Lesson 2, Part 2 THIS IS THE MOST CURRENT (SEPT.

2023) LESSON 2, PART 2

The English Come to North America: How?

1. Virginia Colony

a. like the Dutch, the first English mainland colony was organized as a private company, though
its first efforts were a flop:
- bad weather (hurricanes), lack of financing, Anglo-Spanish Wars (1587-1604)
- but not all of their efforts flopped – for instance, there were the adventures of Francis Drake
# first mariner to circumvent the globe (1577-1580), he got to be Sir Francis by knocking off lots
of Spanish shipping and bringing back loot for Queen Elizabeth I, and he became a vice-admiral
in the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada’s effort to invade England (1588)
# at first, Drake carried slaves to sell in the Americas, but he gave that up and made an alliance
with the Cimarrons – a colony of escaped slaves in Central America opposed to Spanish colonists
# we know all this because we have Drake’s chaplain’s journal, “The World Encompassed” by
Rev. Francis Fletcher
(Alan Massie, “Navigating a Sea of Rivals,” [review of Lawrence Bergreen, In Search of a
Kingdom, 2021] The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2021: A17)
b. the keys to eventual success of the Virginia Company of London:
- persistence of the Company’s directors
- backing of the Crown (King’s government)
- marriage of colonist John Rolfe and local Indian chief’s daughter, Pocahontas
# daughter of Chief Powhatan, she was captured by the English in one of the incessant battles
between them and the Indians, converted to Christianity and, sadly, died in England (possibly
from the flu)
- broad cultivation of tobacco, a major market success in Europe
- Company policy: headrights, indentured servitude, colonial representative assembly
- victory over the local Nativist (anti-foreigner) movement led by Opechancanough in 1622, 1644
- the Colony was made a royal colony (not private anymore) after the first attack on it
- and women – sent frequently by the Company (see VOF)
c. there were also issues: first, by about 1650, the best lands (the tidewater) were taken up by
early survivors and later wealthy newcomers (gentry)
- second, the upshot was establishment of big-time tobacco/slave plantations by the 1660s with
royal government support - elite control of land policy, the fur-trade, ties with the Indians (the
economy)
b. lots
- third, growing groups of disgruntled (unhappy) small-time planters on the frontiers (Piedmont)
with poorer land, no slaves, no Assembly representatives, frontier property alongside Indians
(blocking expansion) and no part in the fur-trade – a set up that would soon produce rebellion
against tidewater governing and planter elites in the 1670s

2. Maryland (established 1632) – a new type of colony

b. Maryland began as (GML Map P. 57)
a. proprietary colony – _ a third type of early English mainland colony: it was the property of
onethe Calvert
family, given to them by King Charles I (1625-1649)
- the idea was (Lord Baltimore)
to found a kind of colonial refuge north of early Virginia, except for English Catholics (the Calverts were
Catholics), though most early Maryland colonists were Protestants
- the upshot was controversy
the Maryland Colony suffered from serious divisions between Catholic local governors and the
mostly Protestant population of planters, as well as fights between some Marylanders and Virginians
over Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay

- the Calverts tried to tamp down the battles by granting what amounted to religious liberty and a
local Assembly (like the assembly in Virginia),, but it didn’t work in the long run: from 1690 to 1715,
Maryland was governed by the Protestant majority, and the Calverts didn’t get their colony back until
they converted to Protestantism
b. as in Virginia, by the 1660s, there was legal slavery along with rambunctious po’whites on the
Maryland frontier (Eastern Shore) where life was rude, harsh, poor

3. As for slavery, perhaps 5, 000 in Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland) by 1700 because of:
a. greed for estates
b. hunger for cheap – in this case, free – labor
c. gradual natural increase and returning runaways (both indentured servants and slaves)
d. gradually expanding slave trade, which grew rapidly after 1715
e. Interested? See Betty White, The Origin of American Slavery (1997) – as with any other refer-
ence, first look it up on your digital toy and find out (in summary) what she says
f. already by 1700 the slaves and colonists had produced an ethnic mix in English America that has
characterized certain swatches of North America ever since

1. 4. New England Colonies (GML Map P. 74)

a. Plymouth Colony (Massachusetts, 1620)
- we have inherited an idyllic (ideal, utopian, perfectionist) picture of early Massachusetts
in our folklore: New England (a kind of
Norman Rockwell drawing in which the scene is what we’d like life to be): pious Puritans
seeking religious liberty in the New World along with , friendly
Indians joining together for sharing dinner at the First Thanksgiving Dinner – helped out a
lot by Norman Rockwell’s paintings from the 1940s and 1950s (look ‘em up)
b. actually,
- something like that may have happened, perhaps more than once – but:
- Thanksgiving in fact was first noticed in the United States in 1841 when Alexander Young
published a book in which a letter by Pilgrim founder Edward Winslow mentioned a “feast” that
could be considered a description of the event in 1621 (but the decline of colonists-Indians
relations followed quickly afterwards)
- by 1630 the Plymouth Colony Ideal was cracking up
 -in at least two ways: fights with the Indians over control of
lands, grazing, local Puritan regulations, fur-trade
- and arguments and fights with non-Puritans (who were a
majority of the English settlement from the start) over what we’d now call Culture Wars:
see political correctness and
social conformity (the non-Puritans didn’t like the Puritans’ regulations)
- a good account of the Puritan/non-Puritan disagreements is in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
story of 1837 called, “The
Maypole of Merry Mount” - Hawthorne was a descendant of the Puritans
but he wasn’t
crazy about their point of view
- what saved Plymouth was: the Great Migration of the 1630s: population, supplies,
investment and leadership by hundreds 1629-1640 of what were richer, educated so-called
Non-
Separating Puritans (Puritans who, unlike
the Plymouth Puritans, wanted to stay inside the Church of England)
- these dudes set up
b. Massachusetts-Bay Colony which, eventually, absorbed Plymouth
[1.] Massachusetts-Bay
a. the Non-Separatists(1629) – these blokes were much wealthier, better educated Puritans
driven out of England by the policy of William Laud, the anti-Puritan
archbishop of Canterbury, and pal of King Charles I

- they set up towns like Boston, Salem, Sudbury and other port towns and
- established a proprietary government with a General Court (quarterly meeting of
Company members), which chose the Governor and his councillors
c. they also soon went to war with the local Pequot Indians and came close to wiping them out
(there is now a Pequot Community College in Boston) in 1637
d. the leadership was the governor, the governor’s council, and a flock of
Puritan churchmen who more or less ran life in the colony, including grants to settlers’
lands
- as Foner points out, the Puritan elite faced Dissenters (Protesters) too:
- in the form of Roger Williams
and Anne Hutchinson who believed in a kind of Inner Grace that trumped the religious
authority of the Puritan clergy, a no-no at the time
- Roger Williams – who questioned the authority of the leadership to take over Indians’ lands
and to authorize the local civil government to enforce church regulations
- also a no-no at the time
e. furthermore, the colony’s leaders

ran off other Christian groups: Baptists, Quakers, and even ministers (priests) from the official Anglicans
(Church of England)
which, along with colonial land grants, treaties with nearby French-allied local Indians (act of a sovereign
government) prompted the dispatch of royal government from England
f. finally, in the 1670s, the Crown sent investigators to Massachusetts-Bay and, in the 1680s, the Crown
set up what we call the Dominion of New England (royal government of all the colonies north of
Maryland – to be treated a bit later)
g.
- meanwhile, some Massachusetts-Bay colonists left Massachusetts for free lands in what became
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey; others went to sea or got into the
shipbuilding business
- by this time, prosperity in Massachusetts had led to a gradual weakening of the early Puritan
social and religious order: in 1662, so many Puritan descendants weren’t coming to church that the
clergy invented what’s called The Half-Way Covenant: people could still be members of the church (save
their souls) if they swore a covenant with God, but they would have no vote in Church and State matters
– this deal lasted for 30 years until the Charter of Massachusetts-Bay was revised by the Crown (as we’ll
see)
- interestingly, in 2022, Chelsea Millsap, 32, who tracks her ancestry back to the Pilgrims in the 1620s,
was named the first woman sexton in the 300-year-old history of Boston’s Old North Church (USA
Today, May 17, 2022: 3B)

5. Indian/Colonial Relations
a. at first, English colonists were startled by the natural wealth of the New World – game, fruits,
veggies, woodlands, rivers
b. many saw the Indians as lazy, ignorant for not exploiting the resources all around them – the
Christian Bible stated that Nature should be governed by humankind
- some perceived the Indians as devils: animism, polytheism, primitive cosmology, communalism,
sexual promiscuity, lack of stable institutions, women seen as both Cinderella and Hillary: all these
differences (which Foner reduces to ideas of freedom) perplexed the Puritan English
- add to these confusions a competition for land and resources, rivalries among the Indians
themselves, ethnic suspicions and the desire of tribes and colonists for allies – and you’ve got
serious troubles brewing on the New England frontiers, as in:
c. Pequot War, 1637: genocide, enslavement, reservations, deportations and the ecological crisis
of the Indians (caused by introduction of guns and horses and cattle which meant more battles and
a need for more land)
d. King Philip’s War, 1675 – more or less a Puritan-dominated peace for the next 40 years after the
Pequot War, but by 1675 a New England version of Nativist Indian revolt against Puritan laws and
culture and land grabs
- in proportional terms, the most devastating war in American history: about 10% of the New
England population and 18 villages were wiped out by the Indians
- but the Indian alliance cracked when the Puritans were able to persuade Indians in Rhode Island
and Connecticut and central Massachusetts to join them and then to outflank the attacking Indians and
destroy their villages and families and oust the Indians once and for all from lands the colonists had
occupied
- King Philip was killed and many of his allies either placed on small village-type reservations (where they
were also made indentured servants) or they were sold off to slave plantations in the West Indies
- we should also note a speech in January 1836 in downtown Boston by a Pequot Methodist minister
(who was raised by Whites), William Apess, called “A Eulogy on King Philip” in which Apess praised
Metacomet (King Philip) as “the greatest American that ever was” – flying in the face of Bostonians’ own
positive beliefs about their ancestors’ relations with the Indians
- an outstanding history of relations between 17th century Massachusetts Puritans and New England
Indians is David Silverman, This Land Is Their Land (2019), and a first-rate review of the book is in
William Burton, “Book Review: ‘This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and
the Troubled History of Thanksgiving’ by David Silverman” Provincetown Banner, December 19, 2020,
online. Burton notes that Silverman’s interviews with contemporary Wampanoags did not go well, as
the Indians complained that some of Silverman’s claims about Indians relations in the 17 th century are
untrue.
e. as for Virginia Colony, relations with the Indians were more complex, because they involved
slavery
- the Tidewater elite planters control of the fur-trade, land grants, government, and the line of
frontier forts (after the defeat of Opechancanogh in 1644) meant the frontier plantation owners
were at the mercy of the elite
- the piedmont (frontier) planters wanted slaves, no tobacco taxes, access to more land, and rep-
resentation in the colonial assembly – and so they forced the hand of the Tidewater elites:
- the piedmont planters under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 attacked frontier
Indians as a way to get them off desired frontier lands, break up the fur-trade and (definitely) get
the attention of the Tidewater elites (Bacon’s Rebellion: GML Pp102-103, 106 and VOF #15, Pp. 49-
53)
- it worked: the Virginia elites opened up the political system to the frontier planters and cut
tobacco taxes, but the price was expansion into Indian lands and, soon, the expansion of slavery

6. William Dampier’s Story – this is an interesting scientific sideshow of the late 17 th century about which
we know these things:
a. an orphan, Dampier joined the English Navy as a teen, bugged out to Java (Dutch East Indies at that
time) and Newfoundland (on the Canadian eastern coast, where my own paternal immigrant family
landed) and eventually made his pile cutting logwood – this wood was very useful for dyes in those days
– on the eastern Mexican coast (Bay of Campeche) – and is still included in youngsters’ chemistry sets
(one of which I owned as a boy)
b. he was also fascinated by the local animal population: porcupines, sloths, armadillos, hummingbirds -
but his troubles began when, at the age of 24 in 1676 (whilst Nathaniel Bacon was rebelling in Virginia),
a huge hurricane wrecked his logging camp and led him into the world of sea-going piracy, a top choice
of unemployed sailors for a generation (as we’ll see) after the end of the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the
1640s-1670s) and King William’s War (1680s-1690s) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13)
c. Dampier, however, used his piratical experience to become a first-rate naturalist (collector of species)
of flora (plants, flowers) and fauna (animals) everywhere he went and, in 1697, he published A New
Voyage Round the World, which also included the first English descriptions of marijuana, tattooing in
Polynesia, foot binding (of females) in China, and lots of new words (new to the English and their
colonists): bananas, sub-species, smugglers (would be a big-time occupation among the colonials),
posse (thank you, says Hollywood), tortilla, avocado, cashews, chapsticks
d. a later publication by Dampier, in 1699, included a (now famous) “Essay on Winds,” which would be
consulted by Captain James Cook and Admiral Horatio Nelson in their 18th and 19th centuries ocean
exploits; anyway, Dampier’s travels as a pirate and, especially, his publications led to his being offered a
post as a captain of HMS Roebuck, which became the first explicitly scientific voyage in history (to
Australia)
# his experience with the Aussie Aborigines (and theirs with him) appears similar to those of Zenas
Leonard with Indians in Nevada in the 1830s – they didn’t respect English gunfire and ran away from the
English rather than talk with them (John B. Reid and Ronald M. James, eds, Uncovering Nevada’s Past: 7-
12)
# Dampier’s piratical experience then cut him a break that became famous in the literary world – in
Queen Anne’s War in 1703, he was taken on board a privateer (a legal pirate vessel attacking enemy
commercial ships) and led his shipmates to the Juan Fernandez Islands off the Chilean coast in search of
fresh water:
* when they stepped ashore they found a hairy marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk, whose shipwreck
and voyage formed the core of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), while Jonathan Swift also picked
over Dampier’s tales for his Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and – much later – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime
of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), as well as Charles Darwin’s bringing Dampier’s books with him on his
exploratory species-hunting “Beagle” voyage in the 1830s
(Sam Kean, The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds
Perpetrated in the Name of Science (2021): 11-32, and Benjamin Shull, “Descent Into Darkness,” [review
of Brad Fox, The Bathysphere Book, 2023] in The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2023: A15)