Historical Dictionary of Colonial America

The historical dictionaries present essential information on a broad range of subjects, including American and world history, art, business, cities, countries, cultures, customs, film, global conflicts, international relations, literature, music, philosophy, religion, sports, and theater. Written by experts, all contain highly informative introductory essays of the topic and detailed chronologies that, in some cases, cover vast historical time periods but still manage to heavily feature more recent events. Brief A–Z entries describe the main people, events, politics, social issues, institutions, and policies that make the topic unique, and entries are crossreferenced for ease of browsing. Extensive bibliographies are divided into several general subject areas, providing excellent access points for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more. Additionally, maps, photographs, and appendixes of supplemental information aid high school and college students doing term papers or introductory research projects. In short, the historical dictionaries are the perfect starting point for anyone looking to research in these fields.

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HISTORICAL DICTIONARIES OF U.S. POLITICS AND POLITICAL ERAS Jon Woronoff, Series Editor From the Great War to the Great Depression, by Neil A. Wynn, 2003. Civil War and Reconstruction, by William L. Richter, 2004. Revolutionary America, by Terry M. Mays, 2005. Old South, by William L. Richter, 2006. Early American Republic, by Richard Buel Jr., 2006. Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny, by Terry Corps, 2006. Reagan–Bush Era, by Richard S. Conley, 2007. Kennedy–Johnson Era, by Richard Dean Burns and Joseph M. Siracusa, 2008. Nixon–Ford Era, by Mitchell K. Hall, 2008. Roosevelt–Truman Era, by Neil A. Wynn, 2008. Eisenhower Era, by Burton I. Kaufman and Diane Kaufman, 2009. Progressive Era, by Catherine Cocks, Peter C. Holloran, and Alan Lessoff, 2009. Gilded Age, by T. Adams Upchurch, 2009. Political Parties, by Harold F. Bass Jr., 2010. George W. Bush Era, by Richard S. Conley, 2010. United States Congress, by Scot Schraufnagel, 2011. Colonial America, by William Pencak, 2011.

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Historical Dictionary of Colonial America William Pencak

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2011

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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by William Pencak All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pencak, William, 1951– Historical dictionary of colonial America / William Pencak. p. cm. — (Historical dictionaries of U.S. politics and political eras) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8108-5587-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-7527-2 (ebook) 1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Dictionaries. 2. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—Dictionaries. I. Title. E188.P45 2011 973.2—dc22 2011006199

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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For the wonderful secretaries, advisers, and technical support people at Penn State who have been my friends and uncomplainingly helped me with my research and teaching over the past 28 years. Thank you Dave Horner, Vicki Blazer, Sandi Moyer, Mary Jo Schillings, Jennifer Gilbert, Rose Niman, Tiffany Mayhew, Darla Franks, Karen Eberling, Ben Whitesell, Toni Mooney, Karen Weaver, Lynn Moyer, Ed DuMond, Judy Shawley, Judy Donohue, Barb Stutzman, Anne Rowe, the late Dinah Geiger, Phyllis Martin, and Ruth Bodkin, with apologies to anyone I may have left out. And also for the librarians at Penn State who have made my work possible: Sally Small, Deena Morganti, Marge Kruppenbach, Binh Le, Marge Hindley, Jeannette Ullrich, Eric Novotny, and Dan Mack.

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Contents

Editor’s Foreword

Jon Woronoff

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Map

xii

Chronology

xiii

Introduction

1

THE DICTIONARY

17

Appendixes 1. Estimated Colonial Population

269

2. Colonial Governors

273

3. Monarchs of England

285

4. British Prime Ministers

287

Bibliography

289

About the Author

461

vii

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Editor’s Foreword

Looking back on it, the colonial era may seem deceptively simple and straightforward, especially from a distance of several centuries. As they taught us in school, a new continent was discovered in the form of America, it was colonized by sturdy settlers, and the frontier was rolled back creating what has become the world’s mightiest power. And this is true as far as it goes, barring the messy details. The land was coveted by several empires, mainly the British, French, and Spanish, but also the Dutch, the Portuguese, and even the Swedes. The colonists had even more origins than that, coming from all corners of Europe. And they imported slaves from Africa. Alas, there were already inhabitants when they arrived, namely what were then loosely called Indians, and there was relatively little concern about what happened to them. There were, indeed, the original thirteen colonies, but these were sometimes royal and sometimes proprietary, and even they were splintered by rivalries among immigrants of different sources, social classes, economic status, and especially religious convictions, as well as quite ordinary quarrels over land, money, and power. What became the United States was hardly united at that time, and the situation was often muddled, to say the least. This gives special significance to the Historical Dictionary of Colonial America, which covers the period from the arrival of the first immigrants in 1607—and actually long before, since it is necessary to see the broader context—and follows this for a century and a half to about 1763, when the revolutionary period begins. For those who only have vague memories of what they did learn in school, this may be quite unsettling as the picture is much more variegated, even confusing, and the colonists no longer look quite so good. This can already be sensed in the chronology by the reference to numerous wars and conflicts even before the “revolution.” But the introduction is crucial in sorting out the divisions and conflicts and providing the general background. Next the dictionary section fills in the details, whether fairly straightforward historical ones or messier aspects that involve ethics and morality. These focus on the more prominent persons, places, institutions, and events, this including the wars and lesser conflicts. There are also entries that deal with the major colonial empires and some, particularly

ix

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EDITOR’S FOREWORD

interesting, that give a feel for the times, such as the economy and trade or family and religion. Those wishing to take their studies further can turn to the bibliography, which is very extensive and where the titles are carefully organized by topics, making it extremely useful and easy to navigate. It would be hard to find a more suitable author for this volume than William A. Pencak. For the past 35 years, he has been teaching American history, with an emphasis on the colonial period, this mainly at Penn State University, where he is professor of history, but at other outstanding schools as well. He has written and edited numerous books and articles in the field and was the founding editor of Explorations in Early American Culture, the journal that is now Early American Studies, of the McNeil Center in Philadelphia. With such a guide, it will be much easier for readers to understand what really was a rather complicated and sometimes confusing period that led up to the formation of the United States out of anything but united colonies. Jon Woronoff Series Editor

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Acknowledgments

Having edited over 50 issues of scholarly journals and 20 books, I know a great editor when I encounter one. Jon Woronoff responds promptly, courteously, and never with too much information. I also want to thank my teachers, especially Chilton Williamson Sr., Alden Vaughan, Jack Greene, and John Murrin (yes, John, you were and are my teacher), for much of what I know about early American history.

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Chronology

B.C.E. 14,000–17,000 Meadowcroft Rock Shelter archaeological site, approximately 35 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, the oldest human remains in the Americas. 2000

Maya culture emerges in southern Mexico and Central America.

1200

Pueblo culture emerges in the southwestern United States.

C.E. 800 Mississippian Culture (Mound Builders) emerges in Mississippi watershed. 986

Norseman Bjarni Herjolfsson sights but does not land in North America.

1000 Leif Ericson is the first Norseman to land in North America, namely in Newfoundland/eastern Canada. 1004

Thorvald Ericson lands in North America.

1009

Thorfinn Karlsefni lands in North America.

1325

The Aztecs begin conquest of central Mexico.

1347

The last mention in an Icelandic text of a voyage to North America.

1438

The Incas begin conquest of Peru, west coast of South America.

1453 29 May: Conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Turks interrupts trade in luxury items between Europe and the Far East. 1469 19 October: Queen Isabella of Castille marries King Ferdinand of Aragon, leading to the creation of a united Spanish realm.

xiii

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1477 5 January: Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy is defeated at Battle of Nancy, ending the independent Duchy of Burgundy and creating a united French state. 1485 22 August: Henry VII defeats Richard III and becomes king of England, ending the Wars of the Roses and reestablishing a stable monarchy. 1492 2 January: The final Spanish conquest of the Moors in Granada unites all of what is now Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. 30 July: The Jews are expelled from Spain, and their wealth is confiscated. 3 August: Christopher Columbus sails with 90 men and three ships to find the Far East. 12 October: Columbus lands (probably) on Watkins’ Island in the Bahamas. December: Columbus founds the first permanent colony in the New World— Hispaniola (Santo Domingo). 1493 15 March: Columbus returns to Spain. 4 May: Papal bull of Pope Alexander VI gives the New World to the Spanish. 15 September: Columbus sails on his second voyage with 17 ships and 1,200 men. 1494 7 June: The Treaty of Tordesillas is signed between Spain and Portugal, which divides the newly discovered lands in the Americas between the two powers. Spain receives most of the Americas except Brazil. 1496

8 June: Columbus returns from his second voyage.

1497 May: John Cabot sails west from Bristol, England, exploring Eastern Canada. 8 July: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama departs Lisbon to reach India by sailing around Africa. 6 August: John Cabot returns from his first voyage. 1498 May: Cabot sails on his second expedition, perhaps lost at sea, perhaps returning in 1500. 20 May: Da Gama reaches India. 30 May: Columbus leaves Spain on his third voyage. 1500 22 April: Portuguese Captain Pedro Alvarez de Cabral, blown off course on a voyage to India, lands in Brazil. October: Columbus and his two brothers are sent back to Spain in chains by Viceroy Francisco de Bobadilla. 1502 11 March: Columbus sails with four ships and about 140 men on his fourth, final voyage. 1504

7 November: Columbus returns from his fourth voyage.

1506

20 May: Columbus dies in Valladolid, Spain.

1507 25 April: German geographer Martin Waldseemuller produces the world map and names the new continent “America” after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer.

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1510

• xv

Spain conquers Cuba.

1513 2 April: Juan Ponce de Leon lands in and names Florida, searching for the Fountain of Youth. 13 September: Vasco Nunez de Balboa (or a member of his expedition) becomes the first explorer in the Americas to see the Pacific Ocean. 1517 31 October: Martin Luther presents the Ninety-Five Theses against abuses of the Roman Catholic Church to begin the Protestant Reformation. 1519 19 January: Balboa is beheaded for treason. March: Defying the governor of Cuba, Hernan Cortes lands in Mexico. 20 September: Five ships and about 250 men leave Spain under Ferdinand Magellan to sail to the Far East by way of the Pacific Ocean. 1520 April: Cortes enters Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and takes the Aztec emperor Montezuma prisoner. 1 July: Montezuma is killed by Aztecs rebelling against the Spaniards. 1521 27 April: Magellan is killed in the Philippine Islands. 25 May: Martin Luther is declared an outlaw and a heretic by the Catholic Church at the Diet of Worms. 13 August: Cuauhtemoc, leader of an Aztec rebellion, is defeated and killed. 1522 6 September: Eighteen men on one ship return to Spain from Magellan’s voyage, the first men to sail around the world. 1524 March or April: Sailing for France, Giovanni da Verrazzano explores the North American coast from North Carolina to New England. 1531 12 December: The Virgin of Guadalupe appears and assists in converting Mexican Indians to Christianity. 1532 16 November: The Inca army is defeated by a Spanish force under Francisco Pizarro at the Battle of Cajamarca. 1533

26 July: The Last Inca ruler, Atahualpa, is executed by Pizarro.

1534 10 May: The French explorer Jacques Cartier sails to Canada. November: Henry VIII founds the Church of England. Parliament passes the Act of Supremacy making him head of the English church and repudiating the authority of the pope. 1535 19 May: The second voyage of Jacques Cartier to Canada for France begins. 1538 St. Thomas Aquinas University, the first in the Americas, is founded in Santo Domingo.

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1541 8 May: Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto becomes the first European to reach the Mississippi River. 23 May: The third voyage of Jacques Cartier to Canada for France begins. 1542 20 November: The Spanish New Laws protect Indians and end encomiendas. 1543 The French attempt to settle Canada is abandoned. 13 September: Protestant theologian John Calvin is welcomed to Geneva to reform the city government based on his religious principles, which will also become those of the English Puritans. 1547

28 January: Edward VI becomes king of England.

1551 12 May: The University of San Marcos, the oldest continually operating university in the Americas, is founded in Lima, Peru. 21 September: The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico (now National Autonomous University of Mexico) is founded in Mexico City. 1553

19 July: Mary I becomes queen of England.

1558

17 November: Elizabeth I becomes queen of England.

1565 28 April: A Spanish expedition commanded by Pedro de Menendez lands in Florida and founds St. Augustine, the first permanent colony in what becomes the United States. 1576 7 June: Martin Frobisher’s first expedition from England sets out and lands at Labrador and Newfoundland. 1577 27 May: Frobisher’s second expedition from England sets out and returns to Labrador. 1578 3 June: Frobisher’s third expedition from England explores islands in northern Canada. 1580 26 September: English mariner Francis Drake returns to Plymouth, having sailed around the world. 1585

17 April: The first English expedition to Roanoke embarks.

1587 22 July: The second English expedition lands at Roanoke. 18 August: The first English child is born in the New World, Virginia Dare. 1588 July–August: The defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English navy leads to a gradual decline of Spanish influence in the New World and the widening of English imperial interests.

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1598 11 July: Juan de Onate founds Acoma, the first permanent Spanish settlement in New Mexico and the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States. 1603 24 March: King James VI of Scotland becomes King James I of England, joining the two crowns. 1604 The first French settlement in Acadia (Nova Scotia) is begun by Pierre du Monts. 1606 10 April: King James I of England charters the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth. 1607 Santa Fe is founded by the Spanish. 14 May: Jamestown is founded by the Virginia Company of London. 1608 January: An additional 110 colonists arrive at Jamestown. 8 July: Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec, the first permanent French settlement in Canada. 10 September: John Smith is elected president of the council in Jamestown. December: Lumber and iron ore are sent from Jamestown to England. 1609 4 April: Henry Hudson, an English mariner, sails for the Dutch East India Company and explores the Hudson River as far as Albany, New York. 25 July: The English vessel Sea Venture is shipwrecked on Bermuda, taking possession for the English. 10 September: John Smith is replaced as president of the Virginia council by George Percy and returns to England. The “starving time” at Jamestown begins. 1610 Santa Fe becomes the capital of New Mexico. 17 April: Henry Hudson sails on his second, final voyage to the New World on behalf of England. 8 June: Sixty survivors, about to leave Jamestown, are met by new governor Lord De La Warr, and the colony is saved. 1611 22 June: Henry Hudson, his son, and seven others are set adrift in a boat in Hudson Bay by mutineers and are never heard from again. 1612

June: John Rolfe exports the first tobacco from Virginia to England.

1614 5 April: Rolfe marries Pocahontas. 17 May: The Dutch lay claim to New Netherland. 1617

21 March: Pocahontas dies in England.

1619 Twenty single women arrive in Virginia (a few married women had been present since 1608). 30 July: The first meeting of a representative

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assembly in the Americas, the Virginia House of Burgesses, is held. August: Twenty Africans are sold by the Dutch in Jamestown as indentured servants, the first blacks in the British mainland colonies. 1620 9 November: The Mayflower, a ship hired by the Pilgrims, lands in New England and establishes the Plymouth colony. 11 November: The 41 men on the Mayflower sign the Mayflower Compact, the first original frame of government drawn up in the New World. 1621 Fall: The first Thanksgiving occurs, but it does not become an annual tradition. 1622 22 May: About 350 settlers, or a third of Virginia’s population, are killed by the surprise attack of Powhatan Indians led by Opechancanough. 1623 The first English settlers arrive in what becomes the province of New Hampshire. 1624 Spring: Thomas Morton and 30 indentured servants establish Merry Mount near present-day Boston, Massachusetts. May: The Virginia Company charter is revoked and Virginia becomes the first royal colony. May: Thirty Dutch families arrive in New Netherland. 1625 25 March: Charles I becomes king of England. 14 May: The British take possession of Barbados. 1626 4 May: Peter Minuit becomes director-general of New Netherland, around which time he purchases Manhattan Island. He names his capital New Amsterdam. 1627

19 March: The Massachusetts Bay Company is established.

1628 April: The Plymouth Colony arrests Thomas Morton and destroys the Maypole erected at Merry Mount. 6 September: John Endecott establishes the first Massachusetts Bay Company settlement at Naumkeag, which he renames Salem. 1630 12 June: John Winthrop, the new governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and about 900 immigrants land at Salem. He preaches the “City upon a Hill” sermon, declaring the colony an example for the world. 17 September: Boston is founded and established as the capital of Massachusetts. 1632 30 June: Maryland is granted to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, by King Charles I, as a haven for Roman Catholics, and plans are begun for a settlement.

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1634 25 March: About 200 settlers, mostly Roman Catholics, land in Maryland. 1635 23 April: The first public school in British North America, the Boston Latin School, is founded. 1636 June: Roger Williams founds Providence, Rhode Island, after being banished from Massachusetts. June: Hartford, Connecticut, is founded by Thomas Hooker. 20 July: The murder of trader John Oldham begins the Pequot War in New England. 28 October: The Massachusetts legislature establishes the New (later Harvard) College. 1637 1 May: The first meeting of the Connecticut legislature occurs. 26 May: The main Pequot settlement at Mystic, Connecticut, is destroyed, and most of the survivors are massacred by Puritans and their Indian allies. November: Anne Hutchinson is convicted of heresy in Massachusetts and banished. 1638 Stephen Daye begins the first printing press in British North America in Cambridge, Massachusetts. April: Anne Hutchinson leaves Massachusetts, her banishment postponed because of the winter and her pregnancy. 14 April: John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton found the town of New Haven and the New Haven Colony. 20 August: The Providence, Rhode Island, compact is signed by Roger Williams and others, guaranteeing religious toleration. 1640 November: Parliament is summoned for the first time in 11 years by King Charles I of England, leading to the English Civil War. 1641 Massachusetts permits the enslavement of captives taken in a just war, thereby allowing Indian slavery and opening the door to African slavery as these slaves were captured by others. 1643 23 February: The director-general of New Netherland, Willem Kieft, attacks Indians near New Amsterdam, beginning Kieft’s War. 19 May: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Haven, and Plymouth form the United Colonies of New England, a military confederation. 1644 18 April: Opechancanough leads the Powhatan Indians in a final, unsuccessful effort to dislodge Virginia settlers. 1645 August: The Indians and Dutch stalemate in Kieft’s War and establish a truce. 1647 May: Massachusetts requires communities with 50 houses to support a school and requires all adults to learn to read.

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1648 August: Massachusetts clergymen agree on the Cambridge Platform, which establishes rules for church government and supervision of individual churches by consociations of ministers. 1649 30 January: King Charles I of England is executed by Parliament, which assumes the government. 1651 9 October: The first English Navigation Act is passed, forbidding foreign ships from trading with the colonies. 1652

10 July: The First Anglo-Dutch War begins.

1653 20 April: Oliver Cromwell dissolves Parliament. 16 December: Cromwell becomes protector, or supreme ruler, of England. 1654 4 April: The First Anglo-Dutch War ends inconclusively. September: Twenty-three Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil arrive in New Amsterdam, joining a few merchants already there. These are the first Jewish inhabitants of colonies that become the United States. 1655 10 May: The English conquer Jamaica from the Spanish, taking permanent possession. 1657 27 December: The Flushing Remonstrance protests the persecution of Quakers in New Amsterdam. 1658 3 September: Oliver Cromwell dies and is succeeded by his son Richard Cromwell. 1660 29 March: King Charles II of England ascends the throne. 1 June: Quaker Mary Dyer is executed by Massachusetts Puritans for refusing to leave the colony. 13 September: A new Navigation Act forbids the colonies from exporting tobacco and sugar outside the British Empire. 1662 22 April: Connecticut is granted a royal charter confirming its selfgovernment, and New Haven is incorporated into Connecticut. 1663 24 March: King Charles II grants Carolina (now North and South Carolina) to eight proprietors, although no effort is made to settle it. 5 July: Rhode Island is granted a royal charter confirming its self-government. 27 July: Under the second Navigation Act, most imports to the English colonies are to be shipped through England. 1664 24 June: The Duke of York (future King James II) grants East Jersey to Sir George Carteret and West Jersey to Sir John Berkeley. 8 September: An English fleet compels New Netherland to surrender without a fight before war is formally declared.

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1665 10 February: Proprietors Carteret and Berkeley of East and West Jersey grant the “Concessions” establishing religious toleration. 4 March: The Second Anglo-Dutch War is formally declared. 1667 31 July: The Second Anglo-Dutch War ends, and the English conquest of New Amsterdam is confirmed. 1669 March: On behalf of the proprietors, John Locke drafts The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina; only its provision for religious toleration is implemented. 1670 23 March: Settlers from Barbados establish the first English settlement in Carolina near present-day Charleston, South Carolina. 2 May: The Hudson’s Bay Company is founded to import furs to England from the land north of French Canada. 1672 12 March: The Third Anglo-Dutch War begins. 19 March: Henry Morgan captures Panama for the English, unaware that peace with Spain had been negotiated, making him a pirate. 27 September: The Royal African Company obtains a monopoly of the English slave trade. 1673 February: With the Revenue Act of 1673, customs commissioners are established in the colonies to enforce the Navigation Acts. 17 May: Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet begin the exploration of the Great Lakes region for France. 9 July: A Dutch fleet recaptures New York. 1674 10 February: The Treaty of Westminster ends the Third AngloDutch War. English maritime supremacy is established, and New Netherland is returned to England. 1675 20 March: Indians attack Swansea, Massachusetts, beginning King Philip’s War. 1676 10 April: A peace treaty signed between Sir Edmund Andros, governor of New York, and the Iroquois initiates the Covenant Chain of friendship between the Iroquois and the English colonies. 10 June: Edward Randolph arrives in Boston, marking the beginning of serious English attempts to curtail Massachusetts’ and Connecticut’s independence. 1 July: Lord John Berkeley deeds West Jersey to three Quakers including William Penn. 30 July: Nathaniel Bacon issues the “Declaration of the People” proclaiming rebellion against Governor Sir William Berkeley of Virginia. 2 August: King Philip is killed by an Indian friendly to the English, as the war winds down with English victories. October 26: Nathaniel Bacon dies of the “bloody flux,” and his rebellion falls apart.

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1677 December: John Culpeper leads a rebellion in North Carolina to protest the limitation of colonial trade under the Navigation Acts. 1679 18 September: New Hampshire is separated from Massachusetts and becomes a royal colony. December: Culpeper is arrested in North Carolina, but pardoned as there is little proprietary authority in the region. 1680 10 August: The Pueblo Indians revolt against Spanish rule, driving out all Spaniards from New Mexico. 1681 4 March: Pennsylvania is granted to William Penn by King Charles II, who insists the colony be named for Penn’s father. 1682 6 February: French explorer Sieur de La Salle reaches the Mississippi River after extensive explorations, claims the region for France, and names it Louisiana. May: Tobacco cutting riots in Virginia try to raise the price of tobacco, which had been lowered by overproduction. 27 October: William Penn arrives in Pennsylvania to initiate his “Holy Experiment” of a pacifist, multiethnic society practicing religious toleration. 1684

August: William Penn leaves Pennsylvania and returns to England.

1685 6 February: The Duke of York succeeds Charles II and becomes King James II of England. 30 July: James II appoints Sir Edmund Andros governor-general of the Dominion of New England with absolute power, ending the right of colonists to elect their own assemblies and deprive nonPuritans of religious liberty. 2 October: The Edict of Nantes is revoked by King Louis XIV of France, forcing Protestants to leave home; some become the Huguenot immigrants to British America. 1688 18 April: Germantown Quakers and Lutheran Daniel Pastorius write the first protest against slavery in British North America. 1689 12 February: William, stadtholder of the Netherlands, and his wife Mary become king and queen of England after the “Glorious Revolution” overthrows King James II. April: John Coode leads Protestant Associators to overthrow the Roman Catholic proprietor of Maryland. 18 April: The Dominion of New England is overthrown in Boston and Governor Sir Edmund Andros is imprisoned. 31 May: Lieutenant-Governor Francis Nicholson of the Dominion of New England is overthrown at his headquarters in New York by Leisler’s Rebellion. June: Abenaki Indians led by French Canadians attack New England settlements, beginning King William’s War. 1690 8 February: The village of Schenectady, New York, is destroyed by the French and Indians. August: Tobacco cutting riots in Virginia protest

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overproduction that has lowered prices. 24 October: A Massachusetts fleet and army commanded by Governor Sir William Phips departs from Quebec after unsuccessfully attempting to conquer Canada. 1691 19 March: Jacob Leisler is arrested by the newly appointed governor of New York, Henry Sloughter. 16 May: Leisler is executed for treason. 27 July: Royal Governor Nathaniel Blakiston replaces, and later pardons, John Coode in Maryland. 7 October: Massachusetts is granted a new royal charter, which stipulates that the crown will appoint its governor. 1692 February: The British crown authorizes Thomas Neale to establish a privately run intercolonial postal service. May: The witch craze begins in Salem village, leading to 20 executions. October: The craze subsides. 1693 8 February: The College of William and Mary is chartered in Middle Plantation (later Williamsburg) Virginia. 1696 20 April: The new Navigation Act establishes the Board of Trade (Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations) to report on and formulate colonial policy. 1697 20 September: King William’s War is ended by the Treaty of Ryswick, leaving territories in North America as before the war. 1698 The Wool Act passed by Parliament forbids the exportation of woolen products outside of the colony where they were produced to encourage importation of British wool. 5 July: The Royal African Company monopoly on slave trade ends, opening it to all English (as of 1707 British) subjects. 1699

Virginia’s capital is relocated from Jamestown to Williamsburg.

1701 23 May: William Kidd, who sailed from New York to capture pirates, is hanged for piracy in London, England. 24 July: The French establish a settlement at Detroit. 9 October: The Collegiate School (later Yale College) is chartered in New Haven, Connecticut. 1702 8 March: Anne becomes Queen of England. 15 April: The proprietary colonies of East and West Jersey are united as the royal colony of New Jersey. 3 November: In response to the declaration of the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe, forces from Charleston, (South) Carolina, unsuccessfully attack St. Augustine, Florida. 1704 29 February: Deerfield, Massachusetts, is attacked by French and Indians, and its inhabitants are all killed or taken captive. 24 April: The first permanent newspaper in the British colonies, the Boston News-Letter, is first published.

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1705 The Virginia slave code is enacted, confirming blacks as slaves without civil rights. It becomes a model for other colonies. 1707 1 May: The Act of Union unites England, Scotland, and Wales as the United Kingdom of Great Britain. June–September: An unsuccessful effort is made by Massachusetts to capture Port Royal, the capital of French Acadia (Nova Scotia). 1708 September: The Saybrook Platform is adopted in Connecticut, providing for collective ministerial supervision of congregations’ behavior. 1710 June: Approximately 3,000 Palatine immigrants begin to arrive in New York. 2 October: Port Royal in French Acadia is conquered by British and New England troops. 1711 1 June: The Post Office Act passed by Parliament in 1710 takes effect, placing the post office under royal control. 22 August: Eight ships sink and 850 men drown in a storm, compelling a British/New England expedition attacking Quebec to withdraw. 22 September: The Tuscarora War breaks out in North Carolina. 1712 6 April: Fires are set in New York City, leading to the execution of 21 people in the New York slave conspiracy of 1712. May: Carolina is divided into North and South Carolina. 1713 11 April: The Peace of Utrecht ends Queen Anne’s War. The principal result for North America is that the French cede Acadia to Britain; it becomes Nova Scotia. 1714

1 August: George I becomes king of England.

1715 11 February: The Tuscarora Indians are defeated in North Carolina. 15 April: The Yamasee War begins in South Carolina. 1716 The first theater in the British colonies opens in Williamsburg, Virginia. 1717 Indians on the South Carolina frontier cease their attacks, ending the Yamasee War. 1718 New Orleans is founded by the French. 22 November: Blackbeard the pirate is killed in North Carolina by an expedition sent from Virginia. 1719 This is the approximate date of the organization of the Boston Caucus, the first political organization formed in colonies; it is designed to oppose the policies of a royal governor.

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1721 26 June: The first smallpox inoculation in North America is given by Dr. Zabdiel Boylston of Boston, following an idea suggested by Onesimus, the African slave of Cotton Mather. 7 August: The New England Courant, the first protest newspaper in the American colonies, is founded by James Franklin in Boston. 1722 10 September: Indians allied with the French attack Georgetown, Maine, beginning (William) Dummer’s War between Massachusetts and the Abenaki and Norridgewock Indians. 1724 23 August: Father Sebastien Rale, a French priest encouraging Indian attacks in Maine, is killed by Massachusetts troops. 1725 26 March: The Explanatory Charter is issued by the crown to Massachusetts. It permits the governor to veto the assembly’s choice of a speaker and to dissolve that body at his pleasure. 31 July: Dummer’s War ends. 1726 William Tennent opens the Log College in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, to instruct future Presbyterian ministers. 1727

11 June: George II becomes king of England.

1729 June: North Carolina and South Carolina become royal provinces. 30 July: Baltimore, Maryland, is founded. 1730 October: Conflict breaks out between Maryland and Pennsylvania over their boundary (Cresap’s War). 1731 1 July: The first public library in British North America, the Library Company of Philadelphia, is founded by Benjamin Franklin. 1732 10 May: The proprietors of Maryland and Pennsylvania agree to a boundary line between their colonies. 29 September: The Hat Act is passed by Parliament to prohibit the exportation of hats out of the colony in which they were manufactured. 28 December: The first issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac is published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. 1733 The Great Awakening begins when Jonathan Edwards inspires the revival of religion in Northampton, Massachusetts. 12 February: The first English settlers arrive in Georgia. May: Parliament passes the Molasses Act, placing a prohibitive tax on the importation of molasses, rum, and sugar from non-British colonies into the North American colonies. 1734 17 November: Printer John Peter Zenger is arrested in New York for libeling Governor William Cosby.

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1735 5 August: Zenger is acquitted in New York by a jury on the grounds that his statements were true. 1736 12 February: The Dock Street Theater, the oldest continuously operating theater in the United States, opens in Charleston, South Carolina. 7 December: Franklin founds the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer fire company in the British colonies. 1737 25 August: The Walking Purchase occurs, the first dishonest seizure of Indian lands in Pennsylvania. 1739 10 July: English ships are authorized by Parliament to attack Spanish vessels, beginning the War of Jenkins’ Ear between the two powers. 9–10 September: The Stono Rebellion begins and is immediately suppressed in South Carolina as slaves try to reach Spanish Florida. November: Evangelical preacher George Whitefield lands in Philadelphia, beginning the first of five trips throughout the colonies during which he inspires religious revivals. 1741 March–May: British and colonial forces are badly defeated by the Spanish at the Battle of Cartagena. March–August: The New York slave conspiracy of 1741 occurs and ends with the execution of 38 blacks and whites. 2 April: Moravians obtain land and begin the settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 25 April: Parliament passes a law abolishing the private banks (Land and Silver) begun in Massachusetts the previous year. 8 July: Jonathan Edwards preaches his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1742 1 October: An election riot in Philadelphia is fomented by Anglicans and Presbyterians unsuccessfully seeking to end Quaker dominance. 1744 15 March: France declares war on Britain, initiating King George’s War between their colonies in the Americas. 4 July: By the Treaty of Lancaster (Pennsylvania), the Iroquois agree to relinquish claims to land in Maryland and Virginia. 1745 Land riots begin against New Jersey proprietors and continue sporadically until 1754. 16 June: Forces primarily from Massachusetts capture Louisbourg, the French fort guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Canada. 1746 The College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) is founded in Elizabethtown. 1747 17–20 November: Anti-impressment rioters in Boston seize British naval officers as hostages, but are compelled to release them under threat of bombardment.

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1748 4 January: The Independent Advertiser, an antiwar protest newspaper, is founded in Boston by Samuel Adams and others. 18 October: By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Britain returns Louisbourg to France in exchange for Madras in India. 1749 Celeron de Bienville deposits several metal plates, claiming the Ohio Valley for the French. 26 January: Massachusetts institutes a currency backed by silver received from Britain to compensate it for the costs of the 1745 Louisbourg expedition. 13 November: The first meeting is held of the board of trustees of the College of Philadelphia, the future University of Pennsylvania. 1750 24 June: Parliament passes the Iron Act, encouraging the production of raw iron but prohibiting its refinement in the American colonies. 1751 Land riots begin against New York proprietors in the mid-Hudson Valley and continue sporadically for 15 years. 11 May: The Pennsylvania legislature issues a charter for the Pennsylvania Hospital, the first in the British American colonies, which opens in 1752. 29 September: The printing of paper money by the New England colonies is prohibited by an act of Parliament. 1752 13 June: The Treaty of Logstown between the Iroquois and Pennsylvania opens settlement of lands south of the Ohio River to whites. 19 December: Benjamin Franklin first describes his kite experiment, which establishes that lightning is caused by electricity. 1753 11 June: What is later known as the Liberty Bell is first rung in the state house in Philadelphia. July: The Susquehannah Company is founded in Windham, Connecticut, to claim and organize Connecticut settlement of what is now northern Pennsylvania. 1754–1763

French and Indian War takes place.

1754 17 February: The French begin construction of Fort Duquesne at the present-day site of Pittsburgh. 28 May: George Washington, commanding Virginia militiamen, defeats a French force commanded by Sieur de Jumonville near Fort Duquesne, beginning the French and Indian War. 19 June–11 July: Colonial representatives meet at the Albany Congress. 17 July: The first classes begin at King’s College (later Columbia) in New York City. 29 October: John Reynolds, Georgia’s first royal governor, arrives. 1755 9 July: General Edward Braddock’s British/Virginian force is surprised and decimated by French and Indians near Fort Duquesne. 8 September: A French force under Baron Dieskau is defeated at the Battle of Lake

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George by colonials commanded by Sir William Johnson. 16 October: Indians in western Pennsylvania begin to attack settlers (Leroy Massacre), with disastrous consequences for the frontier. 1756 15 May: Britain declares war on France, and the Seven Years’ War begins warfare in Europe as well as in America. 14 August: French general the Marquis de Montcalm captures Fort Oswego from colonial troops. 8 September: Pennsylvania militia launch a surprise attack on Delaware Indians at the Battle of Kittanning, rescuing prisoners. December: William Pitt becomes secretary of state for the Southern Department and leader of the House of Commons. He escalates the war against France. 1757 27 July: Benjamin Franklin arrives in London as Pennsylvania’s agent. He spends 16 of the next 18 years in Britain. 9 August: The Marquis de Montcalm captures Fort William Henry and intervenes to stop the massacre of British prisoners by his Indian allies. 1758 Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker begins a diary that records life in the city for over 50 years. July: Some 16,000 troops under James Abercrombie fail to capture the French Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga). 27 July: British forces under Sir Jeffrey Amherst capture Louisbourg, the French fortress at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. 12 October: The Virginia legislature passes the Two-Penny Act, permitting debts to be paid in tobacco with the commodity valued at two pennies per pound. 26 November: The French blow up Fort Duquesne and abandon it to British forces commanded by General James Forbes. 1759 January: War begins between Cherokees on one side, with Virginia, South Carolina, and British troops on the other. 16 June: Sir William Johnson captures Fort Niagara from the French. July–August: General Amherst captures Forts Crown Point and Carillon (Ticonderoga) from the French. 10 August: King George II vetoes Virginia’s Two-Penny Act. 13 September: General James Wolfe captures Quebec. He and French general Montcalm both die in the battle. 20 November: The British navy destroys the French fleet at Quiberon Bay (France), preventing the French from reinforcing Canada. 1760 Thomas Hutchinson is appointed chief justice of Massachusetts, which begins a feud between the Otis and Hutchinson families that becomes a cause of the American Revolution. 8 September: At Montreal, the final major French army surrenders Canada to the British. 25 October: George III becomes king of England.

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1761 February: James Otis, Jr., argues the writs of assistance case in Boston. November: The Cherokees sign peace treaties with South Carolina and Virginia. 1762 4 January: Britain declares war on Spain. March–August: The British attack and capture Havana, Cuba. 1763 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon begin surveying the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania that had been agreed on in 1732, completing the Mason-Dixon Line in four years. 10 February: By the Treaty of Paris ending the French and Indian War, France cedes Canada to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Britain obtains Florida from Spain in return for Cuba. May: An Indian confederation under the Ottawa leader Pontiac begins all-out warfare against the British, destroying all forts in the west of the colonies except for Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt, which are besieged. 5–6 August: The Indians are defeated at the Battle of Bushy Run, lifting their siege of Fort Pitt. 7 October: Britain issues the Proclamation of 1763, banning colonial movement west of the Appalachian Mountains while opening up Canada and Florida to settlement. November: The siege of Detroit ends with the fort holding out against Pontiac. December: A Virginia court grants Anglican priest James Murray one penny in damages for his lost salary under the Two-Penny Act in the Parson’s Case. 14 December: The Paxton Boys massacre the Conestoga Indians in central Pennsylvania.

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Introduction

The years between 1450 and 1550 marked the end of one era in world history and the beginning of another. Most importantly, the focus of global commerce and power shifted from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, largely because of the discovery of the New World. The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 interrupted the spice and silk trades from East Asia on which the European nations had depended for their luxury goods. The Italian city-states and sailors who had conducted much of that trade began to work for the Atlantic powers, as the names of some leading explorers reveal: Cristoforo Colombo, alias Cristobal Colon in Spain and known to us as Christopher Columbus; Giovanni da Verrazzano, who sailed for France; Amerigo Vespucci, a Portuguese explorer who gave his name to the New World; and Giovanni and Sebastiano Caboto, John and Sebastian Cabot, who led the pioneering voyage for the English. What used to be called the “discovery” of America—the preferred term now is the “encounter” between the Native Americans, or Indians, and Europeans—came about because of Columbus’s great mistake. He miscalculated the circumference of the globe and somehow persuaded the Spanish to finance an expedition to reach Asia that smarter minds knew was impossibly long. But what really made the encounter of Europe with America possible was the formation of three united states: Spain in 1469, France in 1477, and England in 1485. These nations could turn their attention away from internal wars and muster the men and ships to expand their realms. Holland and Portugal, although leaders in exploration, mostly established commercial posts in Africa and East Asia, with few exceptions (notably Portuguese Brazil), as they did not have the population or power to compete with the big three. THE PROMISE OF THE NEW WORLD The New World was more than a geographic novelty. It opened the way for new human possibilities, possibilities that were first fulfilled by the British colonies of North America and have since become a reality for much of Europe, 1

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and will, perhaps, someday spread to the rest of the world. Columbus sensed this from the start, as he ended his first letter, dispatched while he was still at sea. He stated that the Spanish should be thankful “for the temporal benefits which will bring solace and profit not only to Spain but to all Christians.” The Old World was filled with poverty, crime, war, and a landscape that was being depleted by deforestation, overcultivation, and especially raising sheep, which displaced peasants, a problem to which both Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote and Thomas More in Utopia called attention. In America, on the other hand, there were “many harbors on the sea coast beyond comparison with any I know in Christendom, and so many good, wide rivers that it is a marvel. . . . There are marvelous pine groves and broad meadows, and there is honey and there are many different kinds of birds and many varieties of fruit. In the interior there are many mines of metal.” Thus America offered solutions to Europe’s problems.1 Over a century later, John Smith, one of the founders of English Virginia, specifically noted how America’s vast resources would provide opportunities for the very people who were superfluous in Europe. In his final book, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Anywhere, he predicted that America “may entertain all the poor artificers and laborers in England which are burdensome . . . for want of work . . . for there is vast land enough for all the people in England, Scotland, and Ireland.”2 Many of the Europeans had no doubt that the Christian God had directed them to the New World. Columbus himself was the first to note this: “Our Redeemer has given glorious success to our most illustrious King and Queen, and to their kingdoms rendered famous by this glorious event, at which all Christendom should rejoice.” But it remained for John Winthrop and the Puritans who founded Massachusetts to put forth the idea that America not only provided the solution for Europe’s population, class, and ecological problems, but it could serve as a spiritual example to the Old World as well. Speaking to colonists about to disembark from their ships in 1630, he urged them to “consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” By keeping “the Articles of our Covenant with Him . . . we may live and be multiplied, and the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.”3 Of course, the opportunity for Europeans who came to America was built upon the tragedy of those they encountered. The best recent scholarship has estimated the population of the Americas at between 50 and 100 million on the eve of the European encounter: about half living in central Mexico, 10 to 12 million in Peru, 5 million in Brazil, and 10 to 12 million north of the Rio Grande. By 1600, these numbers had dropped over 90 percent in the worst demographic disaster in human history. Most of the deaths came even before the Indians had seen a single European; germs spread by the initial contact spread far more rapidly than settlement.4

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Thus, Europeans encountered a population not only greatly reduced, but with its faith in its gods and culture deeply shaken. Many colonists considered Indian depopulation a sign that their extinction was God’s will. Even Benjamin Franklin, noted for his belief in a rational universe and deity, writing in his Autobiography, considered it “the design of Providence to extirpate these savages to make room for cultivators of the earth.”5 Africa, too, became a means to the creation of the Europeans’ New World. That continent’s tragedy, while not as numerically overwhelming as the Indians’, is perhaps even more horrific because it was deliberately engineered almost solely for the purposes of growing sugar and tobacco for profit. The best estimate of Africa’s population between 1500 and 1800 is that it remained stagnant at about 100 million.6 Natural increase was matched by the number of deaths and deportations caused by the Atlantic slave trade. Between 10 and 12 million slaves reached the shores of the Americas, but that number was probably equaled by Africans who died in wars fighting slavers, perished on the journey to the coast, or expired in the holds of the ships in which they were crammed on the voyage to the New World.7 The development, side by side, of apparently incompatible ideals has characterized the Americas ever since, as indeed it has all of world history. But the seizure of an entire continent and the displacement of its people, along with the unprecedented, long-term slave trade, required new rationalizations. The greater the crime, the more lofty the principles required to justify it, both to the world and to satisfy the consciences of those committing it. Thus, it was claimed, Indians and Africans were heathens whose souls could only be saved if they were placed in contact with Christians; earthly slavery was a small price to pay for eternal bliss (although missionary efforts, especially in the English colonies, were sporadic at best). Non-Europeans were lazy, proven by the fact that they did not cultivate their land as intensively as Europeans, who could teach them work habits (although most slaves worked hard while most masters did not). They wore few clothes, sensible considering their climates, but proof that they were savages in need of civilization. Within a century or less, the encounter of Europe with America and Africa relegated perhaps a quarter of the globe’s population to something less than full human stature while convincing those who exploited them that they were on a mission from God.8

VARIETIES OF EMPIRE Nevertheless, despite a common sense of mission and desire to profit from the New World, the different European powers developed radically different systems of colonization. This occurred both because of the different Indian populations they confronted and because their different attitudes toward immigration

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to the colonies. Francis Parkman, a 19th-century historian of the 18th-century conflict between the French and British colonies, summed it up with a reasonable measure of accuracy: “Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.”9 The Spanish, the first to establish a New World empire, were lucky in two ways. They found the enormous deposits of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru, and these were mined by highly civilized people who lived in highly stratified societies similar to those in Europe. As such, they were used to obeying their rulers, and once the rulers were removed, the Spanish could easily take their places and continue giving orders. That many of these Indians had been recently conquered caused them to look at the conquistadors as liberators. The Spanish set up a society much like that of feudal Spain, and with a good deal of continuity with the preconquest past. Indians were not enslaved but placed on estates called encomiendas where a Spaniard ruled over them like a feudal lord. Relatively few Spaniards came to the Americas, and they needed labor in the mines and fields. The Spaniards lived in towns, the Indians in surrounding villages. Indian caciques, or chiefs, served as go-betweens and did much of the actual ruling. A relatively small number of soldiers were able to control a large population, in part because higher authorities were careful to keep exploitation within customary limits. Spanish government in the New World mirrored that in the Old. A viceroy (literally, a stand-in for the king) ruled in Lima, Peru, and in Mexico City. Gobernadores ruled provinces, and alcaldes or mayors ruled the towns. On each level, a council of important men provided advice. In practice, because domains were so vast and bureaucracy so cumbersome, local elites came to dominate everyday life and decision making. Spain attempted to centralize the economy and maximize revenue by requiring ships to sail in gigantic convoys guarded by the navy, but bribery was rampant and evasion easy. Spanish administration encouraged disrespect for the law; for instance, wealthy people of color could purchase “purity of blood” certificates stating that they were white and entitled to all the privileges of whiteness, including holding public office and becoming members of the clergy. The Portuguese Empire was run along the same lines, although it relied mostly on African slaves to labor in its principal colony of Brazil, the main difference being that authority was even looser. The northern English colonists did not need a large native labor force; they wanted land of their own. England encouraged migration—especially of people whose religion made them difficult to handle at home—and the settlers wanted land. North American Indians were hunters and primitive

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agriculturalists. Efforts to enslave them failed, so the tobacco and sugar colonies turned to European servants—whose passage was paid for in return for several years’ labor—criminals, or African slaves. In the northern colonies, people largely owned their own family farms. The small number of Indians who survived early wars or did not live in the interior were placed on reservations, where (except for a few praying Indians) they were generally ignored and lived in poverty. The French, on the other hand, came to Canada primarily to trap furs. Few moved to the New World, and agriculture was largely limited to a strip of land along the St. Lawrence and the rivers that flowed into it. Trappers, alone or in small parties, ventured as far west as the Rocky Mountains, requiring that they befriend the Indians both to do business and for sexual companionship. Canada was governed, as were French provinces, by a governor who handled military affairs and law and order and an intendant who was in charge of finances. Farmers worked on feudal estates, but the seigneurs kept rents reasonable and administered justice leniently. It was important to retain the loyalty of a European population that numbered only 80,000 by 1750 and could easily move to the frontier. In one area, however, all the empires were united: the sugar-producing territories of the West Indies and South America. Here, whites were outnumbered severalfold on plantations where death from disease and overwork required constant replenishment of African slaves. Discipline was brutal, but the great powers were willing to sacrifice not only Africans but their own soldiers and sailors by the thousands in wars in one of the unhealthiest regions of the globe. About a half million immigrants who came to the British West Indies before 1700 resulted in a population of only 150,000.10 This massive slaughter was for sugar; struggles over who would control not only Brazil and Jamaica, but St. Kitts, Dominica, and other tiny islands went on from the 16th through 19th centuries, as these were the only lands where the most profitable crop in the world economy could be grown. And although the West Indies may have been geographically distant from the mainland British colonies, they were vital to their survival and prosperity.

DIVERSE BRITISH COLONIES The West Indies, like the tobacco colonies of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina and the rice colonies of Georgia and South Carolina, all shared an important characteristic: they existed to supply Europeans with valuable crops, and most of these were grown by unfree labor. While European indentured servants preceded black slaves almost everywhere, by 1750 most of the

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export production was done by slaves. These numbered at least three-quarters of the population in the Caribbean and in low-country South Carolina, 40 percent in Virginia, and a third in the other colonies. A major consequence of such large black populations was political harmony among the whites: realizing they needed the support of the white majority who were not slave owners, the large planters cultivated the votes of middling whites and provided frontier lands for them to settle. Two of the most important trends in U.S. history thus developed in the colonial South. The colonies were not settled for religious reasons, or for ideals, but for profit. And racial distinctions, between black and white (slave and free), became far more important for society than class distinctions. White indentured servants had proven unruly and desirous of the rights of Englishmen, as Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 showed. But once slavery became prevalent, and the possibility of land and slave ownership was held out to more people, southern whites united in a regime based on fear of the black population and the curtailment of personal liberty in the interest of community survival. The New England colonies could not have been more different. The early settlers came to exercise their religion, whether Puritans in Massachusetts or the closely related Separatists (Pilgrims) in Plymouth. Many of them had been prosperous and willingly moved to what they knew would be a primitive agricultural society from the more advanced towns of England. They also knew that most colonies still had a very high death rate. Who was a devout Puritan was easy to decide in England—it meant willingness to undergo persecution. In New England, the Puritans controlled access to land and political power. Hence, disagreements over who was sufficiently godly led to spin-off colonies in Rhode Island, New Haven, and Connecticut. But New England prospered, and because its inhabitants came to the New World in families who grew food for themselves in a healthy climate, about 40,000 immigrants had grown to a population of 150,000 by 1700. This was opposed to the heavily male southern mainland colonies, which had only 100,000 people although 150,000 had immigrated in the same period.11 Those who were Puritans, except in tolerant Rhode Island, enjoyed something like democracy among themselves; but those who were not were unwelcome. Few people came to New England after 1640. Fish, exported to feed the West Indies, which could not give up scarce sugar-producing land to grow food, became the principal source of the region’s prosperity. Most of the middle colonies, on the other hand, were characterized by religious and ethnic diversity. New Netherland was settled by the Dutch as a commercial company to supply furs for Europe and food for Brazil, which the Dutch ruled from 1630 to 1654. Like heavily Dutch northern New Jersey, profit was the motive. Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, however, were

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planned by Quakers, a religious sect devoted to toleration and pacifism. Joining them were large numbers of Germans, a few belonging to pacifist sects such as the Moravians and Amish, but most were Lutheran or Reformed (Calvinist). Most immigrants to the British colonies after the initial period of settlement came to Pennsylvania, the gateway to the backcountry. New England filled up quickly and was intolerant, and the best land in the southern low country belonged to plantation owners. Furthermore, the soil of the middle colonies was richer and the growing season longer than in New England; prosperity here came through grain rather than fish. Wheat was milled along dozens of streams and rivers and sent to the West Indies. As with New England, the middle colonies were only able to move beyond subsistence farming because the slaves of the West Indies needed to eat.

A NEW WORLD OF POLITICS No one intended that British North America, alone of any region in the world at the time, would enjoy self-government by a majority of adult (white) men. After diverse initial experiments, the colonies’ governments came to be modeled on the king, lords, and commons that collectively comprised the British Parliament. In the colonies, a governor stood in for the king, a council for the lords, and an assembly for the commons. As in Britain, each could vote down laws passed by the others. The U.S. president, Senate, and House of Representatives today follow the same model, as do our state governments, although the president’s and governors’ vetoes can now be overridden. Britons and British Americans both equated this form of government with the special freedom that they believed only Britons enjoyed. Legislatures representing aristocrats, towns, the clergy, and ordinary folk had been abolished in the other leading nations of Europe in the age of absolute monarchy. Only Britain kept the “mixed government” lauded by Greek philosopher Aristotle in The Politics as the best form; unchecked monarchy would lead to tyranny, unchecked aristocracy to exploitation by the rich, and unchecked democracy to anarchy, but mixed together as “the three negatives,” which they were frequently called, the advantages of each could be preserved—the monarch’s ability to act decisively, the wisdom of an elite, and the desire of the majority to guard its own interests. However, in the colonies, there was no aristocracy. Neither the elite, simply those who had more property and influence than other people, nor the governor, appointed by the crown or (in Pennsylvania and Maryland) by the proprietor, had the prestige of the monarch or aristocracy. Unlike the king, the governor did not have at his disposal a large number of profitable offices

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to which he could appoint influential members of the legislature or their relations. This enabled the crown to work in harmony with Parliament during most of the colonial period. On the other hand, by the mid-18th century, a majority (frequently three-fourths or more) of adult white males could meet the standard British qualification for voting, about 40 pounds of property, as opposed to a small minority in the mother country.12 Combined with the fact that the assembly had the power of the purse, especially the right to decide what salary the governor would receive, the colonial assemblies became the dominant branch of the legislatures. This was not intended to be democracy, but it was becoming a fair approximation. A political ideology arose in the colonies to fit the rise of the assembly. The executive always had to be watched with great care by the representatives. Otherwise he would be prone to tyranny, like the English rulers Charles I and James II and just about every monarch of Europe who had no assembly to check him. The people and their representatives had to preserve their civic virtue, their unwillingness to be seduced by government jobs or special deals, and be devoted to their country and its liberty. The ideas of a limited government, and good citizen participation, both stronger in the United States than in most countries of the world, had colonial roots. Accompanying widespread political participation in the colonies was a growth in what historians call “the public sphere.” Newspapers and pamphlets, as well as coffeehouses, taverns, and inns where they were read and discussed, gave people access to information apart from government and clerical pronouncements. Participation was voluntary, as it was in the voluntary associations that people formed to solve problems the government did not. Elsewhere, the clergy, professional guilds, or the ruler would undertake worthwhile projects, suspecting the independent action of ordinary people as possibly tending to rebellion. But America had no church hierarchy or guilds, and only a weak governor with no other source of revenue than his constituents. Benjamin Franklin is most famous for beginning these associations, such as the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first lending library in the colonies; a fire society; and a voluntary defense force when the Quaker government would not act. But he was only the most prominent of many. To be sure, as we do today, colonials elected to office wealthy people of wide experience with the leisure and money to devote to politics. Usually there was a community of economic interest among the classes in a given constituency. The main political quarrels were between different regions, religions, or simply families contending for control. But as fiercely contested elections in a few places showed—in the towns of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—the voters could remove unpopular representatives if they so desired.

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A NEW ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL WORLD Just as colonial politics proved far more uncontrollable than the British expected, so did the colonial economy. Beginning in the 1650s in New England, the 1660s in New York, the 1670s in New Jersey, and the 1680s in Pennsylvania, the northern colonies prospered because they ignored the British Acts of Trade and Navigation requiring them to sell their grain and fish only to the British West Indies, and only to import goods from Britain rather than the European continent. Had the laws been enforced, the predominant economic theory of the age, known as mercantilism, would have become reality. The point was to maximize the amount of gold and silver in the mother country; if it did not have mines, it then sought crops (such as sugar and tobacco) that other nations craved and for which they would pay good money. This was not simply designed to maximize the profits of those in Europe at the expense of the colonies; self-defense and the ability to survive in a world of nations required countries to pay for an army and navy. Countries without money would find themselves helpless before their enemies. Nevertheless, the colonies brought wealth to Britain not through obeying the rules of mercantilism, but through something approximating what would later be called free trade. Adam Smith realized this in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, which used many examples from the colonies. The colonies could make more money getting the best price for their grain and fish if the Dutch, Spanish, French, and British sugar islands competed. They could then use the extra profits either to produce more rum, buy more slaves, or buy more goods from England. These they would not only consume themselves but import into the southern and West Indies colonies, which did not have their own merchant fleets. Thus the northern colonies not only created more wealth by handling different countries’ trade; they built a good deal of the merchant marine of the British Empire, the “nursery of seamen” that manned the navy as well as the commercial fleet. The colonies knew this. As Jeremiah Dummer, agent for Massachusetts, argued in his 1721 Defence of the New England Charters, “London has arisen out of the plantations, and not out of England. ’Tis to them we owe our vast fleets of merchant ships, and consequently the increase of our seamen, and improvement of our navigation. ’Tis their tobacco, sugar, fish, logwood, and other commodities which have enabled us to . . . make the figure we do at present.”13 Further, since the colonies had to send almost all their gold and silver to England or Europe to pay for imports, they became comfortable dealing in a world of paper money and extensive credit similar to that of today. To create currency for local expenses, colonies would issue notes stating they were

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payable in taxes in a certain year; then people would have to acquire the notes in order to pay their taxes. And since merchants and shopkeepers who bought fish, food, grain, and other commodities—the colonies had become major producers of iron, timber, tar, pitch, turpentine, rice, and indigo by 1750—did not always have cash or desirable goods on hand, they would issue bills of credit that obtained their value from the merchants’ reputations. As the colonial merchants were linked to British merchant houses that supplied them, they too would do business on credit. Elaborate chains of credit and debt stretched from the frontiers of America to England and east to India. Paradoxically, while nowhere else in the world did so many people participate in a complicated economy of multiple currencies and credit arrangements, simplicity was another major feature of colonial economic and social life. At the bottom were the poor (usually a small number), slaves (ranging from almost none in New England to over three-quarters of the population in low-country South Carolina), indentured servants, immigrants, and tenants. Then came the farmers who owned their own property, fishermen who owned their own boats, and the artisans and shopkeepers who operated their own establishments. At the top were merchants in the North and plantation owners in the South. Manufacturing was limited to a few industries—iron and related industries such as making guns, especially in the middle colonies; logging; and shipbuilding. The professions—clergy, physicians, and (late in the colonial era) lawyers—were also members of the elite. But neither a military, a strong clergy, merchant or craft guilds, nor a powerful royal court, all of which had many gradations of status, existed as in Europe. Most occupations in early America were dedicated to supporting the farming economy in which nearly all the population participated. Artisans made farm implements; shipbuilders and merchants carried them to market. Millers processed grain into flour; distillers processed molasses into rum. Cities would have been small European market towns—Philadelphia with 30,000 people on the eve of the Revolution, New York with 20,000, and Boston with 15,000, were the largest cities in British North America. Then came Charleston, South Carolina (12,000), and Newport, Rhode Island (10,000), followed by a number of places with 3,000 to 5,000 people.14 These were the secondary market towns, usually a day’s journey or more from the ports, where farmers in the backcountry could rest on their way to the cities or exchange products with shopkeepers. Thus the colonies paved the way for the American ideal of the virtuous, independent farmer as the backbone of a free society, notably in the writings of Thomas Jefferson—who, of course, was totally dependent on his slaves for producing his crop and on merchants for selling it at a profit. This new society was largely middle class, where for the most part poor whites who worked diligently did not stay poor for long. American society

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was a new phenomenon, in that both the very rich who ruled in Europe and the very poor who were omnipresent did not exist. For example, no house in early America had more than a dozen fireplaces, whereas the great houses of England had over a hundred. At the same time, except during the initial settlement period of some of the colonies, starvation and beggary were unknown. Even the poor, who were defined officially as those who could not support themselves, could partake of the plentiful, cheap food supplies. While there were always indentured servants, slaves, and tenants arriving to work on plantations, by the 18th century, most white families owned their own farms or shops and could be termed middle class. The main effect of this novel, flourishing economy was that people lived, thrived, and multiplied as never before in history. Women had, on average, six children, most of whom survived.15 Benjamin Franklin noticed this as early as 1751 in his famous essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind: “Thus there are supposed to be now upwards of one million English Souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea). . . . This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 Years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this Side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! What numbers of ships and seamen!” As Franklin’s words revealed, his British patriotism was inseparable from his sense of American destiny. As with Jeremiah Dummer, he had no doubt that Britain had become dependent on its colonies, rather than the other way around.

A NEW RELIGIOUS WORLD If anything, Britain encouraged colonial religious dissent. This was untrue of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese territories, where Roman Catholicism was the only worship permitted. King James I’s famous statement that he would “harry them out of the land” with respect to the Puritans was considered by them as a great opportunity to present a model society to the entire world. In fact, the Puritans were much better able to keep religious dissenters under control—as with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, by harrying them out of the land as well—than the Church of England in those colonies where it was established. Establishment meant everyone had to pay taxes to the established church even if they did not worship in it. Rhode Island, Delaware, and Pennsylvania never had an established church; in the other New England colonies, Congregationalism (Puritanism) was established, while New York, New Jersey, and the southern colonies were Anglican. The problem there was

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a shortage of Anglican priests, all of whom had to be ordained in England, and the reluctance of those priests to move to the colonies. Further, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, the Carolinas, Delaware, and Pennsylvania embraced religious toleration from the first. Colonial New York, in fact, was the only place on earth besides Holland where Jews could vote and hold public office. Nevertheless, in most communities until a phenomenon known as the Great Awakening swept the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, most colonial religious practice would have been familiar to people in Europe. A minister preached to a congregation that attended a particular church regularly; most ministers were renowned, if at all, for kindness and diligence rather than charisma. The fervor of the early settlers died out as many of the leading Quaker families of Pennsylvania and Puritan families of Massachusetts joined the Church of England because it was socially more respectable and morally less rigorous. The Great Awakening changed that. In 1739, George Whitefield, an English evangelist, toured the colonies speaking to up to 20,000 people who came great distances to hear him. His powerful speaking undercut many local ministers and encouraged people to select which preacher they would hear, thus marking the beginnings of the voluntary church that characterizes the United States to this day. Furthermore, the Awakening subverted local social hierarchies. The poor, women, and blacks who demonstrated saving faith gained a status denied to unconverted members of the elite, many of whom denounced the Awakening as consisting of people deluded by their own emotions. The Baptist and Methodist churches began their American careers at this time, rising to become the most numerous in the new nation. Also, as King George’s War broke out in 1744, the old idea of the colonies as God’s chosen people resurfaced, providing continuity between the old Puritans and the recasting of this sense of destiny during the American Revolution.

COLONIAL WARS, CRISES, AND THE COMING OF THE REVOLUTION By the 1750s, the colonies’ greatest blessings—prosperity, population growth, and personal freedom—turned into their worst curse. Men had been accustomed to obtaining land for all their male children, an opportunity available nowhere else in the world. This land hunger was fueled further by a famine in Northern Ireland in the 1740s. It sent thousands of Ulster Scots to Philadelphia, where they headed to what is now western Pennsylvania as the land in the east was taken. There they encountered Indians who had been

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bought out and moved west in Pennsylvania’s peaceful policy of expansion, with their new homelands guaranteed. At the same time, Virginians and French Canadians were moving into the same region. The clash of these four peoples in the early 1750s provoked the French and Indian War in 1754. Also known as the “Great War for the Empire,” this struggle differed from earlier conflicts. These had either been regional affairs against Indians (the Pequot War and King Philip’s War in New England; the Yamasee War in South Carolina) or European wars where the French, Spanish, and English commanded their colonies to begin hostilities because of European issues— King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War. These very names indicate that the wars began in the colonies to support the sovereign. But the very name “French and Indian War” tells a different story—for once, the British decided to make a frontier skirmish on the edge of its empire the reason for an international conflict. Between 1755 and 1759, the British sent thousands of soldiers to the colonies annually, finally driving the French from Canada. While removing the French menace from colonial borders, the new interest the imperial government showed in its mainland colonies proved a mixed blessing. British generals were angered by the poor showing of colonial soldiers in the campaigns against Canada, the unwillingness of colonial cities to quarter thousands of young soldiers with nothing to do over the winter, and the refusal of colonial merchants to cease trading with the French and Spanish as they had in peacetime. At the same time, the colonies raised over 20,000 soldiers on their own and handled nearly all the defense of the frontiers located closest to the main areas of colonial population.16 They spent large sums of money—so much that the British reimbursed them over a million pounds for what they called “extraordinary” expenses.17 And they found the arrogance and elitism of British officers appalling. Both the colonies and Britain emerged from their great victory in 1763 with a new sense of empire. But these were vastly different. The colonies looked forward to an expanding frontier and continuation of their astonishing growth as roughly equal partners with the mother country. Britain saw militarily incompetent colonies, disloyal traders with the enemy (and thus traitors), and thoughtless provokers of Indian wars by their unregulated movement into the west. The war defeated the French, but not the Indians, as proven by the Creek War in the South and Pontiac’s War in the North that broke out in the early 1760s. The British looked forward with dismay to an unending series of costly Indian wars in which they would have to protect colonists only too willing to disrupt the peace to acquire land. British colonial policy in the 1760s thus attempted to provide solutions to problems raised during the French and Indian War. The Proclamation of 1763

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INTRODUCTION

forbidding settlement west of the Appalachians hoped to forestall the sort of conflict that had provoked the war in the first place. Effectively regulating colonial trade was an appealing idea because colonial food shipments had prevented enemy islands in the West Indies from being starved into surrender. Taxation would not go to pay off the war debt; the British realized that was too huge and hopeless. But they thought the colonies could at least pay taxes for their own defense, the purpose of the Stamp, Townshend, and Tea acts of 1765–1770. In regulating the colonies more stringently, the British were participating in a European-wide trend known as “enlightened despotism,” whose chief exponents were Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Charles V of Spain. George III belonged to this group. The first English monarch since Queen Anne to be born in the country, learn its language well, and take an interest in its government, he was determined to curtail local privileges and inconsistencies in the interests of efficiency and national unity. The colonists sometimes blamed British corruption for the new laws imposed on them, but they had it wrong: the real problem was a king, supported by his chief minister Lord North, who wanted to integrate them into a united empire. At the same time that Americans were quarreling with Britain, they began to suffer from other problems, also the result of expansion. As colonial population grew from roughly a million in 1750 to two million by 1770, border conflicts between New York and New Hampshire and Pennsylvania with Virginia and Connecticut (which claimed northern Pennsylvania) became violent. Backcountry settlers in the Carolinas clashed with the low-country elites that ran those colonies, resulting in the Regulator movements. Settlers moving into lands claimed by proprietors in New York and New Jersey refused to pay rents and rioted when collectors appeared. Colonial cities found themselves filled with war widows and demobilized veterans, especially Boston. Massachusetts had contributed the most men to the war and suffered the most from customs officers and a local elite disposed to cooperate with Britain once the war ended. Boston filled up with demobilized soldiers once the war was over, where they joined the inhabitants of a city in the midst of a postwar depression. They all found a helping hand in John Hancock, who put them to work, and political direction from his friend Samuel Adams, who directed their anger against the British government and its local representatives. By the time the Revolution broke out in 1775, the British American colonies had been building, on their own, a unique society for the past century and a half. Popular participation in government, general economic prosperity, religious freedom, free trade, and the world’s first sustained population explosion had all occurred in a region where British control had been nearly nonexistent. The American Revolution was conservative because the colo-

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nists wanted to preserve their way of life; the British were the ones seeking radical change. On the other hand, the reason the American Revolution was conservative is that American society was radical by contemporary standards, which is why the European powers regarded the American example as a threat to contaminate their own people throughout the 19th century. Perhaps the colonial period, and its relationship with the Revolution, is best summed up by an interview that historian Mellen Chamberlain conducted in 1842 with 91-year-old Levi Preston, veteran of the Battle of Concord. Asked why he turned out to fight, he first pointed out that he never read any of the political pamphlets, drank tea, or paid a tax to Britain: “Young man, what we meant in going after those Redcoats was simple. You see, we had always governed ourselves, we always intended to govern ourselves, and they didn’t mean that we should.”18

NOTES 1. “Columbus, Letter to Luis de Santangel,” online at http://www.ushistory.org/ documents/columbus.htm. 2. John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Anywhere (Boston: W. Veazie, 1865), 19–20, online at Google Books. 3. “John Winthrop—City Upon a Hill,” online at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/ acad/intrel/winthrop.htm. 4. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2002), 50. 5. “Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography,” online at http://www2.hn.psu.edu/ faculty/jmanis/franklin/a_b_benf.pdf. 6. Mwesiga Barigu, “The African ‘Population Problem’: Situational versus Historical Perspectives,” 24, online at http://www.archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/African% 20Journals/pdfs/Utafiti/vol9no2/aejp009002003.pdf. 7. David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 45. 8. Ruth Danenhower Wilson, “Justifications of Slavery, Past and Present,” Phylon Quarterly 18 (1957): 407–412. 9. Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 131. 10. John M. Murrin, Beneficiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in North America (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1991). 11. Murrin, Beneficiaries of Catastrophe. 12. Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760– 1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 49. 13. Jeremiah Dummer, Defence of the New England Charters (London: J. Almon, 1765), 75, online at Google Books.

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14. Estimates vary. These are derived from Stella Sutherland, Population Distribution in Colonial America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 38, 86, 167, 254. 15. “The History of Private Life: Limiting Births in Early America,” Gilder Lehrman Institute website, online at http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/ limitingbirths.cfm. 16. Albert H. Smyth, ed., Benjamin Franklin, Works, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 75, available online at Google Books. 17. Jack P. Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Connection Reconsidered,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1980): 85–105. 18. Mellen Chamberlain, John Adams: The Statesman of the American Revolution and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), 248–249, online at Google Books.

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A ABENAKI. The Indians who lived in northern New England, southeastern Quebec, and what became the maritime provinces of Canada were known as the Abenaki. They were divided into about 20 eastern (coastal) and western (Connecticut Valley) groups. In the 17th century, they probably lost about three-quarters of their preconquest population, an estimated 40,000 people, in multiple epidemics. They befriended the French in Quebec as Puritan settlers in Maine took over their lands. They struck back during King William’s War and devastated most of the towns in Maine between 1689 and 1692. Sporadic violence over the next three decades led Massachusetts’ lieutenantgovernor, William Dummer, to launch attacks against the Abenaki. In 1724, his forces destroyed Norridgewock, the main Abenaki town, and killed priest Sebastien Rale, the French missionary who served as their principal contact with Quebec. In 1725, another Massachusetts expedition commanded by John Lovewell defeated another Abenaki force, leading to the withdrawal of the Abenaki to Quebec, where they joined other Indians who had fled New England following King Philip’s War. ABERCROMBIE, JAMES (1706–23 APRIL 1781). A Scottish officer who was promoted to major general in 1757, Abercrombie is noted for his disastrous assault in 1758 on the French Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) in the French and Indian War. He lost 2,000 out of 15,000 men, being defeated by the Marquis de Montcalm and 3,500 well-entrenched troops. He left the service and sat in Parliament for the rest of his life. ABOLITION. See ANTISLAVERY; SLAVERY. ACADIA. Although first discovered in 1497 by John Cabot, who was sailing for the English, the French established their first colony at this site, with its capital at Port Royal, in 1604. The English claimed the territory as well, and a number of Scots erected a rival settlement called Nova Scotia in 1629. The French ceded their colony to the English in 1631. Expeditions from New England conquered Port Royal in 1690 and (after Acadia was returned to

17

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France in 1697) again in 1710. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave possession to the British. During the French and Indian War, the British feared the ethnically French majority and in 1755 deported 12,000 Acadians. Some were sent to other British colonies but most to Louisiana, then a Spanish colony, where “Acadians” turned into “Cajuns.” Since the 1990s, historians have compared this expulsion to contemporary instances of ethnic cleansing. Following the war, New Englanders began to move north into Nova Scotia, with its capital of Halifax, and they were joined by many loyalists at the end of the American Revolution. ACTS OF TRADE AND NAVIGATION. Usually referred to more simply as either the Navigation Acts or Acts of Trade, the term describes laws passed in 1651, 1660, and 1663 by England to regulate colonial trade. The 1651 act, which stipulated that ships from other European powers could not trade with the colonies, was nullified in 1660, as the earlier law had been passed under Oliver Cromwell. The new act provided that ships trading with the colonies had to have crews that were three-quarters English (British after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707) and that the colonies’ most lucrative cash crops, such as sugar and tobacco, could be exported only to England. The 1663 act reconfirmed the 1651 provision that ships from other nations had to send goods intended for the colonies to England in order to be reshipped in English ships. Directed principally at the Dutch, the acts over the next century were principally designed to prevent the colonies from supplying the French and Spanish colonies in the West Indies with food and provisions. However, loose enforcement failed to prevent smuggling on a wide scale. Only following the French and Indian War did the British Empire attempt to enforce the laws stringently, which became a major cause of the American Revolution. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. AFRICAN AMERICANS. In this book, the term blacks is used rather than African Americans because the slave trade continued throughout the colonial era, which meant that many of the people sent to the American colonies were not Americanized; they still spoke African languages and followed African customs. AGENTS. The American colonies employed agents to represent their interests before the British government. Sometimes they were influential people in Britain, but more frequently they were colonists themselves. Frequently they were chosen only by the colonial assembly to protest unpopular governors. The most famous agents were Jeremiah Dummer of Massachusetts, who published his Defence of the New England Charters in 1721, and Benjamin Franklin, em-

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ployed by Pennsylvania beginning in 1757 but subsequently by several other colonies, thus becoming the “Voice of America” during the colonial crisis with England from 1764 until 1775. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. AGRICULTURE. Most early Americans were farmers. Fewer than 10 percent of the population lived in towns of more than 2,000 people. North of Maryland, most inhabitants practiced subsistence farming, growing crops such as squash, potatoes, and corn, along with raising animals such as pigs, chickens, and cows. Yet they also produced a surplus that enabled them to trade with merchants for imported goods such as housewares and clothing. The middle colonies shipped much of their grain to the West Indies, which found it cheaper to import food than to give up prime sugar-producing land to feed their overwhelmingly slave population. The New England colonies’ principal export to the West Indies was fish. There was much smuggling of foodstuffs, in exchange for molasses and sugar, into the French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies in the West Indies given the lax enforcement of the Acts of Trade and Navigation. Mainland southern colonial exports were produced for the most part by black slave labor. Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina exported tobacco, nearly all of it to Great Britain. South Carolina and (to a small extent) Georgia grew rice, which could legally be sold to nations bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, South Carolina planters were the richest plantation owners of all the thirteen colonies. See also ECONOMY. AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, PEACE OF. See KING GEORGE’S WAR. ALBANY. Originally the site of a French settlement, the town that became Albany, New York, began in 1540. In 1614, the Dutch rebuilt it as Fort Nassau, renamed Fort Orange in 1624, to conduct the fur trade with the Iroquois and other Indians. In 1654, the settlement and surrounding area were incorporated as Beverwyck. The name was changed to Albany in 1664 when the English conquered New Netherland. Albany grew from about 500 inhabitants in 1686 to 3,500 in the first federal census of 1790. Its main commercial life consisted of trading posts where local farmers exchanged agricultural products for imported goods and where trappers and Indians sold their furs. In wartime, it was an important supply depot for British troops invading Canada (Quebec) through the Champlain Valley. See also DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY. ALBANY CONGRESS. Delegates from seven British colonies met from 19 June to 11 July 1754 in Albany, New York, to discuss selling land to

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the Indians and defense plans against French Canada. The Iroquois sold much of what is now Pennsylvania to that colony over the objections of the Delaware and other peoples who inhabited the region. As a result, these displaced groups would attack the Pennsylvania frontier in 1755 following the defeat of General Edward Braddock’s expedition to capture the French Fort Duquesne at the present site of Pittsburgh. Benjamin Franklin, supported by Thomas Hutchinson, also proposed what is known as the Albany Plan of Union at the conference. It provided that the colonial legislatures would choose representatives to a common American parliament, presided over by a British governor-general, that could levy taxes for imperial defense, especially the anticipated war with the French that broke out that year. But the colonial legislatures did not want to surrender the power of taxation, and the British imperial administration did not want to delegate this power to a colonial body. The failure of a united defense plan was one of the reasons that, in the 1760s, the British began to tax the colonies to provide for their military protection against the Indians.

The first political cartoon in early America: In 1754, Benjamin Franklin conceived and published “Join or Die” to urge the British colonies to unite against the French and Indians. Source: Library of Congress.

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ALBANY PLAN OF UNION. See ALBANY CONGRESS. ALCOHOL. The American colonies manufactured, consumed, and imported alcohol. Hard cider was the most frequent homemade drink; beer was not produced in large quantities until German immigrants arrived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Rum made from molasses imported from the West Indies was the most common form of hard liquor consumed at taverns and other houses licensed to sell liquor. Frequently widows were given these licenses to support themselves, hence the “widow” taverns found throughout the states that were then the thirteen colonies. Wine was primarily consumed by the upper classes, sherry, madeira, and port (in ascending order of potency) being the principal varieties, as in England. Colonials were generally tolerant of drinking: courts would not certify a criminal as drunk—usually a reason for acquittal or lighter punishment—if he could either stand up or find his way home. Toasts were frequently given at the taverns—which were the principal places for small groups of inhabitants to meet, as well as for travelers to spend the night—to popular local or imperial figures. Failure to participate in a toast or accept a drink was considered rude. Alcohol was sold in great quantity to the Indians, who frequently became addicted to it. ALGONQUINS. The Algonquins were a language group consisting of the various Indian peoples who lived in what are now middle and New England states and southern Canada (Quebec). They included the Abenaki, Delaware, Pequot, Munsee, Narragansett, and other groups. Their territory was bordered on the west and north by the Iroquois and Hurons. For the most part they lived in small communities and appear to have suffered catastrophic losses from epidemics before the first permanent Dutch and English settlers arrived in the 1620s. In 1663, Puritan minister John Eliot of Massachusetts published the first Bible in colonial British America in the Algonquin language for those Indians who remained in the several praying towns governed by the colonists. By the late 17th century, most Algonquins had been displaced into northern New England and Canada by European settlers and the Iroquois. In February 1690, Algonquin Indians joined with the French Canadians to destroy the New York town of Schenectady, killing about 60 people who could not escape to Albany. Today, about 11,000 Algonquins live in Canada. See also POWHATAN. ALIQUIPPA (?–23 DECEMBER 1754). A powerful leader of the Seneca branch of the Iroquois nation in what is now western Pennsylvania, Aliquippa negotiated with Conrad Weiser and George Washington during the French and Indian War. She was pro-British and was forced to flee after Washington was defeated at Fort Necessity in 1754. She died shortly thereafter.

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ALLEN, WILLIAM

ALLEN, WILLIAM (5 AUGUST 1704–6 SEPTEMBER 1780). Son of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Allen studied law in England and served as chief justice of Pennsylvania from 1750 to 1774. He sponsored Pennsylvania painter Benjamin West’s first trip to Italy in 1760 and served as the grand master of the Freemasons of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania from 1747 to 1761. A principal leader of the political faction supporting the proprietary Penn family, he became a loyalist and left for England in 1774; but in 1779 he returned to Pennsylvania where he died. He planned and lived part-time in Allentown. ALMANACS. The most popular locally produced form of literature in the American colonies was annually published almanacs. The first colonial almanac was printed in Boston in 1687. The Astronomical Diary, or Almanack, printed by Nathaniel Ames, Jr. and Sr., of Dedham, Massachusetts, from 1726 to 1775, sold up to 60,000 copies annually; Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in Philadelphia from 1733 to 1758, sold up to 10,000 in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and the West Indies. In addition to the weather and useful information such as tides, sunrise, sunset, and the location and dates of markets and fairs, almanacs included proverbs and scientific and practical essays on topics such as medicine and politics. The three Christopher Saurs of Germantown, Pennsylvania, published a German-language almanac. As they were usually hung by the fireplace and each month torn off as with modern calendars, almanacs did not usually survive, and no copies exist of many almanacs that had small circulations and only lasted a few years. AMHERST, SIR JEFFREY (29 JANUARY 1717–3 AUGUST 1797). The commander of the British forces that conquered Canada from the French between 1758 and 1760, Amherst took Louisbourg, the French fortress at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, in 1758. He then oversaw the forces of Generals John Forbes and James Wolfe that seized Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) and Quebec respectively in 1758 and 1759. Amherst next completed the conquest of Canada in 1760 when the last French army in North America surrendered to him at Montreal. Amherst changed the Indian policy of his predecessors: he had contempt for the Indians as warriors and did not wish to waste money supplying them with arms or presents such as clothing, alcohol, and blankets. He instructed Colonel Henry Bouquet, in charge of pacifying the Indians in the Ohio Valley in the early 1760s, to distribute blankets infected with smallpox to reduce the number of warriors he would face. Amherst’s policies were responsible in large measure for Pontiac’s War. Amherst was commander in chief of all the British armed forces during the American Revolution but did not come to America. See also FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR.

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AMISH. A group of Pennsylvania Germans (or Dutch) who originally belonged to the Mennonites (or Church of the Brethren), the Amish broke off with the main branch and take their name from Jakob Ammann (c. 1670–c. 1730). As with all the Mennonites, they were pacifists who practiced adult baptism (Anabaptism) and simple living. They lived mostly in Switzerland and southern and western Germany before many migrated to Berks and then Lancaster counties in Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. The Amish followed stricter rules than most Mennonites, emphasizing communal harmony and conformity. Members who failed to observe the rules were shunned by the rest. Religious meetings were held in homes and communities and governed by older males; once married, men grew beards. Most Amish were, and are, farmers or craftsmen; they frown on more than an elementary education as leading to vanity and individualism and continue to speak Pennsylvania German. “Old Order” Amish continue to live without electricity or automobiles and wear plain clothes. Since the 1700s, they have moved to Ohio and central Pennsylvania and number about 200,000 in the early 21st century. See also BAPTISTS. ANDROS, SIR EDMUND (6 DECEMBER 1637–19 FEBRUARY 1714). An English soldier, Andros served as governor of New York, East Jersey, and West Jersey from 1674 to 1681, and then from 1686 to 1689 as governor of the newly formed Dominion of New England, which included Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, with New York and both parts of what became New Jersey added in 1688. His principal accomplishment was achieving peace with the Iroquois, extending the Covenant Chain that symbolized their friendship with the English. Andros was seized by the inhabitants of Boston, which was his capital, in 1689 when the colony learned that King James II, who had appointed him, was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution. Andros had ruled without the colonial assemblies, imprisoning those such as Reverend John Wise of Ipswich, Massachusetts, who refused to pay taxes and opposed his efforts to enforce the Acts of Trade and Navigation and support the Anglican Church, to which Andros belonged. Sent to England for trial, Andros was soon freed and appointed governor of Virginia by King William III, serving from 1692 to 1698. See also BLATHWAYT, WILLIAM; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. ANGLICAN CHURCH. Also known as the Church of England, and after the American Revolution as the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church was established in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, as it was in England. Establishment meant that the church was supported by taxation levied on all inhabitants

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whether they belonged to it or not. Depending on the colony and governor, efforts were sometimes made to prevent Dissenters, or non-Anglican Protestants, from holding services. Prominent Anglican churches were opened in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1689 (King’s Chapel) and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1695 (Christ Church, which when rebuilt was the tallest building in the colonies at 196 feet). Most Anglican congregations in colonies where the church was not established were supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Anglicans complained of a shortage of priests and tried, unsuccessfully, to have a bishop appointed for the American colonies so candidates would not have to travel to England to be ordained. In the northern colonies, Anglicans tended to be members of the elite, and the clergy were personally powerful within the congregations. In the South, the vestry of prominent parishioners tended to control religious matters rather than the clergy. See also ANGLICIZATION; RELIGION; TWO-PENNY ACT; WHITEFIELD, GEORGE. ANGLICIZATION. In the mid-18th century, many elite colonials began to favor the ways of the English aristocracy. They built elegantly furnished country houses in attractive settings outside of cities. Tory Row in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and mansions along the Schuylkill River in what is now Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, are the most prominent examples. They frequently left the Quaker and Congregational denominations for the Anglican faith, dressed elegantly, and sometimes sent their sons to England for an education and the European continent for a grand tour. Many of them became loyalists in the American Revolution. ANGLO-DUTCH WARS. The First Anglo-Dutch War occurred from 1652 to 1654. It was provoked by the first of the English Acts of Trade and Navigation in 1651, which stipulated that goods trading with the colonies had to be English and sent on English ships. Numerous Dutch vessels trading with the colonies were captured for violating this law, and hostilities broke out in 1652. After two years and several battles fought only on the sea, English protector Oliver Cromwell, upset that the two leading Protestant powers were weakening each other while Roman Catholic France and Spain menaced them both, made peace following a blockade of Holland that caused severe food shortages. The Dutch agreed to respect the Navigation Acts, but they did not. Under King Charles II, the Duke of York, later King James II, head of the English navy and the Royal Africa Company, hoped to advance his nation’s interests at the expense of the Dutch, who were weakened by internal factionalism. English ships began seizing Dutch vessels in 1664, the year that also

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saw the conquest of New Netherland and attacks on Dutch ports in Africa. War was declared in 1665, with France, Denmark, and Brandenburg (later Prussia) joining Holland against England and the German state of Munster. The Dutch lost the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665, an invasion of England during which their fleet was decimated, but in 1667 the Dutch sailed up the Thames River and attacked the English fleet at Medway. Fifteen ships were destroyed in the worst naval defeat in English history. The Peace of Breda, signed in 1667, allowed the English to keep New York while the Dutch retained control of the much more profitable sugar-producing colony of Surinam. The Third Anglo-Dutch War occurred between 1672 and 1674. Charles II having made peace with France, the two nations agreed to attack the Netherlands. England’s naval war was largely unsuccessful, New York being retaken by the Dutch in 1673. British public and elite opinion turned against the idea of an alliance with a Catholic power against a Protestant one. The war ended with New York restored to the English and Surinam remaining in Dutch hands. The Acts of Trade and Navigation, while still in effect and technically agreed to by the Dutch, continued to be widely violated by both the Dutch and the colonists. ANNE, QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND (AFTER 1707) GREAT BRITAIN (6 FEBRUARY 1655–1 AUGUST 1714). Daughter of King James II and sister of Queen Mary, she succeeded to the throne on the death of her brother-in-law William III in 1702. Her Tory sympathies led to the appointment of Joseph Dudley as governor of Massachusetts in the first year of her reign; upon her death, he was replaced. Anne’s ministers supported the war that bears her name, sending large forces to Massachusetts in futile efforts to assist that province in conquering Quebec. She was, however, an important voice for peace in ending Queen Anne’s War and the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 when some of her advisers wanted to continue the struggle. The Act of Union uniting England and Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain occurred during her reign in 1707. See also ACADIA; BLATHWAYT, WILLIAM; CROWN; GEORGE I. ANTI-CATHOLICISM. Also known as anti-Popery, a virulent antiCatholicism was an important belief held by most colonials, nearly all of whom were Protestant. England was the leading Protestant power in Europe after Henry VIII repudiated Roman Catholicism in 1533, and the French and Spanish colonies were frequently at war with Britain and its empire. Fears that “Popery,” spread especially by the monastic Jesuit order, threatened both the religious and political liberty of the colonies was a powerful belief that defined English and American British national identity. The

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hierarchical aspects of the Anglican Church—bishops, priests appointed by the royal government, and masses—led Dissenters to consider Anglicanism “Popish” as well. See also MARYLAND; POPE’S DAY. ANTINOMIAN CONTROVERSY. See HUTCHINSON, ANNE. ANTISLAVERY. Opposition to slavery was rare in the American colonies. In 1688, three Germantown Quakers and their Lutheran leader Daniel Francis Pastorius penned the first antislavery petition in English North America. In 1701, Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts published the first antislavery pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph. The first consistent preachers against slavery were three Quakers, Anthony Benezet, Benjamin Lay, and John Woolman, whose efforts persuaded the Philadelphia Quaker meeting in 1758 to condemn slavery. It was not until the American Revolution, in part because of British taunts that the Americans were depriving considerable numbers of people of the rights they claimed for themselves, that an antislavery movement began in the United States. See also BLACKS. APACHE. A group of several Indian tribes who moved into what is now the southwestern United States sometime after 1000 c.e., the Apache spoke an Athabaskan language, which links them to people in Canada and Alaska. They are divided into several groups: Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipans, Mescalero, Plains Apache, and Western Apache. The Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache, who lived mostly in the mountainous region of northern Mexico and southern New Mexico, were fiercely independent and were never defeated by the Spanish during the colonial era. ARCHITECTURE. Construction of buildings in early America followed regional patterns. New England houses were generally made of wood and usually fit the square, box “Cape Cod” style found in southern England; Dutch or German-style houses, frequently made of brick, with steep roofs and gables, were found in New York, New Jersey, and to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania. The log cabin familiar on the frontier derived from the Finns who settled New Sweden in the mid-1600s. Elite southern houses tended to be brick as well, although ordinary folk made do with wood. Beginning in the mid-18th century, well-to-do colonists built “Georgian” houses where symmetrical windows appeared in two-story houses on either side of a central doorway. Unlike earlier elite and lower-class houses, these would have living rooms and parlors. Few houses had more than three main bedrooms, one for the married couple, one for boys, and one for girls, with smaller bedrooms, frequently in attics, for servants. In New England, if more than one generation

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stayed on the same plot of land, smaller “add-on” houses abutted the main residence. Churches, except for the largest ones in the cities, resembled the small country churches of Europe, and public buildings were modeled after English (or in early New York, Dutch) town structures. See also ART; HARRISON, PETER. ARNOLD, BENEDICT (21 DECEMBER 1615–19 JUNE 1678). One of the original 13 settlers of Rhode Island, Arnold spoke the local Indian languages, served as an interpreter, and rose to be elected first governor of the colony under the royal charter of 1663. He served from 1663 to 1666, from 1669 to 1672, and from 1677 to 1678. He probably constructed the tower in Newport that is sometimes erroneously attributed to the Norsemen, and he was the great-grandfather of the revolutionary war general and traitor of the same name. ART. Consciously created art, as opposed to attractive household items produced for use, was a luxury in colonial America. Except for the elite, few people had their portraits painted. Many early portraits consisted of patterns for male and female bodies to which amateur artists added faces. In the 18th century, artists such as John Feke (who executed the first portrait of Benjamin Franklin), Gustavus Hesselius from Sweden (who painted excellent portraits of Indians), John Singleton Copley (portrait painter to Boston’s mid-18th-century elite), and Benjamin West (a Pennsylvanian who moved to England) practiced their trade. Family portraits, sometimes with dogs and servants, became characteristic of the elite by the mid-18th century, frequently with a house, ship, collection of books, or landscape to identify the source of the person’s wealth or fame. Some of the finest works were done by John Valentine Haidt, a Moravian whose The First Fruits depicts the peoples of several continents converted by the Moravians. Silversmiths—of whom Boston’s Paul Revere is the most famous—and goldsmiths did fine engraving work. The Warner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, features the oldest mural in colonial British America; executed for Captain Archibald Macphaedris around 1716, it features Indian chiefs and settlers being attacked by a French eagle and saved by a British lion. See also ARCHITECTURE; WHITE, JOHN. ARTISANS. There were no large-scale factories in early America, and manufactured goods, if not imported, were made by mostly middle-class craftsmen, known as artisans, who specialized in items for local markets. Principal occupations were coopers, carpenters, wheelwrights, basket makers, blacksmiths, weavers, and shoemakers in both rural areas and towns, and

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milliners, cabinetmakers, apothecaries, printers, silversmiths, house wrights, rope makers, shipbuilders, and wig makers in towns. Young people learned crafts by being apprenticed to master craftsmen; they signed indentures which provided they would be clothed, fed, and taught the trade in return for their labor for a number of years. Most artisans could meet the property qualifications for voting, but only during the era of the American Revolution did artisans begin to engage in independent political action. Artisans lived, usually upstairs, in the shops where they worked. See also ECONOMY. ASSEMBLIES. Houses of representatives, also known as assemblies, existed in all British North American colonies by the end of the 17th century. As in England, their primary purpose was to vote money to the government in the form of taxes, and thus only property owners were represented. Except for a few cases of women property holders who voted in 18th-century Virginia and Maryland, only men aged twenty-one or older could vote. The voters were usually called freeholders and had to possess a minimum amount of property, either a landed estate that would rent for 40 shillings a year, or £40 of taxable property. Assemblies were elected annually in the New England colonies and Pennsylvania and Delaware, and every seven years (except if a new monarch ascended the throne) elsewhere, as was the case with Britain’s Parliament. Assemblies varied in size from about 20 members to over 200—one or two per town—in Massachusetts. Except in Connecticut and Rhode Island, assemblies could be called or dissolved at the discretion of the governor. Assemblies were one of the three branches of the colonial legislature—the other two being the governor and council—except in Pennsylvania, where there was only an advisory council. In most colonies, the assembly became the most powerful branch of the legislature by the mid-18th century because it had the power to vote funds for the government, including the governor’s salary. In Virginia, the assembly was called the House of Burgesses. See also DEFERENCE; POLITICS.

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B BACON’S REBELLION. The first major popular uprising in American history occurred in Virginia in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon, nephew of Governor William Berkeley, led frontier inhabitants first against Indians—most of them pacified—to obtain their land. When the governor attempted to keep the peace, Bacon’s forces marched on Jamestown, the colony’s capital. Bacon issued a “Declaration in the Name of the People” calling for expanded voting rights and war against the Indians, while also condemning a corrupt government. White indentured servants and black slaves joined together with the landless tenants who made up much of Virginia’s population. The rebels destroyed both Jamestown and Berkeley’s home of Green Spring. Bacon died during the rebellion at the age of 29, and with the arrival of ships and troops from England, Berkeley put down the insurrection, hanging 23 rebels. The governor, however, was soon recalled to London. Historians regard the rebellion as either a popular, democratic uprising, anticipating the American Revolution, or else foreshadowing the unrestrained warfare committed by frontier people on American Indians. BANKS. There were no banks as we know them today in colonial America, or anything comparable to the Bank of England, which accepted deposits or issued loans. Colonial land banks were proposed in Massachusetts in 1714 and 1740 and in Connecticut in 1732 where private subscribers would issue currency backed by the value of their lands. Connecticut’s bank was approved by the legislature but folded after three years. Massachusetts suffered severe inflation in the 1730s because its currency obtained its value by requiring inhabitants to acquire a certain amount to pay taxes in a given year, and the legislature failed to redeem it as scheduled. To remedy this situation, in 1740 about 1,200 subscribers mortgaged their estates to a land bank that in turn issued them currency they would circulate and repay at interest. Besides providing much needed circulating money, the bank would also cause the bankers’ real estate to rise in value. Unfortunately, the bank was not approved by Governor Jonathan Belcher, which meant it operated without a charter. In 1741 it was disallowed by the British Parliament, and many

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bankers were ruined, notably Samuel Adams, Sr., the father of revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. A rival scheme at the same time, the Silver Bank, was headed by Boston merchants who wanted a medium that would be useful for international as well as local trade. It sought to borrow silver in England and then repay it at interest, but this bank also fell under the general ban on private banks. Massachusetts continued to issue paper money, which suffered great inflation (about 10 to 1) during the 1740s because of expenses during King George’s War. Reimbursement for these expenses from England in 1749 became the basis of a silver-based currency, unique in the colonies, that kept its value until the Revolution. See also ECONOMY. BAPTISTS. At first known as Anabaptists, Baptists encompassed those Protestants who recognized only baptisms undertaken willingly by adults. They included the Mennonites and Amish, as well as individual ministers such as John Clarke and Roger Williams in Rhode Island. The first formal Baptist church in America from which the present denomination emerged was the Philadelphia Baptist Association, founded in 1707. The Baptists minimized religious ritual and stressed effective sermons and emotional conversions. Baptist preachers began to make significant headway in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, attracting large numbers of lower-class converts and people on the frontier. Isaac Backus (1724–1806) who became minister of the Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts, was the most prominent defender of the rights of Baptists to worship. In Massachusetts and Virginia, they were frequently arrested and punished for disturbing the peace when they held services or tried to convert others; some also were arrested for refusing to pay taxes to the established church. Most persecution ceased with the American Revolution, given both the increasing popularity of religious freedom and the need to recruit the Baptists for the cause. See also RELIGION. BARTRAM, JOHN (23 MARCH 1699–2 SEPTEMBER 1777) and WILLIAM BARTRAM (19 APRIL 1739–22 JULY 1823). The foremost naturalists in early America were John Bartram and his son William. Using his farm on the Schuylkill River just southwest of Philadelphia as a base, John made several journeys from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Ohio Valley, drawing and describing the animals, flowers, and plants, which he published. William joined him on these journeys and extended them into the southwest as far as the Mississippi River. John was appointed botanist to King George III in 1765 and was a founder of the American Philosophical Society in 1769. The Bartrams’ work acquired recognition throughout Europe, and their house and lands are preserved to this day. See also SCIENCE.

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BATTLE OF LAKE GEORGE. During the French and Indian War, on 8 September 1755, a French force headed by Baron Dieskau moving south from Lake George, New York, was defeated by colonial and Indian forces headed by Sir William Johnson. About 1,500 troops were engaged on each side. BEAVER WARS. From 1610, when Samuel de Champlain first assisted the Huron Indians in fighting their traditional enemies, the Iroquois, until the Great Peace of Montreal was signed in 1701, the Beaver Wars were fought between the Iroquois and their neighbors. Allied with the Dutch and English and supplied liberally with European weapons, the Iroquois were able to conquer their less powerful neighbors and take over their lands to obtain the beaver pelts the Europeans craved. The Hurons allied with the Susquehannocks who lived in southern Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, but the Iroquois and English defeated the Susquehannocks, and they ceased to exist as a tribe by the late 1670s. The Hurons no longer could live south of French Canada. The Iroquois also used their European weapons to expand westward into the Ohio Valley at this time. The Great Peace meant the Iroquois would be neutral in Queen Anne’s War, but they sided with the British once again in the French and Indian War. BELCHER, JONATHAN (8 JANUARY 1682–31 AUGUST 1757). Son of Andrew Belcher, one of the wealthiest merchants in Massachusetts, Belcher obtained the governorship of Massachusetts in 1730 after he had traveled to Britain and convinced the Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for the Southern Department, that he could obtain a fixed salary for the governor that would have made him less dependent on the assembly. Although he failed, he held the office until 1741 and successfully negotiated a boundary controversy between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He was removed because of the political machinations of his successor, William Shirley. Belcher returned to Britain where he obtained the appointment as governor of New Jersey in 1747, a post he held until his death. He was instrumental in founding the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, but again quarreled with the assembly over his salary. Also, his support of absentee proprietors trying to obtain rents from settlers led to land riots and added to his unpopularity. See also WENTWORTH FAMILY. BELLOMONT, RICHARD COOTE, EARL OF (1636–5 MARCH 1701). A Protestant Irish landowner who strongly supported King William III, Bellomont was appointed governor of Massachusetts in 1695 and governor of New York and the Jerseys in 1696. The crown also made him commander of

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the militia of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the hope he could mobilize a united front against the French in Canada. His efforts came to naught, however, as he could not reconcile the Leisler and antiLeisler factions in New York, and his campaign against piracy was unpopular with colonials throughout the region. See also BLATHWAYT, WILLIAM; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION; POLITICS. BENEZET, ANTHONY (31 JANUARY 1713–3 MAY 1784). Born in France, the Huguenot Benezet moved with his family to Holland, then to England, and in 1731 to Pennsylvania. He converted to the Quaker faith at an early age. A failure in his father’s profession as a merchant, he turned to educating those with few opportunities such as French refugees from Acadia, women (he established the first secondary school for girls in Pennsylvania), and blacks. He is most noted for his crusade to abolish slavery. Among his writings, A Short Account of That Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes (1762) questioned the prevailing belief that Africans had no civilization and were thus an inferior people. With John Woolman, he worked to persuade the Quaker meeting to condemn slavery and slaveholders, which happened in 1758, and to disown them, which finally happened in 1776. BERKELEY, SIR WILLIAM (3 JULY 1606–9 JULY 1677). Governor of Virginia from 1641 to 1649 and again from 1660 to 1676, Berkeley achieved political stability in the troubled colony through conciliating the wealthy planters, who became known as the “Green Spring faction” after Berkeley’s estate. He was an ardent royalist, intolerant of religious dissenters, and was removed (although allowed to remain on his plantation) after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The presence of large numbers of landless men and Berkeley’s conciliatory policy toward Indians on the frontier led to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Berkeley brutally suppressed the rebellion after Bacon’s death and was recalled to England to account for his administration. He died shortly after he arrived. BERNARD, SIR FRANCIS (JULY 1712–16 JUNE 1779). Son of an Anglican minister, Bernard became a lawyer and married a cousin of Viscount Barrington, a leading dissenter in Parliament who obtained for him the appointment as governor of New Jersey in 1758. Bernard successfully reconciled the political factions representing East and West Jersey and obtained considerable funds and forces for the French and Indian War. His record in New Jersey led to his appointment as governor of Massachusetts in 1760. There, he sided with Thomas Hutchinson, whom he appointed chief justice, and the supporters of imperial administration against the Otis family.

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Along with his determination to uphold British authority, his partisanship undid his good work in supporting Harvard College and motivating the province to support the war in its declining phase. He served until 1769, when he left the province and was replaced by Hutchinson. BLACK BOYS. Following the French and Indian War, frontier settlers in western Pennsylvania continued to fight Indians in Pontiac’s War. They discovered that the British army and Pennsylvania government were allowing trade with western Indians in the hope of pacifying them. Some merchants, however, included guns and knives in their shipments that could be used against the settlers. After meeting in 1765 at Mercersburg at the home of Justice of the Peace William Smith, the settlers went out, intercepted the shipments, and only allowed those without weapons to proceed. They painted their faces black and were thus known as the “Black Boys.” When the British at Fort Loudoun captured some participating settlers and permitted the goods to go through, the Black Boys in turn captured the fort, forcing the British to withdraw. This was the first confrontation between British troops and Americans following the French and Indian War in the years leading up to the American Revolution. BLACKBEARD (c. 1680–22 NOVEMBER 1718). The real name of the most colorful and notorious pirate in North American colonial waters was Edward Teach or Thatch. He only acquired his own ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, in 1717, when the previous captain was removed by the crew. In a little over a year, he blockaded the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and received a pardon from Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina, meanwhile continuing to capture other ships. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard to North Carolina to stop these depredations, and on 22 November 1718, Blackbeard was killed in a naval battle. Noted for his outrageous behavior—shooting his own men, burning matches in his beard—and great strength, images and legends of Blackbeard became more ferocious after his demise. BLACKS. Africans first came to Virginia, of the colonies that later became the United States, in 1619. They arrived from the West Indies. Early blacks were treated as indentured servants, but even at this time they were listed further down on tax lists than white servants, and almost all of them lacked last names, indicating that racial prejudice predated enslavement. Laws providing for the perpetual enslavement of the children of slave mothers, whether their fathers were white or black, came in the mid-17th century, by 1641 in Massachusetts, by 1660 in Virginia. Only about 2 percent of the population

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of the colonial South consisted of black slaves in the mid-17th century. The number rose as British trade with Africa increased and it became profitable to import slaves directly to the mainland rather than indirectly from the West Indies in the years after 1680. By the eve of the American Revolution, 60 percent of the people in the Chesapeake or Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland were slaves, as were about 90 percent of low-country South Carolina. Small free black communities or mixed-race communities of poor people existed in Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and the northern colonies. Most were tenant farmers or laborers, although a few owned land and slaves. Slavery also existed in the North, with the black population ranging from about 10 percent in New York and 8 percent in New Jersey to 2 percent elsewhere on the eve of the Revolution. Free blacks were frequently viewed as potential sources of violence and were subjected to curfews. See also ANTISLAVERY; NEW YORK CONSPIRACY OF 1712; NEW YORK CONSPIRACY OF 1741; SLAVE TRADE; SLAVERY; STONO REBELLION. BLATHWAYT, WILLIAM (1650–16 AUGUST 1717). An imperial official who was placed in charge of colonial affairs by King Charles II in 1676, Blathwayt was instrumental in the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1685 and the establishment of the Dominion of New England. He dominated British colonial policy in the last quarter of the 17th century. He favored the French method of colonial rule with strong governors who had military experience ruling large colonies without the benefit of assemblies, although he accepted these popular representative bodies after the Glorious Revolution. Sir Edmund Andros and the Earl of Bellomont were two of his appointees. He switched allegiance from King James II to William III in 1688 and became William’s secretary of war and the most important member of the Board of Trade, which was founded in 1696 to administer the colonies. He continued to favor strong military rulers in the colonies, a policy that lasted until he lost influence during the reign of Queen Anne. He was removed from the secretaryship in 1704 and the Board of Trade in 1707. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. BOARD OF TRADE. The first body with this name was appointed in 1621 by King James I as a committee of the royal privy council, and reconstituted in 1696 as the eight-man Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations by King William III. The board was charged with investigating the commerce of the colonies and the laws governing them. It reported to the crown and the royal ministers concerning colonial affairs and what measures needed to be taken to regulate them. For much of the time, however, its recommenda-

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tions that the colonies obey the Acts of Trade and Navigation were ignored, as influential members of Parliament were uninterested in colonial policy. The most influential members of the Board of Trade were William Blathwayt (served 1696–1707) and the Earl of Halifax (served 1748–1761), who were responsible for urging tighter imperial control of colonies that for the most part ran their own affairs under a policy known as salutary neglect. Blathwayt proposed stronger military governors for the colonies such as the Earl of Bellomont (governed 1698–1701) for New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Halifax was a leader in persuading the government to intervene on behalf of the colonies in the French and Indian War and to try to eliminate illegal trade in the early 1760s. After Halifax’s resignation, the board was moribund and finally dissolved in 1782. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. BOSOMWORTH, MARY. See MUSGROVE, MARY. BOSTON. Boston was (and remains) the capital of Massachusetts and the principal commercial city in New England. It was the center of trade between the farms and fisheries of the region and the West Indies and Great Britain. Its wealthiest citizens were merchants such as Thomas Hancock (1703–1764) and his nephew John (1737–1793) who sold local produce in exchange for molasses from the West Indies and imported goods (books, clothing, housewares, etc.) from Europe. Boston was also the intellectual center of Puritanism, the home of ministers John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, three leading theologians. The most prominent of thirteen churches were the First Church (Old South) and Second Church (Old North), along with Anglican King’s Chapel. Boston reached its peak population of about 16,000 inhabitants in the early 1730s, a level that remained approximately constant until the American Revolution. High taxes, naval impressment, and the costs of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, King George’s War, and the French and Indian War led to America’s first urban crisis, with poverty increasing and productive inhabitants leaving town. Boston town politics, unlike in most rural areas, was issue oriented, with strong factions supporting or opposing royal authority led by men such as Thomas Hutchinson and Elisha Cooke, Jr. Cooke led the Boston Caucus, America’s first political machine, which turned out voters for the town meetings. BOUNDARY DISPUTES. The charters of many colonies overlapped or were imprecise, leading to boundary disputes with neighboring colonies. Nearly all of these involved either Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. Massachusetts disputed its southern boundary with Rhode Island, its northern boundary with

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New Hampshire, and its western boundary with New York. Connecticut claimed what is now northern Pennsylvania, Virginia claimed the southwestern corner of the colony, and Pennsylvania’s disputed border with Maryland was settled by the Mason-Dixon Line. New Hampshire also disputed its western border with New York: the land in question ultimately became the state of Vermont. See also RIOTS. BOUQUET, HENRY (1719?–2 SEPTEMBER 1765). A Swiss officer employed by the British army, Colonel Bouquet was an effective second-incommand of General John Forbes’s 1758 expedition across Pennsylvania, which ended in the French blowing up Fort Duquesne. After Pontiac’s War broke out in 1763 and the Indians threatened Pittsburgh, Bouquet led a force from Philadelphia that defeated the Indians on 5 August at the Battle of Bushy Run, thus ending an unbroken string of Indian victories that had captured several British forts. In October 1764, Bouquet, as commander of Fort Pitt, led an expedition into the Ohio Valley, successfully freeing about 200 white captives (some of whom did not want to return) by threatening to destroy Indian villages if they did not release them. At this time, he delivered blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians after he had discussed the matter with his commander, General Jeffrey Amherst. It was ironic that he himself died of yellow fever within days of his arrival as commander of the British forces in East Florida. BRADDOCK’S EXPEDITION. In 1755, about 1,400 British regular soldiers and 450 Virginia militia marched westward from Williamsburg, Virginia, to establish British, and Virginian, control over the eastern Ohio Valley by capturing the recently constructed French Fort Duquesne (later Pittsburgh). Commanded by General Edward Braddock (c. 1695–1755), the force was surprised by about 300 French and Indians who had left the fort; Braddock and about 900 of his men were killed, and the remainder were led back to Virginia by Colonel George Washington, the only officer who was not killed or wounded. Braddock’s loss was so great because he failed to scout adequately the mountainous territory through which he marched and because, once attacked, his troops attempted to form the square that British troops always formed in open-field combat, thus serving as easy targets for the enemy. When his advance party fell back, it collided with the second half of the army, producing chaos. No posts had been built along the way in case a retreat was necessary, a deficiency remedied when General John Forbes, embarking this time from Bedford, Pennsylvania, succeeded in approaching and forcing the French to abandon Fort Duquesne in 1758. See also FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR. BRADFORD, WILLIAM (1590–9 MAY 1657). Elected governor of Plymouth Colony for 30 of the years from 1620 until his death, Bradford had a reli-

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gious experience at the age of 12 and left England for Holland with his fellow Separatists—or Pilgrims, as they became known—in 1609. He worked there as a weaver until a minority of the congregation, afraid that their children were adopting Dutch ways, obtained permission from King James I of England to sail to the New World. Bradford succeeded Governor John Carver, who along with half of the 102 original settlers, including Bradford’s wife, died during the first winter. His journal, known as Of Plymouth Plantation, tells the story of the colony and is an American classic. Among the episodes it treats are Captain Myles Standish’s role in defending the colony, the first Thanksgiving, and Bradford’s sorrow that the entire colony grew to the point that it could no longer remain one community. See also MAYFLOWER COMPACT. BRADSTREET, ANNE (c. 1612–16 SEPTEMBER 1672). The first important American poet and woman writer, Bradstreet was the daughter of Thomas Dudley and came with him to Massachusetts; both her father and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, governed the colony. Her brother-in-law John Woodbridge arranged to have her first poems published in 1647 in London, without her knowledge, as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up into America, by a Gentlewoman in such Parts. A second volume, Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, appeared in 1678 after her death. Her poems express her Puritan religious piety and her affection for her family; “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” and “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House” are among her best known works. See also LITERATURE. BRADSTREET, SIMON (FEBRUARY or MARCH 1603–27 MARCH 1697). Husband of poet Anne Bradstreet, Simon Bradstreet was a Puritan who migrated to Massachusetts in 1630. He served on the council for most of his life and as governor from 1679 to 1686 and from 1689 to 1692. A moderate who was willing to accommodate English rule, during his second term he effectively kept the peace among various factions while Massachusetts awaited the settlement of a new government from England following the deposition of Sir Edmund Andros as governor of the Dominion of New England. He was unable, however, to prevent Indian incursions during King William’s War or the outbreak of the Salem witch trials during his regime. BURNET, WILLIAM (MARCH 1688–7 SEPTEMBER 1729). Son of Bishop Gilbert Burnet of Salisbury, William Burnet governed New York and New Jersey from 1720 to 1727 and Massachusetts and New Hampshire from 1728 until his death. He took the part of the Livingston family in New York, earning the enmity of the Delanceys, and became unpopular for trying to curtail the fur trade between northern New York and Quebec. Upon moving to

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Massachusetts, his entire tenure was spent in an unsuccessful effort to obtain a regular salary to lessen the governor’s dependence on the assembly. He died following a carriage accident. BYRD, WILLIAM (28 MARCH 1674–26 AUGUST 1744). The son of a wealthy Virginia tobacco planter, Byrd was educated in England and Holland where he was trained as a lawyer. Upon his return to Virginia, he served on the council and was a leader of the defenders of colonial rights against the governor. He built an impressive mansion on his Westover estate, planned the city of Richmond, and owned probably the largest library—about 4,000 volumes—in the colonies. He is most noted for several literary works: The History of the Dividing Line, which zestfully tells of primitive culture on the frontier; A Journey to the Land of Eden; A Progress to the Mines; and, most notably, his Secret Diary. The diary contains confessions of his sexual affairs with his slaves, his harsh punishments of them, and yet his belief that he was loved as an Old Testament patriarch by his people.

William Byrd, who owned several hundred slaves, built Westover around 1730. It is one of the most elegant colonial mansions in Virginia. Source: Library of Congress.

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C CABEZA DE VACA, ALVAR NUNEZ (1500–c. 1555/1557). The first European to explore Texas extensively, Cabeza de Vaca was the treasurer of a 1528 Spanish expedition to Florida that became lost. He was one of four men who survived when the men attempted unsuccessfully to sail to Mexico. The shipwrecked Cabeza de Vaca spent eight years wandering among the Indians, first as a slave, then as a healer. He recounted his adventures in his Report, a classic of the Age of Exploration, after returning to Spain. It sympathetically described the many groups of Indians he encountered. Sent in 1540 as governor of the La Plata region (present-day Argentina and Uruguay) in South America, his attempt to establish a settlement at Buenos Aires failed. His partiality toward the Indians led other Spaniards to have him sent back to Spain in 1545. CABOT, JOHN (c. 1450–1499?). The first person under the English flag to undertake a voyage to North America, with royal sponsorship from Henry VII, Cabot followed in the footsteps of fishermen. Coming from the British Isles and the Basque region of Spain, they had fished in the Grand Banks and had almost certainly landed on the shores of Newfoundland or the mainland before Christopher Columbus. But their voyages did not attract official attention. Probably born in either Genoa or Venice, Giovanni Caboto lived in Venice before he moved to Spain and then Bristol, England’s second largest city and leading seaport. His first expedition (1497) never reached North America; the second, consisting of one ship (the Mathew) and 18 men, probably landed at or near Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The crews of the five ships of his third voyage (1498) mutinied and returned quickly. Cabot received a royal pension until 1499, suggesting that he died that year. See also CABOT, SEBASTIAN. CABOT, SEBASTIAN (c. 1474–c. 1557). John Cabot’s son Sebastian may have undertaken one or more expeditions to America for England before 1508; from 1512 to 1548 he lived in Spain, commanding (from 1525 to 1530) a failed expedition to repeat Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world.

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He spent the last years of his life in England, living in Bristol, making valued charts of newly discovered land. In 1555 he became head of the Muscovy Company, which handled England’s trade with Russia. His royal pension was not paid after 1557, probably the year he died. CADILLAC, ANTOINE LAUMET DE LAMOTHE (5 MARCH 1658– 15 OCTOBER 1730). A French explorer, Cadillac received a grant of land in Acadia in 1683 where he traded alcohol and furs with the Indians and engaged in privateering expeditions against the English. Cadillac moved to Quebec in 1690 after the English destroyed his home. He was appointed commander of the French post at Michilimackinac on Lake Superior in 1694 by Count Frontenac, and in 1701 he led a party of 100 settlers to establish a post at Detroit. In 1708 he was recalled to France following criticisms by Canadian officials of his tyrannical rule and illegal trading with the Indians and English. Nevertheless, he was appointed governor of Louisiana in 1713, where his quarrels with other officials and leading colonists led to his recall in 1716 and a brief imprisonment in the Bastille. He was soon freed and then retired to France. CALIFORNIA. Although Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored San Diego Bay as early as 1542, the Spanish only took serious interest in the territory of Alta California (the present-day state) when Russian fur trappers began to move into the area of San Francisco Bay. In 1769, Father Junipero Serra founded the first of 21 missions that extended from San Diego northward along the Camino Real (royal road) to San Francisco and beyond. Each mission consisted, usually, of one or two Franciscan missionaries and a number of soldiers who protected it and made sure that surrounding Indians who converted did not run away. Indians were forced to live in the missions, were given Spanish names and blue uniforms, and were forced to labor against their will. They were beaten and in extreme cases executed for disobedience and running away. In 1775, they rebelled, burned down the mission at San Diego, and were brutally suppressed. Most of the estimated quarter-million precontact Indian population of California died from epidemics as a result of close proximity to Europeans in the missions. Besides the missions, sheep and cattle ranches where Indians worked on the estates of wealthy Mexicans were established. Only about 10,000 “Californios,” or Mexicans of Spanish descent, lived in California when the United States conquered it in the war with Mexico in 1846. CALVERT FAMILY OF MARYLAND. The Calverts were the proprietors of Maryland. George Calvert (1579–1632), the first Baron Baltimore, was a

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friend of King James I. He was a Roman Catholic, and he explored possible colonies in the New World for members of his religion. He was the proprietor of Avalon, the first permanent English settlement in Newfoundland, but aside from fishermen, few were interested in this northern territory. Calvert’s son Cecilius (1605–1675), second Lord Baltimore, became the first proprietor of the family’s second colonial venture, Maryland, and Cecilius’s son Leonard (1606–1647) was the first governor who served in the colony itself. Cecilius was succeeded by his son Charles (1637–1715), the third Lord Baltimore, who was followed by his grandson Charles (1699–1751), fifth Lord Baltimore, and then by his son Frederick Calvert (1731–1771), sixth Lord Baltimore. The proprietorship was being disputed between Frederick’s widow and his illegitimate son Henry Harford when the American Revolution broke out. CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM. See CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. CANADA. In the colonial era, Canada referred to the political entity of French (after 1763 British) Canada. Other territories that were ruled by the British before 1763 and are now part of the Dominion of Canada—Acadia (later Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Hudson’s Bay Company—were not considered part of Canada. Territories claimed by the French to the south, especially the Illinois country, which included much of the middle west of the United States, were also considered part of Canada. See CARTIER, JACQUES; CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL DE; FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR; FRENCH CANADIANS; FRENCH EMPIRE; FRONTENAC, COUNT; MONTCALM, MARQUIS DE; QUEBEC. CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES. A popular form of literature produced in early America, most captivity narratives were published in Massachusetts by Puritans who were captured either in King Philip’s War (1675–1676) or at the Deerfield raid in 1704. They detail the horrors of Indian attacks, difficult travels to new homes in Indian villages, the captives’ loyalty to Christianity and European culture, and finally redemption by the authorities. The most famous narratives were The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of his Promises Displayed, Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), with a preface by Increase Mather, and John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive (1704). About 1,600 English inhabitants were captured by Indians between 1675 and 1763. CAROLINA. A colony granted to eight proprietors in 1663 by King Charles II, early settlement was located in two widely separated areas, one around Charleston and the other on Albemarle Sound near Virginia. Their

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inability to be governed from the same location led the colony to be separated into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1712. CARTER FAMILY OF VIRGINIA. Robert Carter (1663–1732) was the estate agent for Lord Fairfax, who owned substantial land in Northern Virginia. He accumulated for himself over 300,000 acres and about 1,000 slaves and was the most influential Virginian in politics during the early 18th century. Nicknamed “King” because of his wealth and importance, he built the impressive mansion Nomini Hall. He served as speaker of the assembly before joining the council in 1699, to which he belonged for the rest of his life. He was acting governor from 1726 to 1727. His son Landon Carter (1710–1778) constructed Sabine Hall, and as one of Virginia’s leading planters he became interested in scientific agriculture, writing essays that won him membership in the American Philosophical Society. He supported the rights of Virginians against the royal government and then the American Revolution, writing pamphlets and newspaper essays on behalf of colonial liberty. He is most noted for his journal, one of the finest accounts of 18thcentury southern family life, agriculture, and politics. CARTIER, JACQUES (31 DECEMBER 1491–1 SEPTEMBER 1557). A mariner from St. Malo in Brittany, Cartier undertook three voyages for King Francis I of France in 1534, 1535–1536, and 1541–1542, claiming Canada for that nation. He encountered Indian settlements at Stadacona (Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal), but he lost many of his men to illness during the cold winters and established no permanent settlement. He spent much of his time in a fruitless search for gold, but he brought the first specimens of corn (maize) back to Europe. CASAS, BARTOLOME DE LAS (NOVEMBER 1484–18 JULY 1566). Las Casas’s father and uncles accompanied Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to America in 1493, which interested him in the New World. He obtained money from them and went to Santo Domingo in 1502, where as a plantation owner he participated in the enslavement and exploitation of the Indians. Then in 1511 he heard a sermon by Father Antonio de Montesinos denouncing these practices. He next established a settlement in northern Venezuela where he attempted to treat Indians fairly, paying them wages for their work, but it was attacked both by other Indians and Spaniards. In 1523, Las Casas joined the Dominican monastic order and began to write and preach extensively against mistreatment of the Indians. In 1537, he successfully preached to, converted, and pacified the warlike Indians of Tuzulutlan in Guatemala.

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In 1542, Las Casas’s writings persuaded the king of Spain to outlaw encomiendas, or grants of labor service of Indians to Spaniards. In 1550 and 1551, he described the sophisticated Aztec and Maya cultures to argue successfully against the enslavement of Indians in a debate before King Charles V. Prominent scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda maintained that they fit Aristotle’s definition of uncivilized peoples who were slaves by nature. Spain’s enemies, especially the English, employed the examples of Spanish atrocities found in Las Casas’s writings to formulate “the Black Legend” that they used to justify their opposition to Spain in the New World. Las Casas’s most important works were The Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (published 1552) and the lengthier Apologetic History of the Indies, which remained unpublished until 1875. CATAWBA. An Indian people whose language resembled the Sioux, the Catawba probably moved from the Great Lakes region to the piedmont (foothills) of the Carolinas and western Virginia, where European settlers encountered them around 1700. They joined the coalition of Indians against South Carolina during the Yamasee War but made an alliance with the colony following the war, and thereafter they frequently fought on its behalf against other Indians. Smallpox epidemics in 1738 and 1759 thinned their numbers by more than half. Yet they maintained their own religion in the face of missionaries and successfully integrated European trade goods into an agricultural economy that also produced pottery for sale. The small number who survived supported the Americans in the Revolution, and they remain in possession of a small reservation in South Carolina. CATHOLICS. See ROMAN CATHOLICS. CATO’S LETTERS. These 144 articles were published by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the London Journal and later the British Journal between 1720 and 1723. They took their name from a champion of the Roman republic who preferred death to submission to Julius Caesar. Collected and reprinted several times in the 18th century, they were a major influence on the political thought of colonial Americans and in shaping the American Revolution. They argued that even the people’s own representatives, in Parliament, were subject to corruption from the crown. The letters interpreted history as the perpetual struggle of beleaguered liberty—which only survived where it was carefully protected by men who loved their country unselfishly—against the ever-threatening claws of despotic power. CAUCUS, BOSTON. See COOKE, ELISHA, JR.

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CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL DE (c. 1570–25 DECEMBER 1635). Known as the “Father of New France,” or Canada, Champlain was the son of a sailor who participated in several expeditions to America as a young man. In 1608, he founded the first permanent French settlement in North America at Quebec, and except for two interludes, 1613 to 1615 when he returned to France and 1629 to 1632 when the colony was conquered by the English, he governed it in fact although not in title. He sided with the Huron Indians in their long-standing feud with the Iroquois, thereby determining that the former would side with the French and the latter with the English until the end of the colonial era. He also encouraged the migration of the clergy to Canada, began to fortify it, and established the fur trade as a private enterprise. CHARLES I, KING OF ENGLAND (19 NOVEMBER 1600–30 JANUARY 1649). Son of King James I, Charles, who became king in 1625, was even more determined than his father to assert the rights of the crown and the Anglican Church as opposed to Parliament when faced with Puritan dissent. In 1629, he sanctioned the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Maryland, the former as he was glad to be rid of at least some Puritans, the latter because he was sympathetic toward Roman Catholics. The English Civil War, which broke out in 1640, caused some Puritans such as Sir Henry Vane to return to England to fight for Parliament against him. He was executed in 1649. See also CHARLES II; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. CHARLES II, KING OF ENGLAND (29 MAY 1630–6 FEBRUARY 1685). Son of King Charles I, he spent his youth in France following his father’s execution before he was brought back to England in 1660 by a consensus of the army, navy, and general population. He favored the French, received subsidies from King Louis XIV, and became a Roman Catholic on his deathbed. He was inclined to religious toleration as it favored England’s Catholic minority, an ideal that was written into the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and established in Pennsylvania, two colonies founded during his reign. He was very interested in building up the empire and its navy, which his brother, the Duke of York and future King James II, headed. His forces conquered New Netherland from the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and later he followed the policies of William Blathwayt to govern the colonies more strictly. Massachusetts lost its original charter in 1685 under his rule, although he had confirmed that charter along with those of Connecticut and Rhode Island in the early 1660s. See also CROWN; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION.

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CHARLESTON. The capital of colonial South Carolina, Charleston was the fourth-largest city in colonial America with a population of about 12,000, about 7,000 of whom were slaves, on the eve of the American Revolution. It was founded in 1680 after a previous settlement a few miles north, begun in 1674, had failed. At the intersection of the Ashley and Cooper rivers on the Atlantic Ocean, it served as the hub of the slave, rice, and indigo trade of the colony. Many of the colony’s richest planters lived in the city in elegant mansions, some of which survive today, rather than on their plantations. Jews, Catholics, Huguenots, Anglicans, and Protestant Dissenters all established congregations in Charleston. Charleston is the site of the Dock Street Theater, the oldest in British North America, built in 1736 and still a functioning playhouse. CHAUNCY, CHARLES (1 JANUARY 1705–10 FEBRUARY 1787). Minister at the First Church of Boston, Massachusetts, from 1727 until his death, Chauncy is most famous as an opponent of Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. His Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743) insisted that reason was a critical element in Christian belief, and that most people who claimed to have been “born again” were victims of deluded emotional experiences. Chauncy later wrote opposing an Anglican bishop for America, staunchly supported the American Revolution, and shortly before he died emerged as one of the first Unitarians and Universalists (believers in the salvation of all human beings) with his essay The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (1784). CHEROKEE. An Indian people who lived in the Appalachian region of North and South Carolina, the Cherokee sided with the British against the Shawnee and Tuscarora between 1710 and 1715 during the Yamasee War; their victories led these tribes to move northward into Kentucky and Pennsylvania, respectively. They continued to fight the Creek (Muscogee) Indians until the French and Indian War. The Cherokee were estimated to have about 60 towns and 6,000 warriors before the smallpox epidemic of 1738 wiped out about half their number. The Cherokee at first sided with the British in the French and Indian War, but incursions from frontier settlers led to warfare between 1760 and 1762. The Cherokee were supposedly guaranteed their territory by the Proclamation of 1763, but incursions from the Carolinas and Georgia continued until the 1830s, culminating in the “Trail of Tears” and the expulsion of the Cherokees to what is now Oklahoma. CHILDREN. Regarded by colonial American Puritans and evangelicals as unredeemed sinners who needed to be severely, physically disciplined,

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children were supposed to obey parental authority unquestioningly. Quakers, however, began a new method of child rearing in which children were treated with affection, and discipline was accompanied by reason. By the mid-18th century, some families, especially those of the elite, began to treat children indulgently. In all cases, children were dressed as small adults once they ceased to wear baby gowns and were expected to assist in farming or shop chores. They were bound out as indentured servants if their parents wished them to follow a different occupation, and some parents did so in any case to avoid spoiling them with too much affection. See also EDUCATION. CHURCH OF THE BRETHREN. See MENNONITES. CHURCH OF ENGLAND. See ANGLICAN CHURCH. CLASSES. Colonials usually divided themselves into “better,” “middling,” and “lower” classes, with the terms “sort” or “order” being used as synonyms for class. There was no nobility in the colonies, except for occasional individuals such as Lord Fairfax in Virginia who had no special privileges. Prestige in a community, determined usually by a mixture of wealth and service in public or religious affairs, was the measure of a person’s status. The “poor” were usually defined as those who needed public assistance to support themselves, and except in rare instances—usually when colonies were first established—actual starvation or inability to acquire at least minimal food and clothing was rare. “Gentlemen” were those who did not earn a living with their hands, including merchants, plantation owners, government officials, and the more prestigious clergy, lawyers, and physicians. Thus, even a wealthy Benjamin Franklin could be excluded from the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, as he worked as a printer. The proportions and distances between classes varied by place and time; in general, 50 to 75 percent of adult white males met the qualification for voting, that is owning property worth about 40 pounds sterling. Class divisions rarely led to class conflict; Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and Leisler’s Rebellion in New York, for instance, are best understood as sectional and ethnic struggles, respectively. Class consciousness, however, was high; especially the “upper orders” feared that the lower orders might become a source of disorder. See also AGRICULTURE; ANGLICIZATION; ARTISANS; CLOTHING; POLITICS; POVERTY. CLASSIS. See REFORMED CHURCH. CLINTON, GEORGE (1686–10 JULY 1761). A naval officer who governed Newfoundland from 1731 to 1737, Clinton was appointed governor

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of New York in 1743 because of his important connections in England. He began by siding with the Delancey faction, but when they opposed New York’s entry into King George’s War, he turned to the Livingstons and Cadwallader Colden. He was instrumental in the appointment of Sir William Johnson as the Indian agent for the northern colonies, but his inability to persuade New York to support attacks on the French angered not only the British but the Iroquois as well. Clinton was replaced in 1753 after he failed to intervene in border disputes between New York and New Jersey. CLOTHING. In the colonial era, clothing was both functional and identified a person’s class. Gentlemen wore breeches, which came to about the knee, whereas working men wore trousers. Linen shirts were worn during the day and at night served as the only garment. Sometimes vests, jackets, and in cold weather greatcoats were worn over these. Gentlemen frequently wore ruffles, as it was considered vulgar to reveal parts of the body except the face and hands, including the neck. Sumptuary laws, forbidding people to dress above their station, were passed in the 17th century in many colonies but ceased to be enforced by the 18th. Stockings came up to the knee and were held up with garters. Beginning in the late 17th century, wigs, frequently powdered white by the mid-18th century to simulate old age and thus maturity and authority, were worn by the upper class. Upper-class men frequently shaved their heads to accommodate wigs. Women wore linen shifts as undergarments and as the sole garment at night. They frequently wore scarves or caps, and they wore stays (corsets) to support their busts. Gowns with one to four petticoats underneath were worn depending on the weather. Women wore capes rather than coats in cold weather. Shoes were uniform with no distinction of left or right. Blue dye and clothing were the most expensive and were a sign of wealth. Children dressed like their parents once out of baby clothes. Slave men usually wore simple linen trousers and a long shirt, while women sometimes wore a dress and shift. Slaves and servants would sometimes wear discarded clothes. CODDINGTON, WILLIAM (1686–10 JULY 1761). A Puritan who migrated to Massachusetts in 1630, Coddington supported Anne Hutchinson’s dissident religious movement. In 1639, he went to the territory that became Rhode Island and founded the town of Newport in 1639. He obtained a patent for an independent colony which he governed from 1651 to 1653, but he quarreled with Roger Williams, who wanted to unite Newport with Rhode Island. Following the royal charter of 1663 that incorporated the two colonies, Coddington acquiesced in the inevitable and served as governor of Rhode Island from 1674 to 1676 and again in 1678. He had become a

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Quaker, and thus a pacifist, by this time, but nevertheless he lent his colony’s support to the other New England colonies in King Philip’s War. COLDEN, CADWALLADER (7 FEBRUARY 1689–20 SEPTEMBER 1776). A Scotsman who graduated from the University of Edinburgh, Colden moved to Philadelphia in 1710 and New York in 1717. He was trained as a physician and was noted as an astronomer, natural scientist, mapmaker, and historian as well. His History of the Five Nations, the Iroquois was published in 1727. He became lieutenant-governor of New York in 1746 and served as acting governor from 1760 to 1761, 1763 to 1765, 1769 to 1770, and 1774 to 1775. Colden mistrusted both the Delancey and Livingston factions and the assembly’s efforts to obtain greater power at the expense of the royal prerogative. He became a staunch loyalist during the American Revolution. See also CLINTON, GEORGE. COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY. In 1693, the College of William and Mary was built in advance of Williamsburg, Virginia, the town soon established around it. The second-oldest college in the nation, its first permanent structure, the Christopher Wren Building, was designed by the famous British architect. It still retains the original walls despite three reconstructions of the interior and is the oldest college building in the nation. James Blair served as president from the beginning until his death in 1743. Thomas Jefferson and 16 signers of the Declaration of Independence attended the college. Originally, teachers had to be members of the Anglican Church, and the college curriculum included both undergraduate instruction and postgraduate preparation for ordination into the Anglican priesthood. See also EDUCATION. COLLEGES. Nine colleges opened in the colonies before the American Revolution: Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Congregational affiliation, was founded in 1636; William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Anglican affiliation, in 1693; Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, Congregational affiliation, in 1701; the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, in New Jersey, Presbyterian affiliation, in 1746; the College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, later the University of Pennsylvania, nonsectarian but with a heavy Anglican influence, in 1749; King’s College, later Columbia University, in New York City, Anglican affiliation, in 1754; the College in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, later Brown University, in Providence, nonsectarian but with a heavy Baptist influence, in 1764; Queen’s College, later Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick, Dutch Reformed affiliation, in 1766; and Dartmouth College in Hanover, New

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Hampshire, Congregational affiliation, in 1769. Even at the end of the colonial era, under a thousand students, all men, were enrolled in colonial colleges at any given time. The primary purpose of most of the colleges was to prepare students for the ministry of their respective denominations, although by the mid-18th century most students were gentlemen who simply sought a general education or were those who hoped to become lawyers or physicians. The schools varied in their curricula, but all were based on the classic seven liberal arts: the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logic)—and the quadrivium— language, music, oratory, and logic. Most students entered between the ages of 14 and 16 and received a bachelor of arts degree after four years. Some colleges offered a master’s degree for an additional year or two of study and oral presentation of a thesis. Except for the college president, who usually taught the senior year, tutors, young men who subsequently went on to the ministry, handled the instruction. Class ranking was based on social standing rather than academic achievement. Discipline consisted of fines, decrease in class rank, or, in extreme cases, expulsion. Several academies (three of which were also called colleges) or grammar schools from the colonial era ultimately became full-fledged colleges: King William’s School in Annapolis, Maryland, nonsectarian, founded in 1696, became St. John’s College; the Free School in Newark, Delaware, nonsectarian, founded in 1743, became the University of Delaware; the Augusta Academy in Lexington, Virginia, nonsectarian, founded in 1749, became Washington College and then Washington and Lee University after the Civil War; the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina, Anglican affiliated, was founded in 1770; the Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) Academy, nonsectarian, begun in 1770, became the University of Pittsburgh; and Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, nonsectarian, was founded in 1773. Only the Moravians, a religious group that treated women as equal to men in nearly every respect, offered two educational institutions for women. The Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Female Seminary, begun in 1742, became Moravian College, and the Little Girls’ School of Salem (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina, founded in 1772, became Salem College. COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER (?–1506). The member a Genoese merchant family (this has been conclusively established), Columbus had traded with and visited England, Ireland, and Iceland, where he probably heard that there were western islands visited by fishermen. In the 1480s, he sought to obtain funding, first from Portugal, then from Castille (united with Aragon as Spain as of 1469), to find a route to Asia by sailing west. As Columbus greatly underestimated the size of the earth (which had been known since

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ancient times) and no educated person believed the world was flat, his early requests were rejected on the grounds that crews could not survive a voyage of the length he intended. But upon the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492, Queen Isabella supported him. He made four voyages to the West Indies and the northern coast of South America in 1492, 1493–1494, 1498– 1500, and 1502–1504, always believing he had landed in Asia and that China and Japan were nearby. On his second voyage, he established the first permanent European settlement in the Western Hemisphere in Santo Domingo. Failure of the Indians to provide him with the extravagant quantity of gold he expected led him to treat them cruelly. He also quarreled with other Spanish officials sent to govern the new territories and was returned as a prisoner following this third voyage. COMANCHE. Originally inhabiting the northern Great Plains as part of the Shoshone Indians, the Comanche moved south to New Mexico and Texas in the 17th century when they acquired horses. In the 18th century, they were noted for their ferocity and frequently warred with the Spanish, Apache, and Pueblo in New Mexico, acquiring territory at their expense and remaining unconquered until the late 19th century. Their population was estimated at about 40,000. CONESTOGA WAGON. A large wagon first used by Mennonite settlers in Pennsylvania around 1750, Conestoga wagons were named for a valley near Lancaster. They were about 21 feet long, could carry up to 16,000 pounds, and were drawn by four to six horses. They were instrumental in enabling settlers from Pennsylvania to travel to the frontier and down the Great Wagon Road into the Shenandoah Valley to inhabit Virginia and the colonies to the south. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. Congregational is the general name for Protestant churches in which the choice of the minister, deacons, and church governance rests with the male members of the congregation. In early America, the Congregational Church most frequently meant the Puritan churches of New England, which adopted the Cambridge Platform of 1648, confirming this self-government as their policy. However, disputes over who was sufficiently saintly to be admitted to the churches as full, voting members and other doctrinal issues led to efforts by Puritan ministers to set down guidelines and doctrines in synod. These, however, never received general acceptance. Today, most Congregational churches belong to the United Churches of Christ. See also CONNECTICUT; HALF-WAY COVENANT; MASSACHUSETTS; NEW HAVEN; RELIGION.

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CONNECTICUT. The first permanent English settlement in Connecticut was made at Saybrook in 1635 at the mouth of the Connecticut River, with John Winthrop, Jr., as governor. In 1644, it merged with three other settlements, Windsor (1633), Weathersfield (1634), and what became the capital, Hartford (1636). Hartford was founded by about a hundred Puritans from Massachusetts. Their leader, Thomas Hooker, the minister at Newtown, was dissatisfied that Massachusetts denied the right to vote to men who behaved well but were not full church members who had related their conversion experience. In 1639, the towns adopted the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the first detailed document in America resembling a constitution—which is why Connecticut is known as the “Constitution State”—granting all free men the right to participate in the government. In 1662, Connecticut received a royal charter confirming these privileges, which granted it land extending to the Pacific Ocean and incorporating the colony of New Haven as part of it. Connecticut physically hid its charter in the “Charter Oak” tree in Hartford when Sir Edmund Andros arrived in 1687 to incorporate it into the Dominion of New England, and resisted again in 1693 when Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York arrived to establish royal control. The colony maintained its self-governance with an elected governor and council as well as an assembly until the end of the colonial period. Most people in Connecticut were subsistence farmers who sold their surplus to merchants in exchange for British goods. New London was the colony’s principal port, but Boston and New York handled much of its overseas commerce. Fishing was also an important occupation. Manufacturing of hats, processing of potash, shipbuilding, and distilling also occurred on a small scale. Connecticut’s population grew enormously, from about 26,000 in 1700 to 111,000 in 1750, to 183,000 in 1770, almost all from fertility, as there was little immigration. This meant that by the mid-18th century, land had become scarce. In 1664, New York’s territory was exempted from Connecticut’s grant of land to the Pacific. Connecticut continued to claim the land that is now northern Pennsylvania under its charter. In 1753, Connecticut organized the Susquehannah Company to settle that land, which led to the Yankee-Pennamite War with Pennsylvania beginning in 1769. In 1786, the U.S. Congress granted the land to Pennsylvania, but Connecticut settlers were allowed to keep their personal landholdings, the extent of which was also contested and led to further conflict. CONVERSION EXPERIENCE. To become members with full privileges of the early Puritan or Congregational churches in New England, people had to narrate a conversion experience. This related how they had come to experience Jesus Christ and obtain a sense of their salvation. Men had to

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speak before the congregation, whereas women were usually allowed to discuss their conversion in private with the minister. Until the Massachusetts royal charter of 1692 established a property qualification, only men who had related such an experience were eligible to vote and hold office in the town and colonial government. Access to land, although not limited to church members, was usually determined by them. Some Puritans believed that relating the conversion experience encouraged hypocrisy, as unlike in England—where being a Puritan could mean persecution—in New England it conveyed distinct advantages. Disagreement over the importance and nature of a public confession of a conversion experience was one reason the settlements at Hartford (led by Thomas Hooker), New Haven (John Davenport), and Rhode Island (Roger Williams) split off from Massachusetts. Many churches continued to require a conversion experience for full membership into the 18th century and beyond, however. See also HALF-WAY COVENANT; DECLENSION. CONVICTS. First sent to the American colonies under the Transportation Act passed in 1718 by Parliament, about 50,000 convicts arrived before the American Revolution, almost all of them to Maryland and Virginia. There they were sold as indentured servants, most of them for seven-year terms, although about a quarter had 14-year or life sentences. Nearly 90 percent were men. Most worked in the fields alongside black slaves, although others, especially those who knew skilled trades, did other work. Although Benjamin Franklin compared them to rattlesnakes, colonial planters found their labor useful and competitive with the more highly priced slaves in a labor-scarce economy. Georgia was founded in 1733 primarily as a settlement for British prisoners. After their terms were over, most convicts had to reindenture themselves or survive as tenant farmers or laborers, as they were not given freedom dues—payments of money, grants of land, or farm implements—upon the expiration of their terms. COODE’S REBELLION. When news of the Glorious Revolution in England reached North America, Maryland Protestants led by John Coode (c. 1648–1709) overthrew the proprietary government of the Calvert family, who were Roman Catholics, as was the ousted King James II. Coode had come to Maryland as an Anglican priest, but he renounced this calling and became a wealthy landowner and member of the Maryland assembly. He had already participated in a failed rebellion in 1681 and was briefly jailed. He headed 700 Marylanders who seized the capital, St. Mary’s; they were angry that the Calverts and the Catholic officials in Maryland did not recognize Protestant King William III, who replaced James II in 1688. Coode briefly

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ruled the colony until a royal governor arrived in 1691. Coode continued to oppose the new government, however; in 1699, he was convicted of blasphemy but pardoned. COOKE, ELISHA, JR. (20 DECEMBER 1678–24 AUGUST 1737). A Boston physician, Cooke led the opposition party in Massachusetts to the royal governor’s following the death of his father Elisha Cooke, Sr. (1637–1715). He founded the Boston “Caucus,” a political machine that ran candidates for town office and continued to organize local discontent until the American Revolution. He served as the province agent in Great Britain from 1724 to 1726, where he was unable to prevent issuance of an “Explanatory Charter” that affirmed the governor’s right to veto the speaker of the house of representatives and to decide when the assembly should be dismissed. He quarreled with governors Samuel Shute, William Burnet, and Jonathan Belcher, and struggled in his final years with Thomas Hutchinson for control of the Boston town meeting. COPLEY, JOHN SINGLETON (3 JULY 1738–9 SEPTEMBER 1815). The son of Boston tobacconists, Copley was the best portrait painter in early America. He was encouraged to paint by his stepfather Peter Pelham, who was an engraver. As a teenager, he painted mythological subjects, but he is most famous for his portraits of leading Bostonians, including Paul Revere and John Hancock. In 1774, Copley left for England, where he remained the rest of his life, painting historical, biblical, and mythological scenes in addition to portraits, many of those being of American loyalists who joined him in England. See also ART. CORNBURY, LORD (28 NOVEMBER 1661–31 MARCH 1723). Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, who later became the Earl of Clarendon and was a cousin of Queen Anne, served as governor of New York and New Jersey from 1701 to 1709. He was a firm foe of Dissenters and tried to stop Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed ministers from preaching. He was despised by the colonists for his extravagance and arbitrary ways, and some of them charged him with dressing as a woman, on the grounds that he more faithfully hoped thereby to “represent” the queen. Some modern historians dispute these charges, while others argue they might be true, as no other colonial governor, however obnoxious, was ever attacked in the same way. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION; POLITICS. CORONADO, FRANCISCO VASQUEZ DE (1510–22 SEPTEMBER 1554). A member of a wealthy Spanish family, Coronado came to Mexico in

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1535. In 1539, he led the expedition that conquered much of northwest Mexico. At this time, he heard stories of the Seven Cities of Cibola, golden cities located to the north. With an expedition of over 300 Spaniards and 1,300 Indians, he spent much of 1540 to 1542 searching what is now the southwestern United States for these cities, exploring much of New Mexico, Arizona, northern Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Only about 100 of his men returned, and he was bankrupted by having invested his fortune in the expedition. COSBY, WILLIAM (c. 1690–10 MARCH 1736). Thanks to his marriage to Grace Montague, sister of the Earl of Halifax and cousin of the Duke of Newcastle, Cosby governed the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean Sea from 1717 to 1727 and then became governor of New York in 1732. Cosby soon alienated New Yorkers by his boorish and greedy behavior, attempting to collect half the salary of lieutenant-governor Rip Van Dam, who had ruled before Cosby arrived. When Chief Justice Lewis Morris threw out Cosby’s case against Van Dam, Cosby dismissed Morris. The governor’s opponents, led by the Livingston family, began to sponsor John Peter Zenger’s New York Weekly Journal. Cosby died shortly after a jury acquitted Zenger of libeling him on the grounds that Zenger’s newspaper’s criticisms were not libelous but true. COTTON, JOHN (4 DECEMBER 1584–23 DECEMBER 1652). A leading Puritan in England who joined the initial migration to Massachusetts, Cotton was minister of the First Church of Boston, where he was favored by Anne Hutchinson and her followers. They believed that the other clerics in the colony only preached a gospel of “works” (that good behavior alone merited salvation) and lacked divine inspiration. Cotton turned against Hutchinson when she was put on trial, reconciled himself to the colony’s leadership, and opposed Roger Williams when he argued against limiting participation in government to members of a state-supported church. He is also noted for his religious works, especially Milk for Babes, the first children’s book published in British America, and for his sermon God’s Promise to His Plantation, which promised great rewards for Massachusetts if the settlers behaved righteously. COUNCIL. The council was the upper house of the colonial legislature in every colony except Pennsylvania, where it only fulfilled the council’s other principal function, to advise the governor. A council generally had between 12 and 30 members. In most colonies, it was officially appointed by the monarch, but in fact it was chosen by the privy council with the advice of the Board of Trade and other prominent colonials or officials, including

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the governor or (in the case of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania) proprietor. In early New England, the members of the council were called assistants. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, the council was elected by eligible male voters throughout the colony, as it was in Massachusetts until 1685; after 1691, it was chosen there each year by the outgoing council and incoming assembly, subject to the governor’s veto. Councilors tended to be wealthy inhabitants such as merchants or holders of large estates who commanded prestige among the general population. Prominent members of the assembly were frequently promoted to the council. Although designed to be an aristocratic counterweight to the more popular assemblies, much as the House of Lords was with respect to the House of Commons in Britain, in fact the council frequently took the assembly’s side against the governor in disputes. Its members did not represent a separate order—no aristocracy was recognized in the colonies—but was comprised of people similar to the representatives and frequently related to them. COVENANT CHAIN. In 1677, Sir Edmund Andros signed a peace treaty on behalf of Massachusetts and New York with the Iroquois; the following year, the Iroquois made peace with Maryland and Virginia on behalf of themselves and the Delaware Indians. The alliance between the Iroquois and the various English colonies was known as the Covenant Chain. Although it promised perpetual brotherhood and friendship, it was breached when the French made the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 with the Iroquois, who for the most part remained neutral in French and British conflicts for half a century. In 1753, the Iroquois declared the Covenant Chain broken, but the British were able to restore it during the French and Indian War, largely thanks to the efforts of Sir William Johnson. The Iroquois fought as allies of the British during that war and, for the most part, during the American Revolution. CRANSTON, SAMUEL (7 AUGUST 1659–26 APRIL 1727). A merchant and goldsmith, Cranston was enormously popular in Rhode Island, being elected governor annually by the entire eligible male population from 1698 until his death. He successfully concluded a boundary dispute with Connecticut and was able to raise troops and funds for Queen Anne’s War despite the colony’s largely Quaker population. He also preserved Rhode Island’s charter from British threats, granting it virtual self-government, by persuading the assembly to accept a royal customs office and vice-admiralty court. CRAVEN, CHARLES (1682–27 DECEMBER 1754). Governor of Carolina from 1712 to 1716, Craven successfully fought the Yamasee War in

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what became South Carolina. He did this by substituting a paid, professional force for the colonial militia. CRESAP’S WAR. John Cresap was a Maryland settler who established a ferry service across the Susquehanna River in 1730 in territory also claimed by Pennsylvania. For the next several years, Maryland militia and nonQuaker Pennsylvanians would evict each other from land disputed by the two colonies. The Pennsylvanians also allied with nearby Indians and claimed they had bought the land from them. When Cresap shot and killed a Pennsylvanian who came to arrest him in 1734, the governor of Maryland made him a captain in the Maryland militia rather than turning him over to Pennsylvania to be tried for murder. In 1738, the Penn and Calvert families signed a peace treaty declaring the boundary between the colonies 15 miles south of Philadelphia, which was surveyed beginning in 1763 as the MasonDixon Line. CRIME. Behavior that was considered criminal in early America varied greatly from colony to colony. In Puritan New England, violent crime was rare, but offenses such as pleasure walking on the Sabbath, gambling, gossiping, and showing physical affection to other people’s spouses were punished. In the 17th-century South, a male society with a large number of landless young men, violent crimes were common, and offenses that were considered serious in New England went unpunished. Indentured servants were frequently punished by adding one or more years to their terms of service. Pacifist Pennsylvania, with a weak structure of authority, had a higher crime rate than London, England, much of it committed by people who appeared on no other records and were vagrants or the poor. In nearly all cases and colonies, minor crimes such as drunkenness or disorderly conduct were handled without juries by justices of the peace. There were no colonial police forces; the justices were called to the scene of a crime by local residents, or miscreants were taken by members of the community before the justices. They in turn were empowered to call out people to handle a problem (the “hue and cry”). Fines (for the upper and middle class), whipping, and public humiliation (such as standing in a pillory or sitting in stocks) for the lower classes were the usual punishments. Serious crimes such as horse stealing, counterfeiting, highway robbery, piracy, smuggling, burglary, and actual or attempted murder were tried before either county courts or the colony’s superior (or supreme) court. Here a jury was present. Capital punishment could be inflicted for these crimes, as well as for sodomy and bestiality (which occurred rarely), except in Pennsylvania, where William Penn limited the death penalty to those convicted of murder and treason.

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The vast majority of court business, however, concerned suits for debt; debtors could be imprisoned until they, their friends, or their relatives paid a debt. The rationale was that only people with collateral could receive loans, and that debtors would sometimes withhold their resources unless compelled to produce them. Imprisonment was rare as a punishment, and jails were usually used to hold people awaiting trial. Lawyers only became common in the late colonial period after 1750. Colonials in general distrusted lawyers, thinking their use meant a case was weak, and referred to those who accepted cases without legal training contemptuously as “pettifoggers.” See also LEGAL SYSTEM. CROGHAN, GEORGE (?–31 AUGUST 1782). A fur trader and land speculator, Croghan came to Pennsylvania in about 1741 and achieved great success by living among the Indians, learning their languages, and appreciating their customs. He owned four warehouses in western Pennsylvania on the eve of the French and Indian War, during which he was ruined. Sir William Johnson appointed him deputy superintendent for Indian affairs for the Northern Department in 1756, an office he held until 1772. Croghan was involved in many treaty negotiations and the purchase of vast lands in the west for the English and colonists. He personally speculated in lands on a large scale, which, combined with losses in trade, led him to fall deeply in debt by the 1770s. In the last years of his life, he was supported by Barnard Gratz, a Jewish merchant, one of several with whom he had worked extensively. CROMWELL, OLIVER (25 APRIL 1599–3 SEPTEMBER 1658). Commander of the New Model Army that defeated King Charles I’s forces in the English Civil War, Cromwell became lord protector of England in 1653 with the army’s support after religious factionalism had paralyzed Parliament. Cromwell pursued an aggressive colonial policy, successfully concluding the First Anglo-Dutch War and capturing Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. He believed in religious toleration and supported the Roman Catholic colony of Maryland against challenges from Puritans who lived there and wanted to take it over. He was succeeded by his son Richard Cromwell, a weak ruler who was unable to deal with increasing demand for the return of King Charles II, which occurred in 1660. CROWDS. See RIOTS. CROWN. The king or queen of England, referred to as the crown, was in theory the ruler of the American colonies, but except for Kings Charles II (ruled 1660–1685), James II (ruled 1685–1688), William III (ruled 1688–

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1702), and George III (ruled 1760–1820) paid little attention to the colonists. The monarch was advised by various officials: the Board of Trade, the privy council, the cabinet, and the prime minister after that position came into being in the 1720s. See also ANNE; CHARLES I; ELIZABETH I; GEORGE II; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. CULPEPER, THOMAS (1635–27 JANUARY 1689). Son of the first Lord Culpeper, who owned over five million acres of land in Virginia, in 1677 Culpeper was appointed governor of the colony to succeed William Berkeley. He had no desire to move to America, but in 1680 King Charles II required him to go. He at first was extremely popular, pardoning those involved in Bacon’s Rebellion, but he returned to England after only a few months. In his absence, riots broke out because tobacco prices were falling and disgruntled inhabitants were destroying the crops to cause them to rise again. In 1682, the king insisted that he again return to Virginia, where he hanged some of the rioters, unilaterally raised tobacco prices, and tried to rule without the assembly. He left the colony in 1683 and was put on trial in Britain for leaving his post a second time without permission. He had the charges dropped in return for giving the crown most of his property in Virginia, and he lived the rest of his life on the income from his large English estates. CULPEPER’S REBELLION. In 1677, colonists in the Albemarle Sound region of Carolina, later North Carolina, replaced Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Miller with John Culpeper, who ruled until 1679. Miller was imprisoned for collecting unpopular taxes on tobacco, the region’s main export. Miller escaped after two years, and Culpeper went to England to argue his case. He was acquitted of treason despite Miller’s charges. CURRENCY. In the colonies, currency consisted of specie (gold and silver) and paper notes. Colonies only rarely had the means to issue their own specie currency, and when available used whatever sort (Spanish dollars, British pounds sterling, etc.) of specie they could obtain. Most gold and silver in the colonies was shipped, primarily to Britain, to pay for imported goods. Local exchanges were conducted almost exclusively using the paper money issued by each colony. This money was backed in various ways, in Virginia, by tobacco, but in most cases, by being redeemable for taxes in a year noted on the bills. Taxpayers had to acquire these bills to pay what they owed. Sometimes, however, colonies postponed redemption or allowed people to pay taxes with goods; this depreciated the value of paper money. Currency lost value especially dur-

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ing wartime, when colonial expenses rose greatly and the taxpaying base (of able-bodied men) was decreased through military service. Merchants also issued their own notes that could be exchanged for goods in their warehouses; if their reputations were good, these passed as currency from one hand to another. No colony’s currency was equal in value to pounds sterling by the 1760s. Britain attempted to curtail colonial issuance of paper money with the Paper Bills of Credit Act (or Currency Act) of 1764, but they continued to circulate, and even British governors admitted they were necessary for trade to prosper. See also BANKS; ECONOMY. CUSTOMS SERVICE. The British customs service developed over time to enforce the Acts of Trade and Navigation. Colonial governors were empowered to look into violations and appointed deputies to assist them. As many governors preferred retaining popularity and obtaining bribes from local merchants to the fees obtained from enforcing the law, the imperial administration appointed a variety of officials to look for illegal goods. Specific ports or an entire colony generally had one or more customs collectors, who chose tidewaiters (to board ships before they could land their cargoes) and landwaiters (to do so on land). Before the reorganization of the customs service in 1764, with the creation of American vice-admiralty courts, violators were frequently tried in colonial courts. There juries of their countrymen rarely convicted them, as smuggling of goods to and from foreign ports benefited the local economy. See also LEGAL SYSTEM; TRADE; WRITS OF ASSISTANCE.

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D DAVENPORT, JOHN (APRIL 1597–15 MARCH 1670). A Puritan clergyman in London, England, Davenport came to Boston in 1637. The following year he founded the New Haven Colony. Davenport thought the Massachusetts Puritans were too morally lax, and New Haven became the most rigid of the Puritan colonies and the site of most of the pre-Salem witchcraft executions. Davenport was influential in advising Governor Theophilus Eaton to draw up the “Blue Laws,” which among other things made adultery punishable by death and forbade running, cooking, or housecleaning on the Sabbath. Davenport was a strong opponent of the Half-Way Covenant, which permitted the baptism of children whose parents had yet to achieve full church membership through a conversion experience. He was also a noted preacher of jeremiads, which proclaimed that the second generation of Puritans had lost their sense of mission and deteriorated from the high standards maintained by their fathers. In 1669, following the incorporation of New Haven into Connecticut, he moved to Boston, where he died the following year. See also DECLENSION. DECLENSION. When by the 1660s the Second Coming of Christ had not occurred, and increasing numbers of second-generation Puritans were failing to undergo conversion experiences and acquire church membership, Puritan leaders began criticizing their society for its declension, or decline from the principles and piety of the first generation. Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, and John Davenport were among the leading critics, preaching sermons known as jeremiads. They also blamed troubles that arose, from royal attempts to take away the colonial charters to King Philip’s War, on the growing lack of piety. But the reverse may have been true. Scrupulous young Puritans did not want to be hypocrites and risk their souls by pretending to have received an infusion of the Holy Spirit when it did not occur. It had been easy to prove conversion in England as it could mean undergoing persecution, but in New England the Puritans were in control, and church membership had the advantages of voting and land ownership. In any case, most New Englanders remained loyal to the Congregational Church well into the 18th century. See also HALF-WAY COVENANT.

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DEERFIELD. The northwesternmost town in Massachusetts in the late 17th century, Deerfield was first settled in 1673 and for the next three years fought the Pocumtuck Indians to possess fertile land on the Connecticut River. Isolated from Massachusetts’ other towns, Deerfield was the victim of a surprise attack by about 50 French Canadians and 200 Indians on 29 February 1704 during Queen Anne’s War. Although 56 colonists were killed and 109 more were marched to captivity in Quebec, the town survived and continued to grow. Today, historic Deerfield is one of the best-maintained museum villages illustrating life in colonial America. DEFERENCE. An important, although not uncontested, theory of how the elite governed colonial America is that ordinary folk “deferred” to the judgment of those with more wealth and education, trusted their judgment to handle political and religious affairs, and elected them to office. Historians dispute whether deference was based on respect or was merely “performative”—that is, people appeared to be deferential as it was advantageous to do so. The elite controlled access to land and patronage, could loan money, and were united, while the populace was dispersed. Members of the elite were also judges and militia officers. In any case, people of different classes from the same region usually had common economic interests that cemented ties between them. When an elite without local prestige tried to enforce its rule without popular consent, land riots or some other form of resistance (for example, Bacon’s Rebellion or Leisler’s Rebellion) occurred. See also ASSEMBLY; COUNCIL; GOVERNOR; VOTING. DELANCEY FAMILY. Stephen Delancey (1663–1741) was a wealthy French Huguenot merchant who fled with considerable wealth to New York in 1685, after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had allowed French Protestants freedom of worship. He became a successful merchant and member of the New York assembly. His son James (1703–1760) served as chief justice and later lieutenant-governor of New York, while sons Peter (1705–1770) and Oliver (1708–1785) were also, beginning in the 1730s, among the leaders of one of the two leading political factions in New York, their rivals being the Livingston faction. They ultimately became loyalists during the American Revolution, although they are commemorated with the name of a major street in lower Manhattan, New York. DELAWARE. Originally part of New Sweden, in 1682 Delaware became part of William Penn’s proprietorship of Pennsylvania. Its three counties—New Castle, Kent, and Sussex—were known as the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania until they obtained a separate legislature in 1704. Located on

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the Atlantic Ocean, the inhabitants feared that pacifist Pennsylvania was not voting expenses for defense during Queen Anne’s War. Most of Delaware’s economy was agricultural, with the milling of grain the principal commercial activity. Quakers and Anglicans were the principal religious groups and New Castle and Wilmington the main port towns, which forwarded international commerce primarily to the port of Philadelphia. Slavery flourished in Delaware, with approximately 2,000 blacks by the 1770s. With about 35,000 people, Delaware had the second smallest population of the colonies (except Georgia) by the end of the colonial era. DELAWARE INDIANS. Originally known as the Lenni Lenape Indians, the Delaware were named after Lord De La Warr, an early governor of Virginia who also gave his name to the river valley in which most of them lived. They were the principal inhabitants of eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey when Europeans arrived in the 17th century. Divided into the Wolf, Turtle, and Turkey clans, they lived in small, loosely organized settlements. The pacifist Quakers who encountered them purchased their lands, although the Delaware were largely unaware they were selling lands other than those physically occupied by the Europeans. Land sales, including the Walking Purchase of 1737, pushed the Delaware westward. The Iroquois compelled them to move against their wishes, calling the Delaware “women” who protected their southern border. By the time of the French and Indian War, they were living primarily in what is now western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Most of them joined the war against the British to recover their former territories, and they continued fighting in Pontiac’s War and into the era of the American Revolution; now most live in Oklahoma. See also TAMMAMEND; TEEDYUSCUNG. DE LA WARR, BARON (9 JULY 1577–7 JUNE 1618). Member of the privy council of both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, De La Warr was appointed governor of Virginia in 1610. He arrived with three ships and 150 men at the end of the “starving time,” just as the colony was about to be abandoned. He remained in Virginia for less than a year, suffering severely from the climate. He returned to England in 1611 and died while undertaking a second expedition when he stopped at the Azores Islands. The Delaware River, the colony of Delaware, and the Lenni Lenape Indians who lived in the Delaware Valley are named after him. See also DELAWARE INDIANS. DEMOGRAPHY. The study of population, the demographic history of early America begins with the catastrophic loss of the Indian population. Estimated at between 50 and 100 million for all the Americas, but usually at

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10 million for the region that became the United States, the original population declined by over 90 percent within a hundred years of the first encounter. Epidemic diseases, notably smallpox, were the primary cause, and most Indians died before any major European settlement appeared in the area, which meant fewer people were available to resist the conquest. Also, Indian religious belief systems were severely shaken as their prayers and medicines failed to prevent the deaths. The first Europeans did not fare well either: of 6,000 migrants to Virginia between 1607 and 1625, only 1,000 were still living at the latter date; half of the Pilgrims died during the first winter at Plymouth in 1620–1621. While about 150,000 people immigrated to the southern colonies in the 17th century, only about 100,000 were alive by 1700. In addition to disease, the fact that most of the immigrants were male also kept the population down. However, in New England, and later the middle colonies, the population grew at an exponential rate, doubling every two decades because of the healthy climate and the availability of food, as most people were subsistence farmers. The presence of nearly equal numbers of men and women produced large numbers of children. By 1700, a growth rate unprecedented in human history was under way in British North America (the South had also begun to experience it), in large part because families had on average four or more children who survived to adulthood. From about a quarter million people in 1700, the population of British North America had risen to a million by 1740 and two million by 1770. In the West Indies, disease decimated the population both black and white. A half million immigrants to the British West Indies prior to 1700 resulted in a population of only about 100,000. Most slaves in the islands were male and lived on average only seven years. On the mainland, however, the slave population grew at a rate comparable to the white, reaching about 400,000 by 1770. The islands required constant imports of slaves to keep up the production of sugar (the principal crop) and to ensure that the population did not decline. DE SOTO, HERNANDO (c. 1500–21 MAY 1542). The first man to explore extensively what is now the southeastern United States, de Soto arrived in Cuba from Spain in 1514 and was an important subordinate of Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of Peru in 1531. De Soto returned to Spain with a large fortune in 1534. Fascinated by the adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, in 1539 he set out with 620 men and landed on the west coast of Florida, hoping to conquer an empire of his own. However, for three years his expedition journeyed without success through the present states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee until he died of a fever

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in what is now Arkansas. About 300 of his men survived and returned to Mexico, having brought the first pigs as well as European diseases to the southeast. DINWIDDIE, ROBERT (3 OCTOBER 1692–27 JULY 1770). Son of a Glasgow merchant, Dinwiddie’s involvement in the colonial trade led to his appointment as surveyor-general of the royal customs of the colonies from Pennsylvania to the West Indies in 1738. In 1741, he settled in Virginia, and in 1751 he made arrangements with the Duke of Albemarle, the absentee governor, to become that colony’s lieutenant-governor. Dinwiddie soon came in for criticism from the assembly for imposing, without its consent, a fee of one pistole (about 16 shillings) for every land patent he signed. But he redeemed himself by supporting the planter elite’s efforts to expand westward, hired George Washington to lay claim to the Ohio Valley, and sent the first expedition to the frontier under Washington’s command in 1754, provoking the French and Indian War. He was an able leader in the war, appointing Washington to lead the colony’s forces on the western frontier and obtaining large commitments of men and money from Virginia. He resigned in 1758 and returned to England. DISEASE. See EPIDEMICS; MEDICINE. DISSENTERS. The term “Dissenters” was the general name used, following the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, to refer to Protestants who did not belong to the Anglican Church (Church of England) in either Britain or the colonies. Congregationalists and Presbyterians were the principal groups, although the latter never ceased reminding Anglicans that after the Act of Union (1707) joined Scotland and England, they too represented an established church, the Church of Scotland. Quakers, Reformed Protestants (both Dutch and Calvinists), and Baptists were also considered Dissenters. Dissenters joined together (they had some members of Parliament) as the dissenting interest to protect and extend religious toleration, and they were influential in preserving New England’s established dissenting churches and governments from too much interference. See also RELIGION. DOBBS, ARTHUR (2 APRIL 1689–28 MARCH 1765). A wealthy Anglican landowner and member of the Irish Parliament, Dobbs came to the attention of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole through his writings and plans to enrich the British Empire. He proposed granting more freedom and selfgovernment for Irish Catholics, and in his Scheme to Enlarge the Colonies and Increase Commerce and Trade, published in 1730, he proposed extending

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free trade to the colonies. He also suggested that the Indians be treated fairly and that they be integrated into colonial society by paying bounties for intermarriage with Europeans. He also speculated extensively in lands in North Carolina, which led to his appointment as governor in 1753. He successfully reconciled the feuding northern and southern regions of the colony at first, but beginning in 1760 he ran into opposition from the assembly for appointing too many of his Irish friends to office, for opposing the land claims of descendants of the colony’s original proprietors, and for marrying a 15-year-old girl, Justina Davis, at the age of 73. He died after he had resigned while he was preparing to return to England. DOMINION OF NEW ENGLAND. In 1686, King James II merged Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire into a single colony to be ruled by a governor without any legislative assembly. A Roman Catholic, James was upset by the Puritans’ religious intolerance and their refusal to permit any English authority over them. In 1688, New York and East and West Jersey were added to the Dominion. Sir Edmund Andros was appointed governor, and he became very unpopular for abolishing town meetings, increasing taxes, favoring the Anglican Church, and enforcing the Acts of Trade and Navigation. In 1688, he was overthrown at his capital, Boston, when the inhabitants learned that James II had been ousted in England. His lieutenant-governor in New York, Francis Nicholson, was also removed the following year by Leisler’s Rebellion. See also DUDLEY, JOSEPH. DONGAN, THOMAS (1634–14 DECEMBER 1715). A Roman Catholic Irishman and career soldier, Dongan served as governor of Tangiers in Africa before the Duke of York appointed him lieutenant-governor, in effect governor, of New York in 1683. He immediately summoned the colony’s first general assembly and approved the Charter of Liberties and Privileges that granted it the power to levy taxes and confirmed the right to trial by jury. He also cemented ties with the Iroquois, which drew them away from the French and increased New York’s fur trade. But the duke never approved the charter Dongan granted, and in 1688, having become King James II, he replaced Dongan with Sir Edmund Andros. Because of his connections with James and Catholicism, Dongan fled to Long Island and returned to England when Leisler’s Rebellion overthrew Andros and the Dominion of New England. DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS (c. 1542–JANUARY 1595). An English sea captain regarded as a hero in Britain and a pirate by Spain, Drake began raid-

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ing Spanish settlements in the Caribbean under the command of his cousin John Hawkins in 1568. He did so for nine years; in 1577, Queen Elizabeth sent him to attack the Spanish possessions on the Pacific Coast in Peru and Mexico, which he did before sailing northward. He probably became the first European to sight San Francisco Bay. He then sailed across the Pacific and around the world in his ship The Golden Hind. Elizabeth knighted him for being the first Englishman to accomplish this feat and for the large sum of treasure he seized. Drake was second-in-command of the British fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. He died while on yet another expedition to the West Indies following an unsuccessful attack on San Juan, Puerto Rico. DRINKER, ELIZABETH SANDWITH (27 FEBRUARY 1735–24 NOVEMBER 1807). Married in 1761 to fellow Philadelphia Quaker Henry Drinker, Elizabeth kept a diary from 1758 until her death, and it is one of the most useful sources for interpreting the history of this period. She was a conservative who opposed the American Revolution and came to oppose slavery as well. Women’s friendships, household management, and medical care are especially important topics in her diary. DUDLEY, JOSEPH (23 SEPTEMBER 1647–2 APRIL 1720). Son of Governor Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts, Joseph Dudley graduated from Harvard College in 1665, served in the Massachusetts assembly, and fought in King Philip’s War. He favored accommodation with England and was sent there by the colony in 1682 to negotiate for the preservation of its charter. He came to support a royal government and in 1686 was appointed interim head of the Dominion of New England until Sir Edmund Andros arrived. At that time, he became chief justice of the Dominion, which included New York. While there, he was seized in 1689 during Leisler’s Rebellion, sent first to Boston as a prisoner, and then in 1690 to England for trial for his support of Andros. But he was freed and in 1691 was appointed chief justice of New York by King William III; he resigned the following year during the trial of those who made Leisler’s Rebellion and returned to England. He there began to campaign to become governor of Massachusetts, a goal he achieved in 1702. Despite early opposition from an assembly that remembered his role in opposing the old charter, by 1707 he had won the support of the majority of the legislature as they united under his leadership to participate heavily, although unsuccessfully, in Queen Anne’s War. Dudley was removed in 1715 after his supporters in Britain lost their influence when King George I ascended the throne. See also ACADIA; DUMMER, JEREMIAH; DUMMER, WILLIAM; STOUGHTON, WILLIAM.

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DUDLEY, THOMAS (OCTOBER 1576–31 JULY 1653). A Puritan who was the steward (estate manager) of the Earl of Lincoln, Dudley came to Massachusetts in 1629, settling first in Charlestown and then Newtown. He led the more orthodox wing of the Puritans, was opposed to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and was elected governor for one-year terms in 1634, 1640, 1645, and 1650. He insisted that all the colonists had a right to know the contents of their charter, which paved the way for his election in 1634 and the formation of an assembly elected by all freemen. Anne Bradstreet was a daughter by his first marriage, Governor Joseph Dudley a son by his second. DUMMER, JEREMIAH (1681–19 MAY 1739). A brilliant student who graduated from Harvard College in 1699, Dummer went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. After failing to obtain either a professorship at Harvard or a job as a minister in Massachusetts, he turned to commerce and moved to London, England. There he became agent for Massachusetts in 1710 and Connecticut in 1712, posts he held until 1728 and 1729 respectively. Supporting the colonies’ rights, he penned the powerful A Defence of New England Charters in 1721, which argued that England had achieved much of its greatness thanks to the profitable trade the colonies had developed outside the law with non-English nations and colonies, frequently in opposition to short-sighted attempts to curtail their political and commercial liberty. See also COOKE, ELISHA, JR.; DUMMER, WILLIAM; SHUTE, SAMUEL. DUMMER, WILLIAM (1677–10 OCTOBER 1761). The brother of agent Jeremiah Dummer and son-in-law of Governor Joseph Dudley, Dummer became lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts in 1716 and held that post until 1730. He was the interim governor from 1723 until 1728, during which time he successfully defeated the Abenaki Indians and secured Massachusetts’ settlements in Maine from their attacks. DUNKERS. A Pietist group organized in Germany in 1708, Dunkers were Mennonites (Church of the Brethren) who were distinguished, and mocked by others, for performing baptism only on adults by “dunking” them three times in a body of water. All of them moved to America by 1733 to escape persecution. Their principal settlements were in eastern Pennsylvania, although others lived in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina. They numbered about 1,500 by 1770. See also BAPTISTS.

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DUTCH. The Dutch were the primary ethnic group to settle New Netherland (New York) beginning in 1624. (They should not be confused with the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” who are Germans—the word “Dutch” in that case being a corruption of “Deutsch,” meaning German.) They remained a majority of New York’s population until at the least the 1730s. Dutch patroons, or proprietors, were granted large tracts of land (the Van Rensselaer, Van Cortlandt, Philipse, and Beekman families) and supported the English when they took over in 1664, remaining influential in economic and political life. Ordinary Dutch inhabitants, less happy paying higher taxes and being ruled by foreigners, participated in Leisler’s Rebellion. Ethnic divisions between Dutch and English remained the basis of New York politics until the mid18th century. Dutch influence remained visible in the large proportion of slaves in the New York City region and northern New Jersey—the largest concentration of blacks north of Maryland—and in the persistence of the Dutch language and the Dutch Reformed Church in many towns of the Hudson River Valley. See also DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY. DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH. The principal religion of New Netherland and later New York until at least the 1730s, the Dutch Reformed Church was Calvinist. Sermons, prayers, and hymns constituted the entire service. The church was governed on an international level by the classis of Amsterdam, which outlawed Arminianism (the belief that good works can lead to salvation) and mandated a stern moral code (including forbidding gambling, the theater, and ostentatious clothing). Under English rule, New York Reformed practitioners objected to supporting the Anglican Church financially, while British governor Lord Cornbury attempted unsuccessfully to destroy the Reformed Church by appointing only ministers who were loyal to the Anglican religion. In 1747, the classis permitted the formation of an independent North American classis, which declared its independence in 1754. The Dutch Reformed Church then cooperated with the Presbyterian Church in forming the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY. Founded in 1621, the Dutch West India Company was a private corporation that founded New Netherland in 1624, but whose principal enterprise was Brazil (or New Holland), which it ruled from 1630 to 1654. It also colonized other territories in the West Indies, notably Surinam on the mainland and the islands of Curacao and St. Eustatius. The company mandated religious toleration in its territories, in part to attract investment and (in Brazil) settlement of wealthy Jewish merchants. It also owned slave trading posts in West Africa. After the English

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conquered New Netherland in 1664, the company continued to administer its West Indies territories until 1791. A director-general was in charge of each colony, but to rule successfully he had to consult with local councils consisting of important inhabitants. DYER, MARY (c. 1611–1 JUNE 1660). Originally a Puritan who came to Massachusetts in 1635, Dyer and her husband William supported Anne Hutchinson and were banished from the colony, moving to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and later Rhode Island. Mary Dyer lived in England from 1652 to 1657, where she became a Quaker after hearing George Fox, the religion’s founder, preach. Between 1658 and 1660, she was banished three times from Massachusetts for preaching her faith, which the colony had banned, on the condition she would not return. On her fourth attempt, she was hanged after refusing to promise, once more, that she would never come back. Today, her statue is prominently displayed on the grounds of the statehouse in Boston as a martyr for religious toleration.

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E EAST JERSEY. See NEW JERSEY. EATON, THEOPHILUS (1590–7 JANUARY 1658). The son of the bishop of Chester, Eaton was attracted to Puritanism and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1637. Dissatisfied with the lack of moral and religious rigor, he joined minister John Davenport in relocating. They founded the colony of New Haven in 1639. Eaton was annually elected governor for the rest of his life, and in 1655 he drew up the sternest moral code of all the New England colonies, the famous “Connecticut Blue Laws,” which among other things punished adultery by death and forbade running, cooking, and housecleaning on the Sabbath, and offering hospitality to any non-Protestant. ECONOMY. The economy of early America was overwhelmingly agricultural. The southern colonies produced, at first using indentured servants and later slaves, staple (export) crops, which were sold primarily to Britain for a profit. Tobacco was the main export of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. South Carolina grew rice and indigo, a dye that was used in making blue clothes, the most expensive color. Rice was also grown in the fledgling province of Georgia, founded in 1733. North Carolina also exported naval stores—tar, pitch, and turpentine—required for building ships, for which it received subsidies from Britain. Most southerners, especially those in the backcountry, did not own slaves and were subsistence farmers who also sometimes grew small amounts of tobacco or rice to exchange for imported goods. Plantation owners were the principal exporters and the wealthiest people in the South. In South Carolina, exports were handled by the port of Charleston, located at the conjunction of two rivers and the ocean. The city was easily accessible to most plantations. In Virginia and Maryland, numerous rivers and streams that flowed west-to-east meant British merchants would usually trade with individual plantations on their docks, which were also used by smaller farmers in the area. North Carolina used several ports protected by the numerous islands off its seacoast.

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The middle colonies were devoted principally to subsistence agriculture, but also exported surplus wheat, primarily from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mostly to feed the West Indies’ sugar islands. Farmers used the proceeds from these exports to purchase imported goods from Britain and to pay their taxes. Manufacturing of iron was also important, especially in Pennsylvania, which produced most of the raw iron in the British Empire. Pennsylvania and New York participated in the fur trade, as did the southern colonies to a lesser extent, almost exclusively deerskins and beaver pelts. Fish, the primary export of New England, was also sent to the West Indies. Shipbuilding in the northern cities—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and smaller towns such as Salem, Massachusetts—provided the vessels for the colonial trade. Cities and towns exchanged goods and services with the farmers. Artisans produced barrels, shoes, rope, and farm implements. Goldsmiths and silversmiths were few; they crafted luxury items including tea services and utensils. Merchants were at the apex of the northern economic ladder, selling imported goods such as books, wigs, household furnishings, wine, and clothes. Shopkeepers, unlike merchants, usually sold only one or a limited variety of merchandise. In the North, too, sugar and molasses from the West Indies were converted into rum, an especially important product in Rhode Island. Rhode Island merchants were also the most prominent in the colonial slave trade. Most colonial Americans were able to feed and clothe themselves, and poverty was rare. A substantial class of white servants and tenant farmers existed in both the North and the South, although the expansion of the frontier enabled many to become independent farmers. See also BANKS; CURRENCY; MERCANTILISM. EDEN, CHARLES (1673–26 MARCH 1722). Appointed governor of North Carolina in 1714, a post he held until his death, Eden supported the Anglican Church and lent assistance to South Carolina during the Yamasee War. He is most famous, however, for having allowed Blackbeard the pirate to operate in the colony’s ports, claiming that he had no resources to fight him. The city of Edenton, North Carolina, is named after him. EDUCATION. Unlike in the present world, schools were only responsible for a minor part of colonial education. Education was primarily conducted either in the home or by binding young people out as indentured servants to learn a trade or work on a farm. Petty or dame schools, so called because they were usually run by women, although sometimes by young men or ministers, provided most school instruction, teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. These schools were usually only open during the winter and summer, when the demand for farm labor was less intense. A Massachusetts

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law of 1647 required communities of 50 or more households to open a school; being able to read the Bible and understand sermons was an important way to achieve conversion and thwart “the Old Deluder Satan,” as the law is commonly known. Still, attendance was not required if reading was taught at home. Mostly boys attended school, usually only for two to four years. Pennsylvania’s first laws of 1683 also required all children reaching the age of 12 to be taught to read and write and that boys learn a useful trade. Nevertheless, nearly all white colonial men and a majority of women attained at least some literacy. At the age of 10 or 12, a small number of boys, mostly of the middle and upper class, went on to grammar schools that taught Greek, Latin, and some science and history based on the instructor’s knowledge. Only the Moravians had academies at this level for girls. Colleges collectively enrolled only a few hundred students a year, all male, at the end of the colonial era. Aside from offering general knowledge to middle- and upper-class boys (usually aged between 14 and 20), the only career for which they prepared students was the ministry. Men seeking to learn the law or become physicians studied with a practitioner after college: lawyers were admitted to practice by the courts in the respective colonies, whereas physicians simply set up practice. See also COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY; HARVARD COLLEGE; LEGAL SYSTEM; MEDICINE. EDWARDS, JONATHAN (5 OCTOBER 1703–22 MARCH 1758). The Congregational minister of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most important early American theologian, Edwards succeeded to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard’s pulpit in 1727 after having graduated and worked as a tutor at Yale College. Beginning in the early 1730s, he had intense experiences of religious conversion and became, through his effective preaching and published sermons, a model for a general revival of religion, first in his congregation and then throughout the colonies, known as the Great Awakening. In his works he stressed the utter depravity of human beings and the need for an overwhelming emotional experience of the Holy Spirit to attain salvation. His most important work was the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), but he is most remembered for the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), in which he termed people more vile in the sight of God than spiders, perpetually suspended over the pit of Hell into which they would fall except for divine mercy. Edwards’s strenuous insistence that his congregation experience conversion and lead blameless lives led them to dismiss him in 1750. He then served as a missionary to the Stockbridge Indians before becoming the president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1758. He died almost immediately upon assuming office when

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he had himself inoculated in the hope of demonstrating the effectiveness of this procedure to prevent smallpox. See also CHAUNCY, CHARLES. ELIOT, JOHN (c. 1604–21 MAY 1690). The principal Puritan minister to take an interest in converting the Indians, Eliot came to Massachusetts in 1631 and served as the minister of the First Church of Roxbury and founded the Roxbury Latin School. He was probably a coauthor of the Bay Psalm Book. In 1663, he translated the Bible into Algonquin and in 1666 published an Indian grammar. He founded 14 towns for praying Indians and lived at the one in Natick, one of the few to survive King Philip’s War. ELIZABETH I, QUEEN OF ENGLAND (7 SEPTEMBER 1533–24 MARCH 1603). Daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558 at a time when there was bitter division in her realm between Protestants and Roman Catholics. She supported the Anglican Church primarily as a national church and compromise between the Catholics and Puritans, who wanted further reforms such as simplifying services, abolishing bishops, and having congregations elect their own clergy. In the 1570s, faced with increasing threats from Spain, she supported Sir Francis Drake’s attacks on the Spanish empire and the unsuccessful Roanoke colony planned by her favorite, Sir Walter Raleigh. In appreciation of the fact that she did not marry and thus subject England to a foreign ruler, she was known as the Virgin Queen, after whom the colony of Virginia was named. See also CROWN. ELLIS, HENRY (24 AUGUST 1721–21 JANUARY 1806). Noted for his scientific explorations of Hudson Bay, Ellis was appointed governor of Georgia in 1757. He brought the Creek Indians over to the British side in the French and Indian War and successfully governed a formerly turbulent province. He resigned due to ill health in 1761 but became an important adviser to the British government, suggesting the expedition that captured Havana from Spain in 1762 and its exchange for Florida at the war’s end. He also drafted the Proclamation of 1763. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. ENDECOTT, JOHN (1588–15 MARCH 1665). Endecott led the first Puritan group of immigrants to New England, who settled at Salem in 1628. He defended the town’s minister Roger Williams from the Massachusetts elite’s criticisms, and served a brief term in prison for his contempt. He is most famous for ordering the red cross cut from the flag of Salem’s militia, which he commanded, as a sign of idolatry or Roman Catholicism. This act

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was repudiated by the colony’s leaders as it might be construed as denying the authority of the British crown. He governed Massachusetts from 1659 until 1662 and oversaw the expulsion of the Quakers and the execution of those, including Mary Dyer, who refused to leave. ENLIGHTENMENT. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in Europe and then in 18th-century colonial America which stressed reason rather than faith as the ultimate test of truth and a guide for human behavior. It also believed that the present age had begun an era of progress that was leading to a marked improvement in the human condition. The ideas of the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) were most important in shaping the American Enlightenment. His major work on politics, the Second Treatise of Government, argued that government exists to preserve the rights of the people and they can legitimately rebel if it does not. His pamphlet, the Letter Concerning Toleration, maintained that religious toleration is both God’s will—Jesus converted people peacefully—and beneficial to society—it prevents violence over which religion is correct. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sought to prove that people only learn about the world through experience and are capable of shaping it through science and experimentation for human betterment. The most notable figure of the colonial American Enlightenment was Benjamin Franklin, others being Cadwallader Colden, John Bartram, and William Bartram. Organizations inspired by it included societies to improve agriculture in various colonies, the Freemasons, and the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1769. Most American Enlightenment thinkers (such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush) made their major contributions during the age of the American Revolution. ENVIRONMENT. The arrival of Europeans changed forever the environment of the Americas. Although the Indians had clearings for settlements and farms, the vast majority of North America consisted of large trees, nearly all of which were felled by 1900—what dominates the landscape now is second, third, or later growth. Indians considered themselves as but one element of the environment extending from parts of the landscape such as trees, rivers, and rocks to animals, and then to spirits that ruled the sky and earth. Europeans, on the contrary, believed they possessed mastery of a world that was theirs to use for their own purposes. Early European agriculture was wasteful as land was abundant: by the time of the American Revolution, nearly all of the good land up to the Appalachian Mountains was farmed. Tree stumps were frequently left in the middle of fields, and stones were removed to make stone walls that can still

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be found throughout the reforested woods. Fur-bearing animals were hunted to near extinction, requiring Indians and trappers to move westward to acquire the pelts. In the southern colonies, tobacco exhausted the soil within two or three generations, making it necessary for farmers to move west. Only in the late colonial period were some societies formed to encourage scientific farming (letting fields lie fallow, planting crops such as clover to replenish the soil, breeding meatier cows), but such knowledge was restricted to a small segment of the elite. EPHRATA CLOISTER. The religious community at Ephrata was founded in 1732 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by Conrad Beissel (1691–1768) after he split from the Mennonite church. His community was centered at the cloisters where the brothers and sisters dwelled. They remained celibate, farmed communally, and lived austere lives. They wore long white robes, ate the minimal amount of food needed to remain alive, and slept on narrow wooden boards. Householders who married lived in the surrounding area. The inhabitants were pacifists and gave generously to the poor. Music was an important part of their service, and they produced beautiful works of fraktur, or illustrated manuscripts, some of which they printed at their own publishing house. Birds and flowers were prominent in these works. An Ephrata resident, Peter Miller, produced the 1,512 page Martyr’s Mirror, describing and illustrating the sufferings of Baptist martyrs in Germany. It was the largest and arguably the most beautiful book produced in colonial America. The community survived until 1934, although the last celibate member died in 1813. EPIDEMICS. Epidemics were frequent in early America. The worst epidemic conditions occurred among the Indians, who probably lost 90 percent of their preconquest population due to disease, principally smallpox. But smallpox, which covers the body with terrible sores, also killed about 10 percent of the white population and infected about 25 percent. Major epidemics occurred in New England (1628–1631, 1639, 1648–1649, 1677–1678, 1689–1690, 1702–1703, 1721, 1752, 1760–1761); Virginia (1679–1680, 1696); South Carolina (1696, 1711–1712, 1738, 1760–1761); and sporadically throughout the colonies from 1715 to 1730. Deaths decreased after 1721 in Boston and by the 1760s in South Carolina, as an inoculation technique was developed by Boston’s Dr. Zabdiel Boylston based on information he received on African practices from Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus. Although inoculation reduced mortality, it still required giving patients a small dose of the disease, which could prove deadly, as it did to Jonathan Edwards when he agreed to be inoculated in 1756 to demonstrate the technique’s effectiveness. (Vaccina-

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tion, based on injecting the far less risky cowpox virus, was only discovered by Edward Jenner in 1796.) Second to smallpox was yellow fever, spread by mosquitoes (of which colonials were unaware), which turned the skin yellow and caused jaundice and liver damage in fatal cases. Epidemics occurred in New York (1693, 1702); Boston (1696); Charleston and Philadelphia (1699, 1762); Charleston (1706); Charleston and New York (1732); and Virginia (1734, 1741). Measles, deadly at the time, struck Boston in 1657–1658, 1687, 1713, 1729, 1739–1740, and in various places in 1747, 1759, and 1772. Throat distemper (sore throats) proved deadly in Boston in 1659, Philadelphia in 1763, and New York in 1769. An influenza epidemic struck the colonies in general in 1775–1776. Most of the victims of epidemics lived in the seaport cities, where sanitation was bad and contact with foreigners frequent. See also DEMOGRAPHY; MEDICINE. ERIC THE RED. See NORSEMEN. EVANGELICALS. See GREAT AWAKENING.

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F FAMILY. In early America, as in Europe at the time, the family did not typically consist of a husband, wife, and children alone (the “nuclear family”). The family could include servants, unmarried or elderly relatives, and in fact whoever lived under one roof, although the “extended family” (three generations under one roof) was rare. The family was considered a “little commonwealth” in which the father ruled and others obeyed. Families were the principal sites of education, and poor people, including the old, sick, and orphans, were frequently placed in families by local authorities. Sometimes these people were auctioned off to whoever offered to support them for the smallest payment of public money, which sometimes encouraged poor treatment, but in many cases families took in those they had known or with whom they sympathized. Clans, rather than families, were the basis of Indian society. Most lineages passed on through the mother, who lived with her children in the household of her eldest brother. Indians were more promiscuous than whites; unmarried folk could engage in sexual intercourse, and divorce, forbidden in nearly all the Christian world, simply required an agreement between the parties. The black family was not recognized, except among the small number of free blacks, in British North America. Some masters encouraged marriages, although not formally recognized, as a way of keeping slaves together and less likely to run away. Others engaged in promiscuous relations with slave women, sometimes freeing the children of these unions. In general, masters encouraged slave women to have children, as this added to their wealth and productivity. In Roman Catholic counties, however, slaves were baptized and their marriages recognized. FAUQUIER, FRANCIS (1703?–3 MARCH 1768). Son of a director of the Bank of England and an intellectual interested in science and philosophy, Fauquier became governor of Virginia in 1758. He was at first popular with the assembly and people, largely for the reason he was rebuked by the imperial administration, for allowing them to flout the crown’s authority. For example, he consented that the assembly pass the Two-Penny Act in 1758, which fixed the salaries of Anglican clergy and other government officials

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in cash—the price of tobacco was soaring in a time of shortage—instead of calculating their wages in pounds of tobacco. He also permitted Virginia to pass a paper currency act in 1764 despite royal instructions to the contrary. He was unable, however, to stem the tide of colonial resistance that began with the Stamp Act, and he died in office. FIRES. The mostly wooden cities of early America were prone to fire. A fire destroyed much of colonial Jamestown a year after it was founded in 1608. The most devastating fire in early America occurred in Boston in 1760, when 349 buildings, or about a fifth of those in the town, were burned. Cities passed laws to prevent fires: Boston’s ban on thatched roofs and wooden chimneys was the first. New Netherland appointed fire wardens in 1648. By 1750, all five colonies had fire companies or fire societies that assembled not only to fight fires but to save the belongings of victims from possible looters. Passing of buckets from wells or other water sources was the only means available to quench the flames. Benjamin Franklin established the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia in 1736, the city’s first volunteer association. FISHERIES. The quantity of fish off the coast of Newfoundland in the Grand Banks was great, and this area was used by English, Basque (Spanish), French, and Portuguese fishermen even before the first voyages of Christopher Columbus. They probably landed on the coast of North America, but the European nations did not use this as a basis for permanent settlement. Once New England was settled, towns from Connecticut to Maine made fishing, and selling the surplus to the West Indies, the principal basis of their economy. Vessels were usually small and were staffed by local networks consisting of family and community members, unlike larger oceangoing vessels, which relied on multinational crews of sailors. Struggle between Britain and France over the fisheries continued until the French and Indian War, when the Treaty of Paris in 1763 left France only the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon to continue its enterprises. FITCH, THOMAS (c. 1700–18 JULY 1774). After graduating from Yale College in 1721, Fitch served in the Connecticut assembly and council, then as lieutenant-governor, and finally as governor from 1754 until 1766. He supported the Saybrook Platform, which provided for associations of ministers to govern the Congregational Church in the colony, thus opposing the New Lights and the Great Awakening, which favored allowing each congregation to run its own affairs. He also opposed expanding the colony into what is now northern Pennsylvania. He lost his post, to which Connecticut voters elected him annually, when he believed his oath as a colonial governor required him to enforce the Stamp Act even though he disagreed with it.

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FLETCHER, BENJAMIN (14 MAY 1640–28 MAY 1703). A career soldier who served King William III and assisted in his accession to the throne, Fletcher was appointed governor of New York and the Jerseys in 1692 and was placed in charge of organizing the forces of all the colonies north of Maryland during King William’s War. He was only successful in imposing his authority in New York and the Jerseys, where he used his troops to fix elections and allowed members of the legislature to engage in piracy and a corrupt trade in provisions and furs to win their support. A Tory, he was ousted in 1698 when the Whigs came to power in England. FLORIDA. Although it was explored by the Spaniards Ponce de Leon, Cabeza de Vaca, and Hernando de Soto beginning in 1513, Florida’s first permanent settlement (the oldest in the United States), St. Augustine, was established in 1565. Under their leader Pedro Menendez de Avila, Spaniards destroyed the French Fort Caroline that had been built three years earlier and massacred its garrison. In the 18th century, Florida became a haven for slaves escaping from the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, many of whom joined the Seminole Indians. The British attempted to capture St. Augustine in 1740 during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and they finally obtained possession of Florida in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War. The other important town in Florida was Pensacola. The colony’s European population numbered about 3,000 at the time. See also SPANISH EMPIRE. FLUSHING REMONSTRANCE. Signed in 1657 by a group of inhabitants in Flushing, a village now in the borough of Queens, New York, the remonstrance asked Pietr Stuyvesant, director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, to stop persecuting Quakers. Stuyvesant had been jailing and fining Quakers and Baptists who had moved to the colony from New England. None of the signers were Quakers themselves. In 1662, Stuyvesant banished John Bowne from Flushing and sent him to the Netherlands for allowing Quakers to meet at his house. Bowne petitioned the Dutch West India Company to overrule Stuyvesant, and they allowed Quakers to worship in the colony beginning in 1663, a provision which was continued when the English conquered New Netherland in 1664. FORT DUQUESNE. See PITTSBURGH. FORT NIAGARA. The first fort near Niagara Falls was built on the northwestern tip of what is now New York by the French in 1679. In 1726 they built a larger fort, which was used for the fur trade with the Iroquois Indians. It was captured by Sir William Johnson and joint British and colonial forces in 1759 during the French and Indian War. The fort remained in

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British hands until 1796, when the Jay Treaty compelled the British to withdraw 13 years after American independence had been won. FORT NECESSITY. See WASHINGTON, GEORGE. FORT OSWEGO. Built in 1727 by the British on the shore of Lake Ontario, Fort Oswego was conquered and destroyed by the Marquis de Montcalm and French/Canadian forces during the French and Indian War in 1756. FORT PITT. See PITTSBURGH. FORT TICONDEROGA. This massive structure was built in 1755 at the southern tip of Lake Champlain in New York by the French during the French and Indian War. They named it Fort Carillon. It commanded the water route between Canada and New York City. A British force of 16,000 men under General James Abercrombie failed to capture it in 1758; the following year, as there were few French defenders (most had withdrawn to defend Quebec), British General Jeffrey Amherst captured and renamed it. It remains standing as one of the best examples of an 18th-century fortification. FORT WILLIAM HENRY. This fort was constructed in New York at the southern end of Lake George in 1755 by British forces commanded by Sir William Johnson. It was built during the French and Indian War to defend the water route to New York against French invasions from Quebec. In 1757, its 2,200 defenders, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel George Munro, were forced to surrender to a combined force of about 8,000 French, Indians, and Canadians led by the Marquis de Montcalm. Although Montcalm had agreed to let the defenders leave with the honors of war, his Indian allies began to attack the prisoners and killed between 70 and 150 of them before Montcalm and the French troops could restore order. The French then burned the fort; a replica now stands. Much of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans concerns the capture of this fort. FORTS. Two types of forts were constructed during the colonial era. Small posts were usually erected to guard frontiers. During the French and Indian War, the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania erected over 40 forts. These wooden enclosures mainly served as centers where scattered farmers could retreat and defend themselves when Indians allied with the French invaded an undefended region. They were usually located in clearings or meadows; frequently, a single entrance was placed on an elevated floor, with a ladder that could be taken up providing the only way of obtaining access. Smaller

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Source: Library of Congress.

In 1756, following the capture of Fort William Henry, the Indian allies of the French began to massacre the captives who had been promised safe conduct. The French general, the Marquis de Montcalm, risked his own life to put an end to the slaughter.

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military forts, such as Fort Necessity commanded by George Washington, were also made of wood. Larger forts, such as Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh), Fort William Henry, Louisbourg, and Fort Ticonderoga were modeled after designs of the French engineer the Marquis de Vauban (1633–1707). The structure was shaped like a five-point star. Raised mounds of earth surrounded a deep moat, which in turn protected the massive stone fort defended by cannons and infantry. They were almost impregnable and were usually destroyed by the defenders rather than being surrendered to an overwhelming enemy. FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (6 JANUARY 1706–17 APRIL 1790). Franklin is one of the few individuals in world history to be prominent as a scientist, writer, and statesman. Born in Boston, he moved to Philadelphia at age 16 where he became an important printer: his most famous publication was Poor Richard’s Almanack. He also founded the Library Company, open by subscription to members, and the Junto, a discussion group where middleclass men could acquire the sort of education usually available only to the upper-class in colleges. These were examples of the voluntary associations he began for improving life in the city, which also included street-paving and fire companies. His scientific experiments led to the discovery of positive and negative electrical charges and the invention of the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, and bifocal eyeglasses. Franklin became involved in public affairs during the French and Indian War. He organized a voluntary defense force and advanced his own money to pay for military suppliers before the British funds arrived. In 1757, he became the province agent to represent Pennsylvania at the British court. He at first attempted to have Pennsylvania changed from a proprietary to a royal government, but he became discontented with British policies to tax the colonies and regulate colonial trade and became the primary spokesman in Britain for American rights. His Autobiography, telling of his rise from poverty to greatness, is the classic boy makes good through hard work and intelligence story that has come to define an important part of the American character. Returning to America from England in 1775, Franklin served on the congressional committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence, as the United States minister to France who negotiated an alliance against the British in 1778, as a delegate who signed the Peace of Paris in 1783 ending the War for Independence, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. See also ENLIGHTENMENT; FRANKLIN, WILLIAM; FREEMASONS; FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR; LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA; PENN FAMILY; POLITICS; POST OFFICE.

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An engraving of Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment, page 159 in Natural Philosophy for Common and High Schools (1881), by Le Roy C. Cooley.

FRANKLIN, WILLIAM (1731–16 NOVEMBER 1813). The illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, William Franklin served as his father’s assistant in his scientific experiments and printing business and accompanied him to Britain in 1757 when the elder Franklin became Pennsylvania’s colonial agent. In 1762, he was appointed governor of New Jersey through his father’s influence. He ruled effectively and humanely before the colonial crisis, proposing that roads and bridges be built, pardoning women imprisoned for

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adultery and people imprisoned for debt, and presiding over a trial in which New Jersey men who killed an Indian prisoner during Pontiac’s War were executed. However, he strictly upheld British authority beginning with the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and went into exile following the American Revolution, during which he organized loyalist forces. FRANKS FAMILY. The leading Jewish merchant in colonial New York, Jacob Franks (1688–1769) married Abigail Levy (1696–1756), whose letters to her son Napthali—who was sent to England to work with family members— are an important source for understanding Jewish and upper-class life in the colonies. She refused to speak to her daughter Phila (1722–1811) ever again after she married the Christian Oliver Delancey. David Franks (1720–1793), their son, opened a branch of the family business in Philadelphia. He and his father served as agents for Moses Franks (1718–1789), another son, who became enormously wealthy and belonged to a consortium of four merchants in London that supplied the British army in North America from 1760 until the American Revolution. David Franks was falsely accused of treason during the American Revolution; he was acquitted by two juries but was forced to leave Philadelphia by mob pressure. He returned in 1785 and became cashier of the Bank of North America. The Franks were also involved in the fur trade through their agents in Pittsburgh and upstate New York. FREEMASONS. Also known simply as Masons, the Freemasons were a European-wide movement that preached international brotherhood and toleration. They strongly distrusted organized religion. Within the society, all men regardless of their social position were considered “brothers” and equals, although membership was exclusively male and usually consisted of the upper and middle class. The first London lodge was organized in 1717. Masonic groups emerged in all the colonial cities in the 1730s; the first lodge in Boston was founded in 1733. Benjamin Franklin became grand master of the Philadelphia lodge in 1734. George Washington was another prominent Freemason, and Jews joined in disproportionate numbers as they were accepted without prejudice. See also ENLIGHTENMENT. FRELINGHUYSEN, THEODORE (1691–c. 1747). Born Theodorus Frelinghuysen in Germany, he was educated at a Dutch Reformed university and was sent to minister to several parishes in New Jersey in 1720. He immediately began criticizing most of his parishioners for their lack of godliness, and he limited Holy Communion to those who convinced him of their piety. He was an influential force during the Great Awakening and worked closely with the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent in spreading a more fervent, evangelical religion, much to the dislike of the more conservative members of his church. He suffered from temporary insanity and disappeared in 1747.

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FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR (1754–1763). This conflict, now also known as the “Great War for the Empire,” a term coined by historian Lawrence Henry Gipson, began in 1754 when French Canadian and Virginia forces clashed over control of the Ohio Valley. For the first time, the British government made a colonial skirmish—the defeat of Colonel George Washington at Fort Necessity—the cause of an international conflict, instead of (as in the past) the colonies being ordered to fight when a war was triggered in Europe. The war went badly at first for the British, with the defeat of Braddock’s expedition in 1755. Subsequent attacks by Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier pushed what had been significant settlement in the western and northern parts of the colony back across the Susquehanna River. The same year, a French force invading New York was repulsed by Sir William Johnson near Lake George. Next, the French built Fort Ticonderoga and the British built Fort William Henry in an attempt to control the water corridor between New York and Canada. In 1756, Prime Minister William Pitt assumed power in Britain; to urge the colonists to pursue a more aggressive war, he promised them assistance with their expenses. In the end, over a million pounds sterling was paid. In 1756 and 1757, the British again sent large armies to the colonies without success. In 1758, Sir Jeffrey Amherst became the British commander in chief and captured Louisbourg, which guarded the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. This made entry into Canada possible. Another British army under General James Forbes approached the French Fort Duquesne at the site of present-day Pittsburgh, forcing its outnumbered defenders to withdraw. In 1759, James Wolfe defeated the main French force in Canada at Quebec. Later in 1759, the British fleet decisively defeated the French navy at Quiberon Bay, preventing it from further reinforcing its troops in the Americas. The following year, Amherst took Montreal. The Spanish joined the war on France’s side in 1762, but with disastrous results: the British captured Havana, Cuba. Meanwhile in Europe, Britain was able to use its superior navy and massive payments to its only major ally, Frederick the Great of Prussia, to hold off a coalition of France, Russia, and Austria. The war ended when Russia’s new czar, Peter II, pulled out of the conflict. Britain gained Canada and Florida. The Indians, however, were not defeated, and Pontiac’s War began almost immediately after the Peace of Paris of 1763, as the British were unable to keep the colonists from infringing on territory guaranteed to the Indians by the Proclamation of 1763. During the war, both the British and the colonists became dissatisfied with each other despite the ultimate victory. The British were angered by the colonists’ failure to unite (as at the abortive Albany Congress of 1754), to fight effectively, and by their extensive trading with the enemy. Still, the colonists raised over 20,000 troops during the course of the war, defended their own frontiers, and objected to the arrogance of British officers who refused to

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recognize their officers as equals or to employ them in more than support tasks. While both sides celebrated the victory, it meant different things. The colonists thought they had fought for access to western lands (which the British tried to cut off with the Proclamation of 1763) and to preserve their liberties; the British had come to see themselves as a centralized empire and set out to reform what they saw as abuses of the colonial system: the failure of the colonies to pay for their own defense and violations of the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which kept enemy colonies from being starved out during the war. The subsequent imperial regulations and colonial resistance led to the American Revolution. See also ABERCROMBIE, JAMES; BATTLE OF KITTANNING; DINWIDDIE, ROBERT; HALIFAX, EARL OF; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION; LOUDON, EARL OF. FRENCH CANADIANS. The population of Quebec, or Canada, at the time of the French and Indian War consisted of about 80,000 people, 8,000 of whom lived in Quebec, the largest and capital city. Most were habitants, or inhabitants, who lived on farms that were adjacent to the St. Lawrence and other rivers in southern Canada, which enabled them to send and receive goods. They were officially tenants on seigneuries—or manors—governed by seigneurs, but paid low rents and taxes. Complaints about manorial justice— which was dispensed without juries—were few. The elite realized that the population could easily escape to the frontier and leave them without productive tenants. Land was plentiful and labor was scarce. The second most important occupation in Canada was the fur trade, in which men ventured west as far as the Rocky Mountains and south to Louisiana. Many of these married or lived with Indian women. That they were few in number and did not seek land explains why French relations with the Indians were generally far better than those of the British or Spanish. Fishing was important along the Atlantic Coast. In Canada, the clergy, both religious orders of nuns and brothers as well as parish priests, were important as moral and spiritual guides and sources of employment. Several thousand French soldiers, many of whom were longterm residents, were also stationed in Canada. See also FRENCH EMPIRE. FRENCH EMPIRE. French colonies in the Americas included Canada (or Quebec) and, at various times, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Bartholomew, St. Croix, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Martin, St. Vincent, and Tobago in the West Indies. (Most of these islands changed hands between the French, Spanish, British, and Dutch during various wars.) The most important French colony was Saint-Domingue (Haiti), the western third of the island of Hispaniola, which by the 1750s was the richest sugar-producing island in the world. The population of the West Indies colonies consisted

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mostly of slaves, although free people of color had most of the rights of white inhabitants and could follow trades and accumulate wealth. (They could not hold government posts, however.) France also ruled Louisiana from its founding until 1763, when it ceded it to Spain before obtaining it again shortly before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. French colonies were jointly administered by a governor, in charge of military defense and law and order, and an intendant, charged with fiscal administration. Although in theory their rule was absolute, as was that of the king of France, in practice they needed to conciliate local notables to rule successfully. The seigneurial system borrowed from France existed, where nobles ruled estates composed of habitants in Canada, or slaves and tenants elsewhere. Priests and the religious orders in monasteries and convents were also prominent. The French colonies were at war with Britain during King William’s, Queen Anne’s, King George’s, and the French and Indian War. See also FRENCH CANADIANS. FROBISHER, MARTIN (c. 1539–15 NOVEMBER 1594). Frobisher was an English explorer who made three expeditions, in 1576, 1577, and 1578, to find the Northwest Passage to Asia. His voyages took him to the northeastern islands and the mainland of Canada. He is famous for mistaking “fool’s gold” for the genuine article and bringing back over a thousand tons on his first voyage. He was later knighted for services in repulsing the Spanish Armada in 1588. FRONTENAC, COUNT; LOUIS DE BUADE (22 MAY 1622–28 NOVEMBER 1698). Frontenac governed New France, or Canada, from 1672 to 1682 and again from 1689 until his death. His stern but efficient rule is responsible for the effectiveness with which the French fought the English in King William’s War and for stabilizing a vast territory with a small, diffuse population. He was recalled in 1682 for quarreling with the powerful clergy, but the inability of his successor to handle attacks by the hostile Iroquois led to Frontenac’s return. The remark with which he greeted Sir William Phips’s demand that he surrender Quebec when Massachusetts attacked it in 1690—“I have no reply to make to your general other than from the mouths of my cannons and muskets”—perfectly illustrates his fearless, militant character. See also FRENCH EMPIRE. FRONTIER. The frontier is generally defined as an area in which the first European settlers were either exploring or beginning settlement. Sometimes “backcountry” is used to mean the same thing. The frontier was thus a region that shifted over time. Since Frederick Jackson Turner in 1890 published his essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historians have questioned whether his thesis about its cultural nature is correct.

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He argued that the frontier was the source of American individualistic and democratic values, a region of opportunity, and a “safety valve” where discontented individuals, who might otherwise be criminals or revolutionaries in overcrowded cities, could either make good or vent their hostility with little harm to the larger society. Other scholars argue that the newer regions of the United States were settled principally by communities rather than individuals, and that they immediately, or very quickly, created replicas of their former homes and sought to instill traditional forms of order through religion and education. The idea of an uncouth, violent frontier appears in much American literature, beginning with the colonial era in William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line and Reverend Charles Woodmason’s 1766 journal of his trip to the backcountry of North Carolina and South Carolina. FUR TRADE. The fur trade was the principal enterprise during the earliest days of several American colonies. The first profitable exports of Canada, New Netherland and its successor New York, and South Carolina were deer and beaver skins. The Indians had long killed these animals for food and clothing, but the infusion of European cash and trading goods (such as guns and alcohol) caused the animals nearest the Europeans to be depleted. The Indians thus turned westward, fighting more intensively with former and new enemies to supply the demand. The fur trade also altered the Indians’ attitude toward nature: they had formerly usually killed animals they needed for their own use, but as skins became a commodity, they tended more to adopt the European attitude that the world and its creatures were simply created for human use. Wars also turned more deadly with the infusion of guns and the desire to permanently occupy lands rich in furs. See also BEAVER WARS; ENVIRONMENT; FRENCH CANADIANS.

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G GEORGE I, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN (28 MAY 1660–22 JUNE 1727). Chosen by Parliament to inherit the crown of Great Britain in 1714 on the death of Queen Anne in order to keep a Protestant on the throne, George was the elector of Hanover, a German principality. He took little interest in colonial affairs. The Whig Party dominated his administration as the Tories were linked to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 that attempted to place the Roman Catholic son of King James II on the throne. The campaign against pirates in the 1720s was the most notable feature of his reign with respect to the colonies, as the Whigs appointed politically well-connected people to rule them and did not push for tighter imperial regulation. The first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, dates from his reign, as George did not speak English well enough to communicate with his ministers. See also GEORGE II. GEORGE II, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN (10 NOVEMBER 1683–25 OCTOBER 1760). The son of King George I, George II was a hero in the American colonies given the massive assistance they received during the French and Indian War, the successful conclusion of which was assured by the time of his death. During most of his reign, imperial administration was handled by the Duke of Newcastle and, after 1748, in consultation with the Earl of Halifax and William Pitt. At the age of 60, he was the last British king to physically command an army on the battlefield, where he won a victory at Dettingen, which endeared him even more to his subjects. See also CROWN; GEORGE I; GEORGE III. GEORGE III, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN (24 MAY 1738–29 JANUARY 1820). Grandson of King George II, George III was the first British ruler born in England since Queen Anne in 1665. He was educated to be an active monarch by the Scots Earl of Bute, whom he appointed his first prime minister. Unlike his predecessors, he firmly championed imperial regulation of the colonies, including the Proclamation of 1763 restricting settlement to the area east of the Appalachians, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and subsequent taxes and restrictions on trade which provoked the American

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Revolution. The irony is that although the colonists blamed British corruption for their woes, they were really caused by a concerned, dedicated king and officials whose vision of the empire differed significantly from theirs. His successor was his son George IV (1820–1830), who had served periodically as regent during his father’s reign beginning in the late 1780s, when George III began to suffer from a disease, porphyria, which produced symptoms similar to insanity. See also CROWN; GEORGE II. GEORGIA. The last of the British colonies that later became part of the United States, Georgia was founded as a penal colony in 1733 by philanthropic British trustees, one of whom, James Oglethorpe (1696–1785), became the first governor. The inhabitants were supposed to farm their own land, slavery and alcohol were prohibited, and inhabitants were assigned plots of land in communities of which Savannah became the principal city. Georgia was also intended to be a base to harass or possibly conquer the Spanish in Florida, and during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, each side mounted an unsuccessful expedition against the other. The trusteeship broke down, however, as unruly colonists ran away seeking slaves, more personal freedom, and larger parcels of land in South Carolina. In 1752, Georgia became a royal colony, and the restrictions on slave owning, landholding, and drinking were lifted. By 1770, about a third of Georgia’s 25,000 inhabitants were slaves. Rice was the principal cash crop. GERMANS. Also known as “Dutch” (a corruption of “Deutsch,” meaning German, not to be confused with the ethnic Dutch from Holland), by 1770 the Germans were the largest ethnic group in Pennsylvania—the only colony without an ethnically English majority—numbering about a third of the population. William Penn had journeyed to the Rhineland in the 1670s, acquainting himself with many of the pacifists there, and advertised for these Germans to settle Pennsylvania and receive land when he obtained title to that colony in 1682. Germantown, about 10 miles north of Philadelphia, was soon built, but most Germans lived further west on farms. The counties of Lancaster, York, Berks, and Northampton were heavily German by the eve of the American Revolution. Over 90 percent of the Germans belonged to the Lutheran or Reformed churches, although the pacifist groups such as the Amish, Mennonites, Moravians, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Ephrata Cloister, and Society of the Woman in the Wilderness have attracted more attention because of their unusual customs. Until the Revolution, the Germans generally stayed out of politics and supported the Quaker party, which had encouraged their emigration. Prominent Germans included the Christopher Saurs I, II, and III,

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The young George III, painted in his coronation robes in 1760 by Allan Ramsay. National Portrait Gallery, London.

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who founded the first German-language press in the colonies at Germantown; Count Zinzendorf, leader of the Moravians; and Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania’s principal negotiator with the Indians. Other significant groups of Germans lived in Georgia, where Protestants from Salzburg, Austria, obtained religions freedom. Moravians moved to Salem, North Carolina, from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, whereas about 3,000 Palatine Germans settled upstate New York in 1709. German settlers in the backcountries of North and South Carolina and Virginia moved southward from Pennsylvania following the French and Indian War. GERMANTOWN PROTEST. The first antislavery protest in British North America was drafted in Germantown, Pennsylvania, by Lutheran leader Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1688 and signed by himself and three Germantown Quakers. They were Germans from Krefeld who had converted to Quakerism and were angered that English Quakers owned slaves. They based their argument on the Golden Rule—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—and warned that slaves were morally justified in revolting, and had many times in the past. The petition was presented at the Abington Friends meeting and forwarded to the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania meetings with no effect, although Quakers such as Benjamin Lay, Anthony Benezet, and John Woolman would resume the Quaker protest against slavery in the next generation. GILBERT, SIR HUMPHREY (1537–9 SEPTEMBER 1583). An English soldier known for his ruthlessness in English attempts to conquer Ireland, in 1578 the crown granted him the privilege for six years to establish colonies in the New World over which he would have full power. He returned from his first voyage to the West Indies in 1579, but he was shipwrecked and drowned on a subsequent voyage to Newfoundland. He claimed this island for England and himself despite objections from the numerous fishermen of different nations he encountered. Survivors from his second voyage added to information he had provided from the first, which became part of Richard Hakluyt’s narratives of the New World. See also ELIZABETH; RALEIGH, WALTER; FROBISHER, MARTIN. GLORIOUS REVOLUTION. So named because no one was killed in the process, the Glorious Revolution occurred in England in 1688, when Parliament declared that King James II had “abdicated” the throne (he actually fled an army arriving from the Netherlands). He had rendered himself obnoxious by attempting to rule without Parliament, favoring Roman Catholics, and persecuting his critics and the majority Anglican Church. When the

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colonists learned of James’s fate, they overthrew Sir Edmund Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, in his capital of Boston, and Francis Nicholson, the lieutenant-governor in New York, who had ruled without the colonial assemblies, although they (unlike James) favored the Anglican Church, tolerating the small number of Catholics who lived under the Dominion. King William III, James’s successor, upheld Andros’s ouster and rewarded the Massachusetts revolutionaries by replacing him with a native son, Sir William Phips. The New York revolution, Leisler’s Rebellion, however, occurred in a sharply divided colony, unlike the nearly unanimous Massachusetts. Leisler’s opponents were able to convince the king that he had usurped power against the crown, and Leisler and his son-in-law were executed. See also CONNECTICUT; RHODE ISLAND. GOOCH, SIR WILLIAM (21 OCTOBER 1681–17 DECEMBER 1751). Lieutenant-governor of Virginia from 1727 until 1749, Gooch endeared himself to the colonists by the respect he showed the assembly. (The governor was an absentee British noble with whom Gooch split his salary.) He obtained the reluctant consent of both the assembly and British customs officials for the inspection of tobacco by Virginia, which guaranteed its quality and caused prices to rise in the 1730s. He was wounded commanding colonial troops attacking Cartagena in the West Indies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear and was knighted for his services in 1746. GORGES, SIR FERDINANDO (c. 1565–1647). A tireless promoter of English colonization, in 1606 Gorges was a leader in establishing the Plymouth Company (in whose territory the Pilgrims ultimately settled). In 1614, he hired John Smith to explore lands north of the existing colony of Virginia. He outfitted three more expeditions, the last of which marked the first permanent settlement in Maine, to which he was given title in 1639. Gorges also wrote pamphlets publicizing his intended colonies. Gorges’s son Robert (1595–1624?), nephew William Gorges (1606–1659), and cousin Thomas Gorges (1618–1670) did go to New England, where they quarreled with the Pilgrims and Puritans who tried to maintain exclusive control over the region. See also MASSACHUSETTS. GOVERNOR. The executive of the British colonies was a governor. He represented the crown and was appointed by the monarch in the royal colonies. In Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts until 1684, he was elected by the freemen. In Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, and in the Carolinas (until 1719) and Jerseys (until 1702), he was appointed by the proprietor. The governor could introduce legislation and held veto power over the

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acts of the assembly and council. In practice, many governors were appointed not because of their merits but because of their connections to important people in Britain. They were therefore inclined to let the colonists rule themselves, especially as they depended on the assemblies for their salaries. Virginia, the most lucrative mainland colony, was generally ruled by a lieutenant-governor who split his salary with an absentee British nobleman. See also BOARD OF TRADE; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION; POLITICS. GREAT AWAKENING. The Great Awakening was a religious revival that began in the colonies in the late 1730s, although Jonathan Edwards had begun revivals as early as 1731 in Northampton, Massachusetts. It petered out by the mid-1740s but had long-term consequences. The journey of preacher George Whitefield to the colonies in 1739 to obtain funds for an orphanage in Georgia was the principal catalyst for spreading the Awakening. People throughout the colonies questioned the religiosity of their ministers and turned instead to evangelicals who did not confine their preaching to one congregation, or denomination, and attracted large crowds. The Awakened “New Lights,” as they were called, differed from the “Old Lights” in stressing individual and emotional experiences of the Holy Spirit rather than good behavior in a communal setting as the key to salvation. Large crowds gathered around charismatic ministers such as Whitefield (Anglican), Gilbert Tennent (Presbyterian), and Theodore Frelinghuysen (Dutch Reformed). Old Light opponents, led by Charles Chauncy, claimed that their opponents were arrogant, intolerant of those without a similar experience, and wallowing in their own delusions. The attraction of the Awakening especially for women and blacks both slave and free (whose conversions were encouraged) also disturbed members of the elite. Even leading New Lights condemned the emotional excesses of some of their followers, who denied the need for formal churches and whose religious experiences included extreme physical and vocal expressions. While the colonial-wide excitement over the Awakening disappeared with the onset of King George’s War in 1744, it had lasting effects. This conflict and the French and Indian War saw a revival of the sense of American destiny as a chosen land that the early Puritans had brought to New England. Furthermore, the idea that ordinary people could choose their religion and publicly express their thoughts on it can also be seen as anticipating and influencing the desire for similar political freedoms sought during the American Revolution. The right of individuals to decide on membership in a particular church, attend meetings by traveling preachers, and express their religious convictions openly all became more common because of the Awakening.

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H HAKLUYT, RICHARD (c. 1552–23 NOVEMBER 1616). An English geographer whose writings, more than anyone else’s, encouraged and influenced the exploration of America, Hakluyt’s main works were Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) and The Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), which expanded to a massive three-volume edition published between 1598 and 1600. Hakluyt wrote powerful and carefully researched books based on firsthand accounts by explorers. He urged settlement for patriotic reasons (to counter the Spanish), to attain profit through the fur trade, and to create opportunity for the poor and working class. See also ELIZABETH; RALEIGH, WALTER; SMITH, JOHN; WHITE, JOHN. HALF-KING. A Seneca Indian chief, whose real name was Tanaghrisson, Half-King negotiated with Virginia and Pennsylvania on behalf of the Iroquois before the French and Indian War. He presented the Iroquois’ demand that the French leave what is now western Pennsylvania and accompanied George Washington when in 1753 he presented the same demand on behalf of Virginia. Half-King and his warriors supported Washington when he defeated a French force commanded by Sieur de Jumonville the following year; Half-King hacked Jumonville’s skull open and scalped him after he was taken prisoner, an act for which Washington was forced to take responsibility when he surrendered Fort Necessity to the French. Half-King died later in 1754 on the present site of Harrisburg, being forced to withdraw from his headquarters at Logstown once the war began. HALF-WAY COVENANT. This agreement was adopted by many, although not all, New England churches beginning in 1662. Many of the secondgeneration Puritans were not experiencing conversion and thereby acquiring full church membership, which also carried with it the right to vote and hold office in the Congregational Church and civil society. While some ministers regarded this as “declension” or backsliding from the piety of the founders, it also reflected the piety of some young people in refusing to pretend that they

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had experienced saving grace. To keep church membership up, children and grandchildren of those who had experienced conversion could belong to the church (although they could not vote) and have their children baptized. The covenant came in for increasing criticism as people who were not descendants of church members believed the covenant had become a way of perpetuating an aristocracy of descendants of the founders. See also DECLENSION; JEREMIAD. HALIFAX, EARL OF (5 OCTOBER 1716–8 JUNE 1771). Halifax became president of the Board of Trade in 1748 and held that post except for a brief hiatus until 1761. He believed the northern colonies in North America were vital to Britain’s imperial success and in 1754 was instrumental in bringing about the French and Indian War to support Virginia’s land claims and expedition under George Washington to the Ohio Valley. He also persuaded Prime Minister Henry Pelham to permit the Board of Trade to appoint colonial governors in 1752. He served as first lord of the Admiralty from 1762 until 1765. See also PITT, WILLIAM. HAMILTON, ANDREW (?–26 APRIL 1703). An Edinburgh merchant who recruited settlers for East Jersey, Hamilton became a proprietor of that colony himself in 1683, came to the colony in 1686, and was appointed governor in 1687. Replaced by the Dominion of New England in 1688, he was restored to office in 1692. He persuaded the governors of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to begin the first postal service in British North America in 1697, which was successful and became the British Postal Service in 1707. He was briefly removed from office in 1698, but when restored in 1699 was imprisoned by rioters who rejected the proprietors’ authority to collect rents and determine land ownership. In 1702, he was replaced by Lord Cornbury when the crown established and took over the united province of New Jersey, but he then became lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania, a post to which William Penn appointed him after he left New Jersey in 1701. HAMILTON, ANDREW (c. 1676–4 AUGUST 1741). A lawyer who moved first to Virginia and then to Maryland, Hamilton met William Penn on a trip to England and began handling the Penn family’s legal business. He went to Philadelphia and beginning in 1717 served first as Pennsylvania’s attorney general, then as a councilor, and finally as speaker of the assembly from 1727 to 1739 (except in 1733). Independent of and yet popular with both the Quaker and proprietary factions, he bought the land on which the Pennsylvania statehouse would stand and then designed it; it later became

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Independence Hall. In 1735 he made the trip to New York to defend John Peter Zenger successfully in his trial for libeling Governor William Cosby. See also HAMILTON, JAMES. HAMILTON, JAMES (c. 1710–14 AUGUST 1783). Son of Andrew Hamilton, James was trained by him in the law and served as lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania, governing the province in effect from 1746 until 1754 and from 1759 to 1763. He was active in directing the French and Indian War and helped found the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and the American Philosophical Society. HANCOCK, THOMAS (17 JULY 1703–1 AUGUST 1764). Son of the Congregational minister of Lexington, Massachusetts, Thomas Hancock began as a bookseller in Boston but by the 1730s carried on active international trade as a merchant. Thanks to privateering and military contracts during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, King George’s War, and the French and Indian War, he probably became the richest man in Massachusetts. He loyally supported Governor William Shirley and other officials who favored war and cooperation with Britain, becoming a member of the Massachusetts council from 1758 until his death. He had no children and left much of his estate to his nephew John Hancock, who used it to finance the protest movement that led to the American Revolution in Boston. HARRIOT, THOMAS (1560–2 JULY 1621). A learned geographer, mapmaker, and mathematician in the service of Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot published in 1587 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, with illustrations by John White. It became the principal source of information about the New World in England, used by writers Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas and inspiring future expeditions. See also ELIZABETH. HARRISON, PETER (14 JUNE 1716–30 APRIL 1775). After marrying a wealthy heiress, Elizabeth Pelham, and converting from the Quaker to the Anglican faith, Harrison moved from England to Newport, Rhode Island, in about 1746. He studied architecture and designed the Redwood Library, Touro Synagogue, and Brick Market in his hometown, along with two Anglican churches in Massachusetts: King’s Chapel in Boston and Christ Church in Cambridge, along with the mansion for Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts in Roxbury, attractive Georgian structures, all of which survive. Although a selftrained amateur, he is generally considered the first British North American architect, and he designed many mansions for the colonial elite as well.

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HARVARD COLLEGE. The first college in British North America, Harvard was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636 as New College, primarily for the purpose of training ministers, although many young men, primarily of the upper class, attended to obtain a general education. In 1639, it was named after John Harvard, who provided its first bequest. Henry Dunster (1640–1654) and Increase Mather (1685–1701) were two early presidents. Mather’s traditional Puritanism was considered too liberal for some, who founded Yale College in New Haven in 1701, and too conservative for others; under President John Leverett (1708–1724), the college exhibited greater tolerance of and connection with both Anglicans and Baptists, leading to a large bequest from English Baptist Thomas Hollis. In 1738, John Winthrop (1714–1779) became the Hollisian Professor of Mathematics and of Natural and Experimental Philosophy. He achieved international renown for his scientific work, especially his studies of astronomy and earthquakes. U.S. president John Adams, Cotton Mather, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Thomas Hutchinson were notable graduates during the colonial era. HAT ACT. New Englanders manufactured beaver hats for export to the other colonies, a measure the Hat Act, passed in 1732 by the British Parliament, attempted to curtail. Colonial hatmakers could employ no more than two apprentices, and no slaves, and could only make hats for use within a given colony. Although the law was not strictly enforced, British hatmakers who provided better and cheaper items soon took over most of the colonial market. See also BEAVER WARS; FUR TRADE; IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. HAYNES, JOHN (1 MAY 1594–JANUARY 1654). A wealthy English country gentleman, Haynes was a Puritan who moved to Massachusetts in 1633, where he was chosen lieutenant-governor in 1634 and governor in 1635. He presided over the trial and banishment of Roger Williams. He then relocated to Connecticut where he was involved in Indian negotiations that led to and ended the Pequot War. He was elected first governor of that colony in 1639 and served in odd-numbered years until his death, being unable to succeed himself. HENDRICK, CHIEF OR KING (1692–8 SEPTEMBER 1755). A leader of the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois Indians, he was a close friend of Sir William Johnson. He was killed during the Battle of Lake George during the French and Indian War in which he led the Mohawk contingent that scouted for the British.

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HESSELIUS, GUSTAVUS (1682–23 MAY 1755). Coming to America in 1712 to join his brother Andreas, who was pastor of the Swedish Lutheran Church in Delaware, Gustavus Hesselius was trained as an artist and is generally considered British North America’s first professional portrait painter. He settled in Philadelphia where he made a good living. Among his most famous works are portraits of Tishcohan and Lapowinsa, two Indian chiefs, and likenesses of himself, his wife, and his daughter. He also painted the interior of the Pennsylvania statehouse, which later became Independence Hall. HOPKINS, EDWARD (1600–MARCH 1657). A wealthy English Puritan merchant, Hopkins moved to the New World in 1637 and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. He was elected governor in the even years from 1640 to 1654 (a governor not being able to succeed himself), even when he returned to England in 1651 or 1652, where he assumed several offices in the navy under Oliver Cromwell. HOUSE OF BURGESSES. See ASSEMBLY; VIRGINIA. HOWARD, FRANCIS (1643–30 MARCH 1695). Appointed governor of Virginia in 1683 because of his strong loyalty to King Charles II and family connections, Howard set about establishing effective royal rule in Virginia. He dismissed officials who disagreed with his policies, which included imposing fees and raising taxes without the consent of the assembly, prosecuting his opponents in court, vetoing numerous laws, and dissolving the assembly when it disagreed with him. He returned to England in 1689, where efforts by Virginians to prosecute him for malfeasance following the Glorious Revolution failed. He was restored to the governorship but remained in England. HUDSON, HENRY (?–1611). Nothing is known of Henry Hudson before 1607, when the English Muscovy Company sent him to sail north of Russia in the hopes of reaching a passage to Asia. Forced to turn back by ice, he sailed again in 1608 with the same result. In 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired him for the same purpose; after failing for a third time to make progress in the Arctic Ocean, he turned west and explored the coast of North America. His most notable achievement was to sail up what is now the Hudson River, which flows into New York harbor, in the hopes of finding a Northwest Passage to the Orient. On his return, Hudson stopped in England where he was detained and his charts were seized. Hired by London merchants connected with the Virginia and East India companies to, once again, find the Northwest Passage, he began his fourth and final voyage in 1610. Stranded in the

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ice during the winter of 1610, he set out in the spring in the body of water now known as Hudson Bay. On 23 June 1611, his crew mutinied and cast him, his son, and seven sick men adrift in an open boat. They were never heard from again. Nine of the mutineers survived an attack by the Inuit (Eskimos) and returned to England in 1611. An expedition in 1612 found no trace of Hudson. The mutineers were cleared of murder charges in 1618 on the grounds that their action was necessary to survive. HUGUENOTS. French Protestants, known as Huguenots, tried to settle in Florida in 1562 and South Carolina in 1564. The attempts failed. After King Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted them religious toleration, few came to America, although some Huguenots accompanied the Dutch to New Netherland. When Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685 and began persecuting the Huguenots, over 300,000 Huguenots left France, of whom about 3,000 came to America. Most of them settled in New Rochelle, New York (named after their principal city in France); Boston, Massachusetts; and Charleston, South Carolina. Some of these were prosperous merchants, and many joined the Anglican Church. Notable Huguenot descendants were John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and revolutionary leader Paul Revere. The Huguenots assimilated rapidly into North American society. HUNTER, ROBERT (1666–31 MARCH 1734). After a successful military career in Europe and Africa, Hunter was appointed governor of New York and New Jersey in 1710. He arranged for 3,300 German Protestant refugees from the Palatinate to settle in upstate New York as part of a policy he devised to resettle those escaping from Roman Catholic nations during the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War). He spent over 20,000 sterling of his own money on this venture and was never compensated by either Britain or New York. As governor, Hunter clashed with the New York assembly over payment of his salary and dispersal of government funds. He achieved a more compliant assembly in 1716 after he published the very successful play Androboros, the first satire published in the American colonies. It attacked the Tories and supporters of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 that hoped to install the Catholic pretender to the British throne. Hunter returned to England in 1720, worked closely with the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, and was rewarded by being appointed governor of Jamaica. He served in that post until his death, where he became the only British colonial governor who ever persuaded a colonial assembly to vote the governor a permanent salary. See also IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION.

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HUTCHINSON, ANNE (1591?–1643). Married to the English merchant William Hutchinson, Anne Hutchinson was converted to Puritanism by the minister John Cotton and came to Boston to be part of his congregation in 1634. A devout, charismatic woman, she began to hold prayer meetings that Massachusetts governor Sir Henry Vane, among others, attended. She preached that all of the colony’s ministers, except for Cotton, lacked divine inspiration and were thus illegitimate. Aside from the threat of independent meetings held by a woman and her critical remarks, most of Massachusetts’ leaders, including John Winthrop, suspected her of antinomianism, the belief that God communicated directly to individuals. This threatened their rule, for it meant that people did not have to obey the colony’s religious and political leaders if they believed their consciences dictated otherwise. In 1637, after Cotton renounced her to save his own position, Hutchinson in fact confessed to receiving divine revelations, following which she was banished from the colony. Joined by many of her followers, she went first to Portsmouth, in what became New Hampshire; then to Rhode Island, where Roger Williams gave her refuge; then to Long Island, New York; and finally to Pelham Bay (New York), where she was killed by Indians. See also CODDINGTON, WILLIAM. HUTCHINSON, THOMAS (9 SEPTEMBER 1711–3 JUNE 1780). The scion of a wealthy Boston, Massachusetts, merchant family, Hutchinson was elected to the Massachusetts assembly (1737–1749) and council (1749– 1766). He was chief justice of the province from 1760 to 1770, lieutenantgovernor from 1758 to 1770, and governor from 1770 to 1774. He played a key role in mobilizing support for the Louisbourg expedition of 1745 and the adoption of a silver currency with the money Britain used to reimburse Massachusetts for that expedition in 1749. Along with Benjamin Franklin, he was an important architect of the unsuccessful Plan of Union at the Albany Congress in 1754. As chief justice, his defense of writs of assistance in 1761–1762 made him unpopular with critics of British policy. His opponents blamed him for the Stamp Act in 1765, and his house was destroyed in the riots of that year. A strong defender of British authority, he subsequently became a scapegoat for the imperial administration. His History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1760, 1768, and a posthumous volume in 1828) and the documents he preserved are outstanding resources for studying the colony’s history. See also BERNARD, FRANCIS; COOKE, ELISHA, JR.

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I IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION. The English (after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, British) monarch was at the head of the imperial administration. He or she had the right to veto colonial laws, and did so with the advice of the privy (or personal) council and the secretary of state for the Southern Department, who was in charge of colonial matters in the cabinet. They all in turn relied for advice on the Board of Trade and other influential people concerned with the colonies, especially merchants and colonial agents. The Admiralty (navy) was also involved in regulating the Acts of Trade and Navigation and protecting colonial shipping in wartime. The Treasury sent customs officials to enforce the Acts of Trade. The army was not required to enforce order in the colonies, and only appeared in wartime (except briefly in Boston and New York to support the administration of Edmund Andros and to suppress Leisler’s Rebellion) before troops remained to enforce order on the frontier following the French and Indian War. In practice, no monarch between King William III (ruled 1688–1702) and George III, who ascended the throne in 1760, took much interest in the colonies. The privy council and secretary were subject to pressure from British economic and religious interests. Thus, manufacturers tried to prevent colonial competition as with the Iron Act (1750) and Hat Act (1732) forbidding the manufacture of these items. Merchants tried to restrict issuance of colonial currency as it depreciated payments to them. The West Indies plantation owners, many of whom served in Parliament, sought to restrict the other colonies’ trade to the British West Indies to ensure cheaper prices for fish, meat, and grain from the northern colonies and to obtain higher prices for their own sugar and molasses. The Anglican Church tried to obtain more converts and regular payment of salaries to its priests in the colonies through the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The Anglicans were opposed by the Dissenters, who sought more religious toleration. Agents for the colonies presented the colonists’ cases, along with other colonials who journeyed to Britain from time to time to argue a particular cause. For instance, Increase Mather spent several years in England, obtaining a Massachusetts native son, Sir William Phips, as the first governor following the Glorious

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Revolution in return for the province’s support of William III and launching an attack on Quebec. Benjamin Franklin served as agent for several colonies during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. By the 1760s, about a quarter of the members of Parliament had some interest in the mainland colonies and usually supported them—about the percentage of representatives America would have had if the British had given it representation. From the 1670s until the Treaty of Utrecht ended Queen Anne’s War in 1713, England attempted to regulate more stringently colonies that had been relatively independent. Military men were chosen as governors of several colonies in an attempt to discipline them and obtain more effective support for wars against the French and Spanish. In the 18th century, the colonial assemblies frequently resisted raising troops and funds, however, although the New England colonies were notable exceptions. From 1713 until the appointment of the Earl of Halifax to the Board of Trade in 1748, “salutary neglect” characterized British policy. Governors who opposed the legislatures retained little support in Britain as colonials were allowed to violate the Acts of Trade with impunity. The colonies were principally regarded as places where friends of influential British politicians could obtain the jobs that kept their patrons loyal to the government. Following the conclusion of King George’s War in 1748, the British began to consider the North American colonies more essential to the welfare of the empire. Large armies and fleets and reimbursements for colonial war expenses were sent overseas to support them during the French and Indian War. At the conclusion of the war in 1763, however, British dissatisfaction with the colonies’ efforts to defend themselves, trading with the enemy, and colonial provocation of the Indians on the frontier led to increased regulation of colonial trade and attempts to tax the colonies. These measures in turn provoked the American Revolution. See also CROWN. IMPRESSMENT. The British navy was the most powerful in the world in the 18th century. It could not obtain sufficient recruits voluntarily, especially during frequent wars, as discipline was harsh, pay low, and danger great. Beginning in 1664, impressment, that is, seizing men, usually those on board merchant ships or from neighborhoods in which sailors congregated, manned much of the navy. The American colonies obtained exemption from the practice in 1707 as British merchants trading with America successfully argued in Parliament that colonial trade was essential to imperial welfare and could not be interrupted because of a shortage of sailors. The navy insisted that this act expired at the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, whereas the Americans insisted it was permanent. The navy’s case was that in American waters, many sailors deserted, enticed by merchant ships (and in wartime, privateers) offering higher pay and easier conditions.

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In 1746, after renewed impressments in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and King George’s War, Parliament passed a new law exempting only the West Indies from naval impressments, implying they were valid elsewhere in American ports and waters. Numerous impressments occurred from that point on, including a press that provoked the impressment riot of 1747 in Boston, and during the French and Indian War. For example, 800 men were seized and 400 retained in a 1757 press in New York. Few happened after the war as the navy’s manpower needs declined, which is why impressment was not an important cause of the American Revolution. IMPRESSMENT RIOT OF 1747. The parliamentary act of 1746 banning naval impressments in the West Indies was especially upsetting in Massachusetts, whose soldiers and sailors had seized Louisbourg the previous year and served in large numbers in King George’s War. In November 1747, a British fleet under Commodore Charles Knowles arrived in Boston. On 17 November, Knowles impressed about 46 men to fill the vacancies of those who deserted. The town seized Knowles’s officers, who were on shore as hostages to compel the release of the impressed men, and held them for three days until Knowles threatened to bombard the town. He released the sailors who could prove they were from Massachusetts on 30 November and sailed away. This was the greatest riot in British North America before the Stamp Act. Whereas the town of Boston and Governor William Shirley attempted (falsely) to excuse the town inhabitants for the riot by blaming it on sailors, blacks, and foreigners in order to escape British wrath, a group of men including the young Samuel Adams began a newspaper, The Independent Advertiser, which praised the rioters as an assembly of people defending their natural rights to life and liberty when the government failed. This marked the first time the ideas of John Locke were used to justify resistance to British authority in North America. INDENTURED SERVITUDE. About three-quarters of all European immigrants to early America arrived as indentured servants, or unfree laborers who agreed to work (usually) between three and seven years to pay for their passage. (A subset of indentured servants, redemptioners, only established the duration of their service upon arriving in America.) The word “indenture” refers to the irregular tear between two halves of the contract, each of which was identical, and could therefore be pieced together to show the validity of the contract. This was undertaken in part to prevent “spiriting” or kidnapping of people to work in the colonies, a frequent practice in early 17th-century Virginia. Indentured servants were the principal source of labor in the southern colonies until large numbers of slaves from Africa were imported beginning in the 1680s.

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Masters could discipline indentured servants within wide limits, and they actually may have been treated worse than many slaves because there was no incentive to keep them alive past their terms of service. In fact, treatment sometimes became worse near the end of the term as the usual punishment for running away or insubordination was to add more years to the indenture. The legal system, headed by landowners, was usually sympathetic to the masters. When their service ended, many indentured servants, left without resources, had to sign leases as tenants to their former masters or others. However, by the 18th century, servants frequently obtained freedom dues, usually clothes, farm animals and equipment, a small amount of money, and sometimes even land, to encourage them to settle the frontier and add value to the holdings of speculators in the area. INDIANS. Although scholars now refer to Indians and Native Americans interchangeably, the term “Indians” is used in this volume to avoid confusion with an alternative meaning of native American, that is, any person born either in America or the United States. Columbus dubbed the inhabitants of the regions he found “Indians” as he believed he had reached the Indies, or Orient. Their precontact population is usually estimated at between 50 and 100 million for the entire New World, with about half of these living in central Mexico, another 10 to 12 million in Peru, and perhaps 10 million north of the Rio Grande in what is now the United States and Canada. European epidemics and diseases brought on by excessive labor and forcing people to live in close proximity to settlers reduced this number about 95 percent by 1700. Indian societies were basically of three sorts. Advanced, united empires— the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas in Peru—were the easiest to conquer. Military elites ruled over subject peoples in Mexico, practicing human sacrifice and cannibalism on an enormous scale, which led many Indians to assist the Spanish and welcome them as liberators. The Maya in southern Mexico and Central America were also advanced, but given nearly inaccessible terrain and diffuse political power in city-states, conquest took much longer. The Powhatans in Virginia were in the midst of creating an empire when the Europeans arrived. Strong united or confederate societies—the Iroquois, Pueblo, and Cherokee—were able to resist European expansion for long periods, as nearly all of their men were warriors and they were located in interior regions. Along much of the coast of North America, smaller groups of Indians had been decimated by disease brought by occasional contact before the first wave of settlers arrived. It was thus easy for Europeans to negotiate with or displace them to acquire their territory. Europeans misinterpreted Indian society in North America. They regarded the men as savage and lazy, as their principal occupation was hunting. In

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Europe, only the upper class was allowed to possess weapons and hunt, frequently for recreation as well as food. Indian hunting involved seasonal following of game and movement of villages every few years to avoid depleting resources. Women, who were considered drudges by the Europeans, in fact were honored guardians of the family and the primary agricultural workers. In most cases Indian lineages descended through the woman. Europeans regarded Indian torture as cruel (ignoring their own punishments) without considering it as a masculine ritual in which captives demonstrated their bravery. Indian children, unlike European ones, were treated indulgently and were shamed rather than beaten. Indians regarded themselves as integral parts of a natural order extending from the earth, the winds, the sun, and animals to ancestral and heavenly spirits, whereas Europeans believed they had been given the earth by the only God, to master and use as they saw fit. Indian warfare was limited in North America, although not in the Aztec and Inca empires, which conquered and enslaved subject peoples. Revenge for woman stealing or those killed over disputed hunting grounds led to attempts to restore honor through reciprocal violence or replacing lost members of a group with those of the enemy. Europeans did not regard Indians as “red” or as a separate race. Some, especially the Puritans of New England, considered them the 10 lost tribes of Israel, whereas others called them brown or tawny. Racial thinking only became important near the end of the colonial era, around the time of the French and Indian War, when for the first time colonists on the frontier began to regard all Indians as their enemy and possessed of a racially innate nature—treacherous, warlike, thieving, lazy, and so on. Previously they had thought of some Indians as allies and others as foes. This racial thinking by whites in turn led Indians such as Pontiac’s followers to consider the whites a separate race and regard them all as evil. By the late colonial era, many Indians in North America, such as the Iroquois and Cherokee, had adopted European-style agricultural practices and at times dressed in European clothes or took European names. However, the increasing assimilation of Indians did not prevent their destruction and removal, as whites who wanted their land simply ignored the real people they confronted and applied the usual stereotypes—savage, lazy, heathen, and failing to make use of the land—to justify their actions, as in the case of the Paxton Boys. Indian relations usually went through three stages in British North America. At first the settlers needed the Indians’ assistance to establish colonies that in many cases barely survived, such as Jamestown and Plymouth. Pocahontas with the Virginians and Squanto and Massasoit with the Pilgrims have respectively become symbols of the ideal Indian from the settlers’ perspective. Early treaties signify this connection as Indian rulers at this stage are

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frequently referred to as “kings” and their people as “nations.” After periods of varying length, the increasing number of settlers and the declining number of Indians led to violent conflicts over land, in which the treaties refer to the Indians as subjects of the colony in question or of the crown. Full-fledged warfare broke out seven years after Massachusetts was established with the Pequot War, and 15 years after the first settlement of Virginia when Opechancanough led the “massacre” of 1622. In both cases, it took one more war—King Philip’s War in 1675 and a final Powhatan uprising in 1644—to complete the process for the main area of settlement. In Pennsylvania, violence was delayed for over 70 years as the Iroquois were able to peaceably relocate the Delaware and Munsee Indians. Thereafter, the surviving few Indians were either assimilated into colonial society or else, as with the praying Indians of Massachusetts, isolated on what became the beginning of the reservation system still in use. Indians who lived in the interior, and were not immediately subject to the onset of epidemics and European settlement, frequently retained their sovereignty for a century or more. The Iroquois, Apache, Comanche, and Cherokee were the most notable of these. Unlike the great empires of the Aztecs and Incas, which fell quickly, they were warrior societies in which each man and family had a more or less equal stake in a society that distributed goods equally. A long-lived loyalty to the community was thus both desirable (as it was not for the subjects of the empires) and possible (as it was not for the smaller nations found on the seacoast). See also PONTIAC’S WAR; PUEBLO REVOLT; SCALPING; SUSQUEHANNOCK INDIANS. INDIGO. After it was cultivated on a large scale, the plant indigo became the principal source of blue dye, the most expensive color to make, in the early modern world. Indigo was grown in Africa, Jamaica, and South Carolina, but it only became a boom crop in the last of these thanks to Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793). A precocious child, beginning at the age of 16 she ran her father George Lucas’s estate near Charleston when he became lieutenant-governor of Antigua. Around 1740, she developed a new procedure for making dye from the indigo plant that many South Carolinians adopted. The British government paid a bounty of six pence per pound of indigo beginning in 1748, and except for rice, indigo was the most valuable export of South Carolina until the American Revolution. IRON. The English were in great need of raw iron for their manufactures, especially weapons, tools, and household items. From the first days at Jamestown, the Virginia colonists made efforts to establish an ironworks, and did so at Falling Creek in 1619. It was destroyed in the Indian uprising

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of 1622. The first successful colonial iron manufacturing occurred at Saugus, Massachusetts, from 1647 to 1668. By the end of the colonial era, over 70 ironworks, typically known as forges or furnaces, were found in eastern Pennsylvania—the first was built in 1716—with a smaller concentration in the Hudson Valley in New York and scattered establishments elsewhere. Accessibility of ore, limestone, wood, and running water as a power source determined the site of most furnaces. Most of the ironworks were in fact plantations, which required a large workforce to hew wood, grow crops for food, and process the ore. Slaves as well as indentured servants, tenants, and hired free laborers worked on them. Although the British attempted with the Iron Act of 1750 to ban the production of processed iron—which was made into stoves and rifles and used for horseshoes, farm equipment, and household utensils—in fact the colonials ignored the act. Pennsylvania was the largest source of iron in the British Empire by the 1760s, and its forges were indispensable in producing the extremely accurate Pennsylvania rifles that were used in the French and Indian War by colonials. IRON ACT. In 1750, Parliament attempted to prevent colonial competition with British iron products. The Iron Act allowed importation into Britain of colonial pig and later bar iron duty free, but banned further construction of mills and furnaces to process the iron. The colonists ignored this law, as the furnaces were located in rural areas where there was no effective British presence. IROQUOIS. Calling themselves Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois were the fourthranking military power in eastern North America from the late 17th century until the American Revolution, after the Spanish, French, and British. Their center of power was upstate New York, and at their peak they could muster between 6,000 and 8,000 warriors. They consisted of five nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—who in 1722 were joined by the Tuscaroras who migrated from North Carolina to avoid devastating warfare. The Iroquois successfully defeated their principal rivals to the south, the Susquehannock Indians, by the early 17th century, driving them into Maryland. The Iroquois were noted for their skilled diplomacy, and both the British and French courted them with presents, especially guns. As such, they were victors in the Beaver Wars, which were motivated by the Europeans’ desire for beaver furs, as guns enabled them to invade their neighbors’ territories to obtain the furs. They usually supported the English in the 17th century, establishing the Covenant Chain that linked them peacefully with the colonies. After British reverses in King William’s War, the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 established their neutrality until the French and Indian War, when they

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once again joined the British. The British Indian agent, Sir William Johnson, lived among the Iroquois in upstate New York, married an Iroquois woman, and was largely responsible for this decision. The Half-King and Chief Hendrick were notable Iroquois who fought for the British. Meanwhile, the Huron, the Iroquois’ long-standing enemies, were allied with the French. The Iroquois had in some measure brought on the French and Indian War by forcing Indians to the south, such as the Delaware and Munsee, to move westward to accommodate Pennsylvania’s desire for more land—the Iroquois were very happy to have a pacifist colony on their southern border. The Treaty of Lancaster (1744), Treaty of Logstown (1752), and Albany Congress (1754) were notable giveaways of other people’s lands the Iroquois arranged. The displaced nations then attacked the Pennsylvania frontier following the defeat of Braddock’s expedition in 1755. The Iroquois for the most part remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution; a few remained in Pennsylvania and New York on reservations, but most moved to what became the province of Ontario in Canada. See also MOURNING WARS; PEQUOT WAR; SHICKELLAMY.

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J JAMES I, KING OF ENGLAND (19 JUNE 1566–27 MARCH 1625). Son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, James inherited the Kingdom of Scotland at the age of one when his mother was imprisoned in England. He assumed the throne of England as well in 1603 on the death of Queen Elizabeth. While a very learned man who sponsored the King James Bible, James believed in (and wrote tracts in favor of) the divine right of kings to serve as God’s unquestioned lieutenants on earth. He clashed with Parliament frequently over their respective powers and favored an Anglican Church that centered authority in the bishops and the crown. He was a foe of the Puritans and those who wanted more of a reformation. Under his rule, Jamestown, Virginia, and the colony of Plymouth were founded. His son, Charles I, carried on his policies, resulting in his execution following the English Civil War. James detested tobacco and wrote a treatise, “Counterblast to Tobacco,” in which he described it as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” However, realizing that it was much in demand, he levied a tax on it—the most lucrative revenue Britain obtained from North America before the American Revolution. JAMES II, KING OF ENGLAND (14 OCTOBER 1633–16 SEPTEMBER 1701). Brother of King Charles II, his title was the Duke of York during his brother’s reign from 1660 to 1685. He was admiral of the British fleet, took a keen interest in imperial administration, and was the proprietor of New York until it became a royal colony when he ascended the throne in 1685. James was a Roman Catholic; he favored religious toleration to aid the Catholics, but this also benefited Jews, Quakers, and other minorities in the colonies. James also favored absolute royal authority, which he attempted to implement in England by ruling without Parliament and in the colonies with the Dominion of New England that abolished the colonial assemblies. He was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as was his regime in America. He then lived in France from where,

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with the support of King Louis XIV, he made an effort to win back his kingdom, but he was defeated in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. See also PENN, WILLIAM; WILLIAM III. JAMESTOWN. The first permanent settlement by the English in the New World was Jamestown, named for English King James I. It was founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company. Its early days were difficult: a council of seven leaders could not agree on policy, and highly specialized tradesmen arrived to perform such tasks as planting vines, forging iron, or processing caviar, while soldiers and gentlemen searched for gold. All the settlers were male employees of the company except for a few wives who accompanied their husbands, until 1619. Then women and blacks (at first servants) were imported to prop up the failing enterprise. No provision was made for food except importing it from England or obtaining it from the Powhatan Indians, either forcibly or through trade. Captain John Smith emerged as the colony’s leader in 1608 and 1609 and prevented the settlement from being abandoned. Furthermore, the James River close to the ocean is an estuary whose water has a high salt content, thus adding to the disease that infested a colony located in a swampy area. The settlement itself was small and surrounded by a wooden stockade. Only 61 out of about 500 settlers survived Jamestown’s first three years, including the “starving time” of 1609–1610, when instances of cannibalism occurred and quarrels with the Indians periodically led to disruption of the food supply. Although it remained the capital of Virginia, Jamestown only consisted of a few government buildings, shops, and houses. It was burned in 1676 during Bacon’s Rebellion and again in 1698. Virginia then moved the capital to Williamsburg. Jamestown eventually was abandoned, but today it is a major archaeological site. See also PERCY, GEORGE; PURCHAS, SAMUEL; WINGFIELD, EDWARD. JEREMIADS. Usually sermons, jeremiads were productions of the New England Puritans, beginning around 1660, which lamented declension, or decline, from the religious spirit of the founding generation. Two prominent examples by Increase Mather were the Day of Trouble Is Near (1674) and A Renewal of Covenant the Great Duty Incumbent on Decaying and Distressed Churches (1677). Jeremiads warned of potential evils and—after King Philip’s War and efforts by imperial administration to exert control of the colonies—real calamities that the authors believed arose from the lack of piety. Modern historians attribute these disasters to the colonists’ taking over the Indians’ land and their refusal to submit to England, but Puritans at this time blamed their own spiritual failings. See also DAVENPORT, JOHN; HALF-WAY COVENANT.

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JEWS. The first Jew in British North America was the Bohemian Joachim Gans (or Gaunse), who accompanied the Roanoke expedition in 1585 as an expert in copper mining and manufacture. The earliest Jewish community was in New Netherland, where three merchants were joined in 1654 by 23 refugees from Brazil, who soon left. New York Jews were the only ones in the colonies with the right to vote and hold public office. The other Jewish communities that had the 10 men (minyan) required to conduct religious services were Newport, Rhode Island; Lancaster and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia. In Savannah, Jews were among the earliest and most prominent settlers. Most Jews were merchants or storekeepers, and single families of Jews traded in places such as Boston, Massachusetts, and Reading and Easton, Pennsylvania. Probably about 2,000 Jews lived in colonial America on the eve of the Revolution. Britain entrusted a four-man partnership, which included Moses Franks, a New York–born Jewish merchant, with supplying the British army in North America in 1760; Franks employed his relatives in New York and Philadelphia, who in turn hired Jews on the frontier, to establish themselves as leaders in the provision and fur trades. Newport’s Jewish community included Aaron Lopez, the wealthiest merchant in the colony and a pioneer in the whaling and candle-making industries. He engaged in the slave trade, as did other Jewish merchants, but the trade was overwhelmingly conducted by Christians. Only the Touro Synagogue, completed in 1762, in Newport, Rhode Island, survives of those built during the colonial era. See also FRANKS FAMILY. JOHNSON, ROBERT (1676?–3 MAY 1735). Proprietary governor of South Carolina from 1717 to 1719 and royal governor from 1729 until his death, Johnson promoted settlement of the frontier and successfully conciliated the assembly, leading to a long period of political harmony in the colony. JOHNSON, SIR WILLIAM (c. 1715–11 JULY 1774). The son of Irish Roman Catholic gentry, Johnson was the nephew of British admiral Sir Peter Warren, who employed him to acquire and then manage his property in upstate New York. Johnson became friendly with the Iroquois, learned their ways, and lived the later years of his life with two Mohawk women, the second being Molly Brant, the sister of Chief Joseph Brant. He acquired extensive lands of his own and built a large mansion, Johnson Hall, in western New York where he employed Irish tenants and over 60 slaves. He engaged on a large scale in agriculture and the fur trade. During the French and Indian War, Johnson was knighted for his defeat of the French invading force in 1755 at the Battle of Lake George. He directed the building of Fort William Henry and in 1759 commanded the troops that captured Fort Niagara. In 1756, he became superintendant of Indian affairs for the northern colonies.

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At his death, he was the second largest landowner in the colonies except for the Penn family. JOHNSTON, GABRIEL (c. 1698–17 JULY 1752). The second royal governor of North Carolina from 1734 until his death, Johnston was faced with a recalcitrant assembly that did not want to pay quitrents and settlers who had received numerous ambiguous land grants from proprietary agents who did not want to pay taxes. He successfully compromised on these issues and was also instrumental in bringing in more Scottish immigrants. JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES. In the early modern world, several governments entrusted much of their overseas expansion to chartered companies that were granted monopolies in certain areas in return for funding the “adventure,” as it was called. The first was the Company of Merchant Adventurers, founded in 1407, to handle the sale of British wool on the European continent. The English government also chartered the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, or Muscovy Company, in 1555 to trade with Russia; the Levant Company in 1581 to trade with the Middle East; and the East India Company in 1603 to trade with India. The East India Company was the most profitable private business adventure in world history, as British India was a colony not of the nation, but of the company, until 1857. For America, the Plymouth Company was founded in 1606, and although it did no effective colonizing, the Pilgrims used its charter to justify their settlement in 1620. Virginia was founded by the Virginia Company in 1607, and Massachusetts by the Massachusetts Bay Company, chartered in 1628. The last of these was the only one to take its charter to the New World (secretly) to be free of control from England; all the other companies were run as commercial enterprises with headquarters in the mother country. The Virginia Company transferred its colony to the royal government in 1624, as few settlers would work for the company rather than their own profit. The principal Dutch companies were the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, which monopolized the spice trade from the Orient to Europe in the 17th century. It controlled the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia) and engaged in extensive slave trading in Africa and the New World. Like the British East India Company, it had its own army and fleet. It went out of existence in 1798. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, ran New Netherland from 1624 to 1664, but its most profitable ventures were Brazil, which it conquered from the Portuguese in 1630 and held until 1654; Surinam in South America; and some islands in the West Indies. All of these colonies produced sugar. The French (1664–1769) and Swedes (1731–1813) also chartered East India companies. The New Sweden Company (1637–1655) governed the Swedish American colony of that name.

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JOLLIET, LOUIS (21 SEPTEMBER 1645–20 MAY 1700). Born near Quebec, Frenchman Jolliet accompanied Father Jacques Marquette on his expedition that explored southward from Lake Superior to the conjunction of the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. He later became a large landowner in Canada.

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K KEAYNE, ROBERT (1595–23 MARCH 1656). Keayne was a wealthy merchant and tailor in London who became a Puritan, supported the Plymouth Colony financially, and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1635. In 1638 he founded the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, which consisted of leading inhabitants who were prepared to defend Boston in case of attack. He liberally gave of his wealth to support Harvard College and the grammar school that became the Boston Latin School. He is most noted, however, for his “Apologia,” a 53-page will in which he defended himself because he had been convicted of usury—in this case excessive profiteering by selling nails. Keayne argued that he sold at a reasonable price and as a good citizen was entitled to a reasonable profit. The Massachusetts court was unconvinced when he made that argument in 1639, and Keayne thus reinvested most of his money in livestock rather than