17th+Century+Perspective

17th Century Perspective

[|The Great Migration of the 17th Century]

One half to two thirds of all immigrants to Colonial America arrived as [|indentured servants]. At times, as many as 75% of the population of some colonies were under terms of indenture.


 * //English: Virginia and the South.//** Permanent English settlement began at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and, although there were non-English in most settlements, English immigrants predominated in every seventeenth-century colony except New York. The Virginia colony was for two decades a demographic disaster in which more than half of the immigrants died within a year or so. The immigrant population there and in other southern colonies was heavily male, so natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—did not begin much before the beginning of the eighteenth century, if then.


 * //English: Massachusetts and New England.//** Most of the early migration to Massachusetts, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620, was family migration, much of it religiously motivated. Most of the leading figures and a considerable number of the lesser lights were Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. For significant numbers of the "lesser sort," economic motives predominated. The decade from 1630 to 1640 marked the period of time known as the Great Migration. During this time, Massachusetts's population skyrocketed with the migration of approximately 21,000 immigrants to New England, about a third of them being Britons. However, by 1660, large-scale migration from Britain to New England rapidly decreased and immigration to the New World was officially discouraged. Unlike the colonies on the Chesapeake, which were immigrant colonies until the beginning of the eighteenth century, persons born in the New World were a majority of the New England settlers within a few decades of settlement. New England was less affected by non-British immigration than any other section.


 * //Africans.//** Africans and their descendents have never been more statistically prominent in American society than in the colonial period. The best estimate is that, at the first federal census in 1790, Africans and their descendents were about 20 percent of the population. The earliest Africans in British North America—brought to Jamestown in 1619—were first treated as indentured servants. By about 1700 in all parts of the American colonies, most Africans were enslaved. Philip Curtin's conservative 1969 estimate judged that almost 430,000 Africans were brought to what is now the United States, about 4.5 percent of all those brought to the New World by the African slave trade. Africans made up more than a third of all immigrants to the United States before 1810. Perhaps fifty thousand more were brought after the United States outlawed further imports of foreign slaves in 1808; those fifty thousand were the first illegal immigrants and the only ones before 1882. Africans and African Americans were found in every colony and state: in 1790 more than 90 percent of the 750,000 Negroes enumerated in the census lived in the South, a percentage that remained fairly constant until well after the World War II era.

During the early 1600's, the Netherlands, France, and England also began to use African slaves in the American colonies.

//**Other Non-English Europeans.**// The largest groups of non-English Europeans in the new United States were Irish, 7.6 percent; German, 6.9 percent; and Dutch, 2.5 percent; but they were distributed quite differently.

 FRENCH In 1685 the French explorer René Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, attempted to establish a settlement on the lower Mississippi River. Sailing from France in 1684 with nearly three hundred settlers and soldiers, he failed to find the Mississippi and built a small fort on the gulf coast of Tejas (Texas). As the French journeyed into the interior, they learned from the Indians of the Spanish presence in the region, although they encountered no Spaniards directly.  SPANISH  Having long been aware of French plans to settle in the lower Mississippi region, the Spanish responded immediately to the news of La Salle’s arrival on the Tejas coast in 1685. Between 1686 and 1691 a total of nine expeditions were sent from New Spain (Mexico) to Tejas, four by sea and five by land, to search for the French. The Spaniards pursued leads provided by the Indians but encountered only a few French survivors of La Salle’s settlement,

America - both the Americas - were not so much settled by Europeans as they were invaded. Sixteenth and seventeenth century European attitudes toward the “virgin” land of the New World implied that they believed that the continent was theirs for the taking, as if it had been waiting millennia for some white people to come along and civilize it. This attitude persisted until very recently, and may not have been annihilated even yet. For awhile, the natives and the European colonists found a use for one another. The basis for the relationship was trade, and trade was something neither side wanted to lose. Indians were enthralled by the wonders of steel blades, guns, and European textiles. Both sides wanted each other’s support against hostile neighbors. In the beginning the Europeans required the assistance of the natives just to survive in what they perceived as a wilderness. They also wanted pelts, wampum (which was accepted as currency in the colonies), handcrafts, and the personal service of the natives. Most of all, though, the white people wanted land. As Indians realized what wonderful objects they could obtain through trade with the Europeans, intertribal trade decreased. Since the white people demanded furs in trade, native energies were devoted to acquiring more pelts than the next tribe down the trail. Overkill disrupted the balance of nature. The Indians’ diligence in getting furs for the Europeans resulted in self-destruction as they wiped out the wildlife upon which their lives depended. White populations grew, and so did the demand for land. The colonists and their sponsoring governments believed that American soil was lying unused. They believed that since the same ground could support a denser population of white people that somehow the white people had a more valid claim to the land. They disregarded the fact that disease brought to America by Europeans had effectively depopulated the Americas; in fact, had they acknowledged such a thing it might be seen as God’s judgment upon the heathen savages, and further proof that the land should be in the possession of those who would put it to obvious use rather than those who would allow it to remain largely untouched. At the root of all native-colonist relations was the hunger for land. Colonists believes that the natives did not utilize land to its utmost because there were, as the Europeans saw it, vast tracts of land left wild, uncontrolled by agriculture or towns. The European colonists did not consider that the indigenous people obtained a great deal of their food from hunting and gathering. To assure the presence of game, the game’s habitat must be preserved. Only with the practice of conservation would the game continue to multiply. Something the colonists did not understand then, and which has largely been ignored in history, is that the native Americans farmed to feed their people. Although many foods were gathered as they grew wild, and animal husbandry was introduced by Europeans, agriculture was widespread in both of the Americas. The natives grew surplus crops and stored them for the winter. Had the Plymouth colonists not stumbled upon stores of these surpluses, and then been given more, they would probably not have survived their first winter. Jamestown colonists were also kept from starving by gifts and purchases of surplus crops already grown and stored by the natives. Arrangements between Europeans and Indians to share the land were made with the ultimate intention of the part of the white people to dispossess the natives. When land was conveyed to an European, whether by a deed or by some other kind of agreement, the European assumed that the tribe gave up rule over the area in question. Imagine a Dutch family buying a home in New York City today and claiming that the law of the Netherlands, and not of the United States, prevailed! This is exactly what the Europeans did, though. Furthermore, when Europeans claimed land in the Americas, they would claim that the natives living in that territory as their subjects. Wars fought between white and native peoples were generally fought over land rights. Whether the disputed land was claimed by both natives and Europeans, or by competing European countries, the Native Americans ended up fighting, either to support their own claims or to support the claims of the European community with which they did the most business. Effectively Indian populations became the vassals of the colonial governments and then later of the American government. They never saw themselves in this light, however. Sovereignty became the single major issue between white and native populations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was an especially bloody concerning the Iroquois, whose lands were claimed by the new governments of State of New York and the United States. The colonists abused inter-tribal feuds for their own purposes, too. They spread rumors about enemy tribes among friendly ones in order to cause suspicion and war. After the tribes battled, the Europeans moved in to enjoy the spoils. The colonists also used the spread of Christianity to pit the natives against each other. As different European nations established colonies, the religious men of those colonies taught the nearby natives their own brand of Christianity, ultimately pitting Catholic against Protestant. Once again, when the bloody battle was over, the white man moved in to enjoy the spoils. When the first serious English settlers arrived in North America in the 1620’s, many sachems welcomed them. Schoolchildren today are taught about the kindness of the Wampanoag chief, Massasaoit, to the Pilgrims when they first arrived and were starving. That initial kindness was not returned by the Englishmen, as can be seen in the sequence of events leading to the struggle for dominance in the Connecticut Valley. This was the land of the Pequots, and both the colonies in Massachusestts and Connecticut coveted the land. What resulted were the Pequot Wars, in which the Massachusetts colonists paid the Narragansetts to fight against their neighbors, the Pequots. The Narragansetts agreed, unaware that no warriors would be in the Pequot village when they arrived. The women, children and old men left in the Pequot village were massacred, mostly by the Englishmen accompanying the Narragansetts. The English depravities horrified the Narragansetts, and the surviving Pequots fled north and west to tribes friendly to them. An entire tribe was now out of the way and English settlement could proceed.