Chapter 4 - Study Guide\Review

US: A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 4 Review

Colonization and Conflict in the North (1600-1700)

Bears on Floating Islands

They came to her one night while she slept. Into her dreams drifted a small island, and on the island were tall trees and living creatures, one of them wearing the fur of a white rabbit. When she told of her vision, no one took her seriously, not even the wise men among her people, shamans and conjurers whose business it was to interpret dreams. No one, that is, until two days later, when the island appeared to all, ﬂoating toward shore. On the island, she had seen, were tall trees, and on their branches—bears. Or creatures that looked so much like bears that the men grabbed their weapons and raced to the beach, eager for the good hunt sent by the gods. They were disappointed. The island was not an island at all but a strange wooden ship planted with the trunks of trees. And the bears were not bears at all but a strange sort of men whose bodies were covered with hair. Strangest among them, as she had somehow known, was a man dressed all in white. He commanded great respect among the bearlike men as their “shaman,” or priest. In that way, foretold by the dreams of a young woman, the Micmac Indians in 1869 recounted their people’s ﬁrst encounter with Europeans more than two centuries earlier. Uncannily, the traditions of other northern tribes record similar dreams predicting the European arrival: “large canoes with great white wings like those of a giant bird,” ﬁlled with pale bearded men, bearing “long black tubes.” Perhaps the dreamers gave shape in their sleep to stories heard from other peoples who had actually seen white strangers and ships. Or perhaps, long before they ever encountered the newcomers, these Indians imagined them, just as Europeans fantasized about a new world. However Micmacs and other northern Indians ﬁrst imagined and idealized Europeans, they quickly came to see them as fully human. Traders might bring seemingly wondrous goods, goods that could transform the way labor, commerce, politics, and war functioned in native communities. And yet the traders themselves hardly seemed magical. They could be by turns generous and miserly, brave and frightful, conﬁdent and confused, kind and cruel. Moreover it soon became clear that these newcomers hailed from different nations, spoke different languages, and often seemed to have different goals. English colonists, it seemed, were every day more numerous and wanted nothing so much as land. The French, in contrast, were relatively few and seemed to care for nothing so much as trade—unless it was their Christian God they brought with them from across the waters. Strange to say, the Europeans argued over their deity as they did over so many other things. The English, the French, and the Dutch were all rivals, and the Micmacs and others who encountered these new peoples studied them closely, and began to make alliances. As northern Indians became more and more aware of Europeans and their ways, they came also to realize that whatever their attitudes and intentions, the newcomers provoked dramatic changes everywhere they went. Thousands of English migrants coming into the land founded villages and towns that multiplied throughout the seventeenth century.

They not only took up land but brought animals and plants that changed the way Indians lived. The Dutch, Europe’s most powerful commercial nation, established no more than a handful of trading settlements up and down the Hudson River, but they encouraged the Iroquois confederacy to push into rival Indian territories in a quest for furs to trade. Even the French, who styled themselves loyal allies to many Indian peoples and claimed to want little more than beaver pelts, even they brought with them profound, sometimes cataclysmic changes—changes that would upend the world that natives knew when Frenchmen were but bears on ﬂoating islands.

France in North America

The ﬁrst ofﬁcial expedition to the land the French would call Canada took place in 1535, when Jacques Cartier sailed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But not until 1605 did the French plant a permanent colony, at Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia). Three years later, Samuel de Champlain established Québec farther up the St. Lawrence valley, where he could pursue the fur trade with less competition from rival Europeans. Champlain soon aligned himself with local Montagnais, Algonquins, and, especially, the mighty Hurons—a confederacy of farmers 20,000 strong whose towns near the Georgian Bay straddled a vast trading network.

The Origins of New France

These allied peoples had reason to embrace Champlain. Like Europeans elsewhere in North America, the Frenchman came with wondrous goods, such as textiles, glass, copper, and ironware. In the early years of contact such things would have been treated as exotic commodities rather than utilitarian items. Copper kettles, for instance, might be cut into strips for jewelry. But before long, metal tools, especially, began transforming native life. Metal knives made it far easier to butcher animals; trees could be felled and buildings built far more easily with iron than stone axes; cooking became more efﬁcient with brass kettles that could be placed directly on the ﬁre; ﬂint strike-a-lights eliminated the cumbersome need for transporting hot coals in bounded shells; beads, cloth, needles, and thread made possible a new level of creative and visual expression; and, because metal arrowheads traveled farther and truer than stone, they would make hunters and warriors more deadly than they had ever been.

Champlain found a warm welcome for all these reasons. But native peoples in North America seldom viewed exchange as a simple market transaction. All exchanges were bound up in complex social relations, and the Montagnais, Algonquins, and Hurons wanted assurance that Champlain would be a good friend as well as a good merchant. To satisfy his hosts, he agreed to accompany them on a campaign against their mutual enemies the Mohawks, one of the ﬁve confederated tribes of the Iroquois. The Frenchman proved his friendship, and his worth, in the spring of 1609 when he and his Indian companions confronted two hundred Mohawk warriors in what is now upstate New York. According to Champlain himself, he strode to the front as the battle was about to begin, raised his musket, and shot dead two Mohawk chiefs. Few if any of the assembled warriors had ever seen a gun ﬁ red in combat.

Chaplain’s allies let out a joyous cry, so loud “one could not have heard it thunder,” attacked the astonished Mohawks, and drove the survivors from the ﬁeld. It was not the last time that European newcomers would alter the balance of power in North America. Satisﬁed with their new ally, the Montagnais, Algonquins, and Hurons became eager trading partners over the next generation. In return for European goods, they provided tens of thousands of otter, raccoon, and especially beaver pelts. These furs went to make fashionable European hats, whereas mink and marten were sent to adorn the robes of high-ranking European ofﬁcials and churchmen. Some in France derided the colonial endeavor, dismissing New France as a comptoir, a storehouse for the skins of dead animals. And yet Champlain wanted more. He struggled to encourage more immigration to Canada, to convince those who came to settle permanently and, above all, to bind his native allies closer and closer to the colonial project. To that end, Champlain encouraged certain French men and boys to live with Indian families, to learn their language and become conversant in their customs. Along with these couriers de bois, or “runners in the woods,” French authorities engaged Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus, to establish missions among the region’s Indians. Just as devout but often more culturally ﬂexible than Franciscan missionaries, Jesuit friars came to New France in the 1610s determined to master Indian languages and make inroads into native culture. They were also ﬁred with the passions of the Counter-Reformation in Europe, a movement by devout Catholics to correct those abuses that had prompted the Protestant Reformation. Initially Jesuit missionaries were tolerated more than listened to. But by the 1630s Champlain began pressing the Indians, insisting that trading partners accept resident Jesuits. More importantly, Christianized Indians got better prices for furs than did their unconverted counterparts. Such policies helped the French pursue what they saw as interlocked economic, strategic, and religious objectives. French pressure also caused friction in native communities, among the Huron in particular. Should they accept European customs and religion? Converts remained relatively few into the 1640s, and the debate over Huron cultural identity provoked internal quarrels that eventually left the confederacy fragmented and vulnerable to enemies.

New Netherlands, the Iroquois, and the Beaver Wars

If Canada was merely a comptoir, it was a proﬁtable one. Potential revenues from the fur trade drew the attention of rival European powers, including the Dutch. By the early seventeenth century the Netherlands had the greatest manufacturing capacity in the world and had become the key economic power in Europe. Intent especially on trade, the Dutch had little desire to plant permanent colonies abroad because they enjoyed prosperity and religious freedom at home. But they did want to tap directly into the wealth ﬂowing out of North America and therefore explored and laid claim to a number of sites around the Connecticut, Delaware, and Hudson Rivers (the last named for the Englishman Henry Hudson, who ﬁrst explored it for the Dutch in 1609). Most of New Netherlands’ few settlers would cluster in the village of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson. More importantly for the geopolitics of the continent, the Dutch West India Company also established a trading outpost 150 miles upriver known as Fort Orange (present-day Albany). Initially the traders at Fort Orange hoped to obtain cheap furs by fostering competition among rival Indian customers.

But by 1630 the powerful Mohawks had displaced their competitors and come to dominate the fort’s commerce. Ever since their encounter with Champlain’s musket the Mohawks and the other four members of the Iroquois League (the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) had suffered from their lack of direct access to European goods. With Mohawk ascendancy around Fort Orange, the Iroquois ﬁnally had reliable access to the tools and weapons necessary to go on the offensive against their northern enemies. They felt compelled to do so because the beaver population, always fragile, had collapsed within their own territory. To maintain their trading position, they began preying on Huron convoys on their way to Quebec and then selling the plundered pelts to the Dutch. Just as this old rivalry revived, and soon after the aging Champlain died of a stroke, two things happened to help plunge the region into catastrophe. First, waves of disease afﬂicted the settlements in the northeast in the 1630s and took a nightmarish toll on nearly all the region’s native peoples, especially agricultural communities in their densely populated towns. Between 1634 and 1640 smallpox killed more than 10,000 Hurons, reducing their total population by half and precipitating a spate of conversions to Christianity that divided the community all the more. The Iroquois likewise suffered greatly, but, unlike the Huron, they reacted by waging war in an effort to obtain captives that could formally replace dead kin. The second transformative event was a dramatic expansion in the regional arms trade. Initially reluctant to deal in guns, by the late 1630s the Dutch at Fort Orange relaxed their policy in order to obtain more furs. Before long, the Iroquois had many times more muskets than the Hurons, whom the French had traditionally refused to arm so long as they remained unconverted.

Reeling from disease and internal division, the Huron saw their world collapsing. In 1648, well-armed Iroquois warriors destroyed three Huron towns. The attacks continued into the next year. At one town under siege, the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau saw desperate Hurons seek baptism and Christian consolation. “Never was their faith more alive, or their love for their good fathers and pastors more keenly felt.” The Hurons made the wrenching decision to burn their remaining towns and abandon their lands for good.

As many as 2,000 Hurons became Iroquois, either as war-captives or humble refugees. Others merged with neighboring peoples, while thousands more ﬂed in desperation and starved to death or died of exposure in the harsh winter of 1649–1650.

So began the Beaver Wars, a series of conﬂicts at least as profoundly transformative for the colonial north as the Indian slave wars were for the south. Seeking new hunting grounds and new captives to replenish their diminishing population, Iroquois raiders attacked peoples near and far. After the Hurons, they struck and scattered the nearby Petuns, Eries, and Neutrals—peoples who, like the Hurons, were all Iroquoian speakers and could thus be integrated into Iroquois communities with relative ease. Iroquois warriors next moved against non-Iroquoian groups, including Delawares and Shawnees in the Ohio Valley, and even extended their raids south to the Carolinas. To the North they attacked Algonquins in the Canadian Shield, and Abenakis and others in New England.

The Lure of the Mississippi

The Beaver Wars continued in ﬁts and starts for the rest of the seventeenth century, bringing dozens of Indian nations to grief and provoking a massive refugee crisis as families’ ﬂed their traditional territories and tried to rebuild their lives in peace. The wars also very nearly led to the ruin of New France. About three hundred Frenchmen were killed or captured in the wars, cutting the colony’s meager population in half by 1666. The survivors saw Champlain’s carefully managed trading system thrown into disarray. French authorities scrambled to ﬁnd reliable new partners in the fur trade and henceforth were less reluctant to trade guns to Indian allies. More broadly, the scope of the conﬂict and the far-ﬂung movement of refugees compelled the French to take a more expansive view of the continent and their place in it.

By the 1660s, French traders, priests, and ofﬁcers were making inroads among diverse refugee villages in the Western Great Lakes, a region the French referred to as the pays d’en haut. These peoples sought trade, assistance against the Iroquois, and mediation of their own disputes. While the French set about building alliances in the pays d’en haut, they became aware of and began exploring the greatest watercourse in North America. The Mississippi River travels nearly 2,500 miles from its source in present-day Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying water from several other major rivers and dominating a drainage area larger than the Indian subcontinent in Asia. As the French began exploring the river in earnest in the 1670s, it dawned on them that the Mississippi Valley could be the strategic key to success in North America. French ofﬁcials set out courting Indian peoples along the river and its tributaries, employing their hard-won insights into native diplomatic culture along the way. The region’s peoples—the Illinois, Shawnees, Quapaws, and others—expressed keen interest in French trade, as well as fear and hatred of their common Iroquois enemies. When René Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle became the ﬁrst European to descend the river to the Gulf in 1682, he encountered the Natchez, Chickasaws, and others who had not seen Europeans since De Soto and his maniacal march nearly a century and a half before. Other Frenchmen went further, erecting trading posts and simple missions, and even making contact and tentative alliances with Osages, Arkansas, Ottos, Pawnees, and others west of the great river.

By the early eighteenth century, New France had helped broker an uneasy peace between the Iroquois and Indian nations to the west, extended its inﬂuence over a vast area, and fortiﬁed its colonial core along the St. Lawrence. In 1700 the colony had scores of simple missions and three modest cities—Quebec, Montreal, and TroisRivières—containing a population of approximately 15,000. Most immigrants to New France eventually returned to Europe, and short-sighted French monarchs insisted that Canada be a Catholic colony, off limits to France’s most obvious emigrants, the Protestant Huguenots. But even with its small colonial population, New France emerged as a powerful player in North America, given its strategic and economic alliances with native peoples. The French had reason to hope that their native allies could help contain the Spanish to the West and limit English expansion from the east.

The Founding of New England

At ﬁrst, the English regarded the northern part of North America as a place in which only the mad French could see possibility. English ﬁsherfolk who strayed from Newfoundland to the coast of Acadia and New England carried home descriptions of the long, lonely coast, rockbound and rugged. Long winters of numbing cold melted into short summers of steamy heat. There were no minerals to mine, no crops suitable for export, no large native population available for enslaving. The Chesapeake, with its temperate climate and long growing season, seemed a much likelier spot. But by 1620, worsening conditions at home had instilled in some English men and women the mixture of desperation and idealism needed to settle an uninviting, unknown world. Religious differences among English Protestants became a matter of sharper controversy during the seventeenth century. Along with the religious crisis came mounting political tensions and continuing problems of unemployment and recession. Times were bad—so bad that the anticipation of worse times to come swept English men and women to the shores of New England. While the French slowly established a fur trade, agricultural communities, and religious institutions in Canada, radical Puritans fleeing persecution and "corruption" in England planted more populous settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftsmen who had fled religious persecution in England and settled in the Netherlands. Concerns that their children were adopting Dutch customs prompted them to settle the Plymouth colony in 1620. A larger wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, an English landowner and gentleman, this group of Puritan migrants was wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in continuing to regard themselves as members of the Church of England. Indeed, members of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony hoped that their settlement would become a model for social and religious reform back in England.

The Puritan Movement

The colonization of New England started with a king who chose his enemies unwisely. James I, shortly after succeeding Elizabeth I in 1603, vowed to purge England of all radical Protestant reformers. The radicals James had in mind were the Puritans, most of whom were either Presbyterians or Congregationalists. Although both groups of Puritan reformers embraced Calvin’s ideas, they differed on the best form of church organization. Individual Presbyterian churches (or congregations) were guided by higher governing bodies of ministers and laypersons. Those in the Congregationalist churches, in contrast, believed that each congregation should conduct its own affairs independently, answering to no other authority. Like all Christians, Protestant and Catholic, the Puritans believed that God was all-knowing and all-powerful. And, like all Calvinists, the Puritans emphasized that idea of divine sovereignty known as predestination. At the center of their thinking was the belief that God had ordained the outcome of history, including the eternal fate of every human being. The Puritans found comfort in their belief in predestination because it provided their lives with meaning and purpose.

They felt assured that a sovereign God was directing the fate of individuals, nations, and all of creation. The Puritans strove to play their parts in that divine drama of history and to discover in their performances some signs of personal salvation. The divine plan, as the Puritans understood it, called for reforming both church and society along the lines laid down by John Calvin. It seemed to the Puritans that England’s government hampered rather than promoted religious purity and social order. It tolerated drunkenness, theatergoing, gambling, extravagance, public swearing, and Sabbath-breaking. It permitted popular recreations rooted in pagan custom and superstition—sports such as bear baiting and maypole dancing and festivals such as the celebration of Christmas and saints’ days. Even worse, the state had not done enough to purify the English church of the “corruptions” of Roman Catholicism. The Church of England counted as its members everyone in the nation, saint and sinner alike. To the Puritans, belonging to a church was no birthright. They wished to limit membership and the privileges of baptism and communion to godly men and women. The Puritans also deplored the hierarchy of bishops and archbishops in the Church of England, as well as its elaborate ceremonies in which priests wore ornate vestments. Too many Anglican clergy were “dumb dogges” in Puritan eyes, too poorly educated to instruct churchgoers in the truths of Scripture or to deliver a decent sermon. Because English monarchs had refused to take stronger measures to reform church and society, the Puritans became their outspoken critics. Elizabeth I had tolerated this opposition, but James I would not endure it and intended to rid England of these radicals. With some of the Puritans, known as the Separatists, he seemed to succeed.

The Pilgrim Settlement at Plymouth Colony

The Separatists were devout Congregationalists who concluded that the Church of England was too corrupt to be reformed. They abandoned Anglican worship and met secretly in small congregations. From their ﬁrst appearance in England during the 1570s, the Separatists suffered persecution from the government—ﬁnes, imprisonment, and, in a few cases, execution. Always a tiny minority within the Puritan movement, the Separatists were people from humble backgrounds: craftworkers and farmers without inﬂuence to challenge the state.

By 1608 some had become so discouraged that they migrated to Holland, where the Dutch government permitted complete freedom of religion. But when their children began to adopt Dutch customs and other religions, some Separatists decided to move again, this time to Virginia. It can only be imagined what fate would have befallen the unworldly Separatists had they actually settled in the Chesapeake during the tobacco boom. But a series of mistakes—including an error in charting the course of their ship, the Mayﬂower —brought the little band far to the North; to a region Captain John Smith had earlier dubbed “New England.” In November 1620, some 88 Separatist “Pilgrims” set anchor at a place they called Plymouth on the coast of present-day southeastern Massachusetts. They were sick with scurvy, weak from malnutrition, and shaken by a shipboard mutiny, and neither the site nor the season invited settlement.

As one of their leaders, William Bradford, later remembered:

For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets represented a savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

For some, the shock was too great. Dorothy Bradford, William’s wife, is said to have fallen overboard from the Mayﬂower as it lay anchored off Plymouth. It is more likely that she jumped to her death. Few Pilgrims could have foreseen founding the ﬁrst permanent European settlement in New England, and many did not live long enough to enjoy the distinction. They had arrived too late to plant crops and had failed to bring an adequate supply of food. By the spring of 1621, half the immigrants had died. English merchants who had ﬁnanced the Mayﬂower voyage failed to send supplies to the struggling settlement. Plymouth might have become another doomed colony had the Pilgrims not received better treatment from native inhabitants than they did from their English backers. Though they understood it only dimly, the Pilgrims were, in one historian’s memorable phrase, the “beneﬁciaries of catastrophe.” Only four years before their arrival, coastal New England had been devastated by a massive epidemic, possibly the plague. Losses varied locally, but overall the native coastal population may have been reduced by as much as 90 percent. Abandoned villages lay in ruins up and down the coast, including the village of Patuxet, where the Pilgrims established Plymouth. Year’s later visitors would still marvel at heaps of unburied human remains dating from the epidemic.

The Wampanoags dominated the lands around Plymouth. Still reeling from loss in 1620 and eager to obtain trade goods and assistance against native enemies, Masasoit, their chief, agreed to help the starving colonists. Initially, the peoples communicated through a remarkable Wampanoag named Squanto, who had been kidnapped by English sailors prior to the epidemic. Taken to Europe, Squanto learned English and eventually returned to America in time to play a crucial intermediary role between Masasoit and the newcomers. The Pilgrims accepted Wampanoag hospitality and instruction, and invited native leaders to a feast in honor of their ﬁrst successful harvest in 1621 (the genesis of the “First Thanksgiving” story).

The Pilgrims set up a government for their colony, the framework of which was the Mayﬂower Compact, drawn up on board ship before landing. That agreement provided for a governor and several assistants to advise him, all to be elected annually by Plymouth’s adult males. In the eyes of English law, the Plymouth settlers had no clear basis for their land claims or their government, for they had neither a royal charter nor approval from the Crown. But English authorities, distracted by problems closer to home, left the tiny colony of farmers alone.

The Puritan Settlement at Massachusetts Bay

Among the Crown’s distractions were two groups of Puritans more numerous and inﬂuential than the Pilgrims. They included both the Presbyterians and the majority of Congregationalists who, unlike the Pilgrim Separatists, still considered the Church of England capable of being reformed. But the 1620s brought these Puritans only fresh discouragements. In 1625 Charles I inherited his father’s throne and all his enemies. When Parliament attempted to limit the king’s power, Charles simply dissolved it, in 1629, and proceeded to rule without it. When Puritans pressed for reform, the king began to move against them. This persecution swelled a second wave of Puritan migration that also drew from the ranks of Congregationalists. Unlike the humble Separatists, these emigrants included merchants, landed gentlemen, and lawyers who organized the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629. Those able Puritan leaders aimed to build a better society in America, an example to the rest of the world. Unlike the Separatists, they had a strong sense of mission and destiny. They were not abandoning the English church, they insisted, but merely regrouping across the Atlantic for another assault on corruption. Despite the company’s Puritan leanings, it somehow obtained a royal charter conﬁrming its title to most of present-day Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Advance parties in 1629 established the town of Salem on the coast well north of Plymouth. In 1630 the company’s ﬁrst governor, a tough-minded and visionary lawyer named John Winthrop, sailed from England with a dozen other company stockholders and a ﬂeet of men and women to establish the town of Boston. The newcomers intended to build a godly “city on a hill” that would serve as an example to the world. Once established in the Bay Colony, Winthrop and the other stockholders transformed the charter for their trading company into the framework of government for a colony. The company’s governor became the colony’s chief executive, and the company’s other ofﬁcers became the governor’s assistants. The charter provided for annual elections of the governor and his assistants by company stockholders, known as the freemen.

But to create a broad base of support for the new government, Winthrop and his assistants expanded the freemanship in 1631 to include every adult male church member. The governor, his assistants, and the freemen together made up the General Court of the colony, which passed all laws, levied taxes, established courts, and made war and peace. In 1634 the whole body of the freemen stopped meeting and instead each town elected representatives or deputies to the General Court. Ten years later, the deputies formed themselves into the lower house of the Bay Colony legislature, and the assistants formed the upper house. By refashioning a company charter into a civil constitution, Massachusetts Bay Puritans were well on the way to shaping society, church, and state to their liking. Contrary to expectations, New England proved more hospitable to the English than did the Chesapeake. The character of the migration itself gave New England settlers an advantage, for most arrived in family groups—not as young, single, indentured servants of the sort whose discontents unsettled Virginia society. The heads of New England’s ﬁrst households were typically free men—farmers, artisans, and merchants.

Most were skilled and literate. Since husbands usually migrated with their wives and children, the ratio of men to women within the population was fairly evenly balanced. Most of the immigrants, some 21,000, came in a cluster between 1630 and 1642. Thereafter new arrivals tapered off because of the outbreak of the English Civil War. This relatively rapid colonization fostered solidarity because immigrants shared a common past of persecution and a strong desire to create an ordered society modeled on Scripture.

Stability and Order in Early New England

Puritan emigrants and their descendants thrived in New England’s bracing but healthy climate. The ﬁrst generation of colonists lived to an average age of 70, nearly twice as long as Virginians and 10 years longer than men and women living in England. With 90 percent of all children reaching adulthood, the typical family consisted of seven or eight children who came to maturity. Because of low death rates and high birthrates, the number of New Englanders doubled about every 27 years—while the populations of Europe and the Chesapeake barely reproduced themselves. By 1700, New England and the Chesapeake would both have populations of approximately 100,000. But, whereas the southern population grew because of continuing immigration and the importation of slaves, New England’s expanded primarily through natural increase. As immigrants arrived in the Bay Colony after 1630, they carved out an arc of villages around Massachusetts Bay. Within a decade settlers pressed into Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Connecticut and Rhode Island received separate charters from Charles II in the 1660s, guaranteeing their residents the rights to land and government. New Hampshire, to which Massachusetts laid claim in the 1640s, did not become a separate colony until 1679. The handful of hardy souls settled along the coast of present-day Maine had also accepted the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s authority.

Early New Englanders established most of their settlements with an eye to stability and order. Unlike the Virginians, who scattered across the Chesapeake to isolated plantations, most New Englanders established tightly knit communities like those they had left behind in England. Each family received a lot for a house along with about 150 acres of land in nearby ﬁelds. Farmers left many of their acres uncultivated as a legacy for future generations, for most had only the labor of their own families to work their land. While the Chesapeake abounded with servants, tenant farmers, and slaves, almost every adult male in rural New England owned property. With little hope of prospering through commercial agriculture, New England farmers also had no incentive to import large numbers of servants and slaves or to create large plantations. Strong family institutions contributed to New England’s order and stability. While the early deaths of parents regularly splintered Chesapeake families, two adult generations were often on hand to encourage order within New England households. Husbands and fathers exacted submission from wives and strict obedience from children. Land gave New England’s long-lived fathers great authority over even their grown children; sons and daughters relied on paternal legacies of farms in order to marry and establish their own families.

Whereas churches were few and far between in seventeenth-century Virginia, they constituted the center of community life in colonial New England. Individual congregations ran their own affairs and regulated their own membership. Those wishing to join had to convince ministers and church members that they had experienced a genuine spiritual rebirth or “conversion.” Most New Englanders sought and won membership. As majority institutions supported by public taxes, churches had the reach and the resources to oversee public morality, often censuring or expelling wayward neighbors. Still, ministers enjoyed less public power in New England than in the old country. New England’s ministers did not serve as ofﬁcers in the civil government, and the Congregational churches owned no property. In contrast, Catholic and Anglican Church ofﬁcials wielded real temporal power in European states, and the churches held extensive tracts of land. Finally, New Englanders governed themselves more democratically than did their counterparts in England. Communities throughout the region held regular town meetings of all resident white men. The town fathers generally set the meeting’s agenda and offered advice, but the unanimous consent of townsmen determined all decisions. Colony governments in early New England also evolved into representative and responsive institutions. Typically the central government of each colony, such as the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, consisted of a governor and a bicameral legislature, including an upper house, or council, and a lower house, or assembly. All ofﬁcials were elected annually by the freemen—white adult men entitled to vote in colony elections. Voting qualiﬁcations varied, but the number of men enfranchised made up a much broader segment of society than that in seventeenth-century England.

Communities in Conflict

Although most New Englanders called themselves Puritans and Congregationalists, the very fervency of their convictions often led them to disagree about how best to carry out the teachings of the Bible and the ideas of John Calvin. During the ﬁrst decades of colonization, such disagreements led to the founding of breakaway colonies. In 1636 Thomas Hooker (the minister of Cambridge Massachusetts), led part of his congregation to Connecticut where they established the ﬁrst English settlement. Somewhat more liberal than other Bay Puritans, Hooker favored more lenient standards for church membership. He also opposed the Bay’s policy of limiting voting in colony elections to church members. In contrast, New Haven (a separate colony until it became part of Connecticut in 1662) was begun in 1638 by strict Congregationalists who found Massachusetts too liberal. While Connecticut and New Haven emerged from voluntary migration, enforced exile ﬁlled Rhode Island with men and women whose radical ideas unsettled the rest of Massachusetts. Roger Williams, Rhode Island’s founder, had come to New England in 1631, serving as a respected minister of Salem. But soon Williams announced that he was a Separatist, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth. He encouraged the Bay Colony to break all ties to the corrupt Church of England. He also urged a more complete separation of church and state than most New Englanders were prepared to accept, and later in his career he endorsed full religious toleration.

Finally, Williams denounced the Bay’s charter—the legal document that justiﬁed Massachusetts’s existence—on the grounds that the king had no right to grant land that he had not purchased from the Indians. When Williams boldly suggested that Massachusetts actually inform the king of his mistake, angry authorities prepared to deport him, instead Williams ﬂed the colony in the dead of winter to live with the Indians. In 1636, he became the founder and first citizen of Providence, later to be part of Rhode Island. Another charismatic heretic from Massachusetts arrived soon after. Anne Hutchinson, a skilled midwife and the spouse of a wealthy merchant, came to Boston in 1634. Enthusiasm for her minister, John Cotton, started her on a course of explaining his sermons to gatherings of her neighbors—and then to elaborating ideas of her own. The fact that a woman would do such things made the authorities uneasy; but they became alarmed when they learned that Hutchinson embraced controversial positions on doctrine. Soon a majority of the Bay’s ministers accused the troublesomely popular Hutchinson of holding heretical views. She in turn denounced her detractors, and the controversy escalated. In 1638 the Bay Colony government expelled Hutchinson and her followers for sedition. She settled brieﬂy in Rhode Island before moving on to Long Island, where she died in an Indian attack.

Goodwives and Witches

If Anne Hutchinson had been a man, her ideas would still have been deemed heretical. However, if she had been a man, she might have found other ways to express her intelligence and magnetism. But life in colonial New England offered women, especially married women, little scope for their talents. Most adult women were hardworking farm wives who cared for large households of children. Between marriage and middle age, most New England wives were pregnant except when breast-feeding. When they were not nursing or minding children, mothers were producing and preparing much of what was consumed and worn by their families. They planted vegetable gardens and pruned fruit trees, salted beef and pork and pressed cider, milked cows and churned butter, kept bees and tended poultry, cooked and baked, washed and ironed, spun, wove, and sewed. While husbands and sons engaged in farm work that changed with the seasons, took trips to taverns and mills, and went off to hunt or ﬁsh, housebound wives and daughters were locked into a humdrum routine with little time for themselves. Women suffered legal disadvantages as well. In contrast to Spanish New Mexico and Florida with their Spanish civil law traditions, English common law and colonial legal codes accorded married women no control over property. Wives could not sue or be sued, they could not make contracts, and they surrendered to their husbands any property that they possessed before marriage. Divorce was almost impossible to obtain until the late eighteenth century. Only widows and a few single women had the same property rights as men, but they could not vote in colony elections. The one arena in which women could attain something approaching equal standing with men was the churches. Puritan women could not become ministers, but after the 1660s they made up the majority of church members. In some churches membership enabled them to vote for ministerial candidates and to voice opinions about admitting and disciplining members.

Puritan doctrine itself rejected the medieval Catholic suspicion of women as “a necessary evil,” seeing them instead as “a necessary good.” Even so, the Puritan ideal of the virtuous woman was a chaste, submissive “helpmeet,” a wife and mother who served God by serving men. Communities sometimes responded to assertive women with accusations of witchcraft. Like most early modern Europeans, New Englanders believed in wizards and witches, men and women who were said to acquire supernatural powers by signing a compact with Satan. A total of 344 New Englanders were charged with witchcraft during the ﬁrst colonial century, with the Salem Village episode of 1692 producing the largest outpouring of accusations after 20 executions. More than three-quarters of all accused witches were women, usually middle-aged and older, and most of those accused were regarded as unduly independent. Before they were charged with witchcraft, many had been suspected of heretical religious beliefs, others of sexual impropriety. Still others had inherited or stood to inherit property.

The People in the Way

Whatever their political battles, doctrinal disputes, and inequalities, New Englanders were all participants in a colonial project that depended on taking land from other people. Perhaps 100,000 Algonquin men and women lived in the area reaching from the Kennebec River in Maine to Cape Cod at contact. Like the Puritans, they relied on ﬁshing in spring and summer, hunting year round, and cultivating and harvesting corn and other crops in spring and fall. And, to an even greater degree than among the colonists, Indian political authority was local. Within each village, a single leader known as the “sachem” or “sagamore” directed economic life, administered justice, and negotiated with other tribes and English settlers. As with New England’s town fathers, a sachem’s power was contingent on keeping the trust and consent of his people. Thus the newcomers had more in common with their hosts than they cared to admit. But English expansion in the region had to come at someone’s expense, and colonists obtained Indian lands in one of three ways. Sometimes they purchased it. Sales varied—they might be free and fair, fraudulent, subtly coerced, or forced through intimidation and violence. Second, colonists eagerly expanded into lands emptied by epidemics. The English often saw God’s hand in such events. Following a terrible smallpox epidemic in 1633–1634, for example, one observer exclaimed that “without this remarkable and terrible stroke of God upon the natives, [we] would with much more difﬁculty have found room, and at far greater charge have obtained and purchased land.” Third and ﬁnally, colonists commonly encouraged and participated in regional wars to obtain native lands. This proved easy enough to do, because, like Europeans, the Indians of New England quarreled frequently with neighboring nations. The antagonism among the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French was matched by the hostilities among the Abenakis, Pawtuckets, Massachusetts, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags of the north Atlantic coast. Epidemics often intensiﬁed existing rivalries. Affecting some villages and nations more than others, outbreaks of Old-World disease opened up new opportunities for stronger neighbors to press the advantage. New England settlers, like those in the Chesapeake, studied Indian feuds to better exploit them.

The English began by aligning with Masasoit and his Wampanoags against other coastal peoples in New England. In 1637 colonial forces joined the Narragansetts in a campaign against the formidable Pequots, who controlled coveted territory in present day Connecticut. The colonists shocked even their Indian allies when they set ﬁre to the main Pequot village, killing hundreds of men, women, and children. Plymouth’s William Bradford recalled that “it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the ﬁre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.” Several years later the colonists turned against their former allies, joining forces with the Mohegans to intimidate the Narragansetts into ceding much of their territory. Only a few colonists objected to those ruthless policies, among them Roger Williams. “God Land,” he warned one Connecticut leader, “will be (as it now is) as great a God with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.”

Metacom’s War

Throughout these wars, the colonists more or less nurtured their original alliance with Masasoit and his Wampanoags. As long as regional enemies bore the brunt of English expansion, Masasoit and his people could live in relative safety. Indeed, certain colonists tried to bring the two societies closer together. While the impulse to convert was not nearly as strong in New England as in New Spain or New France, a few Englishmen worked tirelessly to bring the word of their God to Indians. Most famously, Puritan minister John Eliot began preaching in Algonquian in the 1640s. Over the next two decades he oversaw a project to publish the scriptures in Algonquian using the Latin alphabet. He also trained scores of native ministers (many of whom became literate), and established seven villages or “praying towns” exclusively for Christian Indians. Eliot was not alone. According to its charter of 1650, for example, Harvard College deﬁned its mission as “the education of English & Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness.” In 1655 Harvard established an Indian college and dormitory on campus speciﬁcally to instruct Wampanoag youth in the English language and in Protestantism. None of these efforts embodied respect for Indian culture or religion. But some in New England, at least, wanted to assimilate Indians rather than drive them away. And yet the colony always grasped for more land. By the time Masasoit died and was succeeded by his son in the 1660s, the partnership had become a relationship of subordination and suspicion. Colonial authorities reacted to rumors of pending native rebellion with humiliating interrogations and increasingly severe rules and restrictions. The colonists’ cows and pigs invaded and destroyed Indian ﬁelds, provoking innumerable conﬂicts as white pressures on Indian lands increased. When Indians themselves tried to adapt by raising their own cows and pigs, colonial authorities barred them from using common pasture or selling meat in Boston. At the same time, as many as half the dwindling Wampanoags had followed Eliot into the praying towns, threatening tribal unity in a time of mounting crisis.

By 1675 these and other pressures convinced Masasoit’s son, Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, that his nation could be preserved only by chancing war. Complaining that the English were plotting to kill him and other sachems and replace them with Christian Indians more willing to sell land, Metacom rallied most of southern New England’s native peoples and laid waste to Plymouth Colony. Metacom’s forces destroyed more than two dozen colonial towns. By the spring of 1676, they were closing in on the coast, raiding settlements within 20 miles of Boston. But the momentum could not be sustained. Faced with shortages of food and ammunition, Metacom called for assistance from the Abenakis of Maine and the Mahicans of New York. Both refused his plea, and the English even recruited the powerful Mohawks to their cause. In the summer of 1676 Metacom met his death in battle; colonial forces dismembered his body and brought his severed head to Boston and his hands to Plymouth as trophies. The Indian offensive collapsed, but not before, threatening New England’s very existence. In proportion to population, “King Philip’s War” inﬂicted twice the casualties on New England that the United States as a whole would suffer in the American Civil War. And Metacom’s desperate gamble exhausted native military power in southern New England, virtually destroyed the Wampanoags as a coherent people, and consigned the region’s surviving Indians, Christian or not, to quiet and often desperate lives on the margins of colonial life.

The Mid-Atlantic Colonies

The inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic colonies—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—enjoyed more secure lives than most southern colonials. But they lacked the common bonds that lent stability to early New England. Instead, throughout the mid-Atlantic region a variety of ethnic and religious groups vied for wealth from farming and the fur trade and contended bitterly against governments that commanded little popular support.

English Rule in New York

By the 1660s, the Dutch experiment on the mid-Atlantic coast was faltering. While Fort Orange continued to secure furs for the Dutch West India Company, the colonial population remained small and fractious. The company made matters worse by appointing corrupt, dictatorial governors who ruled without an elective assembly. It also provided little protection for outlying Dutch settlements; when it did attack neighboring Indian nations, it did so savagely, triggering terrible retaliations. By the time the company went bankrupt in 1654, it had virtually abandoned its American colony. Taking advantage of the disarray in New Netherlands, Charles II ignored Dutch claims in North America and granted his brother, James, the Duke of York, a proprietary charter there. The charter granted James all of New Netherlands to Delaware Bay as well as Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Island. In 1664 James sent an invading ﬂeet, whose mere arrival caused the Dutch to surrender. New York’s dizzying diversity would make it difﬁcult to govern. The Duke inherited 9,000 or so colonists: Dutch, Belgians, French, English, Portuguese, Swedes, Finns, and Africans—some enslaved others free.

The colony’s ethnic diversity ensured a variety of religions. Although the Dutch Reformed church predominated, other early New Netherlanders included Lutherans, Quakers, and Catholics. There were Jews as well, refugees from Portuguese Brazil, who were required by law to live in a ghetto in New Amsterdam. The Dutch resented English rule, and only after a generation of intermarriage and acculturation did that resentment fade. James also failed to win friends among New Englanders who had come to Long Island seeking autonomy and cheap land during the 1640s. He grudgingly gave in to their demand for an elective assembly in 1683 but rejected its ﬁrst act, the Charter of Liberties, which would have guaranteed basic political rights. The chronic political strife discouraged prospective settlers. By 1698 the colony numbered only 18,000 inhabitants, and New York City, the former New Amsterdam, was an overgrown village of a few thousand.

The Founding of New Jersey

Confusion attended New Jersey’s beginnings. The lands lying west of the Hudson and east of the Delaware River had been part of the Duke of York’s proprietary grant. But in 1664 he gave about 5 million of these acres to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two of his favorites who were already involved in the proprietary colonies of the Carolinas. New Jersey’s new owners guaranteed settlers land, religious freedom, and a representative assembly in exchange for a small quitrent, an annual fee for the use of the land. The proprietors’ terms promptly drew Puritan settlers from New Haven, Connecticut. At the same time, unaware that James had already given New Jersey to Berkeley and Carteret, New York’s Governor Richard Nicolls granted Long Island Puritans land there.

More complications ensued when Berkeley and Carteret decided to divide New Jersey into east and west and sell both halves to Quaker investors—a prospect that outraged New Jersey’s Puritans. Although some English Quakers migrated to West Jersey, the investors quickly decided that two Jerseys were less desirable than one Pennsylvania and resold both East and West Jersey to speculators. In the end the Jerseys became a patchwork of religious and ethnic groups. Settlers who shared a common religion or national origin formed communities and established small family farms. When the Crown ﬁnally reunited east and west as a single royal colony in 1702, New Jersey was overshadowed by settlements not only to the north but now, also, to the south and west.

Quaker Odysseys

Religious and political idealism similar to that of the Puritans inspired the colonization of Pennsylvania, making it an oddity among the mid-Atlantic colonies. The oddity began with an improbable founder; William Penn. Young Penn devoted his early years to disappointing his distinguished father, Sir William Penn, an admiral in the Royal Navy. Several years after being expelled from college, young Penn ﬁnally chose a career that may have made the admiral yearn for mere disappointment: he undertook a lifelong commitment to put into practice Quaker teachings. By the 1670s he had emerged as an acknowledged leader of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers formally called themselves.

The Quakers behaved in ways and believed in ideas that most people regarded as odd. They dressed in a deliberately plain and severe manner. They withheld from their social superiors the customary marks of respect, such as bowing, kneeling, and removing their hats. They refused to swear oaths or to make war. They allowed women public roles of religious leadership. That pattern of behavior reﬂected their egalitarian ideals, the belief that all men and women shared equally in the “Light Within.” Some 40,000 English merchants, artisans, and farmers embraced Quakerism by 1660, and many suffered ﬁnes, imprisonment, and corporal punishment.

Since the English upper class has always prized eccentricity among its members, it is not surprising that Penn, despite his Quakerism, remained a favorite of Charles II. More surprising is that the king’s favor took the extravagant form of presenting Penn in 1681with all the land between New Jersey and Maryland. Perhaps the king was repaying Penn for the large sum that his father had lent the Stuarts. Or perhaps the king was hoping to export England’s Quakers to an American colony governed by his trusted personal friend. Penn envisioned that his proprietary colony would provide a refuge for Quakers while producing quitrents for himself. To publicize his colony, he distributed pamphlets praising its attractions throughout the British Isles and Europe. The response was overwhelming: by 1700 its population stood at 21,000. The only early migration of equal magnitude was the Puritan colonization of New England.

Patterns of Growth

Perhaps half of Pennsylvania’s settlers arrived as indentured servants, while the families of free farmers and artisans made up the rest. The majority were Quakers from Britain, Holland, and Germany, but the colonists also included Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. In 1682 when Penn purchased and annexed the Three Lower Counties (later the colony of Delaware), his colony included the 1,000 or so Dutch, Swedes, and Finns living there. Quakers from other colonies—West Jersey, Maryland, and New England—also ﬂocked to the new homeland. Those experienced settlers brought skills and connections that contributed to Pennsylvania’s rapid economic growth. Farmers sowed their rich lands into a sea of wheat, which merchants exported to the Caribbean. The center of the colony’s trade was Philadelphia, a superb natural harbor situated at the conﬂuence of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. In contrast to New England’s landscape of villages, the Pennsylvania countryside beyond Philadelphia was dotted with dispersed farmsteads. Commercial agriculture required larger farms, which kept settlers at greater distances from one another. As a result, the county rather than the town became the basic unit of local government in Pennsylvania. Another reason that farmers did not need to cluster their homes within a central village was that they were at peace with the coastal Indians, the Lenni Lenapes (also called Delawares by the English). Thanks to two Quaker beliefs—their commitment to paciﬁsm and their conviction that the Indians rightfully owned their land—peace prevailed between native inhabitants and newcomers. Before Penn sold any land to colonists, he purchased it from the Indians. He also prohibited the sale of alcohol to the tribe, strictly regulated the fur trade, and learned the language of the Lenni Lenapes.

“Not a language spoken in Europe,” he remarked, “hath words of more sweetness in Accent and Emphasis than theirs.” “Our Wilderness ﬂourishes as a Garden,” Penn declared late in 1683, and in fact, his colony lived up to its promises. New arrivals readily acquired good land on liberal terms, while Penn’s Frame of Government instituted a representative assembly and guaranteed all inhabitants the basic English civil liberties and complete freedom of worship.

Quakers and Politics

Even so, Penn’s colony suffered constant political strife. Rich investors whom he had rewarded with large tracts of land and trade monopolies dominated the council, which held the sole power to initiate legislation. That power and Penn’s own claims as proprietor set the stage for controversy. Members of the representative assembly battled for the right to initiate legislation. Farmers opposed Penn’s efforts to collect quitrents. The Three Lower Counties agitated for separation, their inhabitants feeling no loyalty to Penn or Quakerism. Penn ﬁnally bought peace at the price of approving a complete revision of his original Frame of Government. In 1701 the Charter of Privileges, Pennsylvania’s new constitution, stripped the council of its legislative power, leaving it only the role of advising the governor. The charter also limited Penn’s privileges as proprietor to the ownership of ungranted land and the power to veto legislation. Thereafter an elective unicameral assembly, the only single-house legislature in the colonies, dominated Pennsylvania’s government. As Pennsylvania prospered, Philadelphia became the commercial and cultural center of England’s North American empire. Gradually the interior of Pennsylvania ﬁlled with immigrants—mainly Germans and Scots-Irish—who harbored no “odd” ideas about Indian rights, and the Lenni Lenapes and other native peoples were bullied into moving farther west. As for William Penn, he returned to England and spent time in a debtors’ prison after being defrauded by his unscrupulous colonial agents. He died in 1718, an ocean away from his American utopia.

Adjustment to Empire

Whatever his personal disappointments, Penn’s colony had enjoyed spectacular growth—as indeed had British North America more generally. And yet by the 1680s England’s king had reason to complain. Although North America now abounded in places named in honor of English monarchs, the colonies themselves lacked any strong ties to the English state. Until Parliament passed the first Navigation Acts in 1660, England had not even set in place a coherent policy for regulating colonial trade. And the acts had not produced the desired sense of patriotism in the colonies. While Chesapeake planters grumbled over the customs duties levied on tobacco, New Englanders, the worst of the lot, ignored the Navigation Acts altogether and traded openly with the Dutch. Royally appointed proprietors increasingly met deﬁance in New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. If England were to prosper from colonies as Spain’s monarchs had, the crown needed to take matters in hand.

The Dominion of New England

And the crown did so in 1686. At the urging of the new King James II (formerly the Duke of York), the Lords of Trade consolidated the colonies of Connecticut, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire into a single entity to be ruled by a royal governor and a royally appointed council. By 1688 James had added New York and New Jersey to that domain, now called the Dominion of New England. Showing the typical Stuart distaste for representative government, James also abolished all northern colonial assemblies. The king’s aim to centralize authority over such a large territory made the Dominion not only a royal dream but a radical experiment in English colonial administration. The experiment proved to be short-lived. In England James II had revealed himself to be yet another Stuart who tried to dispense with Parliament and who had embraced Catholicism besides. Parliament dispensed with the king just as it had with Charles I during the English Civil War of the 1640s. In a quick, bloodless coup d’état known as the Glorious Revolution, Parliament forced James into exile in 1688. In his place it elevated to the throne his daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. Mary was a distinctly better sort of Stuart—a staunch Protestant—and she agreed to rule with Parliament. William and Mary ofﬁcially dismembered the Dominion of New England and reinstated representative assemblies everywhere in the northern colonies. Connecticut and Rhode Island were restored their old charters, but Massachusetts received a new charter in 1691. Under its terms Massachusetts, Plymouth, and present-day Maine were combined into a single royal colony headed by a governor appointed by the Crown rather than elected by the people. The charter also imposed religious toleration and made property ownership rather than church membership the basis of voting rights.

Royal Authority in America in 1700

William and Mary were more politic than James II, but no less interested in revenue. In 1696 Parliament enlarged the number of customs ofﬁcials stationed in each colony to enforce the Navigation Acts. To help prosecute smugglers, Parliament established colonial vice-admiralty courts, tribunals without juries presided over by royally appointed justices. To keep current on all colonial matters, the king appointed a new Board of Trade to replace the old Lords of Trade. The new enforcement procedures generally succeeded in discouraging smuggling and channeling colonial trade through England. These changes were enough for England and its monarchs for half a century thereafter. English kings and queens gave up any dreams of imposing the kind of centralized administration of colonial life represented by the Dominion of New England. Clearly, royal control had increased over the previous half century. By 1700 royal governments had been established in Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia would shortly be added to the list. Royal rule meant that the monarch appointed governors and (everywhere except Massachusetts) also appointed their councils. Royally appointed councils could veto any law passed by a colony’s representative assembly, royally appointed governors could veto any law passed by both houses, and the Crown could veto any law passed by both houses and approved by the governor.

Nonetheless, the sway of royal power remained more apparent than real after 1700. The Glorious Revolution asserted once and for all that Parliament’s authority—rule by the legislative branch of government—would be supreme in the governing of England. In the colonies members of representative assemblies grew more skilled at dealing with royal governors and more protective of their rights. They guarded most jealously their strongest lever of power—the right of the lower houses to levy taxes. The political reality of the assemblies’ power reﬂected a social reality as well. No longer mere outposts along the Atlantic, the colonies of 1700 were becoming more ﬁrmly rooted societies. Their laws and traditions were based not only on what they had brought from England but also on the conditions of life in America. That social reality had already blocked Stuart ambitions to shape the future of North America, just as it had thwarted the designs of lordly proprietors and the dreams of religious reformers. Still, the dream of empire would revive among England’s rulers in the middle of the eighteenth century—in part because the rulers of France had never abandoned their own imperial visions. France had long been Europe’s largest kingdom in terms of land and overall population. By the 1660s, bureaucratic, ﬁnancial, and political reforms had left the French with the mightiest military as well. Determined to have more territory, France’s ambitious king, Louis XIV, unleashed this titanic war machine against his neighbors on four different occasions from 1667–1714. Even after 1714, France, England and, to a lesser extent, Spain waged a kind of cold war for a quarter of a century, jockeying for position and inﬂuence. Western European monarchs had come to realize that confrontations in North America’s vast and distant interior could inﬂuence the outcome of their feuds closer to home. In this global chess game, the British had the advantage of numbers: nearly 400,000 subjects in the colonies in 1720, compared with only about 25,000 French spread along a thin line of ﬁshing stations and fur-trading posts, and a meager 5,000 or so Spaniards in New Mexico, Texas, and Florida combined. But by a considerable margin, native peoples still represented the majority population in North America. Moreover, they still controlled more than 90 percent of its territory. If events in North America could affect the balance of power in Europe, then French and Spanish administrators could still believe and hope that their Indian alliances might yet help them prevail against each other, and, especially, against Britain’s booming colonies.

Chapter Overview

Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement in North America. In Canada, the Catholic Counterreformation added a missionary zeal to early French exploration and colonization efforts. French Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, helped to win acceptance for French soldiers, traders, and settlers among the native Indians of the Canadian interior. Perhaps most importantly, French colonists, who remained few in number, did not threaten Indian claims to land and political authority. At the same time, the impact of the Reformation in England played a major part in motivating the settlement of Puritan New England and later, the Quaker exodus to Pennsylvania.

New England Communities

Although the Pilgrim Separatists of Plymouth and the Congregationalists of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut differed in some ways, the New England colonies were more notable for their similarities. The distinguishing features of early New England society included rapid population growth through natural increase, large families headed by patriarchal fathers, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality, and an absence of bound labor. These economic and social factors lent stability to early New England society. So did the shared commitment to Puritanism, the organization of churches, and a strong tradition of self-government at both the town and colony level. In all of these respects, New England contrasted strikingly with the early American South.

Despite its coherence and order, early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders often fought bitterly over the proper definition of Puritanism, while contests between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations--the Pequot War and Metacomet's War--as expansion proceeded westward.

The Middle Colonies

The Middle Colonies shared with New England comparable agrarian economies, systems of free labor, and patterns of rapid population growth. Unlike New England, however, all of the Middle Colonies were ruled by proprietary governments, like those in Maryland and South Carolina. Consequently, representative government remained weaker and civic life more embattled. Ethnic and religious antagonisms compounded the political strife in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unlike homogeneously English and Puritan New England, the population of the Middle Colonies included a patchwork of diverse ethnic groups and religious denominations. In New York, for example, English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African Americans, both enslaved and free, adhering to West African tribal religions joined the Dutch Calvinist settlers who had founded the colony as New Netherlands in 1624. Relations between whites and Indians in the Middle Colonies also developed differently. While the Puritans sought to subdue the New England tribes, New Yorkers conciliated the powerful league of the Iroquois in order to maintain a competitive edge over the French for the fur trade.

And for many decades, Quaker Pennsylvanians coexisted peaceably with the Lenni Lenapes. Pennsylvania's Quakers practiced far greater tolerance toward both Native Americans and religious dissenters than did Puritan New Englanders. Even so, both Puritans and Quakers hoped to create religious utopias and representative governments in North America, model societies in which rulers, chosen by popular consent, promoted piety and morality.

Adjustment to Empire

The later Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, attempted to centralize England's American empire. Their efforts created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except newly established Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II went into exile and was replaced on the throne by William and Mary. New England weathered these years of political instability without severe internal turmoil. New Yorkers, however, responded with violence and vicious political infighting in the wake of Leisler's Rebellion. The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced the tensions between England and its colonies. For more than half a century, English monarchs gave up efforts to impose a strict, centralized administration on America. All of the colonies continued to enjoy relative independence under an imperial policy of "benign neglect."

KEY TERMS, PEOPLE, PLACES, CONCEPTS

Jacques Cartier:

Jacques Cartier was a French explorer of Breton origin who claimed what is now Canada for France. He was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named ' The Country of Canadas', after the Iroquois names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona (Quebec City) and at Hochelaga (Montreal Island). The ﬁrst ofﬁcial expedition to the land the French would call Canada took place in 1535, when Jacques Cartier sailed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But not until 1605 did the French plant a permanent colony, at Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia).Page 62

Samuel de Champlain:

Samuel de Champlain, ' The Father of New France', was a French navigator, cartographer, draughtsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler. He is important to Canadian history because he made the first accurate map of the coast and he helped establish the settlements. Born into a family of master mariners, Champlain, while still a young man, began exploring North America in 1603 under the guidance of François Grave Du Pont. He founded New France and Quebec City on July 3, 1608 in the St. Lawrence valley, where he could pursue the fur trade with less competition from rival Europeans. Champlain soon aligned himself with local Montagnais, Algonquin’s, and, especially, the mighty Hurons—a confederacy of farmers 20,000 strong whose towns near the Georgian Bay straddled a vast trading network. Pages 62-63

Dutch West India Company:

Dutch West India Company was a chartered company of Dutch merchants. Among its founding fathers was Willem Usselincx (1567-1647). On June 2, 1621, it was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the West Indies (meaning the Caribbean) by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over the African slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea. Page 63

Henry Hudson:

Henry Hudson was an English Sea Explorer and navigator in the early 17th century. Hudson made two attempts on behalf of English merchants to find a prospective Northwest Passage to Cathay (today's China) via a route above the Arctic Circle. Hudson explored the region around modern New York metropolitan area while looking for a western route to Asia while in the employment of the Dutch East India Company. He explored the river which eventually was named for him, and laid thereby the foundation for Dutch colonization of the region. Hudson discovered a strait and immense bay on his final expedition while searching for the Northwest Passage. In 1611, after wintering on the shore of James Bay, Hudson wanted to press on to the west, but most of his crew mutinied. The mutineers cast Hudson, his son and 7 others adrift; the Hudson’s, and those cast off at their side, were never seen again. Page 63

Counter-reformation:

The Counter-Reformation was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648 which is sometimes considered a response to the Protestant Reformation. The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, composed of four major elements:

•Ecclesiastical or structural reconfiguration

•Religious orders

•Spiritual movements

•Political dimensions

Such reforms included the foundation of seminaries for the proper training of priests in the spiritual life and the theological traditions of the Church, the reform of religious life by returning orders to their spiritual foundations, and new spiritual movements focusing on the devotional life and a personal relationship with Christ, including the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality. It also involved political activities that included the Roman Inquisition.

Page 63

Iroquois League:

The Iroquois also known as the Haudenosaunee or the 'People of the Longhouse', are a league of several nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America. After the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of present-day central and upstate New York coalesced as distinct tribes, by the 16th century or earlier, they came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, or the 'League of Peace and Power'.

The original Iroquois League was often known as the Five Nations, as it was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations. After the Tuscarora nation joined the League in 1722, the Iroquois became known as the Six Nations. Pages 63-64

Beaver Wars:

The Beaver Wars commonly refers to a series of conflicts fought in the mid-17^th century in eastern North America. Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners, the Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade and the trade between European markets and the tribes of the western Great Lakes region. The conflict pitted the nations of the Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant Mohawk, against the French backed and largely Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Great Lakes region. The wars were brutal and are considered one of the bloodiest series of conflicts in the history of North America. As the Iroquois succeeded in the war and enlarged their

territory, they realigned the tribal geography of North America, and destroyed several large tribal confederacies--including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, and Susquehannock-and pushed some eastern tribes west of the Mississippi River, or southward into the Carolinas. Page 64

Pays d'en haut:

By the 1660s, French traders, priests, and ofﬁcers were making inroads among diverse refugee villages in the Western Great Lakes, a region the French referred to as the pays d’en haut. These peoples sought trade, assistance against the Iroquois, and mediation of their own disputes. While the French set about building alliances in the pays d’en haut, they became aware of and began exploring the greatest watercourse in North America. Page 64

Puritan:

The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th century, and from 1630 to 1660 in the 17th century, including, but not also limited to, English Calvinists. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergies shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England. Puritans were blocked from changing the established church from within, and severely restricted in England by laws controlling the practice of religion, but their views were taken by the emigration of congregations to the Netherlands and later New England, and by evangelical clergy to Ireland and later into Wales, and were spread into lay society by preaching and parts of the educational system, particularly certain colleges of the University of Cambridge. Pages 65-68

Presbyterians and Congregationalists:

Predestination:

The Puritans emphasized that idea of divine sovereignty known as predestination. At the center of their thinking was the belief that God had ordained the outcome of history, including the eternal fate of every human being. The Puritans found comfort in their belief in predestination because it provided their lives with meaning and purpose. They felt assured that a sovereign God was directing the fate of individuals, nations, and all of creation. Page 65

William Bradford:

William Bradford was an English leader of the settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and was elected thirty times to be the Governor after John Carver died. His journal (1620-1647) was published as Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford is credited as the first civil authority to designate what popular American culture now views as Thanksgiving in the United States. Pages 66, 72

Squanto:

Tisquantum better known as Squanto (c. 1580s - November 1622) was a Patuxet. He was the Native American who assisted the Pilgrims after their first winter in the New World and was integral to their survival. The Patuxet tribe was a tributary of the Wampanoag Confederacy. Pages 67, 72

John Winthrop:

John Winthrop was a wealthy English Puritan lawyer and one of the leading figures in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first major settlement in New England after Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of migrants from England in 1630, and served as governor for 12 of the colony's first 20 years of existence. His writings and vision of the colony as a Puritan 'city upon a hill' dominated New England colonial development, influencing the government and religion of neighboring colonies. Pages 68, 72

Separation of church and state:

While Connecticut and New Haven emerged from voluntary migration, enforced exile ﬁlled Rhode Island with men and women whose radical ideas unsettled the rest of Massachusetts. Roger Williams, Rhode Island’s founder, had come to New England in 1631, serving as a respected minister of Salem. But soon Williams announced that he was a Separatist, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth. He encouraged the Bay Colony to break all ties to the corrupt Church of England. He also urged a more complete separation of church and state than most New Englanders were prepared to accept, and later in his career he endorsed full religious toleration. Page 70

Thomas Hooker:

Thomas Hooker was a prominent Puritan colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. He was known as an outstanding speaker and a leader of universal Christian suffrage. Called today 'the Father of Connecticut,' Thomas Hooker was a towering figure in the early development of colonial New England. Page 70

Roger Williams:

Roger Williams (c. 1603 – between January and March 1683) was an English Protestant theologian who was an early proponent of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. I n 1636, he began the colony of Providence Plantation, which provided a refuge for religious minorities. Williams started the first Baptist church in America, the First Baptist Church of Providence. Pages 70-71

Massachusetts Bay Colony:

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was an English settlement on the east coast of North America (Massachusetts Bay) in the 17th century, in New England, situated around the present-day cities of Salem and Boston.

The territory administered by the colony included much of present-day central New England, including portions of the U.S. states of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Territory claimed but never administered by the colonial government extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean. The colony was founded by the owners of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which included investors in the failed Dorchester Company, which had in 1623 established a short-lived settlement on Cape Ann. The second attempt, the Massachusetts Bay Colony begun in 1628, was successful, with about 20,000 people migrating to New England in the 1630s. The population was strongly Puritan, and its governance was dominated by a small group of leaders who were strongly influenced by Puritan religious leaders. Although its governors were elected, the electorates were limited to freemen, who had been examined for their religious views and formally admitted to their church. As a consequence, the colonial leadership exhibited intolerance to other religious views, including Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist theologies. Pages 67-68

Anne Hutchinson:

Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan woman minister who was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area. Her popularity and charisma created a schism in the Boston church which threatened to destroy the Puritans' religious experiment in New England.

Page 71

John Cotton:

John Cotton was an English clergyman and colonist. He was a principal figure among the New England Puritan ministers, who also included Thomas Hooker, Increase Mather (who became his son-in-law), John Davenport, and Thomas Shepard and John Norton, who wrote his first biography. Cotton was the grandfather of Cotton Mather, who was named after him. Page 71

King Philip's War:

King Philip's War, or Metacom's Rebellion, was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day southern New England and English colonists and their Native American allies in 1675-1676. The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet, Metacom, or Pometacom, known to the English as ' King Philip'. I t continued in northern New England (primarily on the Maine frontier) after King Philip was killed, until a treaty was signed at Casco Bay in April 1678.

According to a combined estimate of loss of life in Schultz and Tougias' King Philip's War, The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict (based on sources from the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Census, and the work of Colonial historian Francis Jennings), 800 out of 52,000 English colonists (1.5%) and 3,000 out of 20,000 Native Americans (15%) lost their lives due to the war.

Pages 72-73, 79

Quakers:

The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. I t is made of independent organizations which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences. Pages 73-76

Glorious Revolution:

The Glorious Revolution also called the Revolution of 1688, was the overthrow of King James II of England (VII of Scotland and II of Ireland) in 1688 by a union of English Parliamentarians with an invading army led by the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau (William of Orange) who, as a result, ascended the English throne as William III of England together with his wife Mary II of England. The crisis facing King James II came to a head in 1688, when the King fathered a son, James Francis Edward Stuart on 10 June (Julian calendar). Until then the throne would have passed to his daughter Mary, a Protestant, the wife of William. Page 76

Leisler's Rebellion:

Leisler's Rebellion was an uprising in late 17th century colonial New York, in which German American merchant and militia captain Jacob Leisler seized control of the colony's south and ruled it from 1689 to 1691.

The uprising took place in the aftermath of Britain's Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Boston revolt in the Dominion of New England, which had included New York. The rebellion reflected colonial resentment against the policies of the deposed King James II. Royal authority was not restored until 1691, when English troops and a new governor were sent to New York. Leisler was arrested by these forces, which tried and convicted him of treason. Leisler was executed, but the revolt left the colony polarized, bitterly split into two rival factions.

William Penn:

William Penn (14 October 1644 – 30 July 1718) was an English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was an early champion of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Indians. Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed.

In 1681, King Charles II handed over a large piece of his American land holdings to William Penn to satisfy a debt the king owed to Penn's father. This land included present-day Pennsylvania and Delaware. Penn immediately sailed to America and his first step on American soil took place in New Castle in 1682. On this occasion, the colonists pledged allegiance to Penn as their new proprietor, and the first general assembly was held in the colony. Afterwards, Penn journeyed up river and founded Philadelphia. However, Penn's Quaker government was not viewed favorably by the Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers in what is now Delaware. They had no "historical" allegiance to Pennsylvania, so they almost immediately began petitioning for their own assembly.

In 1704 they achieved their goal when the three southernmost counties of Pennsylvania were permitted to split off and become the new semi-autonomous colony of Lower Delaware. As the most prominent, prosperous and influential "city" in the new colony, New Castle became the capital. Pages 74-75

Narragansett:

The Narragansett tribes are an Algonquian Native American tribe from Rhode Island. In 1983 descendants of tribal members identified in an 1880 treaty gained federal recognition as the Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island and re-established sovereignty.

In 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled against their request that the Department of the Interior take land into trust which they had acquired in 1991. The Court ruled that tribes that had achieved federal recognition since the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act did not have standing to have newly acquired lands taken into federal trust and removed from state control.

Early History

Indigenous peoples lived in the New England area for thousands of years. Gradually the Narragansett and other historic tribes developed societies as descendants of earlier cultures. Historically the Narragansett were one of the leading tribes of New England, controlling the west of Narragansett Bay in present-day Rhode Island, and also portions of Connecticut and eastern Massachusetts, from the Providence River on the northeast to the Pawcatuck on the southwest. The Narragansett culture has existed in the region for centuries. They had extensive trade relations across the region. The first European contact was in 1524, when the explorer Giovanni de Verrazano visited Narragansett Bay.

17th Century

Between 1616 and 1619, pandemics originating from infectious diseases carried by European fishermen killed thousands of New England Algonquians in coastal areas south of present-day Rhode Island. At the time the English started colonizing New England in 1620, the Narragansett were the most powerful native nation in the southern area of the region; they had not been affected by the epidemics. Massasoit of the Wampanoag nation allied with the English at Plymouth as a way to protect the Wampanoag from Narragansett attacks.

In the fall of 1621, the Narragansett sent a "gift" of a snakeskin to the newly established English colony at Plymouth. The "gift" was a threatening challenge. The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, sent the snakeskin back filled with bullets. The Narragansett understood the message and did not attack the colony.

They had escaped the epidemics that in 1617 ravaged tribes further south on the coast. European settlement in their territory did not begin until 1635, and in 1636 Roger Williams acquired land use rights from the Narragansett sachems. Later that Europeans and Native Americans realized they had different conceptions of land use.

In 1636, the Narragansett sachems (leaders), Canonicus and Miantonomi, sold the land that became Providence to Roger Williams, a leader of English colonists. During the Pequot War of 1637, the Narragansett allied with the New England colonists. However, the brutality of the English in the Mystic massacre shocked the Narragansett, who returned home in disgust. After the defeat of the Pequot, the English gave captives to both their allies. The Narragansett had conflict with the Mohegan over control of the conquered Pequot land. Page 72

Sieur de La Salle:

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, or Robert de La Salle (November 21, 1643 – March 19, 1687) was a French explorer. He explored the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, the Mississippi River, and the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France. When René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle became the ﬁrst European to descend the river to the Gulf in 1682, he encountered the Natchez, Chickasaws, and others who had not seen Europeans since De Soto and his maniacal march nearly a century and a half before. Other Frenchmen went further, erecting trading posts and simple missions, and even making contact and tentative alliances with Osages, Arkansas, Ottos, Pawnees, and others west of the great river.

Sir George Carteret:

Sir George Carteret, 1st Baronet (c. 1610 – 18 January 1680 N.S.), son of Elias de Carteret, was a royalist statesman in Jersey and England, who served in the Clarendon Ministry as Treasurer of the Navy. He was also one of the original Lords Proprietor of the former British colony of Carolina and New Jersey. Carteret, a town in New Jersey as well as Carteret County in North Carolina, are named after him.

In 1665, Carteret was one of the drafters of the Concession and Agreement, a document that provided freedom of religion in the colony of New Jersey. It was issued as a proclamation for the structure of the government for the colony written by the two proprietors, Berkeley and Carteret.

Wampanoags:

The Wampanoag people also called Massasoit or Wôpanâak, are a Native American tribe. In the beginning of the 17th century, at the time of first contact with the English, the Wampanoag lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as within a territory that encompassed current day Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Their population numbered in the thousands due to the richness of the environment and their cultivation of corn, beans and squash. Three thousand Wampanoag lived on Martha's Vineyard alone. From 1616 to 1619 the Wampanoag suffered an epidemic, long suspected to be smallpox, but recent research alternatively theorizes that it was leptospirosis, a bacterial infection also known as Weil's syndrome or 7-day fever. It caused a high fatality rate and nearly destroyed the society. Researchers suggest that the losses from the epidemic made it possible for the English colonists to get a foothold in creating the Massachusetts Bay Colony in later years. King Philip's War (1675–1676) against the English colonists resulted in the deaths of 40 percent of the tribe. Most of the male survivors were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Many women and children were enslaved in New England.

While the tribe largely disappeared from historical records from the late 18th century, its people persisted. Survivors remained in their traditional areas and continued many aspects of their culture, while absorbing other people by marriage and adapting to changing economic and cultural needs in the larger society.

SAMPLE QUIZ

Multiple Choice Questions

1) The chapter introduction tells the story of French activities in North America to make the point that:

A) the English were relative latecomers to the colonizing business in North America.

B) the Spanish and English were not the only European powers colonizing the Americas.

C) while the French pursued commercial exploitation of North America, the English in New England demonstrated how religion could provide an equally powerful motivation.

D) while the French gained a foothold in North America through the work of the Jesuits, their settlers were few in contrast to the English Calvinists who settled New England.

2) Pilgrims and Puritans migrated to New England for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) their zeal to convert the Indians.

B) the perceived failure of the English government to purify society and the church.

C) political conflict.

D) persecution by James I.

3) The "Mayflower Compact" of the Separatists was:

A) a basis for government devised without a legal basis to do so.

B) an agreement to organize a colony as provided in their original charter.

C) a small group of Pilgrims who determined on shipboard that ministers would hold ultimate authority in the colony.

D) a small floral garden intended to illustrate how God's creation of Eden was a model for society.

4) The Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Company:

A) received a royal charter with title to most of present-day Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

B) were abandoning the Anglican church.

C) had few wealthy members among their ranks.

D) had an inefficient organizational structure and a sense of disunity within the membership.

5) The description of Massachusetts Bay Colony using the biblical metaphor of a "city upon a hill" relates to the Puritan founders' idea that the colony should:

A) be separate from the world.

B) be located on a readily defensible site.

C) be a refuge for all religious dissenters.

D) be a model holy commonwealth and staging area for reform of Old England.

6) New England proved a more hospitable site for colonization than the Chesapeake because:

A) most settlers in New England arrived in family groups, rather than as single indentured servants.

B) the male settlers were mostly free, skilled, and literate.

C) most of the settlers arrived in a cluster between 1630 and 1642, creating a sense of solidarity within the community.

D) all of the above.

7) What was Anne Hutchinson's heresy?

A) She professed that the Spirit of God had taught her that outward works were no indicator of one's inward state of salvation.

B) She believed that salvation came through grace alone, not works.

C) She proclaimed that it was acceptable for women to speak out in church.

D) She proclaimed that the Bay colony was violating God's laws by seizing land from the Indians.

8) Women in New England:

A) suffered such legal disadvantages as laws that forbade wives from suing or making contracts.

B) were portrayed in Puritan doctrine as a "necessary evil."

C) were second-class citizens in the household and in the church.

D) who seemed suspiciously silent might be accused of witchcraft.

9) The Middle Colonies:

A) followed the same patterns of settlement as the New England colonies.

B) discovered cash crops as successful as tobacco, rice, and sugar were in the Southern colonies.

C) founded stable governments that maintained popular support.

D) became a region in which a variety of ethnic and religious groups vied for political authority and economic success.

10) The first blacks to arrive in New Amsterdam in 1626 were:

A) slaves, but some of them were later freed.

B) slaves who were never freed.

C) free, but forced to live in a ghetto in New Amsterdam as the Jews were.

D) free.

11) How did New Netherland become New York?

A) The Dutch sold it to the English.

B) The Dutch abandoned it; the English then colonized it.

C) The English in adjacent areas gradually absorbed the isolated Dutch settlements.

D) The English ignored Dutch claims and conquered it.

12) The Iroquois tribe:

A) succumbed to many of the same pressures as the Indians of other regions.

B) continually shifted their alliance between the French and the English.

C) destroyed the Hurons with the support of Dutch guns and subsequently founded a political alliance that allowed them to deal effectively with both their Indian enemies and the Europeans.

D) based their families on patrilineal kinship.

13) Pennsylvania quickly prospered for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) Penn's planning and publicity efforts.

B) Penn's honest dealings with the Indians that preserved peace.

C) Parliament's generous subsidy.

D) Pennsylvania's rich farmland and Philadelphia's superb natural harbor.

14) William Penn and the Quakers differed from the Puritans of New England in their belief that:

A) the government should be based on equality and consent.

B) the government should promote morality by passing laws.

C) a model society could be created in America.

D) the state should not establish a religion.

15) After the Glorious Revolution, English efforts to exercise closer control over the North American colonies:

A) focused on putting teeth into commercial regulations in order to maximize profits from colonial trade.

B) continued to increase throughout the 1700s, eliciting growing American resistance.

C) ended, as the new monarchy sought to consolidate its power at home.

D) grew substantially but subtly, so that British rule was real though not apparent.

16) Samuel de Champlain established settlements that:

A) brutally subdued the native populations as a labor force for the French.

B) avoided efforts to convert the natives to Christianity.

C) developed reciprocal financial and cultural relationships with the natives in order to gain economic, political, and cultural influence.

D) aligned France with the Mohawks against the Huron.

17) The Beaver Wars:

A) had little impact on the development of new France.

B) were confined primarily to the Hudson Valley.

C) pushed the French westward in an effort to rebuild their trading networks.

D) had little impact on native societies outside the Hudson Valley.

18. The principal economic motive prompting French exploration and settlement in North America was the lucrative trade in:

A) sugar.

B) tobacco.

C) furs.

D) silver.

19. The principal goal of the early Puritans was to:

A) emigrate and set up a separate country with no ties to England.

B) help bring King James to power.

C) reform English society and the Church of England.

D) revive the Roman Catholic Church in England.

20. The Mayflower Compact:

A) was a royal charter from King James providing the Pilgrims the right to set up a colony in North America.

B) provided for an alliance between the Pilgrims in Plymouth and the local Wampanoag Indians.

C) set up a framework for Plymouth's colonial government in which all adult males could vote for local officials.

D) was a petition asking King James to forbid non-Pilgrims from being allowed to immigrate to Plymouth colony.

21. During the so-called "Great Migration" from 1630-1642, most of those who arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony were:

A) not in sympathy with the Puritans and established their own churches throughout New England.

B) poor agricultural peasants, overwhelmingly male, in search of cheap land.

C) primarily farmers, artisans, and merchants who came to the "New World" in families.

D) Pilgrims.

22. Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for:

A) pushing for the separation of church and state.

B) preaching a form of heresy known as "Antinomianism."

C) establishing a house of prostitution in Boston.

D) his refusal to pay church taxes and his outspoken atheistic ideas.

23. Which of the following is NOT true about Anne Hutchinson?

A) Most ministers in Boston supported her religious zeal.

B) Hutchinson believed that obedience to God's laws revealed nothing about the inward state of the soul.

C) Many important merchant families strongly supported her.

D) Many especially disliked her because she was an outspoken, assertive woman at a time when women were expected to have no public role.

24. Most of those accused of witchcraft in 1692 were women who:

A) had sought and achieved elective office in the previous decade but had recently been defeated.

B) were young, recent arrivals to the community.

C) had joined the local Quaker meeting house.

D) were middle-aged or older and regarded as unduly independent.

25. The Iroquois:

A) were a matrilineal society in which women wielded political as well as social influence.

B) made constant war on settlers in New York.

C) maintained close alliances with the neighboring tribes, seeking to prevent exploitation by colonists.

D) were pacifists who denounced warfare as unnatural.

26. The Society of Friends (or Quakers) believed that:

A) only those who professed themselves to be Quakers could enter God's kingdom.

B) all men and women shared equally in the "Light Within" and should be considered equal in society.

C) a holy war against non-Quakers was inevitable, which led to their expulsion from Massachusetts Bay.

D) certain men had been ordained by God to be community leaders and deserved complete respect and deference from all.

27. Leisler's Rebellion in New York in 1689:

A) was a short-lived effort by the Dutch to reclaim from the English what had once been their colony.

B) returned the colony to Dutch hands for nearly 50 years.

C) was a bloody raid on an Indian settlement.

D) reflected aftershocks of the Glorious Revolution in England over who would rule in the colonies.

28. Wider enforcement of the Navigation Acts was provided by Parliament in 1696 in order to:

A) protect the colonists against overzealous customs collectors.

B) discourage colonial smuggling and insure that colonial trade was channeled through England.

C) protect colonial ships against pirates.

D) insure that all ships were adequately equipped with navigational equipment to sail safely across the Atlantic Ocean.

29. The English imperial policy from around 1700 on was to:

A) immediately withdraw from oversight of colonial affairs.

B) gradually withdraw from oversight of all colonial affairs.

C) retain control over the colonies, but allow many decisions to be made by the colonies themselves.

D) sharply increase their control over all affairs in the colonies.

30. All of the following statements about the French colonizing efforts in North America are true EXCEPT:

A) They were the most aggressive early adventurers in the North.

B) They targeted the St. Lawrence river valley for their first settlements.

C) They were hampered because of relatively hostile relations with native tribes.

D) The religious zeal of a renewed Catholicism spurred the colonizing efforts of the French.

31. All of the following, at one time or another, were objectives of the French effort in North America EXCEPT:

A) the quest for a Northwest Passage to the Pacific

B) the quest for profits through the fur trade.

C) finding a place to resettle dissident French Protestants.

D) converting the Indians to Catholicism.

32. The Puritan belief that God was in control of history fueled a zeal to improve society. This belief is known as:

A) divine sovereign grace.

B) the Protestant Reformation.

C) the calling to conversion.

D) predestination.

33. The Puritan program for reforming England included all EXCEPT:

A) purifying the church of England from remaining traces of Catholicism.

B) separating church and state.

C) improving the education of the clergy.

D) limiting church participation to the godly

34. The description of Massachusetts Bay Colony using the biblical metaphor of a “city upon a hill” relates to the Puritan founders’ idea that the colony should:

A) be separate from the world

B) be located on a readily defensible site.

C) be a refuge for all religious dissenters.

D) be a model holy commonwealth and set an example for the world.

35. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay differed from the Pilgrims of Plymouth in all of the following ways EXCEPT:

A) They felt a sense of mission to reform England.

B) They were simpler, less educated folk.

C) They remained within the established Church of England.

D) They carried with them a crown charter for their enterprise.

36. In the early 1600s, migrants to New England differed from those who went to the Chesapeake in that:

A) New England settlement was sponsored by individual proprietors.

B) New England immigrants tended to be motivated by a desire for wealth.

C) New Englanders immigrated in family groups.

D) In the harsher climate of New England, new arrivals often succumbed to disease and death.

37. What is true about New England settlements?

A) Determined to create an alternative model of society, Puritans deliberately set out to establish communities that differed from the places they left behind.

B) The central institution for maintaining stability and order was the church, a “little commonwealth” to which everyone must belong.

C) Almost every adult male owned property, but few had the opportunity to get rich.

D) The basis of local self-government was an elected county Board of Governors.

38. In the early decades of New England settlement, new colonies in adjacent areas were often founded because of:

A) religious differences.

B) overcrowding in the older towns.

C) the opportunities of the fertile frontier lands.

D) imperial ambitions.

39. What characteristic of the “inner world” of New Englanders offers a clue to explain the Salem witchcraft trials?

A) They were a people who lashed out at women who were different.

B) They were deeply insecure about their economic future.

C) They were fascinated by wonders and believed in supernatural forces.

D) They compensated for repressed sexual feelings by targeting women as scapegoats.

40. In their contests with the settlers, New England Indian tribes suffered from the disadvantages of all of the following EXCEPT:

A) disease.

B) disarmament.

C) decentralized authority.

D) disunity.

41. The native peoples of New England:

A) had little in common with practices and attitudes of the white settlers of the region.

B) were alienated by vigorous Puritan attempts to convert them.

C) suffered from the ravages of epidemic disease to the same extent as whites.

D) clashed with settlers in periodic violent conflicts that threatened not only white survival but their own.

42. The Dutch colony of New Netherland was marked by:

A) close control by the government in Holland.

B) small but concentrated centers of population.

C) financial prosperity due to exports of foodstuffs.

D) great ethnic and religious diversity.

43. Which tribe of Indians actually gained strength as a result of its contacts with whites?

A) Powhatans

B) Mohawks

C)Cherokees

D) Iroquois

42. The League of the Iroquois increased its power and autonomy through much of the 1700s for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A) their unification of several tribes into a confederacy.

B) their role as suppliers of furs to white traders.

C) their male-dominated culture that glorified in a fierce warrior tradition.

D) their success in destroying their ancient enemies in Canada, the Hurons.

43. The first colonial endeavor of the Quaker sect focused on this colony, temporarily split in two:

A) Connecticut.

B) New Jersey.

C) Delaware.

D) Carolina.

44. Penn’s vision for his colony included all EXCEPT:

A) displacing the savage Indians.

B) providing a refuge for Quakers from England and elsewhere.

C) establishing a model society to reform the failings of Europe.

D) generating rental revenue for himself.

45. Which of the following statements about the Quakers of Pennsylvania is NOT accurate?

A) Like the Puritans, they sought to create a model society where government would promote morality.

B) They sought a spiritual and social revolution—through politics if possible, through action if necessary.

C) They taught that grace was evidenced by an Inner Light.

D) Their behavior displayed simplicity and equality for all.

46. Which of the following statements most accurately describes the settlement patterns of early Pennsylvania?

A) Most people lived in cities clustered along the coastline.

B) Like New England, the town became the focal point of life.

C) The county, with its dispersed farmsteads, became the dominant settlement pattern.

D) Large plantations similar to Virginia’s were characteristic of Pennsylvania.

47. All of the following statements concerning life in Quaker Pennsylvania are accurate EXCEPT:

A) New arrivals there acquired good land on liberal terms.

B) Penn’s colony was completely free of political strife.

C) A representative assembly existed and guaranteed inhabitants the basic English civil liberties.

D) Inhabitants experienced complete freedom of worship.

48. Leisler’s Rebellion:

A) triggered the Glorious Revolution.

B) was crushed when a joint military force from the New England colonies killed Leisler in battle.

C) ended in Leisler’s execution, which brought on years of political turmoil in New York.

D) overthrew the royal governor with the support of the people, finally giving New York unity and loyalty to

the new English monarchs.

49. After the Glorious Revolution, English efforts to exercise closer control over the North American colonies:

A) extended merely to putting teeth into commercial regulations in order to maximize profits from colonial trade.

B) continued to increase throughout the 1700s, eliciting growing American resistance.

C) ended, as the new monarchy sought to consolidate its power at home.

D) grew substantially but subtly, so that British rule was real though not apparent.

50. By 1700, your text concludes, the North American colonies:

A) were centralizing political power in the office of the royal governor.

B) were becoming permanent, firmly rooted societies.

C) enjoyed stable subsistence economies.

D) had learned to accommodate to cultural differences in ethnicity and religion.

Practice Quiz

1. Thomas Hooker is associated with establishing the colony of:

A. Rhode Island.

B. Vermont.

C. New Hampshire.

D. Connecticut.

E. Maine.

2. The Plymouth colony's relationship with its Indian neighbors was antagonistic from the beginning.

A. made worse by the diseases the colonists brought with them from Europe.

B. an integral part of its survival during the formative years of the colony.

C. similar to that of settlers in Jamestown.

D. one of religious fellowship.

3. The Puritan founders in Massachusetts who described their colony as a "shining city upon a hill"

A. felt they were creating a holy community that would be a model for the world.

B. wanted to construct their community on high ground to save it from Indian attacks.

C. wanted to create a community that would be open to all peoples of all faiths.

D. sought to create a community in which all people were treated as equals.

E. wanted to differentiate their community from the materialism and acquisitiveness of New Haven.

4. In 1637, hostilities broke out between English settlers in the Connecticut Valley and what local Native American tribe?

A. the Seminoles

B. the Powhatans

C. the Sioux

D. the Wampanoags

E. the Pequots

5. In the outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria that marked New England colonial life, those accused were most commonly:

A. not members of the church.

B. criminals.

C. indentured servants.

D. women of low social position.

E. Indians or slaves.

6. The New York colony:

A. had its founding proprietors from the Carolina colony.

B. made a commitment to representative assemblies.

C. emerged after a struggle between the English and the Dutch.

D. saw its population grow slowly for its first fifty years.

E. banned slavery from its inception.

7. In their relations with the Native Americans, the French ________.

A. were as obsessed with Christian conversion as the Spanish

B. cultivated close cooperation in order to sustain their fur trade

C. were ruthless in their treatment of the Native Americans

D. drove them from their land in order to set up plantations

E. were at a distinct disadvantage

8. The majority of colonists who first settled in Plymouth were:

A. members of a Puritan Separatist congregation.

B. not members of a Puritan Separatist congregation.

C. upper-middle class Puritans from the London area.

D. moderate Puritans who wanted only minor reforms in church practices.

E. None of these answers is correct.

9. The Iroquois League was at a disadvantage when dealing with their northern enemies, because they lacked direct access to European weapons. This situation changed during the Beaver Wars when the ________ started dealing guns to them.

A. English

B. Dutch

C. French

D. Spanish

10. The colony of Pennsylvania was established as a religious sanctuary for ________.

A. Puritans

B. Catholics

C. Baptists

D. Quakers

E. Presbyterians

11. Roger Williams insisted that the land on which Massachusetts was settled belonged to the Indians, not to the king.

A. True

B. False

12. Although the inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic colonies enjoyed more secure lives than did most southern colonials, they lacked the common bonds that lent stability to early New England.

A. True

B. False

13. New Englanders liked the idea of centralized authority under the Dominion of New England.

A. True

B. False

14. The Iroquois Confederation consisted of tribes in the southernmost region of the eastern seaboard.

A. True

B. False

15. When the English took New Amsterdam, they were able to quickly rid the colony of Dutch influences.

A. True

B. False

16. The largest outbreak of suspected witchcraft persecution in British North America took place in ________.

Salem

17. The main corridor of French imperial penetration into North America was the ________ River.

St. Lawrence

18. The first English colony to establish the principle of religious toleration was ________.

Maryland

19. The Pilgrims, before disembarking at Plymouth, signed the ________ as a self-instituted basis for government.

Mayflower Compact

20. ________ became a founder of Rhode Island when his radically critical views of established religious practice got him banished from Massachusetts Bay.

Roger Williams

21. King Philip was known among his people as ________.

Metacomet

22. The dominant Indian group on the northern frontier was the ________, a united confederacy of five (later six) tribes.

Iroquois

23. The most concerted attempt by King James II to consolidate control in North America was called the ________.

Dominion of New England

24. Driven by a quest for both furs and souls, the ________ respected Indian culture and in turn won Indian respect.

French

25. The Glorious Revolution brought to power to ________ in England.

William and Mary

26. The most radical Puritans were called ________.

Separatists

27. Late in the 1600s, the English Parliament ousted the Stuart king and brought in William and Mary as monarchs who acknowledged parliamentary rule. This episode is known as the ________.

Glorious Revolution

28. The "Pilgrims"—so called because they migrated from England to Holland to America—in reality are best known as ________ for their views on the Church of England.

Separatists

29. The duke of York became King ________.

James II

30. ________, the leader of the Massachusetts Bay colony, sought to have his people serve as a "city upon a hill."

John Winthrop

31. By the early 1700s, the city of ________ was becoming the commercial and cultural center of the British empire in North America.

Philadelphia

Chapter Quiz

1. How did someone become a member of a church in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?

A. They became part of whatever church was in their community.

B. A person who already belonged to the church had to provide testimony for anyone new who wanted to join.

C. Those wishing to join had to convince ministers and church members that they had experienced a genuine spiritual rebirth or "conversion"

D. A person had to perform community service before being allowed to join a community church.

E. The church community would vote to decide whether to let a new member in.

2. The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay believed that the best way to reform the Church of England was to ________.

A. separate from it and reform it from the outside

B. rely on help from the English monarchy

C. remain in the Church and reform it from the inside

D. refuse to associate with it in any way

E. actively work to destroy the tenets with which they disagreed

3. One reason Roger Williams was deported from the Massachusetts colony was he

A. was a confirmed Separatist.

B. argued that the colony should maintain allegiance to the Church of England.

C. said the land occupied by the colonists belonged to the Indians.

D. attempted to take over the leadership of the colony.

E. advocated the principle of plural marriage.

4. Under the Dominion of New England King James the II:

A. preserved existing colonial legislative assemblies.

B. abolished all northern colonial assemblies

C. only consolidated what now constitutes New England into one entity

D. did away with the Navigation Acts

5. Immigration was the most important factor accounting for New England's colonial population growth.

A. True

B. False

6. The financial success of the French empire in North America depended upon the ________.

A. fur trade

B. complete annihilation of the Native American tribes in Canada

C. discovery of huge amounts of gold

D. conversion of the Indians to Catholicism

E. withdrawal of the Spanish

7. The document in which the Pilgrims established a civil government for their Plymouth colony has become known as the ________.

A. Bill of Rights

B. Mayflower Compact

C. Statement of Principles

D. Cambridge Agreement

E. Plymouth Agreement

8. Which of the following colonies is not properly matched with its founder?

A. Rhode Island-Roger Williams

B. Plymouth-Thomas Hooker

C. Massachusetts Bay-John Winthrop

D. Pennsylvania-William Penn

9. Life expectancy in New England was higher than in England and in the rest of British North America.

A. True

B. False

10. The lives of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson provide strong evidence that ________.

A. Puritans seldom disagreed on matters of theology

B. Massachusetts Bay officials insisted on freedom of religious thought and expression

C. Massachusetts Bay faced difficulties in creating the perfect society in America

D. Massachusetts Bay Colony sent preachers to frontiers as missionaries to the Indians

E. most Puritans had wanted to break away from the Church of England

11. Anne Hutchinson's teaching threatened to undermine the spiritual authority of the established clergy because she:

A. started explaining church sermons to gatherings of her neighbors, and elaborating ideas of her own

B. preached that the clergy was corrupt.

C. denounced clergymen who were also politicians.

D. stressed faith over good works.

E. tried to establish a female clergy.

12. Both the Pequot War and King Philip's War ended disastrously for the Indians.

A. True

B. False

13. The founders of this colony drew Puritan settlers from surrounding colonies by guaranteeing land, religious freedom, and a representative government, in exchange for an small annual fee for the use of the land.

A. Delaware

B. Connecticut

C. New Jersey

D. New York

14. The distinguishing feature of the Puritan's theological beliefs was:

A. that each congregation should conduct its own affairs independently, answering to no other authority

B. the idea of divine sovereignty known as predestination

C. that God was all-knowing and all powerful

D. that they needed to purge the English church of all Roman Catholic "corruptions"

15. What was a deterrent to the French dream of a vast American empire?

A. poor relations with the Indians of Canada and the West

B. the French monarchs' insistence that Canada remain off limits to protestant Huguenots

C. too many French settlers moving to the New World too quickly

D. an inability to find anything of economic consequence in the New World

E. too much competition with the English settlers over land in the New World

AMH 2010 - History of the US to 1877

Chapter 4 - Study Guide\Review

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