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The upcoming section focuses on U.S. history. The review will cover the colonists’ struggle for independence from England, and how the newborn United States fought to keep itself together through the Civil War.
The previous lessons covered world events from the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia to the conflicts in the Middle East. These sections reviewed how humans and the way they live together has changed over the centuries.
Pre-Columbian is a misnomer that refers to the time on the American continents before widespread European influence. While Christopher Columbus is Europe’s most well-known explorer of the New World, there were others before him (such as Italy’s John Cabot, who landed in Newfoundland in 1497), but Columbus’s name has become synonymous with European influence in the Americas. Millions of people lived in the so-called New World before European explorers set foot on the mainland of what would become the colonies and later the United States of America.
In 1607, Jamestown became the first permanent English settlement on the continent. Jamestown was located about sixty miles from the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The colonists, men and boys employed by the Virginia Company, chose a site far enough away from the James River to avoid being an easy target for the Spanish, who were also exploring and staking claims to the region. Almost immediately, the native Powhatan attacked the English colonists. These fights for land with the Spanish and the Powhatan presaged a pattern that would last until well after the colonists’ War for Independence. Europeans would struggle with each other and the native peoples for dominance on the continent. One example of these conflicts is the Pequot War.
The Dutch, English, and indigenous Pequot peoples all had fur-trading interests in the Connecticut River valley in the 1630s. When English trader John Oldham was killed in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent forces to retaliate against the Pequots. This touched off a series of bloody battles, with various native tribes creating alliances with the British and the Pequots.
In 1637, John Mason, with the help of Mohican and Narragansett warriors, attacked a major Pequot fort in Mystic, Connecticut, and killed some 500 Pequots. By the next year, a coalition of British and native tribes had tracked down the remaining Pequot. The Mohicans killed Pequot leader Sassacus.
Due to history’s homogenizing forces, we tend to think of the thirteen colonies as a whole. Although eventually united by their enmity for British rule, the colonies were populated by a wide array of Europeans. The colonists, from many different social classes and religious groups, came for a variety of reasons. Let’s review some of the leaders and important players in the colonial era.
The first leader of the first British colony at Jamestown, Smith was forced to return to England in 1609 after being seriously injured in an accident with gunpowder. His books about New England and the colonies, including The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith in Europe, Asia, Africa and America stoked English interest in the colonies. At age fifty-one, Smith died in England.
William Penn, a Quaker, was granted a tract of land in the New World by Charles II as a payment of a debt that Charles owed to Penn’s father. Penn wanted this new settlement to be a haven for his fellow Quakers, and the free-thinking government that he created proved to be a draw for not only his fellow Quakers but also for German, Dutch, and French settlers who sought religious tolerance. Forced back to England by financial troubles in 1701, he died in 1718.
Though he never visited the colony, Lord Baltimore (Cecil Calvert) governed the colony of Maryland by proxy until his death in 1675.
The pastor Roger Williams initially came to Boston to seek religious freedom, but he quickly ran afoul of the religious establishment, which banished him in 1636. With a small group of followers, Williams settled a piece of land they called Providence. (They felt that God had sustained them and guided them there.) Williams was an outspoken proponent of the separation of church and state and also sought fair treatment for native peoples in the colonies. He died in 1684.
While slavery per se has nothing to do with race, color, or creed, the history of slavery in the United States is synonymous with the coercion of Africans who were first brought to the colonies in the early 1600s in Jamestown, Virginia. Some scholars estimate that twelve million Africans were brought to the Americas over the course of the slave trade.
The slave trade had an immense effect on Africa. As slavery became more crucial to the economies of the Americas, prices for slaves increased and made the slave trade a lucrative occupation. Europeans traded guns and other weapons for slaves, which helped certain African factions dominate their regions and bulk up their treasuries by capturing and selling their conquered foes.
Originally brought over as indentured servants, these Africans were soon outright slaves, unable to gain their freedom. In the latter half of the 1600s, the colonies assembled the slave codes, which institutionalized the practice of slavery by passing laws that set out specific guidelines for owning and trading slaves.
While tobacco and other crops were the initial impetus for slave labor, cotton soon surpassed all of them. The invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s created a huge demand for slaves, and, by 1850, almost two-thirds of these slaves were involved in the production of cotton in the South. Slavery and states’ rights were two crucial issues in pushing the United States toward civil war. In 1865, slavery was abolished by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.