American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as “cowboys”—apparently the origin of that famous term.

“They have a saying here: Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”

In 1700 the colonial gross domestic product was only 4 percent of England’s; by 1770 it had blossomed to 40 percent, as the colonies assumed a much larger place within the imperial economy.

In 1765 a New Yorker complained, “Men Frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors.”

Romantic mythology often miscasts the common colonists as self-sufficient yeomen who produced all that they needed or wanted. There is a germ of truth to this. Most colonists lived on farm households that produced most of their own food, fuel, and homespun cloth. In the mainland colonies (but not the trade-driven West Indies), about 90 percent of economic production remained within a colony for home consumption or local trade; only about 10 percent was exported.

For example, the genteel Dr. Alexander Hamilton of Maryland delighted in his own consumption but denounced that of common colonists, remarking “that if Luxury was to be confined to the Rich alone, it might prove a great national good.”

In 1725, Maryland’s governor conceded, “While we purchase, they will send them, and we bring the Evil upon our selves.”

The system worked well, because successful German farmers in Pennsylvania needed labor, preferred fellow Germans, and favored intact families. The redemptioner system accelerated the chain migration as the early migrants succeeded, reported their gains, encouraged friends and relatives to follow, and helped finance their journey by purchasing their contracts upon arrival. No seventeenth-century indentured servants had been so fortunate.

Contrary to popular myth, most eighteenth-century emigrants did not come to America of their own free will in search of liberty. Nor were they Europeans. On the contrary, most were enslaved Africans forced across the Atlantic to work on plantations raising American crops for the European market.

Only about 1 percent of the blacks living in the British colonies became free prior to the American Revolution.

By crafting an African-American culture, Chesapeake slaves defended their creativity and identity within the confines of a brutal system of coerced labor. They successfully limited the dehumanization demanded by plantation slavery. But, at the same time, by creating consoling comforts within slavery, they made it harder to risk a violent uprising.

They promoted a more pluralistic, egalitarian, and voluntaristic social order by defending the free flow of itinerant preachers and their converts across community and denominational lines.

Christian rationalism held that God created the natural universe and thereafter never interfered with its laws. God seemed less terrifying as learned people reinterpreted epidemics, earthquakes, and thunderbolts as “natural” rather than as direct interventions of divine anger. The Reverend Andrew Eliot, a New England Congregationalist, explained, “There is nothing in Christianity that is contrary to reason. God never did, He never can, authorize a religion opposite to it, because this would be to contradict himself.”

Evangelical preaching provoked conversion experiences that pulled a seeker through despair to an ecstatic experience of divine grace. In the first step, people had to forsake their false sense of security in their own good behavior and instead recognize their utter worthlessness and helplessness without God. Seekers then fell into a profound sense of despair, doubting that God would ever save them. Those who completed the process ultimately surrendered to God and felt an exhilarating and liberating infusion of saving grace called the New Birth.

During the late 1730s, a German emigrant and mystic, Gottlieb Priber, became profoundly disillusioned with the materialism and inequalities of colonial society. Defecting to the Cherokee, Priber promoted a visionary scheme, called the Kingdom of Paradise, to unite the Indians into a confederacy that would draw strength from the colonies by welcoming runaway servants, slaves, and debtors. Alarmed, South Carolina officials demanded that the Cherokee arrest and surrender Priber. The Cherokee refused, but their Creek rivals captured Priber in 1743 and surrendered him to the colonists, who held the dangerous mystic in prison until his death, probably in 1744.

The persistent affiliated with a denomination and compromised with the inequalities and conventions of their larger society. To finance their churches and to attain respectability, they recruited converts farther up the social ladder, abandoning radical practices that might offend.

In Europe, French diplomats pretended that they commanded the Indians as subjects. In North America, French commanders knew better.

Cartagena expedition, but fewer than half survived to return home in defeat. The debacle persuaded the surviving colonists that the British officers were incompetent martinets; the Britons concluded that the Americans were undisciplined cowards. The only significant British victory came on defense, in repelling a Spanish assault on the new colony of Georgia in 1742.

Except for supplying a few warships, after 1744 the British left colonial warfare to the colonists,

To the immense surprise of the British, however, the New English also won the one great victory in the war: the capture of the French fortress at Louisbourg.

But the British colonists dissipated their numerical advantage by their division into fourteen distinct mainland colonies (Nova Scotia was the fourteenth, neglected by historians who speak of only thirteen).

John Lawson, a Carolinian, conceded: They are really better to us than we are to them. They always give us food at their quarters, and take care we are armed against Hunger and Thirst. We do not do so by them, but let them walk by our Doors hungry, and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with scorn and disdain, and think them little better than Beasts in human shape, though, if well examined, we shall find that, for all our religion and education, we possess more moral deformities and evils than these savages do, or are acquainted with.

Indian reassured his compatriots: Brethren, are you ignorant of the difference between our Father [the French] and the English? Go and see the forts our Father has created, and you will see that the land beneath their walls is still hunting ground, … whilst the English, on the contrary, no sooner get possession of a country than the game is forced to leave; the trees fall down before them, the earth becomes bare.

traders offered for their deerskins and beaver pelts. In wartime, the British navy compounded the trade advantage

in 1754, when the British governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, tried to oust the French from the forks of the Ohio. In addition to asserting Virginia’s jurisdiction, Dinwiddie promoted his own interest in a company of land speculators determined to sell Ohio Valley lands to settlers. Dinwiddie sent a small regiment of colonial troops commanded by his fellow land speculator, the young and ambitious George Washington, to evict the French.

Compelled to surrender on July 4, Washington was fortunate to receive generous terms from the victors. Hoping to avoid a full-scale war, the French commander allowed Washington and his men to limp back to Virginia.

The French and the Indians suffered only about forty casualties while killing or wounding nearly a thousand men in the British force. The dead included General Braddock.

Braddock’s defeat emboldened the Lenni Lenape and Shawnee of the Ohio Valley to attack the hated colonial settlements in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. By the spring of 1756,

Abandoned by the Indians, the French blew up Fort Duquesne and fled northward. To the Indians’ dismay, the British replaced Fort Duquesne by building Fort Pitt, which was ten times larger than its French predecessor—an ominous sign of British intentions.

The British overwhelmed New France with sheer numbers of soldiers and sailors, warships and cannon. That ability to project military power across the Atlantic reflected British superiority in shipping, finance, and organization.

In 1759 the British reaffirmed their naval supremacy by crippling the Spanish and French fleets in battles at Lagos, off Portugal, and Quiberon Bay, on the west coast of France. In the Caribbean, a British amphibious operation captured the lucrative sugar island of Guadeloupe. In West Africa, the British seized the French slaving entrepôt at Senegal. The British also secured a dominant position in India by routing the French

At last, in early 1763, the belligerents concluded the Treaty of Paris.

For their own, shared reasons and under their own chiefs, the various native peoples rose up in a rebellion that had no central command:

The longest and oldest document was a cherished copy of a treaty made in 1701 with William Penn, the colony’s Quaker founder. The treaty pledged that the Indians and colonists “shall forever hereafter be as one Head & One Heart, & live in true Friendship & Amity as one People.”

The colonists felt pride in their contributions to the war effort and in belonging to such a powerful, prosperous, and relatively free empire. Celebrating the conquest of Canada, Benjamin Franklin rejoiced “not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton.”

After all, British taxpayers were already paying far heavier taxes than were the colonists: in 1763 imperial taxation averaged twenty-six shillings per person in Britain, where most subjects were struggling, compared with only one shilling per person in the colonies, where most free people were prospering.

In 1764, Boston’s town meeting protested Parliamentary taxation: This we apprehend annihilates our charter right to govern and tax ourselves. It strikes at our British privileges which, as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our fellow subjects who are natives of Britain. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without ever having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?

From 1763 to 1776 the colonial leaders conducted a prolonged and increasingly rancorous constitutional debate with Parliament over the new taxes and the army of occupation.

Members of Parliament suspected that the discrepancy between Britain’s high taxes and America’s low ones encouraged emigration. Narrowing that gap would, they hoped, keep more laborers and tenants at home while rendering the colonists more dutiful.

Until the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, few colonists aspired to national independence, for they felt great pride in the empire, derived great economic benefits from trading within its network, and dreaded the death and destruction of a civil war.

Until the British began to tighten the empire in the 1760s, the colonists had a very good deal—and they knew it. They resisted the new taxes in the hope that the British would back down, preserving their loose relationship with the mother country.

That greater colonial assurance directly clashed with its British counterpart: an imperial arrogance enhanced by so many victories over the powerful French and Spanish. British officials boasted that the conquest of Canada had depended exclusively on the royal navy and army, and that the colonial troops had been no more than expensive cowards.

European leaders increasingly concluded that wealth and power accrued to nations that discovered and analyzed new information.

The naturalist Georg Steller kept alive and busy observing, killing, dissecting, and naming wildlife previously unknown to Europeans, including Steller’s eagle, Steller’s jay, Steller’s white raven, and Steller’s sea cow,

“If perfect symmetry, smoothness, and proportion, constitute beauty, they are beautiful: to me they appeared so beyond any thing I ever beheld.”

In sum, much of the California landscape was subtly anthropogenic (human influenced) long before colonizers arrived with their own even more demanding system of manipulating nature, which they called civilization. In general, the natives encouraged a mix of grasslands, meadows, and open forests characterized by especially large trees, widely spaced. These human-tended landscapes sustained larger numbers of plants and animals and were healthier than today’s forests in California. Indeed, for lack of regular fires, contemporary forests are crowded with small trees, cluttered with deadwood, infested with pests, and vulnerable to destruction by huge and catastrophic fires.

Fray Serra’s death in August 1784, Alta California had two agricultural towns (San Jose and Los Angeles), four presidios, and nine missions. The Spanish simply took the land they wanted without the bother of a formal purchase from the natives. The colonizers reasoned that the towns, presidios, and missions all benefited the Indians by introducing Hispanic civilization and the Catholic faith.

In sum, the environmental trauma was all the greater because it disrupted a nature long shaped by native peoples, rather than the pristine “wilderness” imagined by the Hispanics (and by romantics ever since). As the environment was transformed

In 1769 the California coast between San Diego and San Francisco had a native population of 72,000, which declined to just 18,000 by 1821. One Franciscan conceded, “They live well free but as soon as we reduce them to a Christian and community life … they fatten, sicken, and die.”

The Pacific islanders seemed to possess a worthy simplicity that Europeans had lost. While accepting that the islanders would, inevitably, have to change, the explorers often romantically mourned what they saw as a doomed paradise of natural people.