1) that
were
digitized by New Jersey’s Stockton
University. Read through several to get a
remarkable flavor of life in early eighteenth-
century Philadelphia.
102
THE NAVIGATION ACTS
Creating wealth for the Empire remained a primary goal, and in
the second half of
the seventeenth century,
especially during the Restoration, England attempted to gain
better control of
trade with the American

colonies. The mercantilist policies by which it tried to achieve
this control are
known as the Navigation
Acts.
The 1651 Navigation Ordnance, a product of Cromwell’s
England, required that only
English ships carry
goods between England and the colonies, and that the captain
and three-fourths of
the crew had to be
English. The ordnance further listed “enumerated articles” that
could be
transported only to England or
to English colonies, including the most lucrative commodities
like sugar and
tobacco as well as indigo,
rice, molasses, and naval stores such as turpentine. All were
valuable goods not
produced in England or
in demand by the British navy. After ascending the throne,
Charles II approved the
1660 Navigation Act,
which restated the 1651 act to ensure a monopoly on imports
from the colonies.
Other Navigation Acts included the 1663 Staple Act and the
1673 Plantation Duties

Act. The Staple Act
barred colonists from importing goods that had not been made
in England, creating a
profitable monopoly
for English exporters and manufacturers. The Plantation Duties
Act taxed enumerated
articles exported
from one colony to another, a measure aimed principally at New
Englanders, who
transported great
quantities of molasses from the West Indies, including
smuggled molasses from
French-held islands, to
make into rum.
In 1675, Charles II organized the Lords of Trade and Plantation,
commonly known as
the Lords of Trade,
an administrative body intended to create stronger ties between
the colonial
governments and the crown.
However, the 1696 Navigation Act created the Board of Trade,
replacing the Lords of
Trade. This act,
meant to strengthen enforcement of customs laws, also

established vice-admiralty
courts where the crown
could prosecute customs violators without a jury. Under this
act, customs officials
were empowered with
warrants known as “writs of assistance” to board and search
vessels suspected of
containing smuggled
goods.
Despite the Navigation Acts, however, Great Britain exercised
lax control over the
English colonies during
most of the eighteenth century because of the policies of Prime
Minister Robert
Walpole. During his long
term (1721–1742), Walpole governed according to his belief
that commerce flourished
best when it was not
encumbered with restrictions. Historians have described this
lack of strict
enforcement of the Navigation
Acts as salutary neglect. In addition, nothing prevented
colonists from building
their own fleet of ships
to engage in trade. New England especially benefited from both
salutary neglect and
a vibrant maritime

culture made possible by the scores of trading vessels built in
the northern
colonies. The case of the 1733
Molasses Act illustrates the weaknesses of British mercantilist
policy. The 1733
act placed a sixpence-per-
gallon duty on raw sugar, rum, and molasses from Britain’s
competitors, the French
and the Dutch, in
order to give an advantage to British West Indian producers.
Because the British
did not enforce the 1733
law, however, New England mariners routinely smuggled these
items from the French
and Dutch West
Indies more cheaply than they could buy them on English
islands.

• Identify the causes of the Glorious Revolution
• Explain the outcomes of the Glorious Revolution
During the brief rule of King James II, many in England feared
the imposition of a
Catholic absolute
monarchy by the man who modeled his rule on that of his
French Catholic cousin,
Louis XIV. Opposition
to James II, spearheaded by the English Whig party, overthrew
the king in the
Glorious Revolution of
103

1688–1689. This paved the way for the Protestant reign of
William of Orange and his
wife Mary (James’s
Protestant daughter).
JAMES II AND THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
King James II (Figure 4.7), the second son of Charles I,
ascended the English
throne in 1685 on the death of
his brother, Charles II. James then worked to model his rule on
the reign of the
French Catholic King Louis
XIV, his cousin. This meant centralizing English political
strength around the
throne, giving the monarchy
absolute power. Also like Louis XIV, James II practiced a strict
and intolerant

form of Roman Catholicism
after he converted from Protestantism in the late 1660s. He had
a Catholic wife,
and when they had a son,
the potential for a Catholic heir to the English throne became a
threat to English
Protestants. James also
worked to modernize the English army and navy. The fact that
the king kept a
standing army in times of
peace greatly alarmed the English, who believed that such a
force would be used to
crush their liberty. As
James’s strength grew, his opponents feared their king would
turn England into a
Catholic monarchy with
absolute power over her people.
Figure 4.7 James II (shown here in a painting ca. 1690) worked
to centralize the
English government. The Catholic

king of France, Louis XIV, provided a template for James’s
policies.
In 1686, James II applied his concept of a centralized state to
the colonies by
creating an enormous
colony called the Dominion of New England. The Dominion
included all the New
England colonies
(Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Connecticut, New
Haven, and Rhode Island)
and in 1688 was
enlarged by the addition of New York and New Jersey. James
placed in charge Sir
Edmund Andros, a
former colonial governor of New York. Loyal to James II and
his family, Andros had
little sympathy for
New Englanders. His regime caused great uneasiness among
New England Puritans when
it called into
question the many land titles that did not acknowledge the king
and imposed fees
for their reconfirmation.

Andros also committed himself to enforcing the Navigation
Acts, a move that
threatened to disrupt the
region’s trade, which was based largely on smuggling.
In England, opponents of James II’s efforts to create a
centralized Catholic state
were known as Whigs. The
Whigs worked to depose James, and in late 1688 they
succeeded, an event they
celebrated as the Glorious
Revolution while James fled to the court of Louis XIV in
France. William III
(William of Orange) and his
wife Mary II ascended the throne in 1689.
The Glorious Revolution spilled over into the colonies. In 1689,
Bostonians
overthrew the government
of the Dominion of New England and jailed Sir Edmund Andros
as well as other
leaders of the regime
(Figure 4.8). The removal of Andros from power illustrates New
England’s animosity
toward the English
overlord who had, during his tenure, established Church of
England worship in
Puritan Boston and

104
vigorously enforced the Navigation Acts, to the chagrin of those
in port towns. In
New York, the same year
that Andros fell from power, Jacob Leisler led a group of
Protestant New Yorkers
against the dominion
government. Acting on his own authority, Leisler assumed the
role of King William’s
governor and
organized intercolonial military action independent of British
authority. Leisler’s
actions usurped the
crown’s prerogative and, as a result, he was tried for treason
and executed. In
1691, England restored
control over the Province of New York.

Figure 4.8 This broadside, signed by several citizens, demands
the surrender of Sir
Edmund (spelled here
“Edmond”) Andros, James II’s hand-picked leader of the
Dominion of New England.
The Glorious Revolution provided a shared experience for those
who lived through
the tumult of 1688
and 1689. Subsequent generations kept the memory of the
Glorious Revolution alive
as a heroic defense of
English liberty against a would-be tyrant.
ENGLISH LIBERTY
The Glorious Revolution led to the establishment of an English
nation that limited
the power of the king

and provided protections for English subjects. In October 1689,
the same year that
William and Mary
took the throne, the 1689 Bill of Rights established a
constitutional monarchy. It
stipulated Parliament’s
independence from the monarchy and protected certain of
Parliament’s rights, such
as the right to freedom
of speech, the right to regular elections, and the right to petition
the king. The
1689 Bill of Rights also
guaranteed certain rights to all English subjects, including trial
by jury and
habeas corpus (the requirement
that authorities bring an imprisoned person before a court to
demonstrate the cause
of the imprisonment).
John Locke (1632–1704), a doctor and educator who had lived
in exile in Holland
during the reign of James
II and returned to England after the Glorious Revolution,
published his Two
Treatises of Government in 1690.
In it, he argued that government was a form of contract between
the leaders and the
people, and that

representative government existed to protect “life, liberty and
property.” Locke
rejected the divine right of
kings and instead advocated for the central role of Par liament
with a limited
monarchy. Locke’s political
philosophy had an enormous impact on future generations of
colonists and
established the paramount
importance of representation in government.
105

Click and Explore
Visit the Digital Locke Project
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/jlocke) to read more of
John Locke’s writings. This digital
collection
contains over thirty of his philosophical
texts.
The Glorious Revolution also led to the English Toleration Act
of 1689, a law
passed by Parliament that
allowed for greater religious diversity in the Empire. This act
granted religious
tolerance to nonconformist
Trinitarian Protestants (those who believed in the Holy Trinity
of God the Father,

Son, and Holy Ghost),
such as Baptists (those who advocated adult baptism) and
Congregationalists (those
who followed the
Puritans’ lead in creating independent churches). While the
Church of England
remained the official
state religious establishment, the Toleration Act gave much
greater religious
freedom to nonconformists.
However, this tolerance did not extend to Catholics, who were
routinely excluded
from political power.
The 1689 Toleration Act extended to the British colonies, where
several colonies—
Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, Delaware, and New Jersey—refused to allow the
creation of an established
colonial church, a major
step toward greater religious diversity.

• Analyze the role slavery played in the history and
economy of the British
Empire
• Explain the effects of the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the
1741 New York
Conspiracy
Trials
• Describe the consumer revolution and its effect on the life
of the colonial
gentry and
other settlers
Slavery formed a cornerstone of the British Empire in the
eighteenth century. Every
colony had slaves,
from the southern rice plantations in Charles Town, South
Carolina, to the northern
wharves of Boston.
Slavery was more than a labor system; it also influenced every
aspect of colonial

thought and culture. The
uneven relationship it engendered gave white colonists an
exaggerated sense of
their own status. English
liberty gained greater meaning and coherence for whites when
they contrasted their
status to that of the
unfree class of black slaves in British America. African slavery
provided whites in
the colonies with a
shared racial bond and identity.
SLAVERY AND THE STONO REBELLION
The transport of slaves to the American colonies accelerated in
the second half of
the seventeenth century.
In 1660, Charles II created the Royal African Company (Figure
4.9) to trade in
slaves and African goods.
His brother, James II, led the company before ascending the
throne. Under both
these kings, the Royal

African Company enjoyed a monopoly to transport slaves to the
English colonies.
Between 1672 and 1713,
the company bought 125,000 captives on the African coast,
losing 20 percent of them
to death on the
Middle Passage, the journey from the African coast to the
Americas.
106
Figure 4.9 The 1686 English guinea shows the logo of the Royal
African Company, an
elephant and castle, beneath
a bust of King James II. The coins were commonly called
guineas because most
British gold came from Guinea in
West Africa.
The Royal African Company’s monopoly ended in 1689 as a

result of the Glorious
Revolution. After that
date, many more English merchants engaged in the slave trade,
greatly increasing
the number of slaves
being transported. Africans who survived the brutal Middle
Passage usually arrived
in the West Indies,
often in Barbados. From there, they were transported to the
mainland English
colonies on company ships.
While merchants in London, Bristol, and Liverpool lined their
pockets, Africans
trafficked by the company
endured a nightmare of misery, privation, and dislocation.
Slaves strove to adapt to their new lives by forming new
communities among
themselves, often adhering
to traditional African customs and healing techniques. Indeed,
the development of
families and
communities formed the most important response to the trauma
of being enslaved.
Other slaves dealt

with the trauma of their situation by actively resisting their
condition, whether
by defying their masters or
running away. Runaway slaves formed what were called
“maroon” communities, groups
that successfully
resisted recapture and formed their own autonomous groups.
The most prominent of
these communities
lived in the interior of Jamaica, controlling the area and keeping
the British
away.
Slaves everywhere resisted their exploitation and attempted to
gain freedom. They
fully understood that
rebellions would bring about massive retaliation from whites
and therefore had
little chance of success.
Even so, rebellions occurred frequently. One notable uprising
that became known as
the Stono Rebellion
took place in South Carolina in September 1739. A literate slave
named Jemmy led a
large group of slaves
in an armed insurrection against white colonists, killing sever al
before militia
stopped them. The militia

suppressed the rebellion after a battle in which both slaves and
militiamen were
killed, and the remaining
slaves were executed or sold to the West Indies.
Jemmy is believed to have been taken from the Kingdom of
Kongo, an area where the
Portuguese had
introduced Catholicism. Other slaves in South Carolina may
have had a similar
background: Africa-
born and familiar with whites. If so, this common background
may have made it
easier for Jemmy to
communicate with the other slaves, enabling them to work
together to resist their
enslavement even
though slaveholders labored to keep slaves from forging such
communities.
In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed a
new slave code in 1740
called An Act for the
Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in
the Province, also
known as the Negro Act

of 1740. This law imposed new limits on slaves’ behavior,
prohibiting slaves from
assembling, growing
their own food, learning to write, and traveling freely.
THE NEW YORK CONSPIRACY TRIALS OF 1741
Eighteenth-century New York City contained many different
ethnic groups, and
conflicts among them
created strain. In addition, one in five New Yorkers was a slave,
and tensions ran
high between slaves and
the free population, especially in the aftermath of the Stono
Rebellion. These
tensions burst forth in 1741.
That year, thirteen fires broke out in the city, one of which
reduced the colony’s
Fort George to ashes.

107
Ever fearful of an uprising among enslaved New Yorkers, the
city’s whites spread
rumors that the fires
were part of a massive slave revolt in which slaves would
murder whites, burn the
city, and take over the
colony. The Stono Rebellion was only a few years in the past,
and throughout
British America, fears of
similar incidents were still fresh. Searching for solutions, and
convinced slaves
were the principal danger,
nervous British authorities interrogated almost two hundred
slaves and accused them
of conspiracy.
Rumors that Roman Catholics had joined the suspected

conspiracy and planned to
murder Protestant
inhabitants of the city only added to the general hysteria. Very
quickly, two
hundred people were arrested,
including a large number of the city’s slave population.
After a quick series of trials at City Hall, known as the New
York Conspiracy
Trials of 1741, the
government executed seventeen New Yorkers. Thirteen black
men were publicly burned
at the stake, while
the others (including four whites) were hanged (Figure 4.10).
Seventy slaves were
sold to the West Indies.
Little evidence exists to prove that an elaborate conspiracy, like
the one white
New Yorkers imagined,
actually existed.
Figure 4.10 In the wake of a series of fires throughout New

York City, rumors of a
slave revolt led authorities to
convict and execute thirty people, including thirteen black men
who were publicly
burned at the stake.
The events of 1741 in New York City illustrate the racial divide
in British
America, where panic among
whites spurred great violence against and repression of the
feared slave
population. In the end, the
Conspiracy Trials furthered white dominance and power over
enslaved New Yorkers.
Click and Explore
View the map of New York in the 1740s

(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/NY1700s) at
the New York Public Library’s digital
gallery,
which allows you to zoom in and see
specific events. Look closely at numbers
55 and 56
just north of the city limits to see
illustrations depicting the executions.
COLONIAL GENTRY AND THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION
British Americans’ reliance on indentured servitude and slavery
to meet the demand
for colonial labor
helped give rise to a wealthy colonial class—the gentry—in the
Chesapeake tobacco
colonies and
elsewhere. To be “genteel,” that is, a member of the gentry,
meant to be refined,
free of all rudeness.
The British American gentry modeled themselves on the English
aristocracy, who

embodied the ideal of
refinement and gentility. They built elaborate mansions to
advertise their status
and power. William Byrd
108
II of Westover, Virginia, exemplifies the colonial gentry; a
wealthy planter and
slaveholder, he is known
for founding Richmond and for his diaries documenting the life
of a gentleman
planter (Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11 This painting by Hans Hysing, ca. 1724, depicts
William Byrd II. Byrd
was a wealthy gentleman planter
in Virginia and a member of the colonial gentry.
109
MY STORY
William Byrd’s Secret Diary
The diary of William Byrd, a Virginia planter, provides
a unique way to
better understand colonial life on a

plantation (Figure 4.12). What does it show about daily
life for a
gentleman planter? What does it show
about slavery?
August 27, 1709
I rose at 5 o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew
and some
Greek in Josephus. I said my
prayers and ate milk for breakfast. I danced my
dance. I had like
to have whipped my maid
Anaka for her laziness but I forgave her. I read a
little
geometry. I denied my man G-r-l to
go to a horse race because there was nothing but
swearing and
drinking there. I ate roast
mutton for dinner. In the afternoon I played at
piquet with my
own wife and made her out of
humor by cheating her. I read some Greek in
Homer. Then I walked
about the plantation. I
lent John H-ch £7 [7 English pounds] in his

distress. I said my
prayers and had good health,
good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be to God
Almighty.
September 6, 1709
About one o’clock this morning my wife was
happily delivered of a
son, thanks be to God
Almighty. I was awake in a blink and rose and my
cousin Harrison
met me on the stairs and
told me it was a boy. We drank some French wine
and went to bed
again and rose at 7 o’clock.
I read a chapter in Hebrew and then drank chocolate
with the
women for breakfast. I returned
God humble thanks for so great a blessing and
recommended my
young son to His divine
protection. . . .
September 15, 1710
I rose at 5 o’clock and read two chapters in Hebrew
and some
Greek in Thucydides. I said my

prayers and ate milk and pears for breakfast. About
7 o’clock the
negro boy [or Betty] that ran
away was brought home. My wife against my will
caused little
Jenny to be burned with a hot
iron, for which I quarreled with her. . . .
Figure 4.12 This photograph shows the view down the
stairway from the
third floor of Westover
Plantation, home of William Byrd II. What does this
image suggest about
the lifestyle of the
inhabitants—masters and servants—of this house?
One of the ways in which the gentry set themselves apart from
others was through
their purchase,

consumption, and display of goods. An increased supply of
consumer goods from
England that became
available in the eighteenth century led to a phenomenon called
the consumer
revolution. These products
linked the colonies to Great Britain in real and tangible ways.
Indeed, along with
the colonial gentry,
ordinary settlers in the colonies also participated in the frenzy
of consumer
spending on goods from Great
Britain. Tea, for example, came to be regarded as the drink of
the Empire, with or
without fashionable tea
sets.
110
The consumer revolution also made printed materials more
widely available. Before

1680, for instance, no
newspapers had been printed in colonial America. In the
eighteenth century,
however, a flood of journals,
books, pamphlets, and other publications became available to
readers on both sides
of the Atlantic. This
shared trove of printed matter linked members of the Empire by
creating a community
of shared tastes
and ideas.
Cato’s Letters, by Englishmen John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon, was one popular
series of 144
pamphlets. These Whig circulars were published between 1720
and 1723 and emphasized
the glory of
England, especially its commitment to liberty. However, the
pamphlets cautioned
readers to be ever
vigilant and on the lookout for attacks upon that liberty. Indeed,
Cato’s Letters
suggested that there were
constant efforts to undermine and destroy it.

Another very popular publication was the English gentlemen’s
magazine the
Spectator, published between
1711 and 1714. In each issue, “Mr. Spectator” observed and
commented on the world
around him. What
made the Spectator so wildly popular was its style; the essays
were meant to
persuade, and to cultivate
among readers a refined set of behaviors, rejecting deceit and
intolerance and
focusing instead on the
polishing of genteel taste and manners.
Novels, a new type of literature, made their first appearance i n
the eighteenth
century and proved very
popular in the British Atlantic. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
and Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue
Rewarded found large and receptive audiences. Reading also
allowed female readers
the opportunity to
interpret what they read without depending on a male authority
to tell them what to
think. Few women
beyond the colonial gentry, however, had access to novels.

• Explain the significance of the Great Awakening
• Describe the genesis, central ideas, and effects of the
Enlightenment in
British North
America
Two major cultural movements further strengthened Anglo-
American colonists’
connection to Great
Britain: the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. Both
movements began in Europe,
but they

advocated very different ideas: the Great Awakening promoted a
fervent, emotional
religiosity, while the
Enlightenment encouraged the pursuit of reason in all things.
On both sides of the
Atlantic, British subjects
grappled with these new ideas.
THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING
During the eighteenth century, the British Atlantic experienced
an outburst of
Protestant revivalism
known as the First Great Awakening. (A Second Great
Awakening would take place in
the 1800s.)
During the First Great Awakening, evangelists came from the
ranks of several
Protestant denominations:
Congregationalists, Anglicans (members of the Church of
England), and
Presbyterians. They rejected what
appeared to be sterile, formal modes of worship in favor of a
vigorous emotional
religiosity. Whereas

Martin Luther and John Calvin had preached a doctrine of
predestination and close
reading of scripture,
new evangelical ministers spread a message of personal and
experiential faith that
rose above mere book
learning. Individuals could bring about their own salvation by
accepting Christ, an
especially welcome
message for those who had felt excluded by traditional
Protestantism: women, the
young, and people at
the lower end of the social spectrum.
The Great Awakening caused a split between those who
followed the evangelical
message (the “New
Lights”) and those who rejected it (the “Old Lights”). The elite
ministers in
British America were firmly

111
Old Lights, and they censured the new revivalism as chaos.
Indeed, the revivals did
sometimes lead to
excess. In one notorious incident in 1743, an influential New
Light minister named
James Davenport urged
his listeners to burn books. The next day, he told them to burn
their clothes as a
sign of their casting off the
sinful trappings of the world. He then took off his own pants
and threw them into
the fire, but a woman
saved them and tossed them back to Davenport, telling him he
had gone too far.
Another outburst of Protestant revivalism began in New Jersey,
led by a minister of
the Dutch Reformed
Church named Theodorus Frelinghuysen. Frelinghuysen’s
example inspired other

ministers, including
Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian. Tennant helped to spark a
Presbyterian revival in
the Middle Colonies
(Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey), in part by founding
a seminary to train
other evangelical
clergyman. New Lights also founded colleges in Rhode Island
and New Hampshire that
would later
become Brown University and Dartmouth College.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards led still
another explosion of
evangelical fervor.
Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God,” used powerful
word imagery
to describe the terrors of hell and the possibilities of avoiding
damnation by
personal conversion (Figure
4.13). One passage reads: “The wrath of God burns against them
[sinners], their
damnation don’t slumber,
the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now
hot, ready to

receive them, the flames do
now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over
them, and the pit
hath opened her mouth
under them.” Edwards’s revival spread along the Connecticut
River Valley, and news
of the event spread
rapidly through the frequent reprinting of his famous sermon.
Figure 4.13 This image shows the frontispiece of Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry
God, A Sermon Preached at
Enfield, July 8, 1741 by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was an
evangelical preacher who
led a Protestant revival in
New England. This was his most famous sermon, the text of
which was reprinted often
and distributed widely.
The foremost evangelical of the Great Awakening was an

Anglican minister named
George Whitefield.
Like many evangelical ministers, Whitefield was itinerant,
traveling the
countryside instead of having his
own church and congregation. Between 1739 and 1740, he
electrified colonial
listeners with his brilliant
oratory.
112
AMERICANA
Two Opposing Views of George Whitefield
Not everyone embraced George Whitefield and other
New Lights. Many
established Old Lights decried
the way the new evangelical religions appealed to
people’s passions,

rather than to traditional religious
values. The two illustrations below present two very
different visions
of George Whitefield (Figure 4.14).
Figure 4.14 In the 1774 portrait of George Whitefield
by engraver
Elisha Gallaudet (a), Whitefield
appears with a gentle expression on his face. Although
his hands are
raised in exultation or entreaty, he
does not look particularly roused or rousing. In the
1763 British
political cartoon to the right, “Dr.
Squintum’s Exaltation or the Reformation” (b),
Whitefield’s hands are
raised in a similar position, but
there the similarities end.
Compare the two images above. On the left is an

illustration for
Whitefield’s memoirs, while on the right
is a cartoon satirizing the circus-like atmosphere that
his preaching
seemed to attract (Dr. Squintum was
a nickname for Whitefield, who was cross-eyed). How
do these two
artists portray the same man? What
emotions are the illustration for his memoirs intended
to evoke? What
details can you find in the cartoon
that indicate the artist’s distaste for the preacher?
The Great Awakening saw the rise of several Protestant
denominations, including
Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Baptists (who emphasized adult baptism of
converted Christians
rather than infant
baptism). These new churches gained converts and competed
with older Protestant
groups like Anglicans
(members of the Church of England), Congregationalists (the
heirs of Puritanism in
America), and
Quakers. The influence of these older Protestant groups, such as

the New England
Congregationalists,
declined because of the Great Awakening. Nonetheless, the
Great Awakening touched
the lives of
thousands on both sides of the Atlantic and provided a shared
experience in the
eighteenth-century British
Empire.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was an intellectual
and cultural movement
in the eighteenth
century that emphasized reason over superstition and science
over blind faith.
Using the power of
the press, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Isaac
Newton, and Voltaire
questioned accepted
knowledge and spread new ideas about openness, investigation,
and religious

tolerance throughout
113
Europe and the Americas. Many consider the Enlightenment a
major turning point in
Western civilization,
an age of light replacing an age of darkness.
Several ideas dominated Enlightenment thought, including
rationalism, empiricism,
progressivism, and
cosmopolitanism. Rationalism is the idea that humans are
capable of using their
faculty of reason to

gain knowledge. This was a sharp turn away from the prevailing
idea that people
needed to rely on
scripture or church authorities for knowledge. Empiricism
promotes the idea that
knowledge comes from
experience and observation of the world. Progressivism is the
belief that through
their powers of reason
and observation, humans could make unlimited, linear progress
over time; this
belief was especially
important as a response to the carnage and upheaval of the
English Civil Wars in
the seventeenth century.
Finally, cosmopolitanism reflected Enlightenment thinkers’
view of themselves as
citizens of the world
and actively engaged in it, as opposed to being provincial and
close-minded. In
all, Enlightenment thinkers
endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.
The Freemasons were a fraternal society that advocated
Enlightenment principles of
inquiry and tolerance.

Freemasonry originated in London coffeehouses in the early
eighteenth century, and
Masonic lodges (local
units) soon spread throughout Europe and the British colonies.
One prominent
Freemason, Benjamin
Franklin, stands as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in
British America (Figure
4.15). Born in
Boston in 1706 to a large Puritan family, Franklin loved to read,
although he found
little beyond religious
publications in his father’s house. In 1718 he was apprenticed to
his brother to
work in a print shop, where
he learned how to be a good writer by copying the style he
found in the Spectator,
which his brother
printed. At the age of seventeen, the independent-minded
Franklin ran away,
eventually ending up in
Quaker Philadelphia. There he began publishing the
Pennsylvania Gazette in the late
1720s, and in 1732 he
started his annual publication Poor Richard: An Almanack, in
which he gave readers
much practical advice,

such as “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy,
wealthy, and wise.”
Figure 4.15 In this 1748 portrait by Robert Feke, a forty-year-
old Franklin wears a
stylish British wig, as befitted a
proud and loyal member of the British Empire.
Franklin subscribed to deism, an Enlightenment-era belief in a
God who created, but
has no continuing
involvement in, the world and the events within it. Deists also
advanced the belief
that personal
morality—an individual’s moral compass, leading to good
works and actions—is more
important than
strict church doctrines. Franklin’s deism guided his many

philanthropic projects.
In 1731, he established
a reading library that became the Library Company of
Philadelphia. In 1743, he
founded the American
Philosophical Society to encourage the spirit of inquiry. In
1749, he provided the
foundation for the
University of Pennsylvania, and in 1751, he helped found
Pennsylvania Hospital.
His career as a printer made Franklin wealthy and well -
respected. When he retired
in 1748, he devoted
114
himself to politics and scientific experiments. His most famous
work, on
electricity, exemplified
Enlightenment principles. Franklin observed that lightning
strikes tended to hit
metal objects and reasoned

that he could therefore direct lightning through the placement of
metal objects
during an electrical storm.
He used this knowledge to advocate the use of lightning rods:
metal poles connected
to wires directing
lightning’s electrical charge into the ground and saving wooden
homes in cities
like Philadelphia from
catastrophic fires. He published his findings in 1751, in
Experiments and
Observations on Electricity.
Franklin also wrote of his “rags to riches” tale, his Memoir, in
the 1770s and
1780s. This story laid the
foundation for the American Dream of upward social mobility.
Click and Explore

Visit the Worldly Ways section
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/bfranklin1) of PBS’s
Benjamin Franklin site to see an
interactive map
showing Franklin’s overseas travels
and his influence around the world. His
diplomatic, political, scientific, and business
achievements had great effects in many
countries.
THE FOUNDING OF GEORGIA
The reach of Enlightenment thought was both broad and deep.
In the 1730s, it even
prompted the founding
of a new colony. Having witnessed the terrible conditions of
debtors’ prison, as
well as the results of
releasing penniless debtors onto the streets of London, James
Oglethorpe, a member
of Parliament and

advocate of social reform, petitioned King George II for a
charter to start a new
colony. George II,
understanding the strategic advantage of a British colony
standing as a buffer
between South Carolina
and Spanish Florida, granted the charter to Oglethorpe and
twenty like-minded
proprietors in 1732.
Oglethorpe led the settlement of the colony, which was called
Georgia in honor of
the king. In 1733, he
and 113 immigrants arrived on the ship Anne. Over the next
decade, Parliament
funded the migration of
twenty-five hundred settlers, making Georgia the only
government-funded colonial
project.
Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia followed the ideals of the Age
of Reason, seeing it
as a place for England’s
“worthy poor” to start anew. To encourage industry, he gave
each male immigrant
fifty acres of land,

tools, and a year’s worth of supplies. In Savannah, the
Oglethorpe Plan provided
for a utopia: “an agrarian
model of sustenance while sustaining egalitarian values holding
all men as equal.”
Oglethorpe’s vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned.
However, colonists
who relocated from
other colonies, especially South Carolina, disregarded these
prohibitions. Despite
its proprietors’ early
vision of a colony guided by Enlightenment ideals and free of
slavery, by the
1750s, Georgia was
producing quantities of rice grown and harvested by slaves.
4.5 Wars for Empire
• Describe the wars for empire
• Analyze the significance of these conflicts

Wars for empire composed a final link connecting the Atlantic
sides of the British
Empire. Great Britain
115
fought four separate wars against Catholic France from the late
1600s to the mid-
1700s. Another war,
the War of Jenkins’ Ear, pitted Britain against Spain. These
conflicts for control

of North America also
helped colonists forge important alliances with native peoples,
as different tribes
aligned themselves with
different European powers.
GENERATIONS OF WARFARE
Generations of British colonists grew up during a time when
much of North America,
especially the
Northeast, engaged in war. Colonists knew war firsthand. In the
eighteenth century,
fighting was seasonal.
Armies mobilized in the spring, fought in the summer, and
retired to winter
quarters in the fall. The British
army imposed harsh discipline on its soldiers, who were drawn
from the poorer
classes, to ensure they
did not step out of line during engagements. If they did, their
officers would kill
them. On the battlefield,
armies dressed in bright uniforms to advertise their bravery and
lack of fear. They

stood in tight formation
and exchanged volleys with the enemy. They often feared their
officers more than
the enemy.
Click and Explore
Read the diary of a provincial soldier
who fought
in the French and Indian War on the
Captain David Perry Web Site
(http://openstaxcollege.org/l/DPerry) hosted by
Rootsweb. David Perry’s journal, which
includes a
description of the 1758 campaign,
provides a glimpse of warfare in the
eighteenth
century.

Most imperial conflicts had both American and European fronts,
leaving us with two
names for each war.
For instance, King William’s War (1688–1697) is also known as
the War of the League
of Augsburg. In
America, the bulk of the fighting in this conflict took place
between New England
and New France. The
war proved inconclusive, with no clear victor (Figure 4.16).
116
Figure 4.16 This map shows the French and British armies’
movements during King
William’s War, in which there

was no clear victor.
Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) is also known as the War of
Spanish Succession.
England fought against
both Spain and France over who would ascend the Spanish
throne after the last of
the Hapsburg rulers
died. In North America, fighting took place in Florida, New
England, and New
France. In Canada, the
French prevailed but lost Acadia and Newfoundland; however,
the victory was again
not decisive because
the English failed to take Quebec, which would have given them
control of Canada.
This conflict is best remembered in the United States for the
French and Indian
raid against Deerfield,
Massachusetts, in 1704. A small French force, combined with a
native group made up
of Catholic Mohawks
and Abenaki (Pocumtucs), attacked the frontier outpost of

Deerfield, killing scores
and taking 112
prisoners. Among the captives was the seven-year-old daughter
of Deerfield’s
minister John Williams,
named Eunice. She was held by the Mohawks for years as her
family tried to get her
back, and became
assimilated into the tribe. To the horror of the Puritan leaders,
when she grew up
Eunice married a
Mohawk and refused to return to New England.
In North America, possession of Georgia and trade with the
interior was the focus
of the War of Jenkins’
Ear (1739–1742), a conflict between Britain and Spain over
contested claims to the
land occupied by the
fledgling colony between South Carolina and Florida. The war
got its name from an
incident in 1731 in
which a Spanish Coast Guard captain severed the ear of British
captain Robert
Jenkins as punishment for
raiding Spanish ships in Panama. Jenkins fueled the growing
animosity between
England and Spain by

presenting his ear to Parliament and stirring up British public
outrage. More than
anything else, the War
of Jenkins’ Ear disrupted the Atlantic trade, a situation that hurt
both Spain and
Britain and was a major
reason the war came to a close in 1742. Georgia, founded six
years earlier,
remained British and a buffer
against Spanish Florida.
King George’s War (1744–1748), known in Europe as the War
of Austrian Succession
(1740–1748), was
fought in the northern colonies and New France. In 1745, the
British took the
massive French fortress at
Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia (Figure 4.17).
However, three years
later, under the terms
of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain relinquished control of
the fortress to
the French. Once again, war
resulted in an incomplete victory for both Britain and France.

117
Figure 4.17 In this 1747 painting by J. Stevens, View of the
landing of the New
England forces in ye expedition
against Cape Breton, British forces land on the island of Cape
Breton to capture
Fort Louisbourg.

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
The final imperial war, the French and Indian War (1754–1763),
known as the Seven
Years’ War in Europe,
proved to be the decisive contest between Britain and France in
America. It began
over rival claims along
the frontier in present-day western Pennsylvania. Well-
connected planters from
Virginia faced stagnant
tobacco prices and hoped expanding into these western lands
would stabilize their
wealth and status.
Some of them established the Ohio Company of Virginia in
1748, and the British
crown granted the
company half a million acres in 1749. However, the French also
claimed the lands of
the Ohio Company,
and to protect the region they established Fort Duquesne in
1754, where the Ohio,
Monongahela, and
Allegheny Rivers met.
The war began in May 1754 because of these competing claims

between Britain and
France. Twenty-two-
year-old Virginian George Washington, a surveyor whose
family helped to found the
Ohio Company, gave
the command to fire on French soldiers near present-day
Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
This incident on the
Pennsylvania frontier proved to be a decisive event that led to
imperial war. For
the next decade, fighting
took place along the frontier of New France and British America
from Virginia to
Maine. The war also
spread to Europe as France and Britain looked to gain
supremacy in the Atlantic
World.
The British fared poorly in the first years of the war. In 1754,
the French and
their native allies forced
Washington to surrender at Fort Necessity, a hastily built fort
constructed after
his attack on the French.
In 1755, Britain dispatched General Edward Braddock to the
colonies to take Fort
Duquesne. The French,
aided by the Potawotomis, Ottawas, Shawnees, and Delawares,

ambushed the fifteen
hundred British
soldiers and Virginia militia who marched to the fort. The
attack sent panic
through the British force,
and hundreds of British soldiers and militiamen died, including
General Braddock.
The campaign of 1755
proved to be a disaster for the British. In fact, the only British
victory that
year was the capture of Nova
Scotia. In 1756 and 1757, Britain suffered further defeats with
the fall of Fort
Oswego and Fort William
Henry (Figure 4.18).
118
Figure 4.18 This schematic map depicts the events of the French

and Indian War.
Note the scarcity of British
victories.
The war began to turn in favor of the British in 1758, due in
large part to the
efforts of William Pitt,
a very popular member of Parliament. Pitt pledged huge sums of
money and resources
to defeating
the hated Catholic French, and Great Britain spent part of the
money on bounties
paid to new young
recruits in the colonies, helping invigorate the British forces. In
1758, the
Iroquois, Delaware, and Shawnee
signed the Treaty of Easton, aligning themselves with the
British in return for
some contested land around
Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1759, the British took Quebec,
and in 1760, Montreal.
The French empire in
North America had crumbled.
The war continued until 1763, when the French signed the
Treaty of Paris. This
treaty signaled a dramatic

reversal of fortune for France. Indeed, New France, which had
been founded in the
early 1600s, ceased
to exist. The British Empire had now gained mastery over North
America. The Empire
not only gained
New France under the treaty; it also acquired French sugar
islands in the West
Indies, French trading
posts in India, and French-held posts on the west coast of
Africa. Great Britain’s
victory in the French and
Indian War meant that it had become a truly global empire.
British colonists
joyously celebrated, singing
the refrain of “Rule, Britannia! / Britannia, rule the waves! /
Britons never,
never, never shall be slaves!”
In the American colonies, ties with Great Britain were closer
than ever.
Professional British soldiers had
fought alongside Anglo-American militiamen, forging a greater
sense of shared
identity. With Great
Britain’s victory, colonial pride ran high as colonists celebrated
their identity
as British subjects.

This last of the wars for empire, however, also sowed the seeds
of trouble. The war
led Great Britain deeply
into debt, and in the 1760s and 1770s, efforts to deal with the
debt through
imperial reforms would have
119
the unintended consequence of causing stress and strain that
threatened to tear the
Empire apart.
120

Key Terms
deism an Enlightenment-era belief in the existence of a supreme
being—specifically,
a creator who does
not intervene in the universe—representing a rejection of
the belief in a
supernatural deity who
interacts with humankind
Dominion of New England James II’s consolidated New
England colony, made up of all
the colonies
from New Haven to Massachusetts and later
New York and New
Jersey
English interregnum the period from 1649 to 1660 when
England had no king

Enlightenment an eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural
movement that
emphasized reason and
science over superstition, religion, and tradition
First Great Awakening an eighteenth-century Protestant revival
that emphasized
individual,
experiential faith over church doctrine and the
close study
of scripture
Freemasons a fraternal society founded in the early eighteenth
century that
advocated Enlightenment
principles of inquiry and tolerance
French and Indian War the last eighteenth-century imperial
struggle between Great
Britain and France,
leading to a decisive British victory; this war

lasted
from 1754 to 1763 and was
also called the Seven Years’ War
Glorious Revolution the overthrow of James II in 1688
Navigation Acts a series of English mercantilist laws enacted
between 1651 and 1696
in order to control
trade with the colonies
nonconformists Protestants who did not conform to the
doctrines or practices of the
Church of England
proprietary colonies colonies granted by the king to a trusted
individual, family,
or group
Restoration colonies the colonies King Charles II established or
supported during
the Restoration (the
Carolinas, New York, New Jersey, and

Pennsylvania)
salutary neglect the laxness with which the English crown
enforced the Navigation
Acts in the
eighteenth century
Summary
After the English Civil War and interregnum, England began to
fashion a stronger
and larger empire in
North America. In addition to wresting control of New York and
New Jersey from the
Dutch, Charles
II established the Carolinas and Pennsylvania as proprietary
colonies. Each of
these colonies added
immensely to the Empire, supplying goods not produced in
England, such as rice and
indigo. The
Restoration colonies also contributed to the rise in population in

English America
as many thousands
of Europeans made their way to the colonies. Their numbers
were further augmented
by the forced
migration of African slaves. Starting in 1651, England pursued
mercantilist
policies through a series of
Navigation Acts designed to make the most of England’s
overseas possessions.
Nonetheless, without
proper enforcement of Parliament’s acts and with nothing to
prevent colonial
traders from commanding
their own fleets of ships, the Navigation Acts did not control
trade as intended.
121

The threat of a Catholic absolute monarchy prompted not only
the overthrow of James
II but also the
adoption of laws and policies that changed English government.
The Glorious
Revolution restored a
Protestant monarchy and at the same time limited its power by
means of the 1689
Bill of Rights. Those
who lived through the events preserved the memory of the
Glorious Revolution and
the defense of liberty
that it represented. Meanwhile, thinkers such as John Locke
provided new models and
inspirations for the
evolving concept of government.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the expansion of
slavery in the
American colonies from
South Carolina to Boston. The institution of slavery created a
false sense of
superiority in whites, while
simultaneously fueling fears of slave revolt. White response to
such revolts, or
even the threat of them,
led to gross overreactions and further constraints on slaves’
activities. The
development of the Atlantic
economy also allowed colonists access to more British goods
than ever before. The
buying habits of both
commoners and the rising colonial gentry fueled the consumer
revolution, creating
even stronger ties with
Great Britain by means of a shared community of taste and
ideas.

The eighteenth century saw a host of social, religious, and
intellectual changes
across the British Empire.
While the Great Awakening emphasized vigorously emotional
religiosity, the
Enlightenment promoted
the power of reason and scientific observation. Both movements
had lasting impacts
on the colonies. The
beliefs of the New Lights of the First Great Awakening
competed with the religions
of the first colonists,
and the religious fervor in Great Britain and her North
American colonies bound the
eighteenth-century
British Atlantic together in a shared, common experience. The
British colonist
Benjamin Franklin gained
fame on both sides of the Atlantic as a printer, publisher, and
scientist. He
embodied Enlightenment

ideals in the British Atlantic with his scientific experiments and
philanthropic
endeavors. Enlightenment
principles even guided the founding of the colony of Georgia,
although those
principles could not stand
up to the realities of colonial life, and slavery soon took hold in
the colony.
4.5 Wars for Empire
From 1688 to 1763, Great Britain engaged in almost continuous
power struggles with
France and Spain.
Most of these conflicts originated in Europe, but their
engagements spilled over
into the colonies. For
almost eighty years, Great Britain and France fought for control
of eastern North
America. During most of
that time, neither force was able to win a decisive victory,
though each side saw
occasional successes with

the crucial help of native peoples. It was not until halfway
through the French and
Indian War (1754–1763),
when Great Britain swelled its troops with more volunteers and
native allies, that
the balance of power
shifted toward the British. With the 1763 Treaty of Paris, New
France was
eliminated, and Great Britain
gained control of all the lands north of Florida and east of the
Mississippi.
British subjects on both sides of
the Atlantic rejoiced.
122
Review Questions
1. To what does the term “Restoration” refer?
7.

The Negro Act of 1740 was a reaction to
A. the restoration of New York to English
________.
power
A. fears of a slave conspiracy in the setting of
B. the restoration of Catholicism as the official
thirteen fires in New York City
religion of England
B. the Stono Rebellion
C. the restoration of Charles II to the English
C. the Royal African Company’s monopoly
throne
D. the growing power of maroon communities
D. the restoration of Parliamentary power in
England 8.
What was the “conspiracy” of the New York
Conspiracy Trials of 1741?
2. What was the predominant religion in
A. American patriots conspiring to overthrow
Pennsylvania?
the royal government
A. Quakerism
B. indentured servants conspiring to

B. Puritanism
overthrow their masters
C. Catholicism
C. slaves conspiring to burn down the city and
D. Protestantism
take control
D. Protestants conspiring to murder Catholics
3. What sorts of labor systems were used in the
Restoration colonies? 9.
What was the First Great Awakening?
A. a cultural and intellectual movement that
4. Which of the following represents a concern
emphasized reason and science over
that those in England and her colonies maintained
superstition and religion
about James II?
B. a Protestant revival that emphasized
A. that he would promote the spread of
emotional, experiential faith over book

Protestantism
learning
B. that he would reduce the size of the British
C. a cultural shift that promoted Christianity
army and navy, leaving England and her
among slave communities
colonies vulnerable to attack
D. the birth of an American identity, promoted
C. that he would advocate for Parliament’s
by Benjamin Franklin
independence from the monarchy
D. that he would institute a Catholic absolute
10.
Which of the following is not a tenet of the
monarchy
Enlightenment?
A. atheism
5. What was the Dominion of New England?
B. empiricism
A. James II’s overthrow of the New England
C. progressivism

colonial governments
D. rationalism
B. the consolidated New England colony
James II created 11.
Who were the Freemasons, and why were
C. Governor Edmund Andros’s colonial
they
significant?
government in New York
D. the excise taxes New England colonists had
12.
What was the primary goal of Britain’s wars
to pay to James II for
empire from 1688 to 1763?
A. control of North America
6. What was the outcome of the Glorious
B. control of American Indians
Revolution?
C. greater power in Europe and the world
D. defeat of Catholicism

123
13. Who were the main combatants in the French 14.
What prompted the
French and Indian War?
and Indian War?
A. France against Indians
B. Great Britain against Indians
C. Great Britain against France
D. Great Britain against the French and their

Indian allies
Critical Thinking Questions
15. How did Pennsylvania’s Quaker beginnings distinguish it
from other colonies in
British America?
16. What were the effects of the consumer revolution on the
colonies?
17. How did the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Great
Awakening offer opposing
outlooks to British
Americans? What similarities were there between the two
schools of thought?
18. What was the impact of the wars for empire in North
America, Europe, and the
world?
19. What role did Indians play in the wars for empire?

20. What shared experiences, intellectual currents, and cultural
elements drew
together British subjects
on both sides of the Atlantic during this period? How did these
experiences, ideas,
and goods serve to
strengthen those bonds?
124

Chapter 3 Creating New Social Orders Colonial Societies, 15

More Related Content

Similar to Chapter 3 Creating New Social Orders Colonial Societies, 15 (20)

More from EstelaJeffery653 (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Chapter 3 Creating New Social Orders Colonial Societies, 15