From  Settlement  to  Separation,
1492-1775

A. European Colonies in the New World
          1. Portugal
                    a. In the Papal Line of Demarcation, or the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Pope Alexander VI gave a monopoly over “heathen lands” to Portugal and Spain.
                    b. The Portuguese came to trade rather than to settle.  They established trading posts in Brazil.
         2. Spain colonized and settled. 
                   a. Columbus' voyage took 70 days.  The motto of the conquistadores was “gold, glory, gospel.”  They sent gold and silver from Mexico and Peru back to Spain, expanded the Spanish Empire, and preached Christianity to the natives.
                    b. During the renaissance, the discovery of the Western Hemisphere was inevitable.  People were restless and curious and sought more living space, fortune, and adventure.  
                    c. Ponce de Leon landed in Florida, and Coronado explored Kansas and the Grand Canyon.  Spaniards reached the Mississippi River, and Spanish galleons sailed up the Pacific coast to Oregon.  There were Spanish settlements in St. Augustine, Florida, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Jesuit mission in Chesapeake Bay—all before the British arrived in Jamestown and Plymouth.  In 1783, the Spanish Empire held about half of today’s continental USA. 
          3. France’s empire in America was at first scattered trading posts.
          4. England established colonies.  They came to stay.
                    a. royally chartered trading companies or joint stock companies
                        The king granted charters or patents, for designated areas to trading companies that authorized them to govern and divide the profits among stock holders.  The crown could later revoke the charters for economic or political reasons.
                              1) In 1606, the Virginia Company of London received a charter for the territory from Cape Fear to Long Island Sound.  Due to dissention among stock holders, a royal court dissolved the company in 1624.  
                              2) The Plymouth Company originally held all of present-day New England.  The Massachusetts Bay Company received a charter for  the area between the Charles and Merrimack Rivers.  It was revoked in 1684 over non-payment of taxes.  Plymouth Plantation was absorbed by the royal colony of Massachusetts (1691).  
                    b. proprietorships
                        The king granted political and economic control of colonies to individuals. William Penn governed Pennsylvania; Sir George Carteret (Lord Berkeley), New Jersey; James Oglethorpe, Georgia; Lord Baltimore, Maryland; the Duke of York, New York.
                    c. royal colonies
                        The king appointed the governor and his council, i.e. the upper house.  The voters elected the lower house.  The royal governors' priority was to increase the wealth for the crown.
                    d. On the eve of the Revolution there were eight royal colonies (Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia), three proprietary colonies (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland), and two self governing colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island).

B. Relations between the Colonists and the Native Americans
   About 11,500 years ago, nomads from Siberia came across a land bridge into present day Alaska and down through Canada, the US, and South America in search of big game animals.  Another theory is that Asians migrates across the Pacific Ocean to the Northwest about 10,000 years ago.  A third theory is that Europeans migrated to the Northeast about 12,000 years ago.
          1. Cortez plundered the Aztecs in Mexico, the most advanced civilization in the western hemisphere.  Pizarro conquered the Incas in Peru. Major goals of the Spanish crown were to increase its wealth and to convert the natives to Catholicism.  The Spanish imposed their religion and education on the natives to place them under their control and to assimilate them into their culture.  The King of Spain had direct control of the economy of his colonies. He appointed governors who ruled settlements and were subordinate to him.   Governors appointed viceroys.  There was rule by patronage and little democracy. The encomienda was a system of forced labor to mine gold and silver and to work on sugar plantations.  Spain’s missionary activity displaced native religions and culture.  In 1680, there was the Pueblo Revolt.
                    a. Historians try to discover what happened.  Revisionists interpret or spit the past to serve their views on contemporary events.  Iconoclasts delight in smearing heroes.  E.g., they seize on the allegation that Jefferson fathered children by his slave mistress, Sally Hemings.
                     b. Revisionists tar Columbus as a slave trader and a mass murderer of Native Americans. Columbus was all of the bad things.  He was white, male, Catholic Euro-trash.  Millions died of smallpox, plague, typhus, cholera, diphtheria, measles, influenza, enslavement, slaughter, suicide, and alcoholism that some call a holocaust.  Some missionaries defied the conquistadores.  Bishop Bertolome de las Casas wrote, "What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them." (1527)   It is estimated that, before the arrival of Europeans, there were ten to twenty million Native Americans in the current USA and Canada.  By 1890, they were reduced to 250,000.
                     c.  Between 1505 and 1808, over ten million Africans were transported to the Western Hemisphere.  Africans had immunities to diseases that decimated the natives.  They were first transported to work the silver mines and sugar plantations.                   
                    d. The new and old worlds interfaced.
                             1) Europeans discovered in the New World potatoes that became a staple in Ireland and Germany.  They are nutritious, require little care, and yield more food per acre than wheat or rice. The explorers also returned to Europe with corn (maize), tomatoes, chocolate, and tobacco.
                              2) Europeans took with them to the New World horses that revolutionized hunting, transportation, and warfare. They also transported pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, wheat, bananas, citrus fruits, and sugar cane.  Before this, the meat diet of the natives was mostly turkey, deer, buffalo, and duck.  They also ate fish.
          2. The French set up trading posts and did not try to impose French culture on the natives or enslave them.  The six-nation Iroquois Confederation formed an alliance with the English against the French and their allies, the Hurons and Algonquins, and prevented the French from moving into New England.  The alliances were often based on trade or tribal rivalry.  The French were less given to the attitude of racial superiority than the British, but they could not match English production and economic organization. The English traded axes, knives, glassware, beads, and later guns and alcohol mostly for beaver and deer skins.  Native Americans also traded land for a defensive alliance.  Greed for land governed Anglo-Indian relations and resulted in almost continuous warfare for over two hundred years.
          3. Before British settlement, Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans and later traded them to the British. In one year Charleston, SC, shipped over 10,000 natives to the West Indies, where they could not escape, in exchange for African slaves.  The population of South Carolina in 1708 included 3,960 whites, about 4100 African slaves and 1400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured servants.  A 1730, census of South Kensington , RI, showed 935 whites, 333 African slaves, and 223 Native American slaves.  Most British colonists looked down on Native Americans as racially inferior heathens.  Laws in Virginia and New England colonies forbade interracial marriage.  Spanish and French colonists more freely married Native women.  Spanish and French colonists more freely married native women.  The pilgrims, who arrivedat Plimouth Plantation in 1620, were aided by Squanto who actually spoke English.  In 1614, he was captured and boarded on a British ship.  In 1617, European fishermen transmitted to the natives plague or smallpox which wiped out about 95% of the inhabitants of New England.  Consequently, they were unable to mount a significant challenge British expansion for fifty years.  When Squanto was returned, he found no one living in his village.  When the pilgrims arrived, he taught them to plant corn and served as a guide and translator as they entered the fur trade.  Powhatan helped the Virginians survive by giving them food and introducing them to crops suitable to the soil.  
                    a. the Pequot War (1636-7)
                       When the natives raided rapidly expanding settlements, colonists from Massachusetts and Connecticut retaliated.  There was peace in New England for forty years.
                    b. King Philip’s War (1675-6)
                       King Philip was a name given by the English to Metacomet, Chief of the Wampanoags.  He wanted to halt expansion and gathered the tribes to massacre all the whites in New England.  The colonists formed the New England Confederation, an example of uncharacteristic inter-colonial cooperation.  War raged around Boston and spread throughout New England.  Box score: one tenth of the men of military age in Massachusetts were killed.  Half of the towns in New England were raided.  Metacomet was killed in battle.  His head was brought to Plymouth and displayed on a post for twenty years.  His wife and son were sold into slavery along with about 1000 Indian captives.
                    c. Among the Native Americans, there were many linguistic, political, economic, and cultural differences and intertribal warfarethat hindered their united opposition to the colonists.  In the Northwest, they lived in wooden lodges, ate fish, and used totem poles.  In the Southwest, they lived in pueblos made of clay, farmed corn and beans, and were known for pottery, weaving, and painting.  In California, they lived in tepees, wore animal skins, ate fish, deer, nuts, and berries, and made baskets.  In the Plains, their tepees and clothing were made from buffalo hides; they ate grain, and wore headdresses.  In the Eastern Woodlands, they lived in wigwams and longhouses covered with bark, hunted deer, played lacrosse, and made wampum (beads of polished shells strung in strands or belts.  They were also used as money).  

C. English Colonies in North America, 1607-1763
     The colonists promoted capitalism. local self government, and unrestricted immigration.  They came for land, religious freedom, and economic opportunity.  Most were British, Protestant, and property owners. 
         1. The New England colonies (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.  What is now Vermont was part of the colonies of New Hampshire and New York, and Maine was part of the colony of Massachusetts Bay.)
                    a. After a voyage of sixty-six days, 103 pilgrims, 37 of whom were Puritans, arrived at Plymouth (November 9, 1620).  During the first winter fifty-one died.
                   b. Before going ashore, they endorsed the Mayflower Compact.  It proposed to form a government based on majority rule that would not be subservient to the king or Parliament.  This was the beginning of self-government in the New World.  
                    c. Farming was difficult due to the rocky soil.  Family farms produced enough food for personal needs.  New Englanders turned to commerce: fishing, lumbering, ship building, rum distilling, and later to manufacturing.  By 1760, New England vessels carried 75% of colonial trade, and 30% of the British merchant ships were made in New England.
                   d. The colonies were predominantly agricultural, and cities served primarily as distribution centers for farm produce and imported manufactured goods.  In New England, life was centered in villages surrounded by small farms.  The concentration of industrial workers in cities did not take place until the nineteenth century.  Banking was relatively primitive in colonial cities.  The colonies had very little specie (gold or silver coins).  They experimented with paper currency based on the value of tobacco or land, but it was outlawed by Parliament.  Much of the domestic economy was based on barter.
                   e. The high value that Puritans placed on education was based on religion.  They believed that in order to be saved people needed to receive the word of God.  In order to read the Bible, they needed to be literate.  Harvard College was founded (1636) to train Puritan clergymen.  Yale was established (1701) “to uphold Puritan values that Harvard already had begun to abandon.”  Brown, a Baptist institution, was founded (1764).  Dartmouth was originally established (1769) as an Indian charity school.
                    f. The basic unit of Puritan society was the nuclear family, which was patriarchal.  The father was responsible for and had authority over his wife and children.  Wives were homemakers.  Widows and unmarried women could own property, but it became her husband’s when she married.  Women were denied the right to vote.  By contrast, in the Eastern Woodlands, Native American women exercised tribal leadership and supervised agriculture and marriage choices.  The basic unit of Native American society was the tribe.
         2. The middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware)
                    a. The Dutch West India Company founded New Netherland on Hudson Bay (1623). To consolidate English domination of the Atlantic Rim, King Charles II granted the costal area between Connecticut and Delaware to his brother James, the Duke of York in 1664.  James sent a small fleet to New Amsterdam.  Unable to defend the colony, Peter Stuyvesant was forced to surrender without a struggle.
                    b. The crown was beholden to and deeply in debt to Sir Admiral William Penn.  Charles II satisfied the debt by naming the admiral's son, William Penn, proprietor of the Philadelphia area (1681).  Penn planned an orderly, uncrowded city with one-acre residential lots and wide streets arranged in a rectangular grid.  
                    c. Penn set up an assembly with representatives elected by the landowners.  He initiated the “Holy Experiment.”  He believed in religious toleration, and he wanted to treat the natives fairly by compensating them for land that had been expropriated by the colonists.  True to his Quaker convictions for which he had been imprisoned in England, Penn upheld freedom of religion.  The Society of Friends believed in the “inner light,” or the essential goodness of each person.  All men, women, and children, rich and poor, freemen and slaves, and Indians were equal before God and deserved equal rights.  Quakers were pacifists and abolitionists.                   
                    d. The middle colonies were more diverse and more tolerant.  There were Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Scots-Irish, French, and English.  There was also religious diversity: Dutch Reformed Church, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Huguenots, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews.
                    e. These were the “bread colonies.”  Corn, wheat, and rye grew in abundance.
                   f. The Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna Rivers facilitated commerce and westward movement.
                    g. Presbyterians founded Princeton (1746).  Anglicans established King's College (1754), which was renamed Columbia after the Revolution.  The University of Pennsylvania, founded by Benjamin Franklin and others (1754), was non-denominational.  The Dutch Reformed Church established Queen's College (Rutgers, 1766).
          3. The southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia)
                    a. In 1607, the Virginia Company of London established a colony at Jamestown, Virginia.  Its primary motive was profit.  In 1607, 70 of 108 settlers died from starvation, malaria, and massacres.  Between 1619 and 1622, about 3000 of the 36 brought in by the Virginia Company likewise perished.  Unlike many who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay in family units, most of the early settlers in the Chesapeake were single young men.  New England’s “rocks and religion” was contrasted to southern “sotweed and slavery.”
                       b. The Chesapeake settlement was well suited for growing tobacco (from which they reaped 200% profit), rice, and indigo.  Since tobacco farming required land, the Virginia Company adopted the headright system and gave fifty acres to free settlers.  Large plantations were best suited for tobacco production, and in 1619 twenty African slaves were brought to Jamestown from the West Indies.  The Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and James Rivers flow into Chesapeake Bay.  The tidewaters provided transport for plantations in the interior.
                   c. Until 1670, one-half to two-thirds of all immigrants to the colonies came as indentured servants.  About 100,000 immigrants exchanged passage for five years of service.  Some were criminals who were bound over to a longer period of service.  About one-fourth of the indentured servants were women, and, since men greatly outnumbered women in the Chesapeake, many hoped to marry up.  Most indentured servants were young, single males who looked forward to acquiring land at the end of their service.  Since much of the desirable land had already been claimed and about one-third of the indentured servants died from sickness and overwork, some ran away to the west.  The majority endured and made up the European populations of  Virginia and Maryland.  After 1672, when Charles II granted the Royal African Company a monopoly on the slave trade, the number of African slaves increased rapidly and replaced indentured servants in the tobacco fields.  There was the growing conviction that white servitude was abhorrent and the enslavement of blacks was acceptable.  In 1697, Parliament lifted the monopoly, and New Englanders entered the slave trade.
                    d. Clearly defined classes developed in plantation society: the plantation owners were at the top, shop keepers, merchants, and all other free whites were in the middle, and African slaves were at the bottom.  The southern colonies maintained the strongest ties to England.  The cavalier society with its fine houses and furnishings (e.g., the Georgian architecture of Westover), dress balls, and fox hunts duplicated the lifestyle of the English manor.  Some Southerners who wanted university education for their sons sent them to England.  The Church of England was the established religion in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas.  Most British colonists believed that order and stability depended on the interlocking institutions of church and state.  Anglicans founded the College of William and Mary (1693).  
                    e. In some colonies, the ruling elite looked down upon backcountry farmers as “a pack of beggars and white savages.”  In Virginia, Governor Berkeley denounced Nathaniel Bacon’s expansionist attack on the Indians, and Bacon turned his forces on Berkeley.  In Pennsylvania, there was a similar east-west conflict in the uprising of the Paxton Boys.  In the 1760s in both Carolinas, the colonial governments neglected and abused the frontiersmen.  The Regulators in North Carolina refused to pay taxes, punished corrupt officials, disregarded the courts, and ultimately were crushed by the governor.  In South Carolina, frontiersmen were not protected from outlaws and were victimized by corrupt sheriffs and judges.  The Regulator Movement established justice and restored order.
                    f. Catholics were persecuted in Virginia. George Calvert appealed to the king to create Maryland as a refuge for Catholics, but even there Catholics were a minority.  They were protected by the Maryland Act of Toleration (1649) which granted freedom of worship to "anyone professing to believe in Jesus Christ." 
                    g. Georgia was founded as a colony for English paupers and criminals as a buffer a against Spanish Florida (1732).

D. Massachusetts Bay, The Bible Commonwealth
           1. Puritans left England to live in Leyden, Holland in 1608.  In 1620, they acquired a controlling share of the stock in the Plymouth Company and obtained a charter for a colony which entitled them to appoint a governor and rule it according to Puritan principles.  William Bradford, the governor of Plimouth Plantation, wanted to separate from the Church of England and establish a new, pure Protestant Church.
          2. Charles I and Archbishop William Laud shut down Puritan churches and restored some Catholic ritual.  Puritan leaders entered the Cambridge Agreement (1629) to acquire the Massachusetts Bay Company and obtain a charter for a colony.  John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay, hoped to purify the Church of England from within and remain loyal to the crown.  Most Puritans were not separatists.  They were three thousand miles away from England, and they governed their colony.  There was no point in alienating the king and putting their charter at risk.
          3. Puritanism
                    a. Puritanism was based on the teaching of John Calvin that human nature is fundamentally evil, that no one is capable of salvation, and that everyone is predestined by God to heaven or to hell.  Signs that people are among the elect are virtue, hard work, and prosperity.  Enterprise took on religious zeal.  There is a relationship between religion and economic growth.
                    b. In Puritanism, known as Congregationalism, church authority is in each individual congregation.  It is not under the authority of a bishop or pope.  The congregation set beliefs and practices and selected its clergyman.  The autonomy of the congregation extended to civic life in town meetings.  Direct democracy broke down the hierarchy and class structure of the old world.   There was a relationship between the Puritan attitude of not wanting to be told how to live or what to think by the Church of England and self-government and the spirit of independence.
          4. Puritan New England
                   a. There was union of church and state in Massachusetts Bay.
                             1) Winthropmaintained that Puritanism was the basis of unity in the colony.
                              2) Calvin directed that a community of saints gain control of the state and require it to follow God's will.  Winthrop believed that the purpose of government is to enforce God's laws.  "Blue laws" forbade drunkenness, adultery, and violations of the Sabbath.  
                              3) Taxes paid the salaries of the clergy.
                    b. During this Great Migration, in the 1630s, twenty thousand came to New England, by 1650, fifty thousand, and, by 1700, one hundred thousand. James Truslow Adams wrote that four out of five people entering Massachusetts Bay had no sympathy with the Puritan Church and merely tolerated it in order to enjoy economic opportunity.  Succeeding waves of immigrants were lax in religious observance.  Because of the oppressiveness of the theocratic government and to acquire more land, many settlers moved out of Boston.  The Halfway Covenant (1662) permitted sons of baptized Puritans to be baptized.  They could vote for colonial officials and would be “half way” members of the congregation until adult conversion.
                      c. Roger Williams
                              1) Williams opposed the union of church and state and said that enforcing the Blue Laws and punishing violations of the Sabbath "stinks in God's nostrils."  He encouraged his congregation in Salem to separate from the Church of England. He also condemned the wanton slaughter of the natives and confiscating land that belonged to them without compensation. 
                              2) Winthrop feared that Williams was causing disunity in the colony and that the king would revoke the charter if  the colony were disloyal.  Separation was "the Puritan dilemma."  In 1636, after trying to bring him around for two years, Winthrop banished Williams who established a colony in Providence, RI that was a haven for Quakers and other non-Puritans.
                    d. Anne Hutchinson
                              1) Although Puritans regarded women as subordinate to men in the patriarchal family, they were held as equal before God and had a voice in the congregation.  Hutchinson was the daughter of a silenced clergyman and a follower of the charismatic preacher John Cotton.  They believed that redemption is God’s gift to the elect and could not be earned by human effort, and they denied that good works are a sign of salvation (antinomianism).
                              2) Hutchinson's leadership grew through ladies’ prayer meetings.  She declared that the Holy Spirit, who lived in the hearts of true believers, relieved them from the obligation to obey the religious laws of the state and the directives of the clergy.   Winthrop was determined to uphold the authority of the church and the state. 
                             3) She split the colony.  The episode was a conflict between individualism and the stability of the community. Her followers included young people who rejected authority, merchants who opposed price controls, and women who resented the authority of clergymen.
                             4) A court of twenty-five clergymen tried her for sedition and contempt.  She claimed that the Spirit revealed to her that the tribunal had no authority over her.  She was excommunicated from the Puritan Church with the condemnation, "You have stepped out of your place, and you would rather have been a preacher than a hearer.  You have been a naughty woman."  She was banished while she was pregnant (she had fourteen children), and she established a settlement in Portsmouth, RI (1638).  Later, she and her children moved to Long Island (1642) where they were massacred by Native Americans (1643).
                              5) Believing that theirs was the one true Church, Puritans saw no contradiction in denying to others the freedom of religion that they had left England to secure.  Mary Dyer and three other Quakers were hanged on Boston Common (1659-1661).
                    e. Winthrop’s goal was to create a perfect society, “a Citty upon a Hill.”   America is a place especially favored by God, the New Jerusalem, a beacon of virtue for the world.  This contributed to the attitude of American Exceptionalism; i.e., America has superior political and religious institutions, and Americans are superior in ability and accomplishments.
                    f. In the Salem witch trial (1692) twenty were hanged.  Puritan society had little tolerance for women who were not submissive and who lived outside of the patriarchal family structure.  It scapegoated rebellious, defenseless, superstitious adolescent females and widows.
          5. The legacy of Protestantism, in which the colonies were rooted, was the spirit of individualism, the rejection of the British government, the work ethic, capitalism, abolition, and prohibition.

E. The Colonial Mind
          1. A Massachusetts law (1647) required that every town of over one hundred families have a tax supported school .  By 1700, nearly all adult white males in New England could read and write.  Parents, however, were not compelled to send their children to them.  The literacy rate of free males in all thirteen colonies exceeded that of England which was about 50%.  By 1780, almost half of the white women in America were literate.
          2. Educated colonists devoured the latest oeuvres of the philosophes.  John Locke wrote (1690) that men instituted governments to uphold natural law, especially the rights rooted in nature to life, liberty, and property.  The government that fail to protect these rights has lost its right to exist and deserves to be altered or overthrown.  Governments exist by the consent of the governed.  (See The Declaration of Independence.)
          3. Benjamin Franklin was the quintessential son of the Enlightenment.
                    a. He edited The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” and founded the American Philosophical Society and the American Anti-slavery Society.
                    b. He was the darling of the royal courts of Europe where he gained the support of France for the Revolution.  He was a central figure in drafting the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
                    c. He invented the Franklin stove and was interested in music and electricity.
          4. Deism was the faith of the Enlightenment.
                    a. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were deists.  Deists believed that God created the universe which runs by the natural laws which God set in motion.  In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”  Some believed in an after life.  Deists rejected scripture as the Word of God and Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior.  With the Enlightenment, they rejected the doctrine of the depravity of human nature.  They strove for virtue which could be known from reason.  The sum of John Adams’ faith was, “Be just and good.”
                    b. Radical deists like Tom Paine repudiated formal religions, and rationalists did not hold that morality depended on religion.  While deists were not practicing members of any Church, moderates like Franklin and Jefferson supported religious freedom and people who were moral because of their faith.
          5. An exception to the subservient model for New England women was Ann Bradstreet.  She was an unusually well-educated woman for her time and was the first notable American poet (1666).  Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American poet (1773).  Mercy Otis Warren took hope from the Enlightenment's belief in the individual's potential to learn and held that women’s only limitation was lack of education.

F. The Great Awakening, c. 1735-1750
          1. George Whitefield (pronounced Wit-field), an English evangelical minister on a preaching tour in Georgia, gave emotional sermons on the terrors of hell and the wrath of God (1738). 
          2. At a time when commerce and materialism were growing and the influence of religion was waning, Jonathan Edwards, a pastor in Northhampton, MA, adopted the religious emotion that the Great Awakening had unleashed (1741).  The movement was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment.  Edwards was more scholarly than Whitefield and is known for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
                The Great Awakening and Puritanism compared:

          3. The Great Awakening swept through the colonies.  Almost everyone was involved, for or against it.  “It was the first truly national event in American history.” (Carnes and Garraty, 90)  The new movement caused polarization along sectional and class lines.  It flourished in the rural south, and there was missionary activity on the frontier and among Native Americans and Africans.  Many New Englanders and the well educated opposed it, and it caused divisions within the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches.
          3. The Great Awakening gave women, who were the majority in many congregations, an opportunity to assert their influence.  Some women were drawn to an emotional expression of faith, and preachers encouraged them to bring their men back to church. 
          5. Some revivalists denounced book learning as an obstacle to salvation, while others used education to advance their religious agenda.  During the Great Awakening, Princeton and Rutgers were founded to train “new light” ministers.  Jonathan Edward s was one of Princeton ’s early presidents.  Dartmouth was founded to serve the missionary outreach to Native Americans.
          6. The movement brought about greater independence from the clergy.  Congregations shopped around for preachers who suited them, and clergymen were insecure.
          7. The Great Awakening ran its course.  The new light clergy became so esoteric that hardly anyone understood them.  It had become a fad, and people returned to more stable religions, but there was no longer the same degree of domination by the clergy.

G. The French and Indian War, 1754-1759
          1. Virginians established the Ohio Land Company to acquire land and trade west of the Appalachian Mountains in the Ohio Valley (1749).
                    a. The French were also establishing trading posts there and built Fort Duquesne (1754).  When the French and the natives attacked British settlements, Governor George Dinwiddie sent the Virginia militia under twenty-two year old Lieutenant Colonel G. Washington into Pennsylvania where the Three Rivers meet (the Ohio, Allegheny, and the Monongahela).  He built Fort Necessity thirty miles outside of Pittsburgh where he was defeated (1754).  Dinwiddie appealed to Britain for help. 
                    b. Although the British colonists outnumbered the French 20-1, the French were more united and disciplined.  The English colonists were rooted in their locality, and there were economic rivalries, boundary disputes, religious animosity, and national prejudice. The Redcoats were so harsh toward the Native Americans that most tribes went over to the French.
         2. The Albany Congress (1754)
              Benjamin Franklin convened a meeting of delegates from the colonies and proposed the Plan of Union.  It would unite the thirteen colonies under a president who would be named by the king.  He also proposed a Grand Council which would direct the defense of the colonies, land and trade on the frontier, and relations with the Indians.  Its delegates would be elected by each colonial legislature and its acts would be subject to the approval of the king.  This first attempt at political unity in the colonies was defeated.  Colonial governments rejected any threat to their autonomy, and Britain would not accept any change in the status of its colonies.
          3. The war brought about a significant change in attitude among the colonists.
                   a. Some colonists dreamed of over-spreading the continent.
                    b. The war buoyed the confidence of the colonists.  At Braddock’s Defeat (1755), the Redcoats, who fired in volleys in close ranks, were massacred, while Washington and his Virginians fought Indian-style behind rocks and trees. The Redcoats were not super men.
                    c. Conflicts in Europe between England and France had their analogs in North America.  The British colonists had fought with French colonists in King William’s War (1689-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), and King George’s War (1740-1748).  The French and Indian War was the American theater of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Some colonists resented having to fight the wars of the Old World on behalf of British interests, and New Englanders wanted to end raids on American shipping by the French and massacres by their Indian allies.
                    d. Arrogant British officers disdained the buckskin militias.  The Americans were cry babies who couldn’t fight their own battles.  A decade later, the conviction that they were no matches for British soldiers was behind the hard line that Parliament took toward the colonists.
          4. With the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years War, France lost all of its colonies in North America.  Wolfe had defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham (1759; both were killed).  Bitter and humiliated, France awaited an opportunity for revenge.
          5. The victorious colonists were flushed with optimism.  With the elimination of the “Gallic peril” and the withdrawal of the Redcoats, they looked forward to westward expansion.

H. The New Colonial Policy
          1. The aftermath of the French and Indian War
                   a. “The American Revolution was primarily an outgrowth of the Seven Years War.”  (Lawrence Gipson)
                   b. Pay and obey.
                        Now that the war in Europe was over, Britain could give America its undivided attention.  The colonies must pay their share of the cost of the French and Indian War, which, Britain held, was fought for their protection, and of maintaining the Redcoats in the colonies.  England would also begin to enforce the Navigation Acts of 1660 which were directed at checking the Dutch who were Britain’s trade rivals.
                              1) All imports and exports were to be carried on British or colonial ships.
                              2) Imports to the colonies from outside of the British Empire were to be brought to an English port to pay the tax.
                              3) Enumerated articles such as cotton, sugar, tobacco, and fur were to be traded only within the empire.
                      c. England had neglected to enforce the Navigation Acts, and the colonists had ignored  them or bribed tax collectors.  A century of “salutary neglect” was over.
          2. Mercantilism
                   a. Colonies existed for the economic benefit of the mother country.  They were a source of raw materials for industries in Britain and were a market for manufactured goods.  There were laws prohibiting manufacturing in the colonies which New Englanders ignored.  England wanted a favorable balance of trade, i.e., more goods exported than imported.
                   b. triangular trade: molasses to rum to slaves
                        New England ships transported sugar and molasses from the West Indies to Massachusetts where it was distilled into rum.  Then they carried the rum to West Africa where European merchants purchased it.  The ships then boarded African slaves and transported them to the West Indies.  Ignoring the Navigation Acts, New England merchants made fortunes.
         3. The Proclamation Act (October 1763)
              The Indians bitterly protested the British acquisition of French territory which, they maintained, the French had never purchased or conquered.  It was not France’s to surrender.  To placate the Indians and to protect settlers from Pontiac’s Rebellion (May-November 1763), Parliament prohibited settling west of the Alleghenies.  Colonists protested it but many ignored it, and by 1770, about twenty thousand had settled in the Ohio Valley.
            4. The Grenville Acts (1764-5)
             Prime Minister George Grenville proposed that Parliament, for the first time, levy taxes on the colonies to raise revenue.
                    a. the Sugar Act (1764) 
                              1) It decreased the import tax from six pence to three pence per gallon of molasses.  Wine and coffee were also taxed.
                             2) It would be enforced by British ships patrolling the American coast and by British tax collectors who would replace the corrupt colonial agents. 
                             3) Parliament also granted writs of assistance (search warrants) to customs officials to search ships or buildings for goods on which tax was owed.  This was a violation of the rights of Englishmen against search and seizure.  The colonists had no representation in Parliament which granted the writs.
                             4) Juryless British Admiralty Courts, not colonial courts, would try smuggling cases, and the burden of proof was placed on the accused.  Both were violations of the rights of Englishmen.  Trial by a jury of one’s peers was a right, and peers meant fellow colonists.  Very few, however, were brought to England for trial.  Eight colonial governments wrote to Parliament protesting the Sugar Act.
                   b. The Currency Act (1764) outlawed printing money in the colonies.  This had been done during the French and Indian War.  With less money in circulation, business might suffer.
                   c. the Quartering Act (1765)
                             1) Redcoats were stationed in the colonies, and the colonists had to pay for their housing and provisions.  The justification was Pontiac ’s Rebellion, but the troops were not sent to the frontier.  Americans soon realized that the colonies were occupied territories.
                             2) Quartering was done first in New York.  The colony refused to pay, and Parliament passed the New York Suspending Act which invalidated anything passed by the New York Legislature until it complied.  Repeatedly dissolving representative self-government was condemned in the Declaration of Independence.
                              3) Quartering was an indirect tax without representation in Parliament.  More importantly, using troops to enforce laws on Englishmen (martial law) could be done only by an act of Parliament, and the colonists were not represented in Parliament.
                    d. the Stamp Act (1765)
                        The tax was to raise revenue to support British troops in North America.  A tax was levied on newspapers and fifty-four kinds of legal documents such as wills, licenses, and contracts.  There had been a Stamp Act in England since William the Conqueror.  Stamps ranged from one cent to ten cents.  It would raise so little revenue, and the protest would have such disastrous consequences, why did England insist?  England was boss!
                             1) There were riots in New York (the Battle of Golden Hill).
                             2) “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” roared Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses (or representatives).
                             3) To the complaint that the colonists were not represented in Parliament, Thomas Whately responded that they were like men in England who did not meet the property requirement, women, and the Irish who could not vote.  Only about 4% of the population of Britain voted for members of Parliament.  He reasoned that the colonists were “virtually” represented.  All of the members of Parliament protected the interests of the entire empire.
          5. Colonial reactions to the Stamp Act
              The Stamp Act was passed in March 1765, effective on November 1, 1765.
                    a. the Stamp Act Congress
                       At the invitation of Massachusetts, nine colonies sent representatives to New York in October 1765.
                                 1) It resolved to boycott British imports.
                                 2) John Dickinson wrote in A Declaration of Rights and Grievances that external taxes were legitimate, but internal taxes were not.  External taxes were the duties placed on goods coming into the colonies from abroad such as manufactured goods from England or tea from India.  Internal taxes were levies attached to the internal commerce of the colonies.
                    b. James Otis persuaded the Massachusetts Legislature and its committees of correspondence to write circular letters to all the colonial legislatures encouraging them to protest the tax.  It was at this time that the Redcoats were sent to Boston.
                    c. The Virginia House of Burgesses (or representatives) passed the Virginia Resolves that asserted its right to tax its own citizens.
                    d. The Sons of Liberty in Boston torched the house of a tax agent.  Others were tarred and feathered.  Almost all tax collectors throughout the colonies resigned.
                    e. After November 1, most colonists defied the act.  New York and Boston rejected goods imported from England.  Even if the Stamp Act could have been fully enforced, it would have brought in no more than 80,000 pounds.  The boycott cost Britain a quarter of a million pounds in export trade.
                    f. Ben Franklin persuaded members of Parliament that external taxes were legitimate, but internal taxes were unacceptable.  The results were:
                              1) the Declaratory Act (March 1766)
                                  Parliament declared that it had authority to make laws binding on the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
                              2) Then Parliament repealed the Stamp Act (March 1766).  The boycott hurt. Perhaps there was a post-war economic slump that would have occurred without the boycott.  In any case, the British had backed down. 
          6. The Townshend Acts (1767)
             Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed that Parliament levy a tax on paper, paint, glass, lead, and tea imported by the colonies from England .  Britain still needed money, and all of these were external taxes.
         7. Colonial reactions to the Townshend Acts
                   a. John Dickinson wrote Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer in which he objected to any taxes levied on the colonists without representation.  This shifted the argument.  Dickinson had said that internal taxes were unacceptable but external taxes were legitimate.  Now he was saying that external taxes were unacceptable, but that Parliament had the authority to regulate the empire by acts that did not involve taxing the colonists.
                   b. The British seized John Hancock’s ship Liberty that was smuggling wine.
                   c. Sam Adams and the Massachusetts Legislature sent circular letters to all of the colonies urging opposition to any tax passed by Parliament.
                   d. There were more Virginia Resolves, more boycotting, more British trade losses, and more mobbing.
                   e. the Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770)
                       Box score: 5 killed, including Crispus Attucks, a mulatto.  John Adams defended two British soldiers who had fired their muskets and got their sentence reduced to branding.
                   f. There was a lull for three years and nine months between the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.  Trade boomed, and the only notable incident was the burning of the Gaspee, a British customs schooner that had run aground near Providence , RI (1772).
          8. A case of tea (1773)
             In 1770, Prime Minister Frederick North persuaded Parliament to repeal all of the Townshend Acts but the tea tax.  He had a plan that he hoped would please everyone.
                   a. The East India Tea Company was the British Empire in India .  Even though there had been a good tea harvest, the company faced bankruptcy because of the American boycott.  Lord North permitted the East India Company to bypass the requirement of shipping the tea first to England, paying the tax, and selling the tea to American merchants in England, who in turn shipped it to the colonies and sold it to distributors. This should increase the profit of the East India Company.
                   b. To assuage Parliament, Lord North retained the tax of three pence per pound.
                   c. Consumers in America should welcome the low price of tea.  The plan backfired.  Colonial merchants were outraged, and the Daughters of Liberty mobilized to boycott the tea. 
                    d. The East India Company shipped tea to Charleston , Philadelphia , New York , and Boston .  Because of the protest against the tax, the company’s agents in Charleston , New York , and Philadelphia resigned.  The agents in Boston , among whom were two sons and a nephew of the royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson (Anne’s great-great grandson), would not resign.  The governor refused to send the ships to England without payment of the import tax.  The law required that after twenty days the cargo be sold at auction and the tax paid.  The Boston Tea Party took place on the nineteenth day (December 16, 1773).  The Sons of Liberty and angry businessmen masquerading as Mohawks dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor .
         9. The Intolerable Acts (May 1774), or, as Parliament called them, the Coercive Acts, were aimed primarily at Boston, which it held was a hotbed of radicals.  King George III said, “Blows must decide whether they are subjects or independent.”
                   a. The Port of Boston was closed to shipping until the destroyed tea was paid for.  This was another blow to Boston merchants.  Other colonies sent necessary goods to Boston.
                   b. The General Court (i.e., Massachusetts Legislature) was dissolved, and town meetings were forbidden.  These were violations of the rights of Englishmen: the right of self-government and the right of assembly.  The Virginia House of Burgesses had also been dissolved for supporting Massachusetts at the time of the Boston Massacre.  The New York Assembly had been dissolved over protests against quartering in 1764 and again in opposition to the Intolerable Acts.
                   c. Crimes against the crown in Massachusetts were to be tried in England or Nova Scotia.  The British wanted the ringleaders of the Sons of Liberty, especially Sam Adams.
                    d. A new Quartering Act permitted billeting Redcoats in family homes.
         10. The Quebec Act (1774) accompanied the Coercive Acts.
                   a. It extended the Province of Quebec southward into the Ohio Valley and confiscated land owned by Virginians, including G. Washington.  Very few French colonists, however, migrated from Canada..
                    b. The act suppressed representative government and eliminated trial by jury.  The freedom loving colonists feared that this was a warning shot.
                   c. Catholics were given civil rights, and the Church’s privileges were restored.  This infuriated Congregationalist New Englanders and Anglican Virginians.

I. Attempts at Reconciliation
          1. In response to the Intolerable Acts, the First Continental Congress was convened (September 1774).
                    a. It decided that Massachusetts would collect its own taxes and withhold them from the crown until the Intolerable Acts were repealed.
                    b. It rejected the petition of Joseph Galloway, a Tory who later joined the British army.  The Galloway Plan, similar to Franklin’s Albany Plan, proposed an American parliament, subordinate to the British Parliament, which would oversee all inter-colonial matters.
                    c. The colonies were to muster committees of safety.  A second Continental Congress would convene in May 1775 if the grievances were not redressed.
          2. Edmund Burke and William Pitt (MPs) urged Parliament to repeal the Coercive Acts and return to the pre-war status when British soldiers were not quartered in the colonies and when Parliament did not tax the colonists.  The purpose of the empire was trade.  Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?  Parliament rejected their proposal.
          3. Lord North proposed the Conciliatory Plan (February 1775).
                    a. The colonies must recognize the supreme authority of Parliament.
                    b. Parliament would not tax the colonists.
                    c. The colonies would tax their own citizens.
          4. The Continental Congress rejected this as an attempt to ferment disunity and to turn twelve colonies against Massachusetts.  The Conciliatory Plan did not revoke the Intolerable Acts, and Massachusetts was withholding its taxes.
          5. After Lexington and Concord and the Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), in which the British suffered 1054 casualties, and 100 Americans were killed, 267 were wounded, and 30 were taken prisoner, John Dickinson drafted the Olive Branch Petition (July 1775) in which the Continental Congress  proposed that if England ceased hostilities the colonies would remain loyal to the king but would not be subject to Parliament.
          6. Thomas Paine wrote the 47 page pamphlet Common Sense (January 1776).  It was a plain argument for independence directed to simple farmers and soldiers.  He attacked the principle of monarchy and wrote that the king was a brute and a tyrant.  “Everything that is right and reasonable pleads for separation.  The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis time to part.’”