Indigenous America 

 

Map of Indigenous nations in modern United States before contact with Europeans.

Europeans called the Americas “the New World.” But for the millions of Native Americans they encountered, it was anything but. Humans have lived in the Americas for over ten thousand years. They spoke hundreds of languages, maintained peace through alliances and warred with their neighbors, and developed self-sufficient economies while maintaining vast trade networks. But the arrival of Europeans and the resulting global exchange of people, animals, plants, and microbes inaugurated centuries of violence, unleashed the greatest biological terror the world had ever seen, and revolutionized the history of the world.  

The First American Cities 

Agriculture arose sometime between nine thousand and five thousand years ago, almost simultaneously in the Eastern (Americas) and Western Hemispheres (Africa, Europe, Asia).

Prehistoric Settlement in Warren County, Mississippi. Mural by Robert Dafford, depicting the Kings Crossing archaeological site as it may have appeared in 1000 CE. Vicksburg Riverfront Murals. 

Agriculture allowed for dramatic social change, but for some, it also may have accompanied a decline in health. Analysis of remains reveals that societies transitioning to agriculture often experienced weaker bones and teeth. But despite these possible declines, agriculture brought important benefits. Farmers could produce more food than hunters, enabling some members of the community to pursue other skills. Religious, political, and social leaders, as well as skilled soldiers and artists, could devote their energy to activities other than food production. With the change in society, Native Americans could form sedintary communities, and eventually cities. 

The Mississippians 

The Mississippians developed one of the largest civilizations north of modern-day Mexico. Roughly one thousand years ago, the largest Mississippian settlement, Cahokia, located just east of modern-day St. Louis, Missouri peaked at a population of between ten thousand and thirty thousand. It rivaled contemporary European cities in size. No city north of modern Mexico, in fact, would match Cahokia’s peak population levels until after the American Revolution.

An artist’s rendering of Cahokia as it may have appeared in 1150 CE. Prepared by Bill Isminger and Mark Esarey with artwork by Greg Harlin. From the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

Cahokia was politically organized around chiefdoms, a hierarchical, clan-based system that gave leaders both secular and sacred authority. The size of the city and the extent of its influence suggest that the city relied on several lesser chiefdoms under the authority of a paramount leader.

Around 1050, the population grew almost 500 percent in only one generation, and new people groups were absorbed into the city and its supporting communities. Environmental explanations suggest that population growth placed too great a burden on the arable land leading to an eventual decline before the arrival of Europeans.

North American communities were connected by kin, politics, and culture and sustained by long-distance trading routes. The Mississippi River served as an important trade artery, but all of the continent’s waterways were vital to transportation and communication. Cahokia became a key trading center partly because of its position near the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. These rivers created networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the American Southeast. Archaeologists can identify materials, like seashells, that traveled over a thousand miles to reach the center of this civilization. 

The Lenape 

In the Eastern Woodlands, many Native American societies lived in smaller, dispersed communities to take advantage of rich soils and abundant rivers and streams. The Lenapes, who occupied present-day New York City farmed throughout hundreds of settlements, stretching from southern Massachusetts through Delaware. 

Dispersed and relatively independent, Lenape communities were bound together by oral histories, ceremonial traditions, consensus-based political organization, kinship networks, and a shared clan system.  Marriage occurred between clans, and a married man joined the clan of his wife. Lenape women wielded authority over marriages, households, and agricultural production and may even have played a significant part in determining the selection of leaders, called sachems.

Lenape sachems acquired their authority by demonstrating wisdom and experience. This differed from the hierarchical organization of many Mississippian cultures. Sachems spoke for their people in larger councils that included men, women, and elders. The Lenapes experienced occasional tensions with other Indigenous groups like the Iroquois to the north or the Susquehannock to the south, but the lack of defensive fortifications near Lenape communities convinced archaeologists that the Lenapes avoided large-scale warfare. 

Lenape societies were skilled as farmers and fishers, also harvesting fruits and nuts from trees and cultivating numerous medicinal plants, which they used with great proficiency. The Lenapes organized their communities to take advantage of growing seasons and the migration patterns of animals and fowl that were a part of their diet. They made their homes in some of the most fertile and abundant lands in the Eastern Woodlands and used their skills to create a stable and prosperous civilization.

The first Dutch and Swedish settlers who encountered the Lenapes in the seventeenth century recognized Lenape prosperity and quickly sought their friendship. Their lives came to depend on it. 

Colliding Cultures 

While centuries earlier contact between Viking explorers and potentially Basque sailors reached the Americas, it was the Columbian Exchange beginning in 1492 that radically transformed both sides of the Atlantic. “The Great Dying” of native populations with no defenses to European diseases wiped out entire civilizations in the Americas, and severely weakened those that survived to contest genocidal European conquerors who displayed little humanity towards native populations.

Spain benefited most immediately as the stolen wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened the Spanish monarchy. Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England all raced to the New World, eager to match the gains of the Spanish.

Spanish America 

Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the benefits of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Expeditions slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and economic dominance in a new territory. 

Juan Ponce de León was the first European to establish a settlment in what would become the United States after arriving in La Florida in 1513.

1513 Atlantic map from cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. Wikimedia. 

Farther west, in 1598, Juan de Oñate led four hundred settlers, soldiers, and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico. When Oñate sacked the Pueblo city of Acoma, the “sky city,” the Spaniards slaughtered nearly half of its roughly 1,500 inhabitants, including women and children.

Santa Fe, the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, was established in 1610. Few Spaniards relocated to the Southwest because of the distance from Mexico City and the dry and hostile environment. By 1680, only about three thousand colonists called Spanish New Mexico home. There, they traded with and exploited the local Puebloan peoples. The region’s Puebloan population had plummeted from as many as sixty thousand in 1600 to about seventeen thousand in 1680. That year significant uprising called the Pueblo Revolt would eradicate Spanish authority in the region for 12 years.

Spain’s Rivals Emerge 

The Spanish exploitation of New Spain’s riches inspired European monarchs to invest in exploration and conquest. Reports of Spanish atrocities spread throughout Europe and provided a humanitarian justification for European colonization. English writers argued that Spanish barbarities were foiling a tremendous opportunity for the expansion of Christianity (Protestantism) across the globe and that a benevolent conquest of the New World by non-Spanish monarchies offered the surest salvation of the New World’s pagan masses. With these religious justifications, and with obvious economic motives, Spain’s rivals arrived in the New World. 

The French 

Despite the wealth of the New World, Asia’s riches still beckoned to Europeans. Canada’s St. Lawrence River appeared to be such a passage, stretching deep into the continent and into the Great Lakes. French colonial possessions centered on these bodies of water (and, later, down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans). 

The needs of the fur trade set the future pattern of French colonization. French fur traders placed a higher value on cooperating with Indigenous people than on establishing a successful French colonial footprint. Asserting dominance in the region could have been to their own detriment, as it might have compromised their access to skilled Native American trappers, and therefore wealth.

The French preference for trade over permanent settlement fostered more cooperative and mutually beneficial relationships with Native Americans than was typical among the Spanish and English. Perhaps eager to debunk the anti-Catholic sentiment, the French worked to cultivate cooperation with Native Americans. Jesuit missionaries, for instance, adopted different conversion strategies than the Spanish Franciscans. Spanish missionaries brought Natives into enclosed missions, whereas Jesuits more often lived with or alongside Indigenous people. Many French fur traders married Native American women. The offspring of Native American women and French men were so common in New France that the French developed a word for these children, Métis(sage). The Huron people developed a particularly close relationship with the French, and many converted to Christianity and engaged in the fur trade.

The Dutch 

The Dutch advanced the slave trade and brought enslaved Africans with them to the New World. Sharing the European hunger for access to Asia, in 1609 the Dutch commissioned the Englishman Henry Hudson to discover the fabled Northwest Passage through North America. He failed, of course, but nevertheless found the Hudson River and claimed modern-day New York for the Dutch. There they established New Netherland, an essential part of the Dutch New World empire. The island of Manhattan provided a launching pad to support its Caribbean colonies and attack Spanish trade. 

Dutch traders carried wampum along Native trade routes and exchanged it for beaver pelts. Wampum consisted of shell beads fashioned by Algonquians on the southern New England coast and was valued as a ceremonial and diplomatic commodity among the Iroquois. Wampum became a currency that could buy anything from a loaf of bread to a plot of land.

The Dutch were determined not to repeat Spanish atrocities. They fashioned guidelines that Native peoples possessed the same natural rights as Europeans. Colony leaders insisted that land be purchased; in 1626 Peter Minuit therefore “bought” Manhattan from Munsee Lenape people. Despite the seemingly honorable intentions, it is likely the Dutch paid the wrong people for the land (either intentionally or unintentionally) or that the Munsee Lenape and the Dutch understood the transaction in very different terms. The Dutch engaged in brutal massacres of the native populations despite their self-proclaimed benevolent motivations.

The Dutch also established farms, settlements, and lumber camps. Expanding Dutch settlements correlated with deteriorating relations with local Native Americans. In the places where the Dutch built permanent settlements, the ideals of peaceful colonization succumbed to the settlers’ increasing demand for land. Armed conflicts erupted as colonial settlements encroached on Native villages and hunting lands.

Labor shortages, meanwhile, crippled Dutch colonization. In response, the colony imported eleven enslaved people owned by the company in 1626, the same year that they “purchased” Manhattan. Enslaved laborers were tasked with building New Amsterdam (modern-day New York City), including a defensive wall along the northern edge of the colony (the site of modern-day Wall Street). They created its roads and maintained its all-important port. By 1660, New Amsterdam had the largest urban enslaved population on the continent.

English Colonization 

New World colonization won support in England amid a time of rising English fortunes among the wealthy, a tense Spanish rivalry, and mounting internal social unrest. But supporters of English colonization always touted more than economic gains and mere national self-interest. They claimed to be doing God’s work. This noble rhetoric veiled the coarse economic motives that brought England to the New World. 

New economic structures and a new merchant class paved the way for colonization. England more often simply seized land through violence and pushed out the former inhabitants, leaving them to move elsewhere or to die.

Jamestown 

Incolarum Virginiae piscandi ratio (The Method of Fishing of the Inhabitants of Virginia), c. 1590. The Encyclopedia Virginia. 

In April 1607 the English built Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the present-day United States. The English had not entered a wilderness but had arrived amid a people they called the Powhatan Confederacy. Powhatan, or Wahunsenacawh, as he called himself, led nearly ten thousand Algonquian-speaking people in the Chesapeake. They burned vast acreage to clear brush and create sprawling artificial parklike grasslands so they could easily hunt deer, elk, and bison. The Powhatan raised corn, beans, squash, and possibly sunflowers, rotating acreage throughout the Chesapeake. Without plows, manure, or draft animals, the Powhatan produced a remarkable number of calories cheaply and efficiently. 

Disease and starvation ravaged the colonists, thanks in part to the peninsula’s unhealthy location and the fact that supplies from England arrived sporadically or spoiled. Fewer than half of the original colonists survived the first nine months. 

Powhatan kept the English alive that first winter. The Powhatan had welcomed the English and placed a high value on metal ax-heads, kettles, tools, and guns and eagerly traded furs and other abundant goods for them. With ten thousand confederated natives and with food in abundance, Indigenous people had little to fear and much to gain from the isolated outpost of sick and dying Englishmen. 

Four hundred settlers arrived in 1609, but the overwhelmed colony entered a desperate “starving time” in the winter of 1609–1610. The settlers ate everything they could. They boiled leather. They dug up graves to eat the corpses of their former neighbors. One man was executed for killing and eating his wife. All but sixty settlers would die by the summer of 1610. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants who had arrived in Jamestown had perished. England’s first American colony was a catastrophe. 

But then tobacco saved Jamestown. In 1617 the colony sent its first cargo of tobacco back to England. Within fifteen years American colonists were exporting over five hundred thousand pounds of tobacco per year. Within forty years, they were exporting fifteen million.25 

Tobacco changed everything. It saved Virginia from ruin, incentivized further colonization, and laid the groundwork for what would become the United States.

The colony’s great labor vacuum inspired the creation of the “headright policy” in 1618: any person who migrated to Virginia would automatically receive fifty acres of land and any immigrant whose passage they paid would entitle them to fifty acres more. The next year, a Dutch slave ship sold twenty Africans to the Virginia colonists. Southern slavery was born. 

When it became clear that the English were not merely intent on maintaining a small trading post but sought a permanent ever-expanding colony, conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy erupted. Powhatan died in 1622 and was succeeded by his brother, Opechancanough, who promised to drive the land-hungry colonists back into the sea. He launched a surprise attack and in a single day (March 22, 1622) killed over 350 colonists, or one third of all the colonists in Virginia. The colonists retaliated and revisited the massacres on Indigenous settlements many times over. What amounted to ethnic cleansing drove Native Americans off their land.

English colonists brought to the New World particular visions of racial, cultural, and religious supremacy. Despite starving in the shadow of the Powhatan Confederacy, English colonists nevertheless judged themselves physically, spiritually, and technologically superior to Native peoples in North America. Christianity, metallurgy, intensive agriculture, transatlantic navigation, and even wheat all magnified the English sense of superiority. This sense of superiority, when coupled with outbreaks of violence, left the English feeling entitled to Indigenous lands and resources. 

New England 

Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The History Project (UC Davis). 

The English colonies in New England established from 1620 onward were founded with loftier goals than those in Virginia. Although migrants to New England expected economic profit, religious motives directed the rhetoric and much of the reality of these colonies. Puritans dominated the politics, religion, and culture of New England.

The Puritans did not seek to create a haven of religious toleration. Unlike those heading to Virginia, colonists in New England (Plymouth [1620], Massachusetts Bay [1630], Connecticut [1636], and Rhode Island [1636]) generally arrived in family groups. Most New England immigrants were small landholders in England. The New England climate and soil made large-scale plantation agriculture impractical, so the system of large landholders using masses of enslaved laborers or indentured servants to grow labor-intensive crops never took hold. By accident of geography as much as by design, New England society was much less stratified than any of Britain’s other seventeenth-century colonies.

In contrast to other English colonists who had to contend with powerful Native American neighbors, the Puritans confronted the stunned survivors of a biological catastrophe. A lethal pandemic of smallpox during the 1610s swept away as much as 90 percent of the region’s Native American population. Many survivors welcomed the English as potential allies against rival tribes who had escaped the catastrophe. The relatively healthy environment coupled with political stability and the predominance of family groups among early immigrants allowed the New England population to grow to 91,000 people by 1700 from only 21,000 immigrants. In contrast, 120,000 English went to the Chesapeake, and only 85,000 white colonists remained in 1700.