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The source of those differences lay in England's domestic problems. Increasingly in the early 1600s,the English state church—the Church of England, established in the 1530s—demanded conformity, orcompliance with its practices, but Puritans pushed for greater reforms. By the 1620s, the Church of Englandbegan to see leading Puritan ministers and their followers as outlaws, a national security threat because oftheir opposition to its power.
As the noose of conformity tightened around them, many Puritans decidedto remove to New England. By 1640, New England had a population of twenty-five thousand. Meanwhile,many loyal members of the Church of England, who ridiculed and mocked Puritans both at home and inNew England, flocked to Virginia for economic opportunity.
n 1649, the Parliamentarians gained the upper hand and, in an unprecedentedmove, executed Charles I. In the 1650s, therefore, England became a republic, a state without a king.
English colonists in America closely followed these events. Indeed, many Puritans left New England and returned home to take part in the struggle against the king and the national church.
Other English men and women in the Chesapeake colonies and elsewhere in the English Atlantic World looked on in horror at the mayhem the Parliamentarians, led by the Puritan insurgents, appeared to unleash in England.
The turmoil in England made the administration and imperial oversight of the Chesapeake and New England colonies difficult, and the two regions developed divergent cultures
The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland served a vital purpose in the developing seventeenth-century English empire by providing tobacco, a cash crop
the early history of Jamestown didnot suggest the English outpost would survive. From the outset, its settlers struggled both with each other and with the native inhabitants, the powerful Powhatan, who controlled the area.
John Smith, whose famous mapbegins this chapter, took control and exercised near-dictatorial powers, which furthered aggravated thesquabbling.
The settlers' inability to grow their own food compounded this unstable situation. They were essentially employees of the Virginia Company of London, an English joint-stock company, in which investors provided the capital and assumed the risk in order to reap the profit, and they had to make a profit for their shareholders as well as for themselves.
Most initially devoted themselves to finding gold and silver instead of finding ways to grow their own food
Poor health, lack of food, and fighting with native peoples took the lives of many of the original Jamestownsettlers. The winter of 1609-1610, which became known as "the starving time," came close to annihilatingthe colony. By June 1610, the few remaining settlers had decided to abandon the area; only the last-minute arrival of a supply ship from England prevented another failed colonization effort.
The supply ship brought new settlers, but only twelve hundred of the seventy-five hundred who came to Virginia between1607 and 1624 survived
By the 1620s, Virginia had weathered the worst and gained a degree of permanence. Political stability came slowly, but by 1619, the fledgling colony was operating under the leadership of a governor, a council,and a House of Burgesses
. Economic stability came from the lucrative cultivation of tobacco
To meet these labor demands, early Virginians relied on indentured servants.
An indentureis a labor contract that young, impoverished, and often illiterate Englishmen and occasionally Englishwomen signedin England, pledging to work for a number of years [usually between five and seven] growing tobaccoin the Chesapeake colonies.
In return, indentured servants received paid passage to America and food,clothing, and lodging.
At the end of their indenture servants received "freedom dues," usually food andother provisions, including, in some cases, land provided by the colony.
The promise of a new life inAmerica was a strong attraction for members of England's underclass, who had few if any options at home.In the 1600s, some 100,000 indentured servants traveled to the Chesapeake Bay.
Most were poor youngmen in their early twenties.
Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising of both whites and blacks who believed that the Virginia government wasimpeding their access to land and wealth and seemed to do little to clear the land of Indians, hastenedthe transition to African slavery in the Chesapeake colonies.
The rebellion takes its name from NathanielBacon, a wealthy young Englishman who arrived in Virginia in 1674. Despite an early friendship withVirginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, Bacon found himself excluded from the governor's circleof influential friends and councilors. He wanted land on the Virginia frontier, but the governor, fearingwar with neighboring Indian tribes, forbade further expansion.
Bacon marshaled others, especially former indentured servants who believed the governor was limiting their economic opportunities and denying them the right to own tobacco farms.
Bacon's followers believed Berkeley's frontier policy didn't protectEnglish settlers enough. Worse still in their eyes, Governor Berkeley tried to keep peace in Virginia bysigning treaties with various local native peoples. Bacon and his followers, who saw all Indians as anobstacle to their access to land, pursued a policy of extermination.
n 1676, Bacon andother Virginians attacked the Susquehannock without the governor's approval. When Berkeley orderedBacon's arrest, Bacon led his followers to Jamestown, forced the governor to flee to the safety of Virginia'seastern shore, and then burned the city.
The civil war known as Bacon's Rebellion, a vicious struggle between supporters of the governor and those who supported Bacon, ensued. Reports of the rebelliontraveled back to England, leading Charles II to dispatch both royal troops and English commissionersto restore order in the tobacco colonies. By the end of 1676, Virginians loyal to the governor gainedthe upper hand, executing several leaders of the rebellion.
Bacon escaped the hangman's noose, insteaddying of dysentery. The rebellion fizzled in 1676, but Virginians remained divided as supporters of Bacon continued to harbor grievances over access to Indian land.
The conflict generated by Puritanism had divided English society, because the Puritans demanded reformsthat undermined the traditional festive culture.
For example, they denounced popular pastimes like bear-baiting—letting dogs attack a chained bear—which were often conducted on Sundays when people hada few leisure hours. In the culture where William Shakespeare had produced his masterpieces, Puritanscalled for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places of decadence.
Indeed, the Bible itselfbecame part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who headed the Church of England.
Soon after ascending the throne, James commissioned a new version of the Bible in an effort to stifle Puritan reliance on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John Calvin and placed God's authority above the monarch's. The King James Version, published in 1611, instead emphasized the majesty of kings.
etsablishing the Massachusetts BayColony, the New Haven Colony, the Connecticut Colony, and Rhode Island]
left england in 1630s
, these migrants were families with young children and their university-trained ministers. Their aim, according to John Winthrop [Figure 3.12], the first governor of MassachusettsBay, was to create a model of reformed Protestantism—a "city upon a hill," a new English Israel.
The idea of a "city upon a hill" made clear the religious orientation of the New England settlement, and the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated as a goal that the colony's people "may be soe religiously,peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie Conversacon, maie wynn and incite theNatives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Saulor of Mankinde, andthe Christian Fayth."
To illustrate this, the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company [Figure 3.12] shows ahalf-naked Indian who entreats more of the English to "come over and help us.
Protestantsemphasized literacy so that everyone could read the Bible. This attitude was in stark contrast to thatof Catholics, who refused to tolerate private ownership of Bibles in the vernacular.
The Puritans, fortheir part, placed a special emphasis on reading scripture, and their commitment to literacy led to theestablishment of the first printing press in English America in 1636. Four years later, in 1640, theypublished the first book in North America, the Bay Psalm Book.
As Calvinists, Puritans adhered to thedoctrine of predestination, whereby a few "elect" would be saved and all others damned. No one could besure whether they were predestined for salvation, but through introspection, guided by scripture, Puritans hoped to find a glimmer of redemptive grace. Church membership was restricted to those Puritans who were willing to provide a conversion narrative telling how they came to understand their spiritual estateby hearing sermons and studying the Bible
Although many people assume Puritans escaped England to establish religious freedom, they provedto be just as intolerant as the English state church.
When dissenters, including Puritan minister RogerWilliams and Anne Hutchinson, challenged Governor Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, theywere banished.
Roger Williams questioned the Puritans' taking of Indian land. Williams also argued fora complete separation from the Church of England, a position other Puritans in Massachusetts rejected,as well as the idea that the state could not punish individuals for their beliefs.
Although he did acceptthat nonbelievers were destined for eternal damnation, Williams did not think the state could compeltrue orthodoxy.
Puritan authorities found him guilty of spreading dangerous ideas, but he went on tofound Rhode Island as a colony that sheltered dissenting Puritans from their brethren in Massachusetts. InRhode Island, Williams wrote favorably about native peoples, contrasting their virtues with Puritan NewEngland's intolerance.
When the Puritans began to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, local Algonquian peoples had viewed them aspotential allies in the conflicts already simmering between rival native groups. In 1621, the Wampanoag,led by Massasoit, concluded a peace treaty with the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
In the 1630s, the Puritans inMassachusetts and Plymouth allied themselves with the Narragansett and Mohegan people against thePequot, who had recently expanded their claims into southern New England.
In May 1637, the Puritansattacked a large group of several hundred Pequot along the Mystic River in Connecticut. To the horror oftheir native allies, the Puritans massacred all but a handful of the men, women, and children they found.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritans had pushed their way further into the interior of NewEngland, establishing outposts along the Connecticut River Valley. There seemed no end to theirexpansion.
Wampanoag leader Metacom or Metacomet, also known as King Philip among the English,was determined to stop the encroachment.
The Wampanoag, along with the Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, andNarragansett, took up the hatchet to drive the English from the land.
In the ensuing conflict, called KingPhilip's War, native forces succeeded in destroying half of the frontier Puritan towns; however, in the end,the English [aided by Mohegans and Christian Indians] prevailed and sold many captives into slavery in the west indies
The severed head of King Philip was publicly displayed in Plymouth.
The war alsoforever changed the English perception of native peoples; from then on, Puritan writers took great pains tovilify the natives as bloodthirsty savages. A new type of racial hatred became a defining feature of Indian-English relationships in the Northeast
a crushing demand for labor existed to grow New World cash crops, especially sugar and tobacco
This need led Europeans to rely increasingly on Africans, and after1600, the movement of Africans across the Atlantic accelerated
The English crown chartered the RoyalAfrican Company in 1672, giving the company a monopoly over the transport of African slaves to theEnglish colonies. Over the next four decades, the company transported around 350,000 Africans from theirhomelands. By 1700, the tiny English sugar island of Barbados had a population of fifty thousand slaves,and the English had encoded the institution of chattel slavery into colonial law.
This new system of African slavery came slowly to the English colonists, who did not have slavery athome and preferred to use servant labor.
Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, the Englisheverywhere in America—and particularly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies—had come to rely on Africanslaves
Once sold to traders, all slaves sent to America endured the hellishMiddle Passage, the transatlanticcrossing, which took one to two months.
By 1625, more than 325,800 Africans had been shipped to theNew World, though many thousands perished during the voyage.
An astonishing number, some four million, were transported to the Caribbean between 1501 and 1830.
When they reached their destinationin America, Africans found themselves trapped in shockingly brutal slave societies.
In the Chesapeake colonies, they faced a lifetime of harvesting and processing tobacco.
The popularity of beaver-trimmed hatsin Europe, coupled with Indians' desire for European weapons, led to the overhunting of beaver in theNortheast. Soon, beavers were extinct in New England, New York, and other areas.
With their loss came the loss of beaver ponds, which had served as habitats for fish as well as water sources for deer, moose, andother animals.
Europeans introduced pigs, which they allowed to forage in forests and otherwildlands. Pigs consumed the foods on which deer and other indigenous species depended, resulting in scarcity of the game native peoples had traditionally hunted.
owning land as private property clashed with natives' understanding of land use.
Native peoples did not believe in private ownership of land;
Colonizers established fields, fences, and other means of demarcating private property.
Native peoples who moved seasonally to take advantage of natural resources now found areas off limits, claimedby colonizers because of their
insistence on private-property rights