Outline Chapter 3

Expansion and Diversity: The Rise of Colonial America, 1625-1700

The Stuart Dynasty in England

Name, Reign Relation to America

James I, 1603-1625 / VA., Plymouth founded; Separatists persecuted
Charles I, 1625-1649 / Civil Wars, 1642-1649; Mass., MD formed
Interregnum, 1649-1660 / Commonwealth; Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell)
Charles II, 1660-1685 / The Restoration; Carolina, Pa., N.Y. founded; Conn. chartered
James II, 1685-1688 / Catholic trend; Glorious Revolution, 1688
William and Mary, 1689-1702
(Mary died in 1694) / King William's War, 1689-1697

The New England Way

  • One of the earliest regions to prosper in North America was New England.
  • 1630 Puritans led Great Migration to New England.
  • A City Upon A Hill, 1625-1642
  • Charles I (ruled 1625-1649)
  • Anglican authorities undertook a systematic campaign to eliminate Puritan influence within the Church of England.
  • Bishops insisted on services based on Book of Common Prayer, which prescribed rituals similar to Catholic practices.
  • Result: Puritan ministers were dismissed who refused new practices, and church courts fined or excommunicated Puritan laypersons.
  • Result: Several Puritan merchants obtained charter to colonize at Massachusetts Bay, north of Plymouth, in 1628 (Massachusetts Bay Company) to escape harassment.
  • Massachusetts Bay vs. Plymouth
  • Similarities: Puritan dominated, self-governing colony rather than controlled from England by stockholders, proprietors, or the crown.

Both primarily attracted landowning farm families of modest means, most of them receptive if not actively committed to Calvinism.

  • Differences: Massachusetts leaders were nonseparatists, advocating the reform of, rather than separation from the Anglican Church.
  • Massachusetts Bay Company
  • In 1630, sent out 11 ships and 700 passengers under Governor John Winthrop.
  • John Winthrop
  • “A Model of Christian Charity”
  • Spelled out new colony’s utopian goals.
  • “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
  • Settlers would build a godly community whose example would shame England into reforming the Church of England.
  • Reached Boston in June 1630.
  • First winter, 30% of Winthrop’s party died and another 10% went home in the spring.
  • By mid-1631, however, 1300 new settlers had landed, and more on the way. The worst was over. The colony would never suffer another starving time.
  • Immigrants quickly established a healthier, more stable economy than their contemporaries in Virginia. By 1642, more than 15,000 colonists had settled in New England.
  • Native Americans
  • Unlike Virginia, colonization in New England began with little sustained resistance from Native Americans, whose numbers drastically reduced by disease.
  • 1st epidemic killed about 90% of New England’s coastal Indians(Ch.2)
  • 2nd epidemic inflicted comparable casualties on Indians throughout NE in 1633-1634.
  • In 1600, 2000 Indians to a few dozen survivors by the mid 1630s, the Massachusetts and Pawtucket Indians were pressed to sell most of their lands to the English.
  • During 1640s Massachusetts Bay passed laws prohibiting Native Americans from practicing their own religion and encouraging missionaries to convert them to Christianity.
  • Ceded more land to the colonists thereafter and moved into “praying towns” like Natick, a reservation established by the colony.
  • Praying towns: Were Puritan missionaries, like John Eliot, hoped to teach the Native Americans Christianity and English ways.
  • The Pequot War, 1637
  • Aroused by rapid expansion of English settlement farther inland.
  • Beginning in 1633, settlers moved into the Connecticut River Valley and in 1635 organized the new colony of Connecticut.
  • Friction developed with the Pequot Indians, who controlled the trade in furs and wampum with New Netherland.
  • After tensions escalated into violence, MA and CT took coordinated military action in 1637.
  • They gained support of the Mohegan and Narragansett Indians.
  • In a predawn attack English troops surrounded and set fire to a Pequot village at Mystic, CT, and cut down all who tried to escape.
  • Several hundred Pequot’s, mostly women and children, were killed.
  • Narragansett Indian allies protested brutality.
  • By late 1637 Pequot resistance was crushed and survivors taken as captives and slaves.
  • Pequot lands awarded to the colonists of CT and another new colony New Haven (absorbed by CT in 1662).
  • Dissent and Orthodoxy, 1630-1650
  • Puritans, in the beginning, had focused on their common opposition to Anglican practices. Upon arriving in NE, theological differences began undermining the harmony Winthrop envisioned.
  • Ministers in MA, CT, and New Haven struggled to define a set of orthodoxy practices— “The New England Way.” (Other Puritans resisted efforts)
  • Means of establishing orthodoxy
  • Education
  • Puritans insisted that conversion required familiarity with the Bible and therefore literacy. Believed education should begin in childhood and should be promoted by each colony.
  • 1637 MA Bay ordered every town of 50 or more households to appoint a teacher to whom all children could come for instruction, and every town of at least 100,000 households to maintain grammar school.
  • Represented NE first steps toward public education.
  • Properly trained ministers
  • MA founded Harvard College in 1636. From 1642 to 1671 the college produced 302 graduates, including 111 ministers.
  • NE only part of English America with a college educated elite during the 17th century.
  • Government
  • Puritans agreed that the church must be free of state control, and they opposed theocracy (government run by clergy).
  • But Winthrop and other MA Bay leaders insisted that a holy commonwealth required cooperation between church and state.The colony obliged all adults to attend services and pay set rates (or tithes) to support their local church. MA had a state sponsored, or “established,” church, whose relationship to civil government was symbolized by a single building – a meetinghouse rather than a church – was used both for religious services and town meetings.
  • Challenges to the New England Way
  • Roger Williams, arrived in 1631
  • Argued that civil government should remain absolutely uninvolved with religious matters, whether blasphemy (cursing God), failure to pay tithes, refusal to attend worship, or swearing oaths on the Bible in court. Also opposed any kind of compulsory church service or government interference with religious practice, not because all religions deserved equal respect but because the state (a creation of sinful human beings) would corrupt the church.
  • Banished in 1635, because of colony officials declared his opinions subversive. They saw him as a threat.
  • Purchased Providence, which in 1637 joined to form Rhode Island.
  • The only NE colony to practice religious tolerance.
  • Ann Hutchinson
  • Argued that ministers, who scrutinized a person’s outward behavior for “signs” of salvation, especially when that person was relating his or her conversion experience, were discarding God’s judgment in favor of their own. Only by looking inwards and ignoring false prophets could individuals find salvation.
  • By casting doubt on the clergy’s spiritual state, Hutchinson undermined their authority on laypersons.
  • Her followers called Antinomians, meaning those who opposed to the rule of law.
  • Supporters: Boston merchants who disliked the government’s economic restrictions on their businesses, young men chafing against the rigid control of church elders, and women impatient with their second class status in church affairs.
  • Hutchinson put to trial for heresy by Winthrop would have won if she didn’t say she had a direct revelation from God.
  • Settled in Rhode Island.
  • Antinomians Defeat: Effect
  • New restrictions on women’s independence and religious expression.
  • Increasingly, women were prohibited from assuming the kind of public religious roles claimed by Hutchinson, and were even required to relate their conversion experience private to their minister rather than publicly.
  • Self-Interests
  • Most fundamental threat. People would abandon the ideal of a close-knit community to pursue self interest.
  • While hoping for prosperity, Puritans believed that there were limits to legitimate commercial behavior. Govt. leaders tried to regulate prices so that consumers would not suffer from the chronic shortage of manufactured good that afflicted NE.
  • 1635- MA General Court forbade pricing any item more than 5% above its cost. Merchants objected.
  • Ex: Robert Keayne, a merchant, who sold nails at 25% to 33% percent above cost violating the law and forced to give a humiliating apology.
  • Puritans ability and desire to insulate their city upon a hill vs. a market economy that, they feared, would strangle the spirit of community within a harsh new world of frantic competitors.
  • Power to the Saints, 1630-1660
  • Control of each congregation lay squarely in the hands of its male “saints,” as Puritans termed those who had been save.
  • By majority vote these men chose their minister, elected a board of elders to handle finances, and decided who else deserved recognition as saints.
  • Massachusetts Puritans, unlike English Puritans who accepted as saints any who correctly professed the Calvinist faith, repented their sins, and lived free of scandal, they insisted that candidates for membership stand before their congregation and provide a convincing, soul-baring “relation,” or account, of their conversion experience. This was NE Way’s most vulnerable feature.
  • Political participation more broadly based in NE that elsewhere.
  • Suffrage did not require landownership but bestowed suffrage on every adult male “saint.”
  • 1644 – General Court became bicameral (two chamber) lawmaking body when the town’s deputies separated from the appointed Governor’s Council.
  • Clustering of families fostered an atmosphere of mutual watchfulness that Puritans hoped would promote godly order. Such enforcement was relied on women.
  • Neighboring women exchanged not only goods but advice and new of other neighbors as well. They created a setting of a “community of women.”
  • Ex: In 1663 Mary Rolfe of Newbury, MA was being sexually harassed by a high-ranking gentleman while her fisherman husband was at sea. She confided in her mother, who in turn consulted with a neighboring woman of influence before filing formal charges. Male jury convicted the gentleman of attempted adultery with neighboring woman’s influence.
  • New England Families
  • Puritans believed that society’s foundation rested not on the individual but rather on the “little commonwealth”—the nuclear family at the heart of every household.
  • Puritans defined matrimony as a contract rather than a religious sacrament, and NE couples were married by justices of the peace instead of ministers.
  • As a civil institution, a marriage could be dissolved by the courts in cases of desertion, bigamy, adultery, or physical cruelty.
  • Permitted divorces which diverged radically from practices in England.
  • Didn’t mean many divorces were given. MA courts allowed just 27 divorces from 1639 to 1692.
  • Puritans believed that healthy families were crucial to the community’s welfare; authorities intervened whenever they discovered a breakdown of household order.
  • Churches censured, and sometimes expelled, spouses who did not maintain domestic tranquility.
  • Courts disciplined unruly youngsters, disobedient servants, disrespectful wives, and violent or irresponsible husbands.
  • Women:
  • NE wives enjoyed significant legal protection against spousal violence and nonsupport and also more opportunity than European women to escape failed marriage.
  • Had no property rights independent of her husband unless he consented to prenuptial agreement, no heirs, or stipulated in husbands will.
  • Environment and Life Expectancy
  • Easy access to land allowed most families an adequate diet, which improved resistance to disease and lowered death rates associated with childbirth.
  • NE lived longer and raised larger families than almost any society in the world in the 17th century.
  • Men – 65 yrs. OldWomen – nearly the same as men.
  • More than 80% of all infants survived long enough to get married.
  • Roles
  • Women
  • Bore, nursed, and reared the children.
  • In charge of work in the house, barn, and garden, including making the food and clothing.
  • Men
  • Heads managed the family’s crops and livestock, conducted most of its business transactions, and represented it in town govt.
  • Children
  • Were dependent for labor.
  • Depended on their parents to provide them with acreage for farming.
  • The Half-Way Covenant, 1662
  • First generation believed that they had accepted a holy contract, or covenant, with God, obliging them to implement godly rule and charge their descendants with its preservation. In return, God would make the city upon a hill prosper and shield it from corruption.
  • Crisis arose because many Puritans’ children were not joining the elect.
  • By 1650, for example, fewer than half the adults in the Boston congregation were saints.
  • Principal reason was the children’s reluctance to subject themselves to public grilling on their conversion experience.
  • Because Puritan ministers baptized only babies born to saints, the unwillingness of the 2nd generation to provide a conversion relation meant that most 3rd generation children would remain unbaptized.
  • In 1662, a proposed compromise was given known as the Half-Way Covenant, which would permit the children of baptized adults, including nonsaints, to receive baptism.
  • Congregations divided bitterly over limiting membership to pure saints or compromising purity in order to maintain Puritan power in NE. In the end, chose for worldly power over spiritual purity.
  • Expansion and Native Americans. 1650-1676
  • Farmers building homes on Native American outlying tracts, often cut Native settlements from one another and from hunting, gathering, and fishing area.
  • The fur trade, which initially, benefited interior Natives, became a liability after midcentury. Depletion of region’s beavers and other fur-bearing animals put Natives in debt because English traders shrewdly advanced trade good on credit to Indian hunters before the hunting season, the lack of pelts putting Natives in debt.
  • Anglo-Indian conflict became acute during the 1670s because of pressures imposed on unwilling Indians to sell their land and to accept missionaries and the legal authority of colonial courts
  • King Phillips War 1675-1676
  • Metacom, or “King Phillip,” the son of the colony’s onetime ally Massasoit was now the leading Wampanoag sachem.
  • King Phillip’s War ignited because of minor incident, in which several Wampanoags were shot while burglarizing a farmhouse.
  • 2/3 of the colonies’ Native Americans, including some Christians, rallied around Metacom.
  • Unlike before Native Americans were not unfamiliar with guns and used them to their advantage.
  • Tide turned against Metacom in 1676 after the Mohawk Indians of NY and many Christian Indians joined the English against them.
  • English and their allies destroyed their enemies’ food supplies and sold hundreds captives into slavery. About 5000 Indians starved or fell in battle, including Metacom himself, and others fled to NY and Canada.
  • Effect: Indian population reduced in southern NE by about 40% and eliminated overt resistance to white expansion.
  • Deepened English hostility toward all Native Americans, even the Christian and other Indians who had supported the colonies.
  • Salem Witchcraft and the Demise of the NE Way, 1691-1693
  • New England’s regional commercial economy was growing, especially in its port cities, and the distribution of wealth was becoming less even.
  • Residents of the village’s eastern section farmed richer soils and benefited from Salem Town’s commercial expansion, whereas those in the less fertile western half did not share in this prosperity and had lost the political influence that they once held in Salem.
  • Witchcraft hysteria started when in late 1691 several Salem Village girls encouraged an African slave woman, Tituba, to tell them their fortunes and talk about slavery. Later girls named two local white women and Tituba that they were the reasons for witchcraft.
  • The witchcraft hysteria was but an extreme expression of more widespread anxieties over social change in NE.
  • Governor William Phips forbade further imprisonment for witchcraft in Oct. 1692. Phips ended the terror in early 1693 by pardoning all those convicted or suspected of witchcraft.
  • Chesapeake Society
  • Sharply divided between a few wealthy planters who dominated a majority consisting of (mostly white) indentured servants and small but growing numbers of black slaves and poor white farmers.
  • Indentured servants: a person who came to American and was placed under contract to work for another over a period of time, usually four to seven years, especially during the 17th and 19th centuries. At the expiration of that period, they gained their freedom and either worked for wages or obtained land of their own to farm.
  • Government in Virginia
  • After 1630 the need for additional taxes led royal governors to call regular assemblies. The small number of elected representatives, or burgesses, initially met as a single body with the council to pass laws. During the 1650s the legislature split into two chambers—the House of Burgesses and the Governor’s Council, whose members held lifetime appointments.
  • Maryland
  • 1632 land grant went to Lord Baltimore (Cecilius Calvert) for a large tract of land north of the Potomac River and east of Chesapeake Bay, which he named Maryland.
  • Haven for Catholics (suppose to be)
  • Maryland Act of Toleration: Made because of antagonism increase between Catholics and Protestants. Passed in 1649. It made Maryland the second colony (after Rhode Island) to affirm liberty of worship. However, the act did not protect non-Christians, nor did it separate church and state, since it empowered the government to punish religious offenses such a blasphemy.
  • Economics:
  • Tobacco Shapes a Region, 1630-1670
  • Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina
  • Dependent on the price of tobacco.
  • Tobacco dominated in region since 1618. Boom ended in 1629 when prices sank 97%. Stabilized later to 10% of its former price.
  • 1660 the price of tobacco fell far below profitable level, to a penny a pound. Began a 50 yr. depression. Many landowners held on by offsetting tobacco losses with small sales of corn and cattle to the West Indies.
  • Bacon’s Rebellion, 1675-1676
  • Conflict:
  • Tensions flared between Chesapeake Natives struggling to retain land and sovereignty in the face of settler’s expansionism.
  • Governor Berkeley and Lord Baltimore, along with a few cronies, held fur trade monopolies that profited from friendly relations with frontier Indians.
  • Result: settler resentments against the governor and proprietor became fused with those against Indians.
  • Governor Berkeley proposed defending the frontier with a chain of forts but taxes needed to collect for it would take almost a quarter of their yearly incomes (already low from tobacco prices).
  • Result: Small farmers preferred the less costly solution of waging a war of extermination.