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Between 1492 and 1776, North America lost population, as diseases and wars killed Indians faster than colonists could replace them.
More than minor aberrations, Indian deaths and African slaves were fundamental to colonization. The historian John Murrin concludes that “losers far outnumbered winners” in “a tragedy of such huge proportions that no one’s imagination can easily encompass it all.”
Moreover, not all of colonial America was English. Many native peoples encountered colonizers not as westward-bound Englishmen, but as Spanish heading north from Mexico, as Russians coming eastward from Siberia, or as French probing the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. And each of their empires interacted in distinctive ways with particular settings and natives to construct varied Americas.
In such exchanges and composites, we find the true measure of American distinctiveness, the true foundation for the diverse America of our time.
Once race, instead of class, became the primary marker of privilege, colonial elites had to concede greater social respect and political rights to common white men.
On the contrary, remembering the painful and powerful legacies of the colonial past can only highlight the progress made in the past two centuries—as well as underline how difficult further progress will be.
To highlight the social inequities and environmental degradation of our own society, some romantics depict the pre-1492 Americans as ecological and social saints living in perfect harmony with one another and with their nature. To refute that critique, more conservative intellectuals eagerly point out every example of native violence, human sacrifice, and environmental waste.
And although Indians lacked the perfection of environmental saints, they did possess a culture that demanded less of their nature than did the Europeans of the early modern era. Almost all early explorers and colonizers marveled at the natural abundance they found in the Americas,
Where Europeans believed that humanity had a divine duty and an unchecked power to dominate nature, North American Indians believed that they lived within a contentious world of spiritual power that sometimes demanded human restraint and at other moments offered opportunities for exploitation.
Indian animism should not be romantically distorted into a New Age creed of stable harmony. In fact, the natives regarded the spiritual world as volatile and full of tension, danger, and uncertainty. To survive and prosper, people had to live warily and opportunistically. Engaged
Lacking domesticated animals and metal tools and weapons, the Indians seemed a primitive people to the Europeans. The natives, however, regarded themselves as more intelligent and resourceful than the Europeans.
the explorer Jean de Léry reported that America was so “different from Europe, Asia and Africa in the living habits of its people, the forms of its animals, and, in general, in that which the earth produces, that it can well be called the new world.”
Most scholars now gravitate to the middle of that range: about fifty million Indians in the two American continents, with about five million of them living north of Mexico. Even this middle range represents a fivefold increase over the former “low count.”
Prior to 1820, at least two-thirds of the twelve million emigrants from the Old to the New World were enslaved Africans rather than free Europeans.
Although the demographic disaster and ecological imperialism undermined the Indians’ ability to defend their lands and autonomy, they remained sufficiently numerous and resourceful to hinder and compromise the colonial conquest. Despite the depopulation, nowhere did the colonizers find a truly empty land. Although the population collapse made it possible (even probable) that European colonists and their slaves would eventually swarm over the continent and subdue the native peoples, that process took nearly four centuries to complete.
According to the Aztecs, when given presents by Moctezuma, the Spanish “picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; they seemed to be transported by joy, as if their hearts were illumined and made new. … Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous. They hungered like pigs for that gold.”
The sermon did profoundly touch one encomendero in the congregation, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who renounced his encomienda, entered the Dominican order, and became the most eloquent and vociferous critic of the American conquest.
Cabeza de Vaca explained, “The way in which we cured was by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria; and then we prayed as best we could to God Our Lord to give them health and inspire them to give us good treatment.” Most of their patients recovered, and the four became honored men among their native hosts.
Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian “tribes” were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.
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. In exchange, the Huron obtained manufactured goods both for themselves and to trade, at inflated prices, to their Indian clients for more furs. 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
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By framing an alliance to control the east-west trade, the Montagnais, Algonkin, and Huron excluded and alienated the Five Nation Iroquois.
A frustrated Jesuit reported that the Indians listened patiently but ultimately replied, “You can have your way and we will have ours.” He added, “If we reply that what they say is not true, they answer that they have not disputed what we have told them and that it is rude to interrupt a man when he is speaking and tell him he is lying.” Another impatient missionary remarked, “What can one do with those who in word give agreement and assent to everything, but in reality give none?”
Another Huron concluded, “God does not love us, since he gives us commandments that we cannot keep.”
In the mid-seventeenth century, Iroquois warfare dramatically escalated to nearly genocidal proportions, devastating their native enemies and imperiling the French colony.
By attracting experienced colonists, Maryland benefited from the expertise garnered by hard trials and many errors in the older colony of Virginia. Suffering fewer and shorter growing pains, Maryland rapidly prospered as a tobacco colony.
In 1676, Virginia erupted in rebellion when the frustrated servants and freedmen blamed their plight on an insensitive, exploitative, and unqualified class of ruling planters. Led by Nathaniel Bacon,
In 1677 a crown official investigated Virginia and reported, “A poor man who has only his labour to maintain himself and his family pays as much as a man who has 20000 acres.”
land-hoarding was “one of the most apparent causes of the misery and mischiefs that attend this colony by occasioning the Planters to straggle to such remote distances when they cannot find land nearer to seat themselves but by being Tenants, which in a Continent they think hard.”
To keep the slaves intimidated, the great planters needed a colonial militia drawn from the common farmers. Consequently, in shifting to African slaves, the great planters acquired yet another reason to cultivate the common white men. Instead of a threat to social order, the armed whites became essential to its defense against slave rebellion.
That a black man would own a slave also indicates that getting ahead in planter society was more important to Johnson than any sense of racial solidarity with his fellow Africans in Virginia.
“The planters do not want to be told that their Negroes are human creatures. If they believe them to be of human kind, they cannot regard them … as no better than dogs or horses.”
Puritans regarded such a broad-based prosperity as more compatible with a godly life than the extremes of wealth and poverty found in England, the Chesapeake, and the West Indies. The Puritan minister John White observed, “Nothing sorts better with Piety than Competency.”
Because New England had the most decentralized and popularly responsive form of government in the English empire, royalists despised the region as a hotbed of “republicanism.”
Rejecting much that was traditional to England, the Puritans promoted a Reformed culture that emphasized literacy and lay participation in governing congregations.
baptism in favor of adult baptism as an initiation to full membership.
A Puritan minister described Hutchinson as “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit, and active spirit and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.”
INSTEAD OF VIEWING the precolonial landscape as beautiful, the leading Puritans perceived, in William Bradford’s phrase, “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.”
as pagan peoples who had surrendered to their worst instincts to live within the wild, instead of laboring hard to conquer and transcend nature.
An Indian field consisted of many small hillocks with maize in the center and squashes, pumpkins, and beans tumbling down the sides.
In fact, Indian cultivation was more efficient, producing substantial yields from relatively small amounts of land and labor.
Such fires spared the tall and thick mature trees with a dense bark, shaping a relatively open forest of many large trees and few small ones. Noting the effect, if not always the cause, colonists marveled at their ability to ride freely between immense trees through long stretches of the forest.
With fire the Indians shaped and sustained a forest that suited their needs.
The regular burning diminished mice, fleas, and parasites that troubled people or the game that they ate. The fires also fertilized the forest floor and opened patches of sunlight. Both effects promoted ground-hugging plants, especially grasses and berries, which sustained a larger deer herd, to the ultimate benefit of their human hunters.
Their culture also cherished leisure and generosity more than the laborious accumulation of individual property for display.
Compared with the colonists, the Indians demanded less from their nature, investing less labor in, and extracting less energy and matter from, their environment.
Consequently, the New English disdained the Indians as “Lazy Drones [who] love Idleness Exceedingly” for failing to create more property from their abundant nature.
The colonists maintained that by signing deeds, the Indians gave up every right to the land and had to move out, in favor of the purchasers, who obtained exclusive possession. The Indians, however, regarded their deed as an offer to share the land with the colonists. The natives expected to persist in hunting and fishing where they wished as they pursued their annual cycle
Narragansett chief Miantonomi complained: You know our fathers had plenty of deer … and our coves [were] full of fish and fowl. But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall be starved.
The indiscriminate slaughter contradicted Indian custom and shocked the Narragansett and Mohegan allies, who had expected to capture and adopt the women and children. They bitterly complained that the New English mode of war was “too furious and slays too many people.”
Because white men could more easily escape to pass as free on another island or aboard a pirate ship, planters increasingly saw an advantage in employing only permanent slaves of a distinctive color immediately and constantly identified with slavery.
