American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

The rebellion began to falter almost as soon as it triumphed. Deprived by victory of their common enemy, the Pueblo peoples revived their traditional feuds, falling out both within villages and between them. In addition, renewed drought brought famine and another rupture in trade with their Apache allies, who resumed their raiding.

In 1691 the beleaguered Hispanic refugees at El Paso rallied under the able leadership of a new governor, Diego de Vargas, an ambitious, resourceful, and selectively ruthless Spanish nobleman. Exploiting divisions and war-weariness among the Pueblo, he reclaimed New Mexico in 1692–93, overcoming the greatest resistance at Santa Fe, which he captured by storm.

Bloody and destructive to the Pueblo as well as the Spanish, the rebellions of 1680 and 1696 taught both to compromise. The Pueblo peoples accepted Spanish persistence and authority, while the Hispanics practiced greater restraint.

In 1541 the Spanish emperor declined to block a French expedition to colonize along the St. Lawrence River in Canada. The emperor explained, “As regards settling in the Northern Sea, there is nothing to envy in this; for it is of no value, and if the French take it, necessity will compel them to abandon it.”

Rendered scarce in Europe by overhunting, furs commanded high prices for making hats and for trimming fine clothes. Because Indians voluntarily performed the hard work of hunting the animals and treating their furs, traders could immediately profit in America without the time, trouble, expense, and violence of conquering Indians to reorganize their labor in mines and plantations.

the Indians thought of all objects, material as well as living (stones as well as beavers), as possessed of some spiritual power, which the Algonquian speakers called manitou. Detecting manitou concentrated in especially bright and shiny objects, the northeastern Indians traditionally cherished copper ornaments brought from Lake Superior or polished seashell beads, known as wampum, from Long Island Sound. They discerned the same beauty and spiritual power in the colorful glass beads and shiny metals brought by European mariners and traders.

The natives also adapted alcohol to their own purposes. At first, they balked at the novel taste and disorienting effect, but eventually they developed a craving. Drinking as much and as rapidly as they could, the Indians got drunk as a short cut to the spiritual trances that had previously required prolonged fasting and exhaustion. Alcohol also offered a tempting release of aggressions, ordinarily repressed with great effort and much stress, because Indian communities demanded the consistent appearance of harmony. Regarding alcohol as an animate force, natives believed that drinkers were not responsible for their violent actions.

In drink, natives lashed out with knives and hatchets, killing their own people far more often than the colonial suppliers of their new drug.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the trade goods were sufficiently common that the northeastern Algonquian peoples had forsaken their stone tools and weapons—and the craft skills needed to produce them. If cut off from trade, natives faced deprivation, hunger, and destruction by their enemies.

No longer hunting only to feed and clothe themselves but also to supply an external market, the Indians had to kill more animals, especially beaver. As market incentives overwhelmed the inhibitions of animism, the Indian hunters killed animals at an unprecedented rate that depleted their numbers.

Upon depleting their local beaver, Indians extended their hunting into the territories of their neighbors, provoking new and more desperate conflicts.

Indians had long conducted sporadic and limited wars, inflicting a few casualties every year. The new weapons, however, enabled the well-armed to destroy their trade-poor neighbors.

Because their large numbers quickly overhunted the nearby animals, including the beaver, the Huron could not contribute much to the fur trade as hunters. Instead, they staked out a role as provisioners and middlemen in the west-to-east trade network of the north country. The Huron traded their agricultural surplus to more northern and western Indian hunters—the Algonkin, Nipissing, Ottawa, and Ojibwa—in return for their furs. The Huron then carried the pelts eastward via the Ottawa River in canoes to trade to the French at Quebec.

During the 1620s, the Huron annually supplied ten to twelve thousand pelts, nearly two-thirds of all the furs obtained in New France, although very few derived from animals killed by Huron hunters.

Coming in small numbers, the French needed relatively little land, putting slight pressure on Canada’s natives, who had more territory than they needed after the epidemics of the sixteenth century.

The introduction of firearms revolutionized Indian warfare as the natives recognized the uselessness of wooden armor and the folly of massed formations. Throughout the northeast, the Indians shifted to hit-and-run raids and relied on trees for cover from gunfire. They also clamored, with increasing success, for their own guns as the price of trade.

colonial officials of all empires had forbidden the sale of guns to Indians, even if allies, but as the fur trade grew more competitive, traders recognized the immense profits in selling what the Indians wanted most.

More than any other northeastern people, the Five Nation Iroquois could sustain longdistance and large-scale raids against multiple enemies. The Huron could nearly match the horticultural surplus and devotion to war, but the Montagnais and Algonkin were hunter-gatherers who could not.

Captive men more often faced death by torture, especially if they had received some crippling wound. Inflicting death as slowly and painfully as possible, the Iroquois tied their victim to a stake, and villagers of both genders and all ages took turns wielding knives, torches, and red-hot pokers systematically to torment and burn him to death.

After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles, and served the stew to the entire village, so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captive’s power.

Probably introduced by the Iroquois peoples, the rituals of torture and adoption had spread to their Algonquian neighbors to become common throughout the northeast long before the European invasion.

the torments of northeastern torture had their counterparts in early modern Europe, where thousands of suspected heretics, witches, and rebels were publicly tortured to death: burned at the stake, slowly broken on a wheel, or pulled apart by horses.

The Great League was not a European-style nation-state. Unlike the kingdoms of France, England, and Spain, the Iroquois Great League possessed no central political authority to devise collective policies or to coerce its own people into obedience. Indeed, the various villages preserved their autonomy, all free to go their own way, provided they relied on the condolence ceremonies to keep the peace with their fellow confederates. The Great League was primarily a ceremonial and religious forum for promoting calm and peaceful thinking in a world where grief, rage, and war prevailed.

Only through periodic public, oral, and ritual reiteration could peace have a chance to compete on an equal footing with the anger of warriors.

The French priests frequently denounced the fur traders as moral reprobates who set a vicious example to the Indians, while the traders often resented the missionaries as unrealistic meddlers who ruined the natives as hunters and warriors.

Seventeenth-century Europeans regarded non-Europeans as socially and culturally inferior—but not as racially incapable of equality. Lacking a biological concept of race, seventeenth-century Europeans did not yet believe that all people with a white skin were innately superior to all of another color. European elites primarily perceived peoples in terms of social rank rather than pigmentation.

Seventeenth-century colonial leaders ordinarily considered the common peasants and laborers of Europe as little better than Indians.

Once assimilated to French culture and religion, Indians were entitled to equality with common colonists. Of course, assimilation to the bottom ranks of a European social hierarchy was not an especially appealing prospect.

Rather than compel Indians to learn French and relocate into new mission towns, the Jesuits mastered the native languages and went into their villages to build churches.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Iroquois warfare dramatically escalated to nearly genocidal proportions, devastating their native enemies and imperiling the French colony.

Never before had native peoples attacked and killed each other on the scale and with the ferocity of the Iroquois during the 1640s and 1650s. European trade and diseases combined both to empower and to distort the Iroquois way of war, ultimately to their own detriment, as well as to the misery of their many enemies.

Spanish and French mariners explored the long coast north of Florida and south of Acadia (Nova Scotia) but deemed the temperate region of little value for colonies: too cool for tropical crops but too warm for the best furs.

Thereafter, the Spanish concluded that Florida adequately protected the precious heartland of their empire to the south in Mexico and the Caribbean. Neglected by the Spanish and French, the mid-Atlantic seaboard remained open to English colonization during the 1580s.

Moreover, during the mid-sixteenth century, the English were preoccupied with the conquest and colonization of Ireland.

Possessed of a relatively small and poor realm, the English queen lacked the means to finance and govern an overseas colony, especially after a full-scale war erupted with Spain in 1585. Obliged to play defense in the nearby Netherlands and English Channel, the English crown lacked the men and ships for risky ventures far from home. Instead, following French and Spanish precedent, the crown subcontracted colonization by issuing licenses and monopolies to private adventurers, who assumed the risks in speculative pursuit of profits.

In wooing investors and the crown, the West Country promoters also addressed a pervasive anxiety over the proliferation of poverty, vagrancy, and crime in sixteenth-century England. They pitched a radical program of overseas colonization by appealing to a conservative fear that the hierarchical society of England was eroding.

Unlike the authoritarian kings of France and Spain, Queen Elizabeth had to share national power with the aristocracy and gentry, who composed the bicameral national legislature known as Parliament.

Only about 25 percent of the adult men owned enough property to qualify for the vote—and only for one house of Parliament.

Although a narrow system of government by our standards, the English constitution was extraordinarily open and libertarian when compared with the absolute monarchies then developing in the rest of Europe. Consequently, it mattered greatly to the later political culture of the United States that England, rather than Spain or France, eventually dominated colonization north of Florida.

The growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed reduced the wages that employers had to pay. The growing population also bid up the costs of food and housing. The double squeeze cut real wages in half between 1500 and 1650, depressing the already bleak living conditions of the poor. Growing numbers depended upon public relief funded by “poor rates” levied on propertied people. Although inadequate to provide even a basic subsistence to the numerous poor, the rates seemed oppressive to taxpayers.

The sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland contradicted the English pretensions to “faire and loving meanes” as colonizers. Indeed, the illusions of the English lowered their threshold for brutal violence when frustrated. Convinced of their own benign intentions and superior civilization, the English regarded Irish resistance as rank ingratitude by stubborn barbarians.

Treating the Irish as treacherous beasts, the English waged a war of terror and intimidation, executing prisoners by the hundred, including women and children. The English commander Sir Humphrey Gilbert decorated the path leading to his tent with human heads.

Contrary to the Black Legend, the English treated the Irish no better than the Spanish treated the Guanche, and they offered no prospect of fairer play for the Indians of Virginia. Indeed, the conquest and colonization of Ireland served as the English school for overseas empire, the English equivalent of the Spanish invasion of the Canaries.

In contrast to the occupational specialization and class stratification in England, the Virginia Indians divided tasks almost exclusively along gender lines.

The challenge confronting Powhatan and his people in 1607 was to turn the English newcomers to advantage. Instead of trying to crush the newcomers and risk heavy casualties, Powhatan hoped to contain them, subject them to his power, enlist them as subordinate allies against his own enemies, and secure through trade their metals, including weapons.

Unlike the Spanish in Florida and the French in Canada, the English sent no missionaries to convert the Indians of Virginia. More thoroughly commercial, the English meant to Christianize the Indians by first absorbing them as economic subordinates.

Between 1607 and 1622 the Virginia Company transported some 10,000 people to the colony, but only 20 percent were still alive there in 1622. An English critic belatedly remarked, “Instead of a plantacion, Virginia will shortly get the name of a slaughterhouse.”

Even when healthy, many colonists refused to work diligently at raising corn to feed themselves. They were an unstable and fractious mix of gentlemen-adventurers in command and poor vagrants rounded up from the streets of London and forcibly sent to Virginia. Neither group had much prior experience with work. In England, birth and wealth had screened the gentlemen from manual labor, while the vagrants, for want of employment, had learned to survive by begging and stealing.

Preferring to explore for gold, the colonists expected the Indians to feed them. After all, the promoters had promised that the natives would welcome the English with generosity and submission.

The colonial leaders applied the same brutal logic to their own colonists, in the conviction that only pain and terror could motivate the poor. Convicting a laborer of stealing two pints of oatmeal to allay his hunger, the leaders had a long needle thrust through his tongue, to keep him from ever eating again. Chained to a tree, the convict slowly starved to death, a vivid and lingering example to terrify his fellow colonists.