When did the English once more take an interest in America?

The voyages of John Cabot in the late 1490s (discussed previously) had perhaps granted the English some vague claim to a section of North American coastline, but official interest from the Crown in continued exploration—let alone colonization—remained low for decades.

Henry VIII, who ruled England for most of the first half of the sixteenth century, was too busy marrying, divorcing, and/or executing his wives (he went through six), breaking from the Catholic Church and establishing the Church of England, and confiscating monastic lands, to care much about adventures in America. Henry's successor, Edward VI (r. 1547-1553), was focused on completing his government's Protestant transformation, while Edward's successor, Mary I (r. 1553-1558), worked tirelessly to undo Protestantism and revert back to Catholicism (this often meant burning Protestants at the stake). Mary's reign was considered so dangerous for Protestants that thousands fled the country to the European mainland, where many of them embraced the more austere Calvinist form of Protestantism. It wasn't until the reign of Mary's sister, Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), that Protestantism was favored once more and the exiles returned home. They brought their Calvinism with them, and within a generation the Church of England, while very Catholic in terms of ritual, hierarchy, and liturgy, nevertheless became more or less Calvinist in terms of doctrine.

America was thus far from the minds of most in England during this period.

Still, during the reign of Elizabeth, something of a mild resurgence, at least, in English interest in the Americas began to manifest itself from the 1560s.

What do English colonies in Ireland have to do with America?

For centuries, the rulers of England had also claimed Ireland—but the truth was that Ireland was mostly autonomous, governed by local lords with little or no oversight from London. As we've discussed, however, this was a period of centralization for England, and thus such a state of affairs in Ireland could not be tolerated, especially since many in England viewed the Irish as savages or barbarians. Under the Tudors, then, the English began to assert their control over Ireland. In 1542, Henry VIII was recognized as King of Ireland by the Irish parliament, and under Elizabeth, a policy of Anglicization was imposed on the country. Henceforth all Irish were to adopt English linguistic, agricultural, judicial, political, hierarchical, and even religious (i.e. Protestant) norms.

Under the new policy, private armies were abolished, martial law was instituted, and native revolts were brutally extinguished. The English tried to drive the Catholics out of Ulster (in the north) and replace them with Protestants. Catholic leaders were thrown out in Munster (in the south), and efforts were made to place all Irish Catholics there under the tenancy of Protestant landlords. It was here that Humphrey Gilbert, one of the queen's most brutal lieutenants, killed any who stood in his way—and laid waste to the country's crops, besides. In 1574, hundreds of Irish Catholics were massacred by the English at Belfast Castle; the next year, hundreds of men, women, and children were cut down at Rathlin Island.

Perhaps the most effective English solution to the challenge of Ireland came in the form of plantations, especially in southern and southeastern Ireland. Establishing a plantation involved confiscating Irish land (for the Crown), then colonizing this land with loyal settlers from England, Wales, and Scotland. Over time, these colonies—established and maintained by force—created a powerful English-culture, English-language, Protestant minority in Ireland. Many Irish responded by clinging to their Catholicism more fiercely—and by rising up in rebellion.

The English experience colonizing Ireland, particularly via the plantation system, turned out to be something of a dress rehearsal for English colonization of the Americas—likewise filled with natives the English considered savages. We might say that Humphrey Gilbert himself led the charge, hoping to establish English control of the Grand Banks and plant colonies in North America that could facilitate attacks on Spain's American holdings. But after several expeditions, his own ship fell prey to an ocean storm off the Azores.

Who was John Hawkins? Francis Drake?

During the 1560s, a man named John Hawkins attempted to profit from the slave trade, purchasing slaves in West Africa (or simply hijacking Portuguese slave ships; we may rightly describe him as a pirate), then making for the Caribbean to trade with the Spanish. Sometimes the Spanish traded with the Englishman, at other times they seized Hawkins's vessels—and, on his third voyage, they actually sunk four of his six ships. Accompanying Hawkins on this last journey was his young second cousin, Francis Drake; both managed to escape, but they now harbored a deep resentment of the Spanish.

After successfully working as Queen Elizabeth's spy for a time, Hawkins was placed over the Royal Navy (where he improved ship speed, among other innovations), led the naval defense of England against the Spanish Armada (Drake serving as second-in-command), received a knighthood from the queen, and engaged in officially-sanctioned piracy targeting Spanish treasure ships from the Americas. Not to be outdone, Drake embarked upon a dramatic round-the-world journey between 1577 and 1580, attacking and plundering Spanish ports on the Pacific coast of South America and exploring the coast of California (including San Francisco Bay), which he claimed for England (much to Spain's dismay). Continuing on, he returned to England west through the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, in the process becoming the first captain to actually survive a complete world circumnavigation. Francis Drake, whose venture earned him and his investors 4,600% profits, was subsequently knighted on the very deck of his ship by Queen Elizabeth—herself (secretly) one of those investors! Meanwhile, the Spanish declared both Hawkins ("Juan Aquines") and Drake ("El Draque") pirates, and placed a large bounty on their heads.

Both Drake and Hawkins died months apart while engaged in Caribbean piracy in the mid-1590s.

How did initial English colonization efforts go?

Even though Humphrey Gilbert was gone, the man had started something with his North American enterprises. His half-brother, Walter Raleigh, picked up where Gilbert had left off, twice attempting to establish a colony in North America, on the island of Roanoke (in modern-day North Carolina, though at the time off the coast of an area that the Virgin Queen Elizabeth had named after herself: Virginia).

The first Roanoke attempt saw all of the settlers decide to return home, hopping a ride aboard the ships of Francis Drake (at that time returning from a successful attack on Spanish St. Augustine, where he'd burned the town and freed its enslaved American Indians).

The second time around, the colony finally included some women—an indication that Raleigh actually wanted to plant something permanent—but the newly-established settlement was left alone, without supplies, for an extended period, while all English ships faced off against the Spanish Armada back home (1588). The Armada, which ended in disaster for Spain, was meant to punish the English for rewarding "sea dogs" (privateers) like Drake, and for aiding Dutch Protestants in their war against Spanish rule. In all of the drama, poor little Roanoke, literally on the other side of the world, was all but forgotten. By the time a supply ship finally got back to the Roanoke colony in 1590, the colonists were nowhere to be found. One of the only clues as to their whereabouts was a word, CROATOAN, which had been carved into a tree. Had the settlers left and joined some Chesapeake nation of American Indians? Had they been wiped out by the Powhatan Confederacy (we'll discuss them shortly) up the coast? Something else? To this day, scholars are unsure.

Among the lost colonists' number was the first English child to be born in the Americas—a girl named Virginia Dare.

What was the Virginia Company?

Spanish Jesuits actually set up a mission in present-day Virginia as far back as 1570—but the natives destroyed it. Thereafter the Jesuits concentrated their American efforts south of the Rio Grande.

The conflict between England and Spain, a twenty-year affair that lasted until 1604, drew English ships—entire fleets of privateers—into American waters, seeking to do damage to Spanish ports and plunder Spanish treasure ships. More and more, then, English attention turned to the west, especially after 1600, when Richard Hakluyt and his cousin (of the same name) began printing accounts of English derring-do overseas—highlighting men like Humphrey Gilbert, John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and Walter Raleigh. But none of these men had been successful at establishing a permanent English base in America. Why? Perhaps it had been a lack of resources. Perhaps founding a successful, profitable colony was too big a venture for one man, or even a handful, to finance on their own.

What was needed, then, was capital—the capital of many, pooled and acting as one. A new sort of enterprise, the joint-stock company, allowed just that. Large numbers of investors, called "adventurers," could put their money together and thus take part (and risk) in ventures that were much larger than any of them individually might entertain.

Originally, the Virginia Company had two branches. First, there was the Plymouth Company, which attempted in 1607 to plant a colony in the northern portion of the original grant (in what we call Maine today). Known as Popham Colony, the venture did not go well. The locals, an Algonquian-speaking people called the Abenaki, refused to trade with the colonists. By the end of the year, half of the English had sailed back home, and by 1608—after a harsh winter marked by disputes over leadership—the settlement was completely abandoned. The Plymouth Company, now out of money, called it quits.

Second, there was the London Company. The same year that the ill-fated Popham Colony was established, three ships carrying 104 colonists made for the more southern portion of Virginia, landing about 40 miles up a river they called the James and establishing a small settlement they called Jamestown, both named after the king. The site—which included a fort and a church, plus several thatched-roof dwellings—was an unhealthy one, replete with mosquitoes, but it was easily defensible both against hostile natives and against hostile Spaniards. Its simplicity—and backwardness—has been compared by scholars to that of a small European hamlet of the 6th or 7th century. Jamestown was hardly comparable to the great Spanish colonial centers of Mexico or Peru, with their cathedrals, printing presses, plazas, and universities.

The Jamestown venture, it was hoped, would discover silver and gold and, with luck, the Northwest Passage. There were loudly-trumpeted aspirations for converting the natives to Christianity, too. Perhaps unbeknownst to the colonists, however, was that the river they'd settled upon was actually called the Powhatan—and that they were squatting on territory controlled by a powerful chiefdom that would later be called the Powhatan Confederacy.

Who was Powhatan?

How did Jamestown survive?

Both Gates and West arrived in the middle of the colony's first war with the natives—a conflict that lasted five years (the First Anglo-Powhatan War, 1609-1614). Colonists who wandered beyond the settlement were likely to be killed by Powhatan's warriors, who saw the settlers as both land-hungry and annoyingly incompetent. Since the starving time, Powhatan had attempted to take advantage of Jamestown's apparent weakness. The colony thus found itself marooned in enemy territory.

The English responded by fiercely attacking American Indian villages and destroying their crops. Skirmishes continued for several years. The war finally ended after the Jamestown colonists managed to kidnap Pocahontas—and use her as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations. For her part, Pocahontas actually converted to Christianity, married a settler named John Rolfe, visited England (where John Smith urged the queen to treat Pocahontas as a royal visitor), and even met King James himself. Her efforts at procuring peace between the two groups during this early stage may have spelled the difference between Jamestown's survival and its demise.

When, in 1611, the Virginia Company sent a new "high marshal" to oversee the colony—his name was Thomas Dale—he quickly identified Jamestown's number one problem: a complete lack of individual property rights. Henceforth each man would receive three acres of land and only be required to work a single month a year for the colony (this last was a form of taxation). Almost immediately, Jamestown began to thrive. John Rolfe imported tobacco from the Caribbean and began growing it in Virginia, experimenting with various methods of growing and curing it in order to eliminate its bitterness—until it was positively sweet. Rolfe's tobacco earned him great profits back in England, so others in the colony followed Rolfe's lead. Soon almost everyone in Jamestown was growing the "noxious weed," as King James described it. The crop even lined some of Jamestown's streets, and colonists preferred to import their food if only to make room for the production of ever more tobacco. By 1618, any settler who paid his own way to Virginia was granted fifty acres, and by 1623, all landholdings were made completely private. Tobacco was the cash crop of choice.

Land was important to the English. Most of the country's inhabitants were tillers of the soil, but recently England's top export industry, wool, had been booming. One result was that many of the old farms were converted into grazing land, just when the old monasteries and nunneries which used to take care of the poor and the needy were being seized by the English state as part of its transformation from Catholic to Protestant. As such, tens of thousands of poor, landless farmers roamed the English countryside as beggars (or brigands)—and flooded London and other cities. Perhaps, some mused, America was the perfect dumping ground for such people. So inviting was the prospect of land that thousands of these would-be colonists were more than willing to face years of slavery as indentured servants if, at the end of it all, they might be rewarded with a few acres of their own.

What's significant about the year 1619?

For all its advantages, tobacco, if planted over and over in the same field, could ruin the soil. Thus more land was needed so that fields could lay fallow for a season. And the more the tobacco plantations grew, the more demand existed for slave labor. The first black African slaves, numbering twenty, were delivered to the colony in 1619 aboard a Dutch warship—a momentous event. Almost all of them were purchased by the colony's new governor, George Yeardley, for use on his own thousand-acre plantation.

Actually, these first African arrivals weren't slaves, strictly speaking, since they were purchased as indentured servants; after five years, they were to be freed, given land, and enjoy the benefits of citizenship. White indentured servants labored under the same contracts. The reality, however, was that both black and white indentured servants often found their servitude prolonged by further borrowings, strapping them with financial obligations that extended their period of indenture. It is unclear if any of the 1619 black indentured servants were ever freed or granted land; perhaps one or two were, or perhaps none. This seemed the fate of most indentured servants, regardless of skin color; most white indentured laborers, if they survived their period of indenture, ended up as mere tenant farmers. Certainly, a few early Virginia blacks ended up free citizens with their own land. But Yeardley and others found that blacks worked well as laborers, and thus began buying more—as out-and-out chattel slaves. Still, for now (and continuing on until the end of the century), the colony had far more white laborers and indentured servants than blacks, slave or otherwise. But an ominous process had been initiated.

Ironically, the same year that black slaves arrived, the colony formed its first representative assembly: the General Assembly of Virginia. The Assembly was composed not only of the Company's on-site ruling council (making up something of an upper house, analogous to a House of Lords), but also 22 elected burgesses, or free citizens (making up something of a lower house, analogous to a House of Commons). Eventually this lower-house element would be officially called the House of Burgesses. Though the General Assembly of Virginia met for only five days that year (called off on account of the mosquitoes, flies, and heat), it was the first of many—essentially local parliaments that allowed for representative self-government in each of the various (future, British) American colonies. Nothing like this existed in any of Spain's American colonies, nor Portugal's, nor France's, and some of them had been around for more than a century. It did not take long, then, after the establishment of a permanent English colony for England's unique political traditions to make their mark in the new land.

1619, too, saw the importation of ninety young, unmarried Englishwomen. A colonist could actually purchase one of these women as a wife—provided he pay 125 pounds of tobacco to cover the woman's ocean passage.

What happened to the Powhatan Confederacy?

Meanwhile, the marriage between Rolfe and Pocahontas brought peace between the Powhatan Confederacy and the Jamestown settlers—until Powhatan himself died in 1618. This combined with the rise of tobacco as Jamestown's chief cash crop (a crop which drove an acute need for more and more land on the part of the English) to spur renewed tension with the natives: the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-1632). It didn't help that the colonists had become friends and allies with some of the Confederacy's local enemies. In March 1622, Opechancanough, who had succeeded his brother Powhatan, surprise attacked the colony. The Indian massacre of 1622 saw 347 settlers—men, women, and children—killed, plus many farms burned to the ground. Opechancanough's hope was that the blow would convince the colonists to simply pack up and leave. Instead, the settlers fought back, over the next decade raiding the Confederacy's villages every summer—slaughtering their inhabitants, destroying buildings, laying waste to crops. Peace finally came in 1632 with the signing of a treaty.

As settlers continued to spread into the Rappahannock and Potomac valleys, Opechancanough decided to attempt one final, massive attack. In April of 1644, he led his warriors against the unsuspecting English, killing perhaps five hundred colonists (out of a total population of around eight thousand) living in outlying villages; more might have been killed if not for the warnings of Christian Indians. English retaliation for the attack was swift and brutal; the colonists marched into village after village, destroying everything in their path, in the hopes of driving the natives out of the area once and for all. Opechancanough himself was captured and shot. His successor, Necotowance, signed a peace treaty in 1646 that finally ended the violence.

English settlement of the region continued unabated, even encroaching on native land protected by the 1646 treaty. But the old chiefdom of Powhatan was crumbling—and, like everywhere else the Europeans had settled in the Americas, disease was killing off sizable segments of the native population.

Within just a few years, the once-mighty Powhatan Confederacy, with its tens of thousands spread out across eastern Virginia, had been reduced to a few hundred survivors.

The GUIDED NOTES KEY for this session can be viewed here. The RUBRICS for this session can be viewed here: guided notes; Structure term connections.