American Childhoods

Year

President

America

Britain/World

Pre – 17^th Century

1492

Christopher Columbus “discovers” America and claims it for Spain.

1500s

Through the next three centuries The Spanish, led by the conquistadors and missionaries, extend their conquest of  Southern America. The first Euro-American colony was established in St Augustine Florida by the Spanish in 1565. Territory boundaries shifted through the 17^th and 18^th centuries as European conflicts, with Britain in particular, extended into the Americas. The  Spanish-American war of 1898, in which the US supported  national  independence movements in the colonies (Cuba), saw the end of Spanish rule in the southern continent.

17^th Century: Early Settlement/Puritanism

1600

1603: Death  of Elizabeth I

James I

1603-25

1606: Jamestown , Virginia colony established

1610s

1616-1619: first major Indian smallpox epidemic. 

King James Bible (1611)

1616: Death of William Shakespeare

1620s

Charles I

1625-49 

1620: Mayflower “Puritan” Separatists establish Plymouth.

1630s

1630: John Winthrop arrives with 900 Puritans and a Royal Charter to govern Salem.

1637 Pequot War with colonists.

1640s

Iroquois and Huron Wars (1643-53)

English Civil War (1642-1652)

1650s

Oliver Cromwell

1653-58

Richard Cromwell

1658-59

1656 Historical setting of  Hawthorne’s “A Gentle Boy” (1832) First Quakers arrive in America; outlawed in Puritan districts (now Massachusetts). 

1660s

Charles II

1660-1685

1660: Restoration of the English Monarchy

1660 founding of Royal Adventurers into Africa

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

1670s

1675-76: “King Phillip’s” War

1680s

James II

1685-88

William III & Mary 1689-[1694]1702

1681: Pennsylvania established by William Penn as a Quaker State; Persecutory laws against them revoked.

John Locke, “Some Thoughts concerning Education” (1683)

1687: Isaac Newton identifies Laws of Gravity

1688: Glorious Revolution ousts James II, establishes protestant succession and English Bill of Rights.

1690s

1692: Salem Witch Trials

Cotton Mather, “A Token for the Children of New England” (1699)

Historical Sketch: 17th Century

Predominant myths of the early colonists include the story of Captain James Smith and his encounter with he “noble savage” Pocahontas in Jamestown (Virginia); the Puritan “Pilgrims” landing at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in The Mayflower, escaping religious persecution in England, making friends with the local Indians and sitting down to Thanksgiving Dinner with them. The subsequent reputation of the Puritans – promulgated by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the nineteenth-century amongst others – emphasized their stern religious asceticism, strong work ethic, and their brutality in quelling sedition – most significantly in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, but also in their treatment of rival religious sects such as the Quakers from 1656 to 1681.

Motivations for immigration from England combined mercantilism with religious utopianism. The Jamestown settlement was set up as an exclusively  commercial venture backed by a London company under Royal Charter. It faced a difficult struggle to survive until it began to establish tobacco crops to export back to England.

The first religious separatists to arrive in Massachusetts on The Mayflower, on the other hand, had the stated motivation of seeking a haven to practice their religion, as a group that had emerged from intense sectarian conflicts in England that continued through the century. By 1630, with the arrival of John Winthrop and 900 Puritan colonists with a Royal Charter for the Massachusetts Bay Trading Company, these motivations had also become entangled with mercantilism. Winthrop, nevertheless, maintained the dominance of religious principles, declaring in his famous speech on “A Model of Christian Charity” aboard The Arabella: “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of the world are upon us.” (See Norton A) Some 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America through the century, and their early cultural dominance has had a lasting impact on the modern American sense of self-identity.

The principle features of early settlement life to have a lasting impact on North American culture were the practice of allotting land parcels to individual settlers, the practice of local self-governance through “covenants” between members, and the election of local governors (English rule from across the Atlantic proving to be somewhat nominal until the 18^th-century).

Dutch settlers founded New Amsterdam, which was lost to the British in 1664 and renamed New York. The founding of Pennsylvania in 1681 by William Penn saw the arrival of more Dutch and German Quakers to British America.

African American

Jamestown introduced the first Africans to British America in 1619, initially under the same system of indentured servitude as white European workers. This was a system whereby individuals were “bonded” to a master for a limited period of time to “pay” for their passage before becoming free men. White individuals were more likely to volunteer for indentured service, although it could also be forced in penalty for a criminal action (there was some limited “transportation” of British convicts to the American colonies, but never on the same scale as Australia). Africans were more likely to be kidnapped, bought as the spoils of inter-tribal conflicts in Africa, or transferred from the already established slave system in the British West Indies. By the 1660s, with the expansion and growth of  the colony into Virginia, the system of bonded labor had hardened along racial lines, with African slaves now being bonded for life, and subjected to increasingly draconian “slave codes”. This shift coincided with the formation in England of the “Royal Adventures into Africa” company in 1660, which launched British dominance in the slave trade (by 1780s Britain would account for a third of the trade globally). African Slaves were also present in the northern colonies through the century, although the more pronounced tendency to organize social life through agricultural smallholdings meant that there was not the same economic demand to import slaves on the same scale as the south.

Native American

The Native American population at 1492 has been conservatively estimated at 54m throughout the continent. The tribal names likely to be most familiar to non-(Native) Americans are some of the Plains Tribes – one of the ten ethnographic groups of tribes throughout the northern continent – which includes the Sioux, Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Pawnee. This is largely due to their dominance as figures in Hollywood Westerns, especially in the John Ford/John Wayne era of early to mid twentieth-century, set during the principle period of Euro-American westward expansion through “The Territories” in the mid- to late- 19th century. The name of the ship in Moby Dick, the Pequod, alludes to the Pequot tribe. At the start of the war with Puritan colonizers in 1637, captured tribe members were traded for African slaves from Bermuda, with remnants of the tribe pushed west into Connecticut.

James Smith did indeed succeed in negotiating with the local tribe, forming a strong alliance though Pocahontas with her father Powhatan, leader of the Algonquian Indians. As the century progressed, however, relations between the colonist and Indians deteriorated, yielding two wars in 1622, the first between Indians and colonizers, and 1644. Likewise, the New England settlers initially had good relations with the Wompanoeg tribe (largely as a result of one of their members speaking English as a result of a prior captivity by English explores), and later forming trading alliances with the “five nations” tribes collectively known as the Iroquois. Colonialism effected internal Indian politics, such as the tribal wars of 1643-1653, caused by the Iroquois moving westward into Huron territory in search of furs to trade with the colonists. In 1675-76, relations with the Wompanoeg also collapsed into war, led by Pometacon (also know as Metacom or Metacomet and nicknamed “King Philip” by the English). Wars between Indians and colonists/early republicans would remain a regular occurrence through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which would also see a number of alliances being forged between individual tribes and warring European colonist (particularly the French and English), until increased US state power and the belief in a “manifest destiny” to expand westward in the 19^th-century would see the introduction of a more sustained policy of forced removal, containment in reservations, and slaughter. 

A further major impact of European colonizers arriving in the New World was introducing alcohol, and European diseases to which the Indians lacked immunity – particularly smallpox. It is estimated that some 90% of Indians on the Atlantic seaboard died in the first major smallpox epidemic of 1616-19. (Early New England colonists wrote of arriving to see fields tilled and ready for planting.) Subsequent epidemics stuck throughout the century and formed a pattern up until the early 20^th-century.