NHC+1492+Permanence


 * NHC 1492**
 * PERMANENCE**

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/permanence/permanence.htm

The items on this wiki page are taken from the following website and are only intended for the use of my students:

National Humanities Center Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature Toolbox: American Beginnings: The European Presence in North America, 1492-1690 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/index.htm


 * 1. Prosperity**

English: Tobacco production in Maryland, 1666

Most of the settlements that appear on a map of North America in 1650 exist today in some form, even if moved several miles up the river or renamed after merging with a larger settlement or rebuilt after total destruction in an Indian war. We call them permanent because they're still here. Simple enough, but determining why they're still here leads us to more elusive criteria. Prosperity. Numbers. Geography. Luck. Change of vision. The settlers' commitment or stubbornness, depending on one's view. And the goals of the colonizing nations, obviously. Spain maintained its American empire for "gold, God, and glory," the first dominating the crown's policies. From the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Central America were shipped enormous quantities of ore to Spain, and the thousands of Spanish settlers in the Americas worked in support of the crown's mining and conquest ventures. France had the fewest settlers in North America since its riches came from fish and furs, neither of which required large and permanent settlements.

The English, however, did not establish colonies on direct orders of the crown. Instead, with permission of the crown (charters), private groups of investors established their own settlements in pursuit of their own economic goals. Their first attempts were disastrous. Permanence would require, as historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman states, "a complete overturning of previous notions of what colonies were to be for. . . The keys lay in learning about the environment and what it would grow, and then finding a commodity for which an infinitely expanding market existed or could be created in Europe." By 1650, the English had made this transition.

MARYLAND. George Alsop was an indentured servant in Maryland for four years, from 1648 to 1652. After returning to England due to illness, he wrote a promotional piece, A Character of the Province of Mary-Land, to encourage others to emigrate to Maryland and share the prosperity enjoyed by the colony due primarily to one crop, tobacco. He presents a picture of a thriving peaceful colony and gives us a glimpse of the religious diversity already manifest in English America. Later the tobacco market would collapse in the southern colonies for a time, primarily due to overproduction, but at this point Alsop could herald tobacco as "the current Coin of Mary-Land."


 * 2. Cities & Towns**

English: The growth of Philadelphia, 1685 English: The need for towns in Virginia, 1661

Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Santa Fé, Quebec, Boston, New Amsterdam, Philadelphia, St. Mary's City, Charles Town—all colonial capitals, representing the wide variety of colonial urbanization. To what extent do they signify a colony's success or permanence? Are seaport towns more significant than interior communities? Does the lack of cities or towns reflect a deficiency in a colony? The answers are, annoyingly, dependent on the colony you're talking about. But one factor appears in the cities that came to herald a colony's permanence: a sense of possession and continuity in the residents, and a sense of awe in its visitors.

PHILADELPHIA. William Penn and Philadelphia are part of elementary-schoolbook America, but William Penn himself spent only four years in America. One of his friends and colleagues in planning the Pennsylvania colony was Robert Turner, who lived in the colony from his arrival in 1683 until his death in 1700. He held numerous official positions during these years and also built the first brick house in Philadelphia, a sign of permanence you will note in other accounts in this section. In this letter to Penn in 1685, Turner describes the progress of house-building and industry in Philadelphia, assuring him that "it goeth on in Planting and Building to admiration."

VIRGINIA. What if there were no significant towns in a colony? The settlers of Virginia in the mid 1660s were widely dispersed in plantations with no towns of any size to serve as centers of community, government, and religion. This latter function, of religious community, so concerned the Anglican Bishop of London that he commissioned an investigation into the failure of Virginia's planters to build an adequate number of churches. The main recommendation of the report: build towns. "It is easy to conclude," stresses the report's author, "that the only way of remedy for Virginia's disease . . . must be by procuring towns to be built."


 * 3. English Colonies I: New England**

Massachusetts: Three months as an Indian captive, 1675 Connecticut: A farmer's year, 1668-1669

How did England come to populate North America in far greater numbers than its sixteenth-century rivals, Spain and France? How did it come to dominate the continent north of the 30th latitude? "The English succeeded as colonies," explains historian Alan Taylor, "because their society was less successful at keeping people content at home." The poor of Spain and France were not as inclined or encouraged to emigrate, while England offered incentives to its poor, discontented, and dissenters to populate their Atlantic colonies. Successful North American colonies required, as historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman summarizes, "a permanent commitment on the part of individual settlers to the land and the expectation of trade in colonist-produced commodities. It also required replication of something approaching normal European societies. Women were essential. . . . Once these principles were established, the settlers would spread over the land with a rapidity no one anticipated." By 1660 there were 58,000 English settlers in the Atlantic colonies in contrast to 5,000 in New Netherland and 3,000 in New France. (The Spanish population in the hemisphere, primarily in Central and South America, numbered in the hundreds of thousands.)

In the next three groups, we will focus on the English Atlantic colonies, keeping the standard regional division of New England, Middle, and Chesapeake/Southern colonies. For each region, we will pull from a variety of sources—diaries, letters, wills, pamphlets, sermons, poems, memoirs, court records, and official reports—to convey the relative permanence of the colony or of the writer's perception of its permanence. In these seemingly disparate readings, focus on the perspective, tone, and assumptions of the writers. Do they feel they are living in a colony that will endure or one that will fail? Do they feel that they will endure or fail as individuals? For these New England colonists, in addition, religious faith is central to their experience. What role does faith play in these settlers' endurance and sense of permanence?

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE. The widow of a Puritan minister in Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson and two of her children spent three months as captives of the Narragansett Indians during Metacom's (King Philip's War) in 1676. She was released for a ransom of 20£, paid by her husband. In this selection, she recounts her weariness, hunger, and resourcefulness as she lives with the Indians, often commenting on the behavior of the "praying Indians" who had become Christians and those who had not converted.

A FARMER'S YEAR. Thomas Minor was born in England, was baptized as an Anglican, and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1630, moving to Connecticut in 1643. Active in the church and community as well as on his farm, he kept a journal from 1653 to 1684. This selection presents his entries for one year, March 1668 to March 1669, in cryptic yet revealing entries.


 * 4. English Colonies II: Middle Atlantic**

Pennsylvania: The arrival of German settlers, 1683

The Middle Colonies—the region with the most diverse population, the most varied commercial ventures, and the most mobile boundary lines in the 1600s. For the first half of the century there was no such region as the English "Middle Colonies," for the region was bifurcated by powerful New Netherland and (less powerful) New Sweden, blocking a clear line of English claim between its New England and Chesapeake colonies. England was determined to change this state of affairs and by 1664 it had assimilated the rival colonies. Soon King Charles II chartered three new colonies—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Carolina—and English emigration boomed anew.

ARRIVAL OF GERMAN SETTLERS. In 1683 a group of German Mennonites and Quakers bought a tract of land near Philadelphia and founded the settlement of Germantown. They were led by Francis Daniel Pastorius who soon wrote a promotional piece to encourage more Germans to emigrate to Pennsylvania. In this selection, we read of the Germans' voyage from Europe, the towns and people of Pennsylvania, and the 15,000-acre purchase from William Penn.


 * 5. English Colonies III: Southern/Chesapeake**

Virginia: A governor's recommendations, 1663 Carolina: Founders' promises to new settlers, 1666 Carolina: A young settler in Charles Town, 1682

It is in the southern colonies that we see the most dramatic transition from instability to permanence. The first settlers in Jamestown and the Roanoke colonies were adventurers rather than farmers, for the most part, and their leaders lacked the experience or will for the longterm building of stable colonies. Many had no intention of staying in the colonies forever: making quick riches and returning home were the goals. As historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes, "Not until Europeans began to think of America as a place to come and live out their lives, establishing homes to be passed on to their children, would these apparently unpromising lands be colonized."* By the mid 1600s, the Chesapeake colonies had made this change. Would the new colony of Carolina benefit from their hard-won experience?

VIRGINIA'S STATUS. In 1624, after nearly two decades of failure, Jamestown was placed under the control of the crown instead of the investment company that founded it. By the 1650s, with a tobacco production boom and an emigration boom of poor people arriving from England as indentured servants, Virginia had turned its course toward permanence. Many servants who survived their indenture were able to start their own farms. Prosperity? Not yet, except for the few wealthy planters favored by William Berkeley (bark-lee), the appointed governor from 1641-52 and 1660-77. In 1663 he wrote a status report on the colony, affirming the "natural advantages it has above all other His Majesty's Plantations" and proceeding to list the reasons why Virginia "has not in all this supposed long tract of time produced those rich and staple Commodities, which I shall in this Discourse affirm it is capable of." Basically, he recommends that Virginia abandon its economic dependence on the "vicious weed of tobacco." A few years later, Virginia would fall into harder times from tobacco overproduction, trade limitations imposed by England, attacks by Dutch rivals, and the consequences of the restoration of the English monarchy, and in 1675 a settlers' rebellion would break out. But for this "discourse and view" Berkeley could report that, while the Virginia of 1663 had much room for improvement, it was not the Jamestown of 1624.

CAROLINA PRIVILEGES. In the same year that Berkeley reviewed Virginia's progress, the extensive lands to its south were granted to eight supporters of King Charles II. Remember that from 1663 until 1710 "Carolina" meant the current states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the northern third of Florida (and "from sea to sea," the norm in English colonial charters). In 1663 the eight Lords Proprietor published a promotional pamphlet listing the six major privileges offered to "industrious and ingenious persons" including any "maid or single woman with a desire to go over." The privileges included cheap land, low taxes, liberty of conscience, a popularly elected government, and overall, the opportunity to work for "fortunes far beyond what he could ever hope for in England."

EARLY CHARLES TOWN. Seven years after Carolina was chartered, its first settlement was established at Charles Town (Charleston) in 1670.

Twelve years later Thomas Newe, a young educated man in his mid twenties, arrived in the new settlement which "two years since had but 3 or 4 houses, hath now about a hundred houses in it." In three letters to his father he describes the growing river plantations, the trade with Barbados, the ongoing Indian wars, the Spanish threat from nearby St. Augustine, and his sighting of Halley's Comet. He asks his father to conduct financial business for him, reporting that he "can not yet make any return; for money here is but little," and to send various items to aid his transition to a colonial life. Newe died in 1683 of an unknown cause at age 28.


 * 6. Servitude (Chesapeake Colonies)**

Maryland: A former servant's praise of servitude, 1663 Virginia: A former servant's "sorrowful account" of servitude, ca. 1680 Virginia: A servant uprising, 1640

Until the late 1600s, the labor supply for the Chesapeake plantations was indentured servants, not enslaved Africans. Of the 120,000 emigrants to the Chesapeake colonies in the 1600s, 90,000 were indentured servants. Escaping the poverty of England, they contracted to work for four to seven years before being freed with enough clothes and tools—and in some cases free land—to establish their own homesteads. Their experiences varied, of course, depending on their master, their work, their health, and their temperament. Many died before they could attain freedom. Here we read two opposing views of servitude by former servants in the Chesapeake colonies, followed by the punishments ordered by a Virginia court after a servant uprising in 1640.

IN PRAISE OF SERVITUDE. Probably due to political strife in England rather than poverty, George Alsop worked as an indentured servant in Maryland from 1648 to 1652. After returning to England due to illness, he wrote A Character of the Province of Mary-Land. He devotes a full chapter to the defense of servitude against those who "prick up their ears and bray against it." Servitude, he insists from experience, "checks in the giddy and wild-headed youth" of England, offering them a chance to escape a doomed undisciplined life for the opportunity to thrive in America.

A "SORROWFUL ACCOUNT" OF SERVITUDE. Admitting he was one of the "giddy and wild-headed youth" that Alsop deplored, James Revels wrote a four-part poem relating his fourteen-year indenture in Virginia, which he earned as a sentence for thievery. In simple rhyming couplets he describes his early life of crime, his arrival in Virginia, and his hard labor on a tobacco plantation before being bought by a more considerate master. "My countrymen," he concludes, "take warning e'er too late / Lest you shou'd share my unhappy fate." (The poem is meant to be sung to the tune of "Death and the Lady": link below in Supplemental Sites). Truth be told, while Revels and Alsop relate different experiences of servitude, they join in extolling its reformative power. Little is known about Revels, and no published edition of the poem exists before 1767, yet scholars generally agree that "The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account" is a document of the 1600s.