A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 1: Colonialism and NationhoodPart 9: Colonial Expansion and Economics

THE DUTCH AND THE QUAKERS IN THE NORTHEAST

In 1664, the Dutch gained control of part of present-day New York. When the English Duke of York laid claim to the same territory, the English formed a naval blockade of the area and the Dutch surrendered it to them.

In 1681, William Penn, an English entrepreneur, founded the Province of Pennsylvania as a proprietary colony. Penn was a Quaker who intended the colony to be a haven for religious tolerance and political liberalism.

By 1763, Great Britain laid claim to much of

the eastern seaboard of

North America. Its colonies were

bound in the west by the

Appalachian Mountains,

beyond which lay territory claimed by

France.

THE DUTCH COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA

FRENCH COLONIZATION

France laid claim to most of North America, including the important waterway of the Mississippi River which connected the Great Lakes with the Gulf of Mexico.

THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

• Thomas Buxton: “[T]heir apartments became so extremely hot as to be only sufferable for a very short time. The deck… was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or more disgusting. Numbers of the slaves having fainted, they were carried on deck, where several of them died; and the rest were with great difficulty restored.”

SLAVERY IN AFRICA• Alexander Falconbridge: “I was…

told by a Negro woman that as she was on her return home, one evening, from some neighbors… she was kidnapped; and, notwithstanding she was big with child, sold for a slave. … A man and his son… were seized by professed kidnappers, while they were planting yams, and sold for slaves. This likewise happened in the interior parts of the country, and after passing through several hands, they were purchased for the ship to which I belonged. It frequently happens that those who kidnap others are themselves, in their turns, seized and sold.”

AN EXPERIENCE OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

• Olaudah Equiano: “The stench of the hold… was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time… but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.”

PLANTATION ECONOMICS

• Masters and their families make money by selling sugar in the Caribbean and, later, cotton and tobacco in the South.

• Overseers, usually poor white men, maintain order on the plantation by brute force.

• Head slave, contracted to the overseer to supervise the other slaves ‘from within.’

• House slaves carried out domestic tasks.

• Field slaves worked the farms.

INDENTURED SERVITUDE• First known as ‘the Headright System’

when it came into being in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1618.

• The growth of tobacco plantations,at the same time as labor shortages, required a workforce of people who could provide inexpensive labor.

• The Crown government encouraged the practice in order to increase the general population of the colony.

• The Crown government offered landowners the legal title to fifty acres of land (a ‘headright’) for every European immigrant whose fare they paid, which is to say for every indentured servant they purchasedand brought to North America.

INDENTURED SERVITUDE• Gottlieb Mittelberger: “The sale of

human beings in the market on board the ship is carried on thus: Every day Englishmen, Dutchmen and High-German people come from the city of Philadelphia and other places… and go on board the newly arrived ship that has brought and offers for sale passengers from Europe, and select among the healthy persons such as they deem suitable for their business, and bargain with them how long they will serve for their passage money, which most of them are still in debt for. When they have come to an agreement, it happens that adult persons bind themselves in writing to serve three, four, five, or six years for the amount due by them. But very young people, from 10 to 15 years, must serve till they are 21 years old.”

INDENTURED SERVITUDE• Gottlieb Mittelberger: “Many parents

must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle; for if their children [are forced to] take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained; but as the parents often do not know where and to what people their children are going, it often happens that such parents and children, after leaving the ship, do not see each other again for many years, perhaps no more in all their lives. When a husband or wife has died at sea… the survivor must pay or serve not only for himself or herself, but also for the deceased. When both parents have died over half-way at sea, their children… must stand for their own and their parents’ passage, and serve till they are 21 years old.”

INDENTURED SERVITUDE• Richard Hofstadter: “The most

unenviable situation was… on Southern plantations, living alongside but never with Negro slaves, both groups doing much the same work, often under the supervision of a relentless overseer. … Even as late as 1770, William Eddis, the English surveyor of customs at Annapolis, thought that the Maryland Negroes were better off than ‘the Europeans, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity.’ The Negroes, Eddis thought, were a lifelong property [and] so were treated with a certain care, but the whites were ‘strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labor.’”

COLONIAL ERA MANUFACTURING AND MERCANTILISM

During the colonial era, mercantilism was a theory of economic exchange founded on the suggestion that colonies existed for the benefit of the Mother Country.

According to the theory, the colonies would provide the Mother Country with the raw materials for commercial goods while the Mother Country exported manufactured goods to the colonies.

THE REIGN OF THE COLONIAL ERA ARISTOCRACY

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the English colonies in North America were ruled by an aristocratic elite: white Protestant mercantilists, usually involved in the plantation economy, who built great fortunes on the land and labor of exploited minorities.

THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING (1730s)

The American Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards sparked an intellectual and theological revolution in America. He believed that human beings are watched over by an angry, vengeful God, and he convinced great numbers of people that their spiritual salvation depended less on their worldly actions than on cultivating a personal relationship with their savior, Jesus Christ.

FRENCH COLONIAL FORTIFICATIONS

• In the mid-1700s, the French began to dominate trade with the Native Americans of the Ohio River Valley, one of the most fertile and prosperous areas to the west of the Appalachian Mountains.

• To consolidate their advantage and prevent British incursions into the Ohio River Valley, the French built a series of forts at strategic locations.

• One of these was built on the site of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

TENSIONS BETWEEN THE BRITISH AND THE FRENCH

In 1754, a British military expedition from Virginia entered the Ohio River Valley to dislodge the French. The result was the first truly global conflict in human history…

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 1: Colonialism and NationhoodPart 9: Colonial Expansion and Economics