American Colonies6:Virginia

Megan Foster

American Colonies: 6; Virginia• After success in conquering(with

extreme force) Ireland, English leaders decided to extend colonial ambitions across Atlantic to Virginia

• Virginia was named in honor of their queen, Elizabeth I, a supposed virgin

• When get-rich-quick schemes(search for gold mines by land and Spanish treasure ships by sea)proved to be expensive deadly failures, colonizers gradually turned to slower and more laborious development of plantations

• 1616 English belatedly discovered the prime commodity tobacco

• About 80% of English lived in country villages

• During the late 16th century early 17th century, rural people suffered increasing displacement and unemployment

• This rendered redundant, homeless, and miserable, thousands of peasants and laborers

• About ½ lost their land between 1530 and 1630

• Because of the poverty, many stole, and were subsequently brought to the gallows

• Newly poor gravitated from towns and seaport villages to market towns and seaport cities, like London

• London grew from 120,000 people in 1550, 200,000 in 1600, and 375,000 by 1650

• London became notorious for filth, poverty, plagues, fires, crimes, and executions

American Colonies: 6; Virginia• Colonial promoters announced an easy solution for England’s social woes

• To export a New Colony in Virginia, the idle and larcenous poor could be put to work raising commodities for transport to, and for sale in, England.

• Offered neat package that would simultaneously control and employ the poor while generating new wealth and a power for the realm

• To deter fears of Indian resistance, promoters insisted that the Indians of Virginia would welcome the English as liberators

• 1585, Sir Walter Ralegh sent 100 male colonists to settle in Roanoke, a small Island on the North Carolina Coast(then a part of Virginia)

• Starving colonists abandoned Roanoke later that spring• Sir Walter Ralegh dispatched a second set of colonists with a new civilian leader, John White• 94 colonists made this endeavor including 17 women, and 9 children. These were the first

families to settle in the Americas.(They were believed to have inhabited space with the locals, then later executed by Powatan)

• 1607 English tried again, this time at Chesapeake Bay• Chesapeake Bay abounded in Fish, shellfish, edible plants, and game animals• Captain John Smith described Virginia as “Overgrown with trees and weeds, being a plain

wilderness as God first made it”• English believed that savage Indians had no right to keep any land that they did not exploit

to it’s fullest potential• English insisted that God required them to improve the wilderness into productive farmland,

subduing Indians in the process• Dec. 1606, 3 vessels left England for Virginia, they reached Chesapeake Bay, April 26, 1607• Colonists died in droves from disease and hunger• Of the initial 104, only 38 were alive 9 months later• Dec. 1609 220 Colonists, then after an especially deadly winter only 60 remained after

Spring• Between 1607 and 1622, Virginia Company transported about 10,000 people, and only 20%

remained alive in 1622

American Colonies: 6; Virginia

• English hoped to trick and seize Powatan(local chief)• Instead, Captain John Smith was made captive• He was later released after Pocahontas (Powatans daughter)stopped a mock execution.• Colonial leaders applied brutal logic, in the conviction that only pain and terror could

motivate the poor• 1613 English captured Pocahontas• She was held in Jamestown and indoctrinated by the English, she accepted Christian

conversion, took the name Rebecca, and married a colonist, John Rolfe, in 1614• Virginia Company adopted a system that awarded land freely to men with the means to

pay for their own passage and that of others, across the Atlantic• 50 Acres for self, 50 acres for every servant or relative brought over at your expense• Servants were entitles 50 acres each, if and when they survived the terms of indenture

American Colonies: 6; Virginia

• Led by John Rolfe, planters learned to raise tobacco in 1616• Ahead of his time, King James fought a losing battle when he denounced smoking as “a

custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.”

• He later learned to love the large revenues that the crown derived from taxing tobacco imports

• Virginias long, hot, humid growing season proved ideal for growing tobacco• Produced 200 pounds in 1624, 3,000,000 in 1636• Chesapeake outstripped the West Indies to become principle supplier of tobacco in Europe

American Colonies: 9; Puritans and

Indians• New English feared that their own

people would degenerate into Indians from prolonged contact with native ways and native land

• Proponent of puritan emigration predicted that “religion and profit would jump together”

• As colonists spread over land, leaders worried that profit and religion were jumping apart

• Puritans worked to subdue, convert, and transform the Indians into replicas of English Christians

• The natives’ highly productive horticulture supplied most of their diet

• This went against English belief that Indians were nothing more than hunters

• Indian cultivation was more efficient, producing substantial yields from relatively small amounts of land and labor

American Colonies: 9; Puritans and Indians

• Indian men assumed tasks that involved travel away from village• These included hunting, fishing, warfare, and making their tools

and weapons, including bows and arrows, spears, nets, snowshoes, and canoes

• Men's work alternated between bursts of intense exertion and ease• Women worked more steadily through the day and year• Women built and maintained homes, known as wigwams• Women assumed work compatible with the supervision and care of

young children• Women wove baskets and mats• Women gathered firewood, tended fires, and stored animals and

fish that the men brought in• Women and children did most of the gathering of shellfish, berries,

roots, and herbs• Women planted, weeded tended and harvested crops• Colonists saw this as meaning that the women were drudges• They dismissed the men as lazy exploiters of their hardworking

women

American Colonies: 9; Puritans and Indians

• Indians regarded most colonists as mean and stingy• Colonists marveled at the apparent abundance of nature,

and the vast numbers of fish, birds, trees and deer• Colonists saw a potential commodity in the wild plants and

animals of New England• Puritans insisted that the Christian God meant for them to

enjoy the land, in reward for their Godly industry, and to punish the Indians for their pagan indolence

• Colonists decided it was up to them to dole out land to the Indians

• Natives did not share European notion of private property• Colonists cultivated larger fields of grain to yield surplus for

export to the West Indies• As colonists made the land more familiar and profitable for

themselves, they rendered it more alien and hostile to the Indians

American Colonies: 9; Puritans and Indians

• After King Philips War, puritan victors defined Indians as traitors

• Puritans were warned to waste no sympathy on the dead or enslaves Indian children

• Many puritans felt that the colonists needed to shed blood to alienate themselves from the Indian ways, thoughts, and bodies

• One colonist, Joshua Tift, married an Indian and joined her people. Colonial soldiers captured Tift. He was then tried and convicted, and suffered an traitors painful death, pulled apart by horses.