# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Slavery

I have added a few brief videos for you to view to explain the origin of the Atlantic slave trade which played a role in the mercantilist model that England (and other European nations) subscribed to in the 16th-18th centuries. They are worth your time!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I have added a few brief videos for you to view to explain the origin of the Atlantic slave trade which played a role in the mercantilist model that England (and other European nations) subscribed to in the 16th-18th centuries. They are worth your time!

# data[].attributes.headline
The Enlightenment & the Great Awakening!

# data[].attributes.subject
The Enlightenment & the Great Awakening!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Enlightenment & the Great Awakening

These two movements led American colonists to begin thinking for themselves and realizing that they were capable of leading themselves. The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening changed the colonists' beliefs about their society and their relationship with the Mother Country. They realized that they didn't require the Mother Country for survival and these movements changed their way of thinking about themselves and England.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These two movements led American colonists to begin thinking for themselves and realizing that they were capable of leading themselves. The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening changed the colonists' beliefs about their society and their relationship with the Mother Country.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Colonial Concepts! - Background Knowledge You Need to Know! by Jennifer Egas | This newsletter was created with Smore, an online tool for creating beautiful newsletters for individual educators, schools and districts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many times we don't think about (or are not taught about) how the colonists actually came to the conclusion that revolution was the answer to the issues between the colonies and the Mother Country.

Consider the following things:

1. The colonists didn't arrive at this conclusion overnight. (And many of them never supported independence at all. It is a "myth" that "all colonists" wanted independence. In fact no more than 50% supported it at any given time and usually it was closer to 33% for, 33% against and 33% neutral depending on how the war was going.)

2. It is illogical to think that the colonists decided one day that independence was the answer. There were no democracies or republics on the face of the earth at the time of the war. The most recent democracy and republic were the Greeks and the Romans, respectively.

3. Without the Enlightenment, the Great Awakening and the French & Indian War, we can't logically arrive in 1763 on the eve of Revolution. The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening showed the Americans that they could think for themselves and the French and Indian War doubled the English Crown's debt level, leading the government to tax the colonists without allowing them even 1 seat in Parliament--the triggers fo the American Revolution.

There are 3 essential steps that we have to go through to logically arrive at the American Revolution. Let's learn more about the French & Indian War now!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many times we don't think about (or are not taught about) how the colonists actually came to the conclusion that revolution was the answer to the issues between the colonies and the Mother Country. Consider the following things: 1. The colonists didn't arrive at this conclusion overnight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Spanish claim to territories that are today the United States rested upon the 16th century exploits of Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.

St. Augustine in Florida was established as a Spanish fort in 1565, the first permanent settlement in what would become the United States. The impact of this settlement was slight, however, since it served primarily as a base camp for other exploratory ventures and also as the center of efforts to convert the area's natives to Roman Catholicism. A handful of Spanish settlements was established in outlying areas, but they soon fell prey to Indian attacks or economic insufficiency.

Greater progress was made by Spanish colonizers on the other side of the continent. In 1598, Don Juan Oñante led 500 men from Mexico northward into Pueblo lands in present-day New Mexico. The invaders brought with them a labor system known as the encomienda, which had originally developed in Spain.

Under this scheme, large New World land grants were made by the Crown to favored Spanish individuals. The grantees were responsible for the protection and Christian instruction of inhabitants of the lands, and those natives were required to pay tribute - often in the form of crops and labor - to the grantee.

Understandably, the Pueblo deeply resented the entire system - invasion of their lands, suppression of their religion, payment of tribute, and enforced loyalty to a foreign monarch.

The encomienda was used throughout Spanish America. Its application differed sharply from one area to another, being relatively benign in some regions, but virtually enslaving in others. Reform of the system was sought by a Spanish missionary, Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Oñante, fired by a passion for precious metals, launched a series of explorations eastward into present-day Kansas and Oklahoma, and westward to the Gulf of California. In some instances, he retraced Coronado's steps and was equally unsuccessful in discovering gold and silver.

New settlements were erected at Santa Fe in 1609 and nearby Taos in 1615.

Relationships between the colonists and the Pueblo improved as they cooperated in livestock raising (mostly cattle and sheep), but an undercurrent of resentment remained strong. In 1680, a major revolt broke out under native leader Papé. Hundreds were killed on both sides in the fighting and order was not restored until 1692.

As the 17th century drew to a close, Spanish colonial administrators finally realized that, given their minority status in so many parts of New Spain, policy reform was necessary. In the coming years, the Pueblo were allowed to resume the practice of their religion, own land, and be free from forced labor.

From a material standpoint, the Spanish ventures in the northern portions of their realm were far less successful than those to the south.

- - - Books You May Like Include: ----

Commanches by T.R. Fehrenbach.
Authoritative and immediate, this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T.R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' ris...
The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous empire rose to dominate the f...
The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution by William R. Polk.
In this provocative account of colonial America, William R. Polk explores the key events, individuals, and themes of this critical period. With vivid ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Spanish claim to territories that are today the United States rested upon the 16th century exploits of Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. St. Augustine in Florida was established as a Spanish fort in 1565, the first permanent settlement in what would become the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is equally important that in attitudes toward class and race Spanish possessions differed from the English colonies. Most colonists were of mixed racial backgrounds and racial mixture continued throughout the Spanish colonial period. In general, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry) and Indians were concentrated in the lower levels of the social structure.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the years after Columbus's first voyage, Spanish adventurers known as conquistadores began to colonize the surrounding areas of the Caribbean and the Americas. In this video, Kim explores the social changes that Spanish colonization created in the New World.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Spanish Colonization Learning Guide. Spanish Colonization analysis by PhD students from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Coming of the English

The 17th century marked the early beginnings of English rule in the Americas with the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies.

Learning Objectives

Analyze and recall the early colonization attempts of the English Colonial Empire

Key Takeaways

Key Points

Sir Walter Raleigh established what is now known as the "Lost Colony " of Roanoke in the late 16th century.

The 17th century saw a rapid increase of English colonial activity, driven by the pursuit of new land, trade, and religious freedom.

The London Virginia Company created the first successful English overseas settlements at Jamestown in 1607, and the Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629.

The colonial South included Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Carolina, and the Middle Colonies consisted of the present-day states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

Key Terms

London Virginia Company: An English joint stock business established by royal charter and James I of England on April 10, 1606, with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America.

Plymouth Company: An English joint stock business founded in 1606 by James I of England with the purpose of establishing settlements on the coast of North America; also called the Virginia Bay Company.

Early British Attempts to Colonize

The first serious attempts to establish English colonies overseas were made in the last quarter of the 16th century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Financed by the Muscovy Company, Martin Frobisher set sail in 1576, seeking the Northwest Passage. In August of 1576, he landed at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island. In 1578, he reached the shores of Greenland and made an unsuccessful attempt at founding a settlement in Frobisher Bay. At the same time, between 1577 and 1580, Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe. In 1579, he landed somewhere on the western coast of North America, claiming the area for Elizabeth as "New Albion."

The Founding of Roanoke

In 1584, Queen Elizabeth I granted Sir Walter Raleigh a charter for the colonization of an area of North America which was to be called Virginia. Raleigh and Elizabeth intended that the venture should provide riches from the New World and a base from which to send privateers on raids against the treasure fleets of Spain. He called his new privately-funded colony, Roanoke, and founded it on an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina, where it would be relatively isolated from existing settlements in North America.

The colony was small, consisting of only 117 people, who suffered a poor relationship with the local American Indians, the Croatans, and struggled to survive in their new land. Their governor, John White, returned to England in late 1587 to secure more people and supplies; by the time he returned in 1590, the entire colony had vanished. The only trace the colonists left behind was the word "Croatoan" carved into a fence surrounding the village. Governor White never knew whether the colonists had decamped for nearby Croatoan Island (now Hatteras) or whether some disaster had befallen them all. Roanoke is still called "the Lost Colony" today.

The Beginning of the Thirteen Colonies

England made its first successful efforts at the start of the 17th century. Most of the new English colonies established in North America and the West Indies, whether successful or otherwise, were proprietary colonies. Proprietors were appointed to found and govern settlements under mercantile charters granted to joint stock companies. Soon, there was a rapid increase of English colonial activity, driven by the pursuit of new land, trade, and religious freedom.

The Thirteen Colonies were the colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, starting with Virginia in 1607, and ending with Georgia in 1733. The colonies were Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Each colony developed its own system of self-government.

Jamestown

In 1606, James I sold a charter containing lands between present-day South Carolina and the U.S.-Canada border to two competing groups of investors. The Plymouth Company was given the northern portions, and the London Company was given the southern portions. The Northern Plymouth settlement in Maine faltered and was abandoned. However, the London Virginia Company created the first successful English overseas settlements at Jamestown in 1607. Its first years were extremely difficult, with very high death rates from disease and starvation, wars with local American Indians, and little gold. The colony survived and flourished by developing tobacco as a cash crop for the colony; it served as a beginning for the colonial state of Virginia.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

The Puritans (a much larger group than the Pilgrims) established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 with 400 settlers. They fled England, and in America, they attempted to create a "nation of saints" or a "City upon a Hill"-an intensely religious community designed to be an example for all of Europe. Other colonists who disagreed with the Puritans in Massachusetts settled to the north, mingling with adventurers and profit-oriented settlers to establish more religiously diverse colonies in New Hampshire and Maine.

Unlike the cash crop-oriented plantations of the Chesapeake region, the Puritan economy was based on the efforts of self-supporting farmsteads who traded only for goods they could not produce themselves. Along with agriculture, fishing, and logging, New England became an important mercantile and shipbuilding center, serving as the hub for trading between the southern colonies and Europe.

The Middle Colonies and Colonial South

The Middle Colonies, consisting of the present-day states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, were characterized by a large degree of religious, political, economic, and ethnic diversity. In 1664, England took over the Dutch colony of New Netherland, including New Amsterdam, and renamed it the Province of New York. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 as a proprietary colony of the Quaker, William Penn.

The colonial South included the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake region-Virginia and Maryland-and the lower South colonies of Carolina and Georgia. Carolina was not settled until 1670. The original settlers in South Carolina established a lucrative trade in provisions, deerskins, and American Indian captives with the Caribbean Islands. The settlers came mainly from the English colony of Barbados and brought African slaves with them.

Population Growth

By 1640, 20,000 settlers had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, the British shipped an estimated 50,000 convicts to its American colonies; the first convicts in the colonies arrived before the Mayflower. After 1700, most immigrants to Colonial America arrived as indentured servants-young unmarried men and women seeking a new life in a much richer environment. Philadelphia became the center of the colonies; by the end of the colonial period, 30,000 people lived there, having come from diverse nations and practicing numerous trades.

By 1776, about 85% of the white population in the British colonies was of English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh descent, with 9% of German origin and 4% Dutch. These populations continued to grow at a rapid rate throughout the 18th century, primarily because of high birth rates and relatively low death rates. Immigration was a minor factor from 1774 to 1830. Over 90% of people were farmers. Several small cities that were also seaports linked the colonial economy to the larger British Empire.

Indentured Servants

Colonial farmers, planters, and shopkeepers hired servants from Europe who agreed to work for a number of years in exchange for their passage to America.

Learning Objectives

Discuss the rise and decline of indentured servitude in colonial North America

Key Takeaways

Key Points

Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of colonists, especially in the British colonies, as well as a system of labor to support the new colonies. Indentured servants received passage to the colonies and would work for several years to pay off the debt of their travel costs.

The servants were not paid wages, but were provided food, room, clothing, and training (also called the "terms of indenture").

In the 17th century, nearly two-thirds of English settlers came as indentured servants.

Unlike slaves, servants could look forward to a release from bondage once their contract had been served. While slaves themselves were bought and sold as property, only a servant's labor was sold, maintaining them as a free person. Indentured servitude was a major element of colonial labor economics from the 1620s until the American Revolution. As indentured servants became more expensive, their labor was replaced by African slaves.

Key Terms

terms of indenture: A legal contract that specifies the conditions, timeline, and exchange involved in servitude.

redemptioner: An immigrant, generally from the 18th or 19th century, that gained passage to America by selling themselves as an indentured servant.

Background: Indentured Servitude in the Colonies

In colonial North America, farmers, planters, and shopkeepers found it very difficult to hire workers, primarily because cash was short and it was easy for those workers to set up their own farms. Consequently, the more common solution became to pay the passage of a young worker from the British Isles (including Ireland, Wales, and Scotland) or Germany, who would work for several years to pay off the debt of the travel costs. Tens of thousands of workers, usually Europeans, immigrated as indentured servants (also known as redemptioners), particularly to the 13 colonies of British North America.

An indenture was a legal contract enforced by the courts. Europeans who were displaced from their land or unable to find work signed contracts of indenture and took passage to the Americas. Some indentured servants were deported from their country and sent to the New World as punishment for law breaking. Prior to the American Revolutionary War, an estimated 50,000 convicts from the United Kingdom were transported to the American colonies and served out their time as indentured servants before receiving an official pardon. Labor was in demand in North America, and so free persons were also recruited in exchange for passage to the Americas. Many recruiters abused the system, however, including lying to recruits.

Indentured servitude was a method of increasing the number of colonists, especially in the British colonies. Voluntary migration and convict labor only provided so many people, and because the journey across the Atlantic was dangerous, other means of encouraging settlement were necessary. Contract-laborers became so numerous that the United States Constitution counted them specifically in appointing representatives.

Process

Indentured servants or their parents would make arrangements with a ship captain in Europe, who would not charge any money. The captain would transport the indentured servants to the American colonies and sell their legal papers to someone who needed workers. When the ship arrived, the captain would often advertise in a newspaper that indentured servants were for sale. When a buyer was found, the sale would be recorded at the city court. One could buy and sell indentured servants' contracts, and the right to their labor would change hands, but not the person as a piece of property.

In the 17th century, nearly two-thirds of English settlers came as indentured servants. Given the high death rate, many servants did not live to the end of their terms. The servants were not paid wages, but were provided food, room, clothing, and training (also called the "terms of indenture"). Unlike slaves, servants could look forward to a release from bondage. At the end of their term they received a payment known as "freedom dues" and a new suit of clothes; they were then free members of society.

Abuses of the System

Abuse of indentured servants on board ships is well documented. If a person died more than half way across the Atlantic, the surviving family members had to pay the deceased's fare as well as their own. The crew often pilfered their baggage, and while many travelers started their journey with sufficient funds to pay their way, they were often overcharged so that they arrived with a debt to settle in addition to their servitude contract. If the ship needed to sail before some of the passengers' indentures had been sold, an agent in the American port kept them confined until a buyer presented himself.

Indentures could not marry without the permission of their contract's owner, were subject to physical punishment (occasionally even resulting in death), and saw their obligation to labor enforced by the courts. To ensure uninterrupted work by the female servants, the law lengthened the term of their indenture if they became pregnant.

The British Parliament eventually enacted laws protecting British subjects from the worst abuses. The law required that the specific terms and conditions of servitude be approved by a magistrate in Great Britain and declared that any indentures not bearing a magistrate's seal were unenforceable in the colonies. As a result, colonial masters increasingly sought servants from elsewhere.

Effects on the Economy

Indentured servitude was a major element of colonial labor economics from the 1620s until the American Revolution. The system declined as the price of indentured agricultural labor increased (for example, the cost of indentured labor rose by nearly 60% throughout the 1680s in some colonial regions). Few indentures arrived after 1775, and so southern planters turned increasingly to African slaves for their labor force, who were comparatively less expensive. Thereafter, Africans began to replace indentured servants in both skilled and unskilled positions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 17th century marked the early beginnings of English rule in the Americas with the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies. Analyze and recall the early colonization attempts of the English Colonial Empire Key Points Sir Walter Raleigh established what is now known as the "Lost Colony " of Roanoke in the late 16th century.

# data[].attributes.headline
Indentured Servitude in Colonial Virginia

# data[].attributes.subject
Indentured Servitude in Colonial Virginia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Origins

Richard Hakluyt (the
Younger)

Servitude had a long history in England, dating back to medieval serfdom. The Ordinance of Labourers, passed in June 1349, declared that all men and women under the age of sixty who did not practice a craft must serve anyone requiring their labor. Parliament updated the law in 1495 and 1563, with the latter version, the Statute of Artificers, still being in effect when the English founded Jamestown. Between 1520 and 1630, England's population more than doubled, from 2.3 million to 4.8 million, and Parliament hoped its 1563 statute might "banishe Idleness[,] advance Husbandrye," and so deal with the near-overwhelming number of poor and unemployed citizens. In fact, the founding of Virginia itself was partially in response to this problem. In hisDiscourse on Western Planting (1584), Richard Hakluyt (the younger) argued to Queen Elizabeth that new American colonies would energize England's "decayed trades" and provide work for the country's "multitudes of loyterers and idle vagabondes."

In England, an indenture, or contract for labor, was known as a "covenant merely personal," and could apply either to farm laborers or apprentices learning a trade. Contracts generally lasted a year, after which terms were renegotiated. As the merchant and adventurer Sir George Peckham noted in 1583, many English men and women willingly became servants "in hope thereby to amend theyr estates," and young children were sometimes bound to service by parents who might not otherwise be able to afford their upbringing. While there was not necessarily a strong stigma attached to indentured servitude, the institution-first in England and then in Virginia-temporarily transformed free men and women into chattel, or property to be bought and sold.

Land and Labor

Merchants of
Virginia

The Virginia Company of London always had more land than labor to work it. At first, the company attempted to entice investors by offering them shares in the company that were redeemable for land. But when profits failed to materialize and the colony became infamous for its high mortality rate, the company began shipping servants to Virginia at its own expense and placing them on company-owned land. (An Englishman willing to risk his life in order to work someone else's acreage was not usually someone who could afford transatlantic passage.) Once the servants arrived, the company could rent them out to planters for a year at a time, requiring the planters to take responsibility for the workers' food, shelter, and health.

With the introduction of marketable tobacco, however, demand for labor skyrocketed. Private investors who, alongside the company, had shipped servants at their own expense continued to do so while the company rid itself of its role as rental agent. Instead, it sold servants directly to planters at a price based on the cost of passage. Planters, mariners, and merchants then fixed the servants' years of service based on the labor required to recoup their purchase price and subsequent care.

Servants, who ranged from convicted criminals to skilled workers, in time came to occupy the lowest rung on the social ladder in Virginia. While tenants kept half of what they earned, servants kept nothing and were almost entirely at the mercy of their masters for the terms of their indentures. Movement up the ladder was limited, even once a term of service had been completed, although servants with marketable skills had a greater chance of success. Few servants were like Robert Townshend, who arrived as an apprentice in 1620 and eventually served in the House of Burgesses.

In the summer of 1620, the Virginia Company of London announced that it would send to Virginia, at "publike charge," "eight hundred choise persons," half of whom were assigned to be tenants of company land. One hundred "yong Maides" were sent to "make wives for these Tenants," and one hundred boys to serve as apprentices. Finally, "one hundred servants [were] to be disposed amongst the old Planters, which they greatly desire, and have offered to defray their charges with very great thankes."

Soon, however, the company found it unnecessary to continue incurring the "publike charge" of transporting servants. Instead, it implemented a system by which it used the prospect of land to entice new colonists, and with them laborers. Headrights, first described in the so-called Great Charter of 1618, awarded 100 acres of land each to planters who had been in the colony since May 1616, and 50 acres each to anyone who covered the cost of transporting a new immigrant to Virginia. These newcomers, more often than not, were indentured servants, allowing successful planters simultaneous access to land and labor, with no upfront cost to the company. Merchants and mariners reaped a benefit, too, for they recruited prospective servants, bargained their indenture terms with them, and then sold the contracts to planters in Virginia. Merchants also accumulated headrights that could be used to acquire land. In time, these headrights, or land certificates, were bought and sold much like modern-day stock certificates.

Early Virginia
Colonists

Sometimes groups of investors collectively absorbed the cost of outfitting and transporting workers to the colony. Virginia Company of London stockholders were entitled to 100 acres per share, and high-ranking officials were furnished with indentured servants as part of their stipend. In some instances groups of investors promised to give land to their indentured servants after they fulfilled their contracts. The Society of Berkeley Hundred's investors offered their skilled servants parcels that ranged from 25 to 50 acres, to be claimed once they had fulfilled their contracts.

Various factors fueled the need for new servants. One was demographics. Approximately 50,000 servants-or three-quarters of all new arrivals-immigrated to the Chesapeake Bay colonies between 1630 and 1680. The ratio of men to women among servants in the 1630s was six-to-one. Between 1640 and 1680, the ratio dropped to four-to-one, but even then, many men could not find wives to marry and therefore could not establish families. As a result of this and the high mortality rate among new servants, company officials and English merchants were forced to constantly replenish the Virginia colony's servant population.

Another factor creating a need for new servants was the rapidly expanding tobacco market. It created substantial opportunities for would-be planters, but because tobacco was a demanding, labor-intensive crop, it also required a large number of laborers. At the same time, tobacco's acceptance as a medium of exchange prompted planters to enhance their productivity. Between the 1620s and the 1670s, the annual output of tobacco per hand rose from approximately 710 pounds to around 1,600 pounds; during the same period, shipping costs decreased. Although tobacco prices had begun to decline sharply by late in the 1620s and continued to fall, production remained profitable because planters were able to produce larger crops with fewer hands. Yet even as they technically required fewer servants, planters demanded more. That's because tobacco consumption rose in response to lower prices, and planters, eager to meet that demand, increased their production.

Contract Terms

As indentured servants poured into Virginia, they came to account for fully half of Virginia's population. Such rapid change caused problems, however, and the General Assembly passed numerous statutes designed to address them. These laws served several broad purposes, including regulation of servants' contract terms, behavior, and treatment.

Contract terms were important for several reasons. The assembly wished to protect masters from terms that did not fully recoup their cost of transporting servants from England to Virginia, in addition to their subsequent care. The assembly also faced the problem of servants who arrived without any contracts; the English custom of requiring a single year's service absent any other arrangement would not suffice in America, where the labor market was less stable than in England. Finally, the masters-who included most men who sat in the assembly-had an interest in prolonging terms of indenture because briefer service led to disruptive turnover, labor shortages, and an unstable workforce.

For these reasons, terms of service did not shorten even as tobacco production became more efficient and profitable. Instead, lengthy terms of service became customary and dictated by law. As early as 1619, the General Assembly required all servants to register with the secretary of state upon arrival and "Certifie him upon what termes or conditions they be come hither." In its 1642-1643 session, the assembly passed a law mandating that any servant arriving without an indenture and who was younger than twelve years old should serve for seven years, servants aged twelve to nineteen should serve for five years, and servants aged twenty and older should serve for four years. Legislation passed in the 1657-1658 session adjusted these ages: anyone under the age of fifteen should serve until he or she turned twenty-one, while anyone sixteen or older should serve for four years. By 1705, the law had been simplified, so that all non-indentured Christian servants older than nineteen should serve until they turned twenty-four. ("Christian servants" generally referred to non-blacks and non-Indians.) Lawmakers entrusted the county courts with judging the age of each servant. In the meantime, they required slightly different terms for Irish servants.

The assembly declined to dictate standard terms for privately negotiated indentures; as a result, contracts varied in length and specificity. On September 7, 1619, Robert Coopy, whose age went unnoted, signed an indenture for three years' service to the proprietors of Berkeley's Hundred requiring that he be "obedient" to his betters and that they "transport him (with gods assistance)" to Virginia and there "maintayne him with convenient diet and apparel." In a much shorter document, dated March 14, 1664, Lott Richards, a merchant from Bristol, England, sold "one Sarvant boy by name William [F]reeman being about eleven years old and haveing noe indenture" to John Barnes for a term of eight years. By 1755, Thomson Mason could simply fill out a form, which he did in order to indenture for four years William Buckland, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter and joiner, to his brother George Mason, who was overseeing the construction of Gunston Hall. Buckland's agreement was somewhat unusual in that, as a skilled worker, he was paid wages of £20 per year in addition to receiving "all necessary Meat, Drink, Washing, [and] Lodging."

Servants whose contracts had expired typically received "freedom dues," loosely described as a quantity of corn and clothing. The 1705 statute was the first to explicitly mention this "good and laudable custom," and required that male servants, "upon their freedom," be supplied with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings (or the like value in goods), and a musket worth at least twenty shillings. Women were entitled to fifteen bushels of corn and the equivalent of forty shillings.

During the seventeenth century, freedom dues were negotiated as part of the indenture. Robert Coopy's contract, for instance, guaranteed him thirty acres of land at Berkeley's Hundred. John Barnes, who purchased William Freeman, was obliged only to pay the boy "his full due According to the Custom of this Country." Depending on the time and place, this might have included corn, clothing, and tools. In 1675, an indentured servant who charged his master with cheating him asked the General Court to free him "and pay him corne & clothes." The judges ruled in his favor, granting him "three Barrels of Corne att the Cropp." Occasionally the owners of indentured servants refused to release them or give them their freedom dues. At Jamestown, when a male indentured servant who had fulfilled his contract insisted on receiving his "corn and clothes," his master exploded in rage and struck him on the head with his truncheon.

Servants' Behavior

The Whole Duty of Man,
Laid Down In a Plain and Familiar
Way for the Use of All, but
especially the MEANEST READER.

In addition to contract terms, the General Assembly concerned itself with servant behavior. In The Whole Duty of Man, a Protestant devotional work published anonymously in 1658, the English author reminds readers that all servants owe their masters, as a matter of conscience, "obedience," "Faithfulness," "Patience and Meekness," and "Diligence." In Virginia, at least, such ideals were not always met. For instance, burgesses were forced to pass laws in response to servants who ran away and to those who, while still under contract, hired themselves out to new masters under better terms. The 1642-1643 assembly passed a law-subsequently revised in 1657-1658-requiring that servants carry certificates and punishing any master who hired a servant without proper papers.

The assembly was also perennially concerned with "ffornication," especially when it resulted in female servants becoming pregnant. This led to a loss of the servants' labor, for which the law attempted to provide compensation to the master. An act passed in the 1642-1643 session and revised in 1657-1658 added time, in the case of pregnancy and so-called secret marriages, to the indentures of male and female servants both; it called for fines on any freemen involved. Sometimes servants were singled out in the context of broader morals laws, such as in"Against ffornication," passed in 1661-1662, which responded to servant pregnancies by requiring large fines to be paid to the local parish. If the master refused to pay, then the servants were to be whipped.

Another law, passed in 1662, stipulated that the children of such pregnancies were to be handed over to the church, which would be reimbursed for its trouble by the "reputed father." If the father of an illegitimate child were a master, then, according to a 1662 law, the maidservant would, upon completion of her indenture, be sold to the local parish for two years. This was to prevent female servants from avoiding work through pregnancy and then attempting to leave their children in the care of their masters. A number of these laws were combined and revised into"An act for punishment of ffornication and seaverall other sins and offences," passed by the assembly in 1696.

Servants' Treatment

Servants ran away largely because their lives in Virginia tended to be nasty, brutish, and short. Although they often worked alongside their masters in tobacco fields, they usually lived apart and often under primitive conditions. They worked from dawn until dusk, six days a week through the growing season, which on tobacco and wheat farms could last from as early as February until as late as November. The mortality rate was very high, mostly due to what Virginians called the "summer seasoning," a time during which disease killed a majority of new arrivals. According to the Dutchman David Peterson DeVries, who visited Virginia in March 1633, immigrants died "like cats and dogs," while the sick "want to sleep all the time, but they must be prevented from sleeping by force," lest they die.

In the meantime, servants-whether seasoned or unseasoned-were treated as property subject to overwork and beatings. For instance, in 1624 Alice Proctor, whom Captain John Smith termed a proper and civil gentlewoman, arranged for her runaway maidservant Elizabeth Abbott to be beaten, and the punishment was so severe that Abbott died. George Sandys, the colony's treasurer, allowed his servants to starve and languish for lack of medical treatment, while in 1649 a mistress was charged with thrashing her "mayd Servant ... more Liken a dogge then a Christian," so that her head was "as soft as a sponge, in one place" and her back was possibly broken. Other female servants were victims of sexual assault. DeVries worried that servants were not treated with appropriate dignity. "I was astonished to observe of the English people, that they lose their servants in gambling with each other," he wrote. "I told them I had never seen such work in Turk or Barbarian, and that it was not becoming Christians."

The Massacre of the
Settlers

Jane Dickenson was a servant living on the Martin's Hundred plantation with her husband, Ralph Dickenson, when Opechancanough's Indians attacked in 1622. After killing Ralph Dickenson, the Pamunkey Indians held Jane Dickenson prisoner for ten months until Dr. John Pott, a Jamestown physician and future Virginia governor, ransomed her freedom for two pounds of beads. Pott claimed that Dickenson owed him both the remaining time on her late husband's contract and the time it would take her to reimburse him the ransom he paid for her release. In a petition dated March 30, 1624, Dickenson asked the General Court to free her, alleging that Pott's treatment of her "much differeth not from her slavery with the Indians."

On at least two occasions, servants banded together to protest the way they were treated. In 1661, forty servants in York County, angered by the lack of meat in their diets, conspired to rebel against their masters; in 1663, a group of nine indentured servants in Gloucester County plotted to arm themselves and march to Governor Sir William Berkeley's home, where they would demand their freedom. In both cases, the authorities were notififed before the plans could be carried out, and the conspirators were punished. According to Berkeley, four of the Gloucester County conspirators were hanged for their actions.

The General Assembly did pass legislation aimed at protecting servants from mistreatment. In a 1657 statute otherwise concerned with runaways, servants were granted the right to take to the courts complaints of "harsh and bad usage, or else for want of diett or convenient necessaries." In 1661, one act required "suffitient" diet and clothing to servants on their transatlantic voyage, while another prohibited "cruell" treatment once they arrived, with burgesses worrying that the "feare thereof" had discouraged some servants from coming to Virginia. In 1676, the assembly further directed masters not to make bargains with their servants in an attempt to trick or manipulate them into extended terms of service. Other acts aimed to protect the limited rights of Virginia Indian servants. Of course, these laws were neither preventative nor always enforced; rather, they reflected the harsh reality of servitude in Virginia, a reality that, as time passed, became less and less distinct from chattel slavery.

From Servitude to Slavery

"Servitude in Virginia's tobacco fields approached closer to slavery than anything known at the time in England," the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. "Men served longer, were subjected to more rigorous punishments, [and] were traded about as commodities" beginning in the 1620s. For much of the seventeenth century, those servants were white English men and women-with a smattering of Africans, Indians, and Irish-under indenture with the promise of freedom. By 1705, and the passage of "An act concerning Servants and Slaves," slavery had become ensconced at all levels of Virginia society and was well on its way to completely replacing indentured servitude as the primary source of bound labor in the colony.

Most historians have explained this shift by citing either social or economic shifts in Virginia beginning around the 1670s. Morgan and others, for instance, have argued that Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677) was, in part, the result of discontent among former servants. By harnessing that discontent and, in the name of racial solidarity, pointing it in the direction of enslaved Africans, white elites could create a more stable workforce and one that was less likely to threaten their own interests. Other historians have observed that the flow of English servants began to dry up beginning in the 1660s and fell off dramatically around 1680, forcing planters to rely more heavily on slaves. Slavery did not end indentured servitude, in other words; the end of servitude gave rise to slavery.

The historian John C. Coombs has suggested a third possibility: "There was no 'trigger' cause for the conversion." Instead, slavery expanded gradually as the English empire grew, its role in the slave trade matured, and enslaved Africans became more available throughout Virginia. By the 1670s, slaves had begun to replace white indentured servants among the Virginia gentry -before both Bacon's Rebellion and the sharp decline in new servants. By 1690, slaves accounted for nearly all of the gentry's bound workforce but only 25 to 40 percent of the non-elite's. Over time, as the supply of enslaved Africans increased and their prices decreased, farmers and planters agreed that they preferred a slave for life to a servant who had the hope of freedom. Even so, indentured servants-particularly those with specialized skills-and convict servants continued to be imported to the colony throughout the eighteenth century.

Further Reading

Billings, Warren M. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700. Revised Edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Billings, Warren M. "The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia." The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99:1 (January 1991), 45-62.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Coombs, John C. "Beyond the 'Origins Debate': Rethinking the Rise of Virginia Slavery," in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, eds. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.

Galenson, David W. "The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis." The Journal of Economic History 44:1 (March 1984), 1-26.

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake: 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975.

Cite This Entry

APA Citation:
Wolfe, B., & McCartney, M. Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia. (2015, October 28). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Indentured_Servants_in_Colonial_Virginia.

MLA Citation:
Wolfe, Brendan and Martha McCartney. "Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia." Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 28 Oct. 2015. Web. READ_DATE.

First published: December 8, 2011 | Last modified: October 28, 2015

Contributed by Brendan Wolfe and Martha McCartney. Brendan Wolfe is editor of Encyclopedia Virginia from 2008 to 2019. Martha McCartney is a historian and independent researcher in Williamsburg.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Servitude had a long history in England, dating back to medieval serfdom. The Ordinance of Labourers, passed in June 1349, declared that all men and women under the age of sixty who did not practice a craft must serve anyone requiring their labor.

# data[].attributes.headline
Indentured Servitude in the American Colonies

# data[].attributes.subject
Indentured Servitude in the American Colonies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This picture, Industry and Idleness, shows 2 apprentices starting in identical circumstances, one is the industrious Francis Goodchild and the other is the unsuccessful Thomas Idlefrom.

The growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America. Without the aid of modern machinery, human sweat and blood was necessary for the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of these cash crops. While slaves existed in the English colonies throughout the 1600s, indentured servitude was the method of choice employed by many planters before the 1680s. This system provided incentives for both the master and servant to increase the working population of the Chesapeake colonies.

Virginia and Maryland operated under what was known as the "headright system." The leaders of each colony knew that labor was essential for economic survival, so they provided incentives for planters to import workers. For each laborer brought across the Atlantic, the master was rewarded with 50 acres of land. This system was used by wealthy plantation aristocrats to increase their land holdings dramatically. In addition, of course, they received the services of the workers for the duration of the indenture.

This system seemed to benefit the servant as well. Each indentured servant would have their fare across the Atlantic paid in full by their master. A contract was written that stipulated the length of service - typically five years. The servant would be supplied room and board while working in the master's fields. Upon completion of the contract, the servant would receive "freedom dues," a pre-arranged termination bonus. This might include land, money, a gun, clothes or food. On the surface it seemed like a terrific way for the luckless English poor to make their way to prosperity in a new land. Beneath the surface, this was not often the case.

Only about 40 percent of indentured servants lived to complete the terms of their contracts. Female servants were often the subject of harassment from their masters. A woman who became pregnant while a servant often had years tacked on to the end of her service time. Early in the century, some servants were able to gain their own land as free men. But by 1660, much of the best land was claimed by the large land owners. The former servants were pushed westward, where the mountainous land was less arable and the threat from Indians constant. A class of angry, impoverished pioneer farmers began to emerge as the 1600s grew old. After Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, planters began to prefer permanent African slavery to the headright system that had previously enabled them to prosper.

The misery reaches the climax when a gale rages for 2 or 3 nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously. -Gottlieb Mittelberger, On the Misfortune of Indentured Servants, 1754
Learn More...

Report broken link

If you like our content, please share it on social media!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This picture, Industry and Idleness, shows 2 apprentices starting in identical circumstances, one is the industrious Francis Goodchild and the other is the unsuccessful Thomas Idlefrom. The growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607.

The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia Company developed the system of indentured servitude to attract workers. Indentured servants became vital to the colonial economy.

The timing of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year's War had left Europe's economy depressed, and many skilled and unskilled laborers were without work. A new life in the New World offered a glimmer of hope; this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured servants.

Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. There were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments meted out to people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.

For those that survived the work and received their freedom package, many historians argue that they were better off than those new immigrants who came freely to the country. Their contract may have included at least 25 acres of land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes. Some servants did rise to become part of the colonial elite, but for the majority of indentured servants that survived the treacherous journey by sea and the harsh conditions of life in the New World, satisfaction was a modest life as a freeman in a burgeoning colonial economy.

In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants, and given the same opportunities for freedom dues as whites. However, slave laws were soon passed - in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 -and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks were taken away.

As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery had begun.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indentured Servants In The U.S. | History Detectives | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to care for, but no one to care for it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Did Slavery Start in America?

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery's abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it valued each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the mid-19th century, America's westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

Cotton Gin

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur-notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822-but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner's group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner's rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious "free-labor" argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubmanguided escapees on their journey North, and " stationmasters" included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Althoughestimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen's determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America's explosive growth-and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century-would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government's right to restrict slavery over Missouri's application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri's southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out-with considerable bloodshed-in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia-in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown's sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal-resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown's hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

Civil War

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln's anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that "slaves within any State, or designated part of a State...in rebellion,...shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn't officially end all slavery in America-that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War's end in 1865-some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples' status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the "equal protection" of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy-including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Slavery in America was the legal institution of enslaving human beings, mainly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War. Slavery officially ended in America with the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War's end in 1865.

# data[].attributes.body
This site is hosted by Jefferson's Monticello!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Directly or indirectly, the economies of all 13 British colonies in North America depended on slavery. By the 1620s, the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco for European markets was established in Virginia, with white indentured servants performing most of the heavy labor. Before 1660 only a fraction of Virginia planters held slaves. By 1675 slavery was well established, and by 1700 slaves had almost entirely replaced indentured servants. With plentiful land and slave labor available to grow a lucrative crop, southern planters prospered, and family-based tobacco plantations became the economic and social norm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African Slavery in Colonial British North America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Directly or indirectly, the economies of all 13 British colonies in North America depended on slavery. By the 1620s, the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco for European markets was established in Virginia, with white indentured servants performing most of the heavy labor. Before 1660 only a fraction of Virginia planters held slaves.

# data[].attributes.body
It is impossible to characterize slavery in one way or to generalize anything basically about slavery except that it was totally inhumane. The nature of this "peculiar institution' as it was labeled in the South in the 19th century varied greatly from large plantation to small farm, from region to region and from owner to owner. Moreover, it is important to remember that most people in the South never owned enslaved people at all. AND only 5-9=8% of the total number of Africans kidnapped from Africa actually arrived in mainland British North America. The majority (about 95%) stayed in the Caribbean Islands and in Brazil on the sugar cane plantations where the life expectancy from arrival was 2 years because of the harsh working and living conditions and disease. Also the institution developed over time. In the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was basically a means to an end---an answer to the labor shortage that existed particularly as indentured servitude disappeared throughout the first half of the 18th century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slavery in the British colonies (article) | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every English colony practiced slavery, building an empire-wide system of white racial dominance and African oppression.

# data[].attributes.body
English policies adopted in the 17th century sowed the seeds of discontent in the colonies that would eventually lead to revolutionary activities. Mercantilism is IMPORTANT!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the 17th and 18th centuries Europeans believed in an idea called mercantilism, the idea that a nation's existence depended on power, and power depended on wealth. To gain wealth a country had to have colonies. These to provided a constant source of raw materials and become markets for the manufactured goods to the country that owned them or their "Mother Country."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It was in the 16th century that England began its meteoric rise to the top of the economic and industrial heap. The English Crown in effect tried its best to hobble this development by mercantilist laws and regulations but was thwarted because, for various reasons, the interventionist edicts proved unenforceable.

Raw wool had for several centuries been England's most important product, and hence its most important export. Wool was shipped largely to Flanders and to Florence to be made into fine cloth. By the early 14th century, the flourishing wool trade had reached a height of an average annual export of 35,000 sacks. The state naturally then entered the picture, taxing, regulating, and restricting.

The principal fiscal weapon to build the nation-state in England was the "poundage," a tax on the export of wool and a tariff on the import of woolen cloth. The poundage kept increasing to pay for continuing wars. In the 1340s, King Edward III granted the monopoly of wool exporting to small groups of merchants, in return for their agreeing to collect the wool taxes on the king's behalf. This monopoly grant served to put out of business Italian and other foreign merchants who had predominated in the wool export trade.

By the 1350s, however, these monopoly merchants had gone bankrupt, and King Edward finally resolved the issue by widening the monopoly privilege and extending it to a group of several hundred called the "Merchants of the Staple." All wool exported had to go through a fixed town under the auspices of the company of the Staple, and be exported to a fixed point on the continent, by the end of the 14th century at Calais, then under English control. The monopoly of the Staple did not apply to Italy, but it did apply to Flanders, the major place of import for English wool.

The Merchants of the Staple soon proceeded to use their privileged monopoly in the time-honored manner of all monopolists: to force lower prices upon English wool growers, and higher prices upon Calais and Flemish importers. In the short run, this system was quite pleasant for the Staplers, who were able to more than recoup their payments to the king, but in the long run, the great English wool trade was crippled beyond repair. The artificial gap between domestic and foreign wool prices discouraged the production of English wool while it also injured the demand for wool abroad. By the mid-15th century, average annual exports of wool had fallen greatly to only 8,000 sacks.

The only benefit to Englishmen from this disastrous policy (apart from the joint short-term gains to King Edward and to the Staplers) was to give an unintended boost to the English production of woolen cloth. English cloth-makers could now benefit from their artificially lower prices of wool in England, coupled with the artificially high prices of wool abroad. Once again, the market managed to get a leg up in its unending, zigzag struggle with power. By the mid-15th century, fine, expensive, broadcloth "woolens" were being produced abundantly in England, centering in the West Country, where swift rivers made water plentiful for fulling the woven cloth, and where Bristol could serve as the major port of export and entry.

"In the long run, the great English wool trade was crippled beyond repair."

During the mid-16th century, a new form of woolen-cloth manufacture sprang up in England, soon to become dominant in the textile industry. This was the "new draperies," or worsteds, cheaper and lighter-weight cloth that could be exported to warmer climates and was far more suitable for dyeing and decoration, since each individual strand of yarn was now visible in the cloth.

Since the worsted was not fulled, the draperies did not need to be situated near running water, and so new textile manufacturers and workshops sprang up in the countryside - and in new towns such as Norwich and Rye - all round London. London was the largest market for the cloths, so transportation costs were now cheaper, and furthermore, the southeast was a centre for sheep bearing the coarse, long-stapled wool particularly suitable for worsted production. The new rural firms around London were also able to hire skilled Protestant textile artisans who had fled the religious persecution in France and the Netherlands. Most important, going to the countryside or to new towns meant that the expanding and innovating textile industry could escape from the stifling guild restrictions and frozen technology of the old towns.

Now that over 100,000 cloths were exported annually, compared to a few thousand two centuries earlier, sophisticated production and marketing innovations took place. Establishing a "putting-out" system, merchants paid artisans by the piece to work on cloth owned by the former. In addition, marketing middlemen sprang up, yarn brokers serving as middlemen between spinners and weavers, and drapers specializing in selling the cloth at the end of the production chain.

Seeing the rise of effective new competition, the older urban and broadcloth artisans and manufacturers turned to the state apparatus to try to shackle the efficient upstarts.

As Professor Miskimin puts it,

As often happens during an evolutionary period, the older, vested interests turned to the state for protection against the innovative elements within the industry and sought regulation that would preserve their traditional monopoly. 1

In response, the English government passed the Weavers' Act in 1555, which drastically limited the number of looms per establishment outside the towns to only one or two. Numerous exemptions, however, vitiated the effect of the act and other statutes placing maximum controls on wages; restricting competition in order to preserve the old broadcloth industry came to naught from systemic lack of enforcement.

The English government then turned to the alternative of propping up and tightening the urban guild structure to exclude competition. These measures succeeded, however, only in isolating and hastening the decay of the old urban broadcloth firms. For the new rural firms, especially the new draperies, were beyond guild jurisdiction. Queen Elizabeth then went national, with the Statute of Artificers in 1563, which placed the nation-state squarely behind guild power. The number of apprentices each master could employ was severely limited, a measure calculated to stifle the growth of any one firm, and to decisively cartelize the wool industry and cripple competition. The number of years of apprenticeship, before the apprentice could rise to become a master, was universally extended by the statute to seven years, and maximum wage rates for apprenticeships were imposed throughout England.

"If the Statute of Artificers had been strictly enforced, industrial growth might have been permanently arrested in England. But fortunately, England was far more anarchic than France, and the statute was not well enforced."

Beneficiaries of the Statute of Artificers were not only the old, inefficient urban broadcloth guilds, but also the large landlords, who had been losing rural workers to the new, high-paying clothing industry. One announced aim of the Statute of Artificers was compulsory full employment, with labor directed to work according to a system of "priorities"; top priority was accorded to the state, which attempted to force workers to remain in rural and farm work and not leave the farm for glittering opportunities elsewhere. To enter commercial or professional fields, on the other hand, required a graded series of qualifications such that the occupations were happy in having entry restricted by this cartelizing statute, while the landlords were delighted to have workers forced to remain on the farm at lower wages than they could achieve elsewhere.

If the Statute of Artificers had been strictly enforced, industrial growth might have been permanently arrested in England. But fortunately, England was far more anarchic than France, and the statute was not well enforced, particularly where it counted, in the new and fast-growing worsted industry.

Not only was the countryside beyond the grasp of the urban guilds and their nation-state ally, but so too was fast-growing London, where custom decreed that any guild member could engage in any sort of trade, and no guild could exercise restrictive control over any line of production.

London's position as the great export centre for the new draperies - largely to Antwerp - partially accounted for the enormous growth of this city during the 16th century. London's population grew at three times the rate of England's as a whole over the century, specifically from 30-40,000 at the beginning of the 16th century to a quarter of a million early in the next. The London merchants were not, however, content with free-market development, and power began to move in on the market. Specifically, the London merchants began to reach for export monopoly.

In 1486 the City of London created the Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers of London, which claimed exclusive rights to the export of woolens to its members. For provincial merchants (outside of London) to join required a stiff fee. Eleven years later the king and parliament decreed that any merchant exporting to the Netherlands had to pay a fee to the Merchant Adventurers and obey its restrictionist regulations.

The state tightened the monopoly of the merchant adventurers in the mid-16th century. First in 1552, the Hanseatic merchants were deprived of their ancient rights to export cloth to the Netherlands. Five years later, customs duties were raised on the import of cloth, thereby conferring more special privileges on the domestic cloth trade and increasing the financial ties of the Crown to the cloth merchants. And finally, in 1564, in Queen Elizabeth's reign, the merchant adventurers were reconstituted under tighter and more oligarchic control.

"The London merchants were not, however, content with free-market development, and power began to move in on the market. Specifically, the London merchants began to reach for export monopoly."

In the late 16th century, however, the mighty merchant adventurers began to decline. The English war with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands lost the Adventurers the city of Antwerp, and at the turn of the 17th century they were formally expelled from Germany. The English monopoly of woolen exports to the Netherlands and the German coast was finally abolished after the revolution of 1688.

It is instructive to note what happened to printed calico in England as compared to the suppression of the industry in France. The powerful woolen industry managed to get the importation of calicoes banned from England in 1700, a decade or so after France, but in this case domestic manufacture was still permitted. As a result, domestic manufactures of calico spurted ahead, and when the woolen interests managed to get a prohibition-of-calico-consumption act passed in 1720 (the Calico Act), the domestic calico industry was already powerful and could continue to export its wares.

In the meanwhile, calico smuggling continued, as did domestic use - all stimulated by the fact that prohibition was not enforced nearly as strictly in England as in France. Then, in 1735, the English cotton industry won an exemption for the domestic printing and use of "fustians," a mixed cotton and linen cloth, which were the most popular form of calico in England in any case. As a result, the domestic cotton-textile industry was able to grow and flourish in England throughout the 18th century.

Prominent in English mercantilism was the pervasive creation by the Crown of grants of monopoly privilege: exclusive power to produce and sell in domestic and in foreign trade. The creation of monopolies reached its climax in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), in the latter half of the 16th century. In the words of historian Professor S.T. Bindoff, "... the restrictive principle had, like some giant squid, fastened its embracing tentacles round many branches of domestic trade and manufacture," and "in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign scarcely an article in common use - coal, soap, starch, iron, leather, books, wine, fruit - was unaffected by patents of monopoly." 2

In sparkling prose, Bindoff writes how lobbyists, using the lure of monetary gain, obtained royal courtiers to sponsor their petitions for grants of monopoly: "their sponsorship was usually a mere episode in the great game of place-and-fortune-hunting which swayed and swirled incessantly around the steps of the throne." Once granted their privileges, the monopolists got themselves armed by the state with powers of search-and-seizure to root out all instances of now-illegal competition. As Bindoff writes,

The "saltpetre men of the gunpowder contract dug in every man's house" for the nitrate-laden soil which was their raw material. The minions of the playing-card monopoly invaded shops in search of cards lacking its seal and browbeat their owners, under threat of summons to a distant court, into compounding for their offences. The search-warrant was, indeed, indispensable to the monopolist if he were to eliminate competition and leave himself free to fix the price of his wares. 3

The result of this expulsion of competition, as we might expect, was the lowering of quality and the raising of price, sometimes by as much as 400 percent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mercantilism in England | Murray N. Rothbard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Seeing the rise of effective new competition, the older artisans and manufacturers turned to the state apparatus to try to shackle the efficient upstarts. But again and again, the market managed to get a leg up in its unending, zigzag struggle with power.

# data[].attributes.headline
Life in the 17th Century Colonies Flashcards

# data[].attributes.subject
Life in the 17th Century Colonies Flashcards

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Life in the 17th Century Flashcards | Quizlet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
09/03/2008 Learn with flashcards, games, and more - for free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender and Sexuality in Colonial America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Painted by John Singleton Copley, 1770-1772. Oil on Canvas, Corcoran Gallery of Art,

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exploring Maryland's Roots: Library: FAQs about The Colony Grows

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like people everywhere, Indians married and divorced, cooked, played games, named their children, and educated their young. Boys were initiated into manhood through a frightening process called the , which involved a ritual death and rebirth.

# data[].attributes.headline
The New England Colonies in the 17th Century

# data[].attributes.subject
The New England Colonies in the 17th Century

# data[].attributes.body
Southern colonists faced a different set of challenges than did the colonists in the northern colonies since the Southerners faced not only Indian hostilities and starvation--in the early years--- (like the New Englanders) but also dread mosquito-borne illnesses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Indentured servants, these immigrants suffered through malnutrition and horrible conditions upon arriving in America

smithsonian.com

Do you have complicated feelings about Thanksgiving? Maybe your ancestors were among this continent's indigenous peoples, and you have good reason to be rankled by thoughts of newly arrived English colonists feasting on Wamapanoag-procured venison, roasted wild turkey, and stores of indigenous corn. Or maybe Thanksgiving marks the beginning of a holiday season that brings with it the intricate emotional challenges of memory, home and family.

If you're someone who feels a sense of angst, foreboding, or misery about this time of year, take heart: American history is on your side.

The truth of our history is that only a small minority of the early English immigrants to this country would have been celebrating as the New England Puritans did at the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621.

A thousand miles south, in Virginia and the Carolinas, the mood and the menu would have been drastically different-had there ever been a Thanksgiving there. Richard Frethorne, an indentured servant in the Virginia colony during the 1620s, wrote in a letter: "Since I came out of the ship, I never ate anything but peas, and loblollie (that is, water gruel)."

And don't imagine for a second that those peas Frethorne was gobbling down were of the lovely, tender green garden variety dotted with butter. No, in the 1620s, Frethorne and his friends would have subsisted on a grey field pea resembling a lentil.

"As for deer or venison," Frethorne wrote , "I never saw any since I came into this land. There is indeed some fowl, but we are not allowed to go and get it, but must work hard both early and late for a mess of water gruel and a mouthful of bread and beef."

Frethorne's letter is a rare surviving document reflecting the circumstances of the majority of English colonists who came to North America in the 17th century. The New England Puritans, after all, comprised only 15 to 20 percent of early English colonial migration.

Not only did the majority of English colonial migrants eat worse than the Puritans, but also their prayers (had they said any) would have sounded decidedly less thankful.

"People cry out day and night," Frethorne wrote, "Oh! That they were in England without their limbs-and would not care to lose any limb to be in England again, yea though they beg from door to door."

English migrants in Virginia had good reason not to feel grateful. Most came unfree, pushed out of England by economic forces that privatized shared pastures and farmlands and pushed up the prices of basic necessities. By the 17 th century, more than half of the English peasantry was landless. The price of food shot up 600 percent, and firewood by 1,500 percent.

Many peasants who were pushed off their homelands built makeshift settlements in the forests, earning reputations as criminals and thieves. Others moved to the cities, and when the cities proved no kinder, they signed contracts promising seven years of hard labor in exchange for the price of passage to the Americas, and were boarded onto boats.

A trip to Virginia cost Frethorne and others like him six months salary and took about 10 weeks. One quarter to one half of new arrivals to Virginia and the Carolinas died within one year due to diseases like dysentery, typhoid, and malaria. Others succumbed to the strain of hard labor in a new climate and a strange place-an adjustment process the English described as "seasoning." Only 7 percent of indentures claimed the land that they had been promised.

Most of these common English migrants did not read or write, so vivid and revealing letters like Frethorne's are rare. But in the research for my book Why We Left: Songs and Stories from America's First Immigrants, I learned how English migrants viewed their situation through the songs they sang about the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Those songs survived hundreds of years by word of mouth before they were written down in the 20th century.
Joanna Brooks is Associate Dean of Graduate and Research Affairs at San Diego State University and author of Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants (Minnesota, 2013). She wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.
These were not songs of thankfulness-not by a long shot. They were ballads full of ghastly scenes of the rejection, betrayal, cruelty, murder, and environmental ruin that had driven them out of England -- and of the seductive but false promises that drew them to America. These 17 th-century songs planted the seeds for a new American genre of murder and hard luck ballads that was later picked up and advanced by singers like Johnny Cash, whose ancestors, like mine, were among those early hard luck migrants from England to America.

So if you find yourself a little blue this holiday season, take your marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes with a liberal dose of the Man In Black, and reassure yourself that you are a part of a long, long American tradition.

Like this article?
SIGN UP for our newsletter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 17th-Century English Who Settled in the Southern U.S. Had Very Little to be Thankful For

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com Do you have complicated feelings about Thanksgiving? Maybe your ancestors were among this continent's indigenous peoples, and you have good reason to be rankled by thoughts of newly arrived English colonists feasting on Wamapanoag-procured venison, roasted wild turkey, and stores of indigenous corn.

# data[].attributes.headline
Daily Life in Plymouth Colony in the 17th Century

# data[].attributes.subject
Daily Life in Plymouth Colony in the 17th Century

# data[].attributes.body
Life in the 17th century was perilous at best no matter where you made your home---in the Old World or the New!  Death was never far from your mind if you were a colonist---death by illness, starvation, Indian attack, childbirth, injury--no matter how minor---and people were very in touch with their religion because they needed to be "right with God" since death could occur at any minute. About half the infants born died before age 5.  Even so, colonists and people in general went about daily life-despite the harshness of their situations and the dangers that faced them by relying on their faith...which explains why religion and the church was at the center of their society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The history of the Plymouth Colony is often told as a story of dramatic events and important leaders. But here's some of what we know about the everyday life of the people who settled there in the 1600s.

Dwellings: Soon after they arrived, the colonists initially built in the style of farmer's cottages in rural England-walls fashioned from tree trunks with branches and twigs stuffed between then, all cemented together by clay. The tiny windows were covered with linseed-coated parchment instead of glass. Eventually, they switched to more elaborate homes made from posts and beams, and covered with clapboards and shingles. A house customarily had a wood-burning hearth equipped with a huge brick chimney to heat. Keeping warm required each family to consume more than 1,900 cubic feet of wood each year, which meant cutting down a lot of trees.

Food: Corn was a big part of the colonists' diet, and they ate it in dishes such as hominy and johnnycakes that were based upon native recipes. They also had a lot of different sources of protein-including venison, wild turkey, duck, goose, fish, and lobsters-and fruit ranging from strawberries to plums.

Clothing: Men wore a short jacket called a doublet, attached to breeches-knee-length pants-to form a suit. Usually they were made of wool cloth or linen canvas. A felt hat often completed the outfit. The only portrait of a Pilgrim made from life, a painting of Edward Winslow made in London in 1651, depicts him in the severe-looking black attire with white collar and cuffs that we've come to associate with Pilgrim men. Actually, however, at the time when the Pilgrims first arrived in Massachusetts, colors were fashionable, and the colonists wore various hues. The wardrobe of colonist William Brewster, for example, included a pair of green trousers and a violet-colored coat. Women colonists wore elaborate multi-layered outfits-a corset, multiple petticoats, stockings, a dress over those items, and a waistcoat or apron. They also wore linen caps called coifs over their hair, and felt hats as well. The natives took a liking to the colonists' English-made clothing as well, and sometimes agreed to trade land for coats and other manufactured goods.

Work: The colonists worked long and hard to survive. In 1623, Gov. William Bradford decided to abandon communal agriculture and instead gave each family a plot of land to cultivate, with the understanding that they would keep whatever food they managed to grow. Men, women and children all labored together, tending corn and other crops, and raising goats, pigs, chickens and cows. But from the start, they also produced goods for export, such as beaver skins and small oak clapboards that could be used to make barrel staves. Subsequent generations of colonists built a flourishing export trade in timber, grain fish and cattle, which were in demand in Europe.

Family Life: The colonists had big families, often with eight or more children. There wasn't an official school in Plymouth until the 1670s, but the Pilgrims thought reading was an important skill because it was needed for Bible study, so they usually taught their offspring at home. There wasn't much time for children to play, because they were expected to work alongside their parents.

Worship: Religion was a dominant influence upon life in Plymouth. The Pilgrims, like other Puritans, believed that the entire Sabbath should be devoted to worship. Sunday included both a morning and an afternoon meeting, and people spent their free time in personal prayer as well. Work or recreation of any sort was forbidden. But playing music and singing psalms was an important part of their worship, and colonial leader Edward Winslow noted that some of the original Mayflower contingent were "very expert in music."

Health: There weren't many university-trained doctors in England in the 1600s, and healthcare was mostly provided by non-physician healers who prescribed medicine and even did surgery. The Plymouth Colony's surgeon, Samuel Fuller, seems to have been one of those self-taught doctors, though he did have some medical books in his library. He had his hands full, since the early colonists were plagued by infectious diseases as well as scurvy-about half of the Mayflower contingent died in the first winter alone. Fuller himself died of fever during a 1633 epidemic.

Media: The Plymouth colony didn't have a printing press until the late 1700s, so reading material was limited to what the colonists brought along with them. Miles Standish, for example, owned a copy of Homer's "The Iliad" and Caesar's "Commentaries." They got news of the outside world from visitors and communicated through letters, such as one that Gov. Bradford sent to Massachusetts Bay Col. Gov. John Winthrop in 1638, inquiring about Anne Hutchinson, who had challenged the authority of the Puritan ministers.

Entertainment and Recreation: Since the colonists had to work pretty hard to survive and devoted one day out of seven to worship, they probably didn't have much time to spend in leisure pursuits. Some of Plymouth's non-Pilgrim inhabitants played stool ball, an English game resembling cricket. (When they made the mistake of playing on Christmas, though, the Pilgrims were so offended that Gov. Bradford had their balls and bats confiscated.) The colonists also enjoyed shooting contests at which they could demonstrate their prowess with muskets.

Life in the early days of the Plymouth Colony was very different from ours, and in many ways, much more difficult. But even so, the colonists survived and eventually prospered, and helped set the foundation for modern America.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The history of the Plymouth Colony is often told as a story of dramatic events and important leaders. But here's some of what we know about the everyday life of the people who settled there in the 1600s.

# data[].attributes.headline
More About the "Pilgrims'" Journey to the New World!

# data[].attributes.subject
More About the "Pilgrims'" Journey to the New World!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Town Brook gave sustenance to the Plymouth's early settlers, but years of dam building have endangered the struggling stream

smithsonian.com

In the spring of 1621, Plymouth Colony's Town Brook-the main water supply for the newly arrived Pilgrims-filled with silvery river herring swimming upstream to spawn. Squanto, the Indian interpreter, famously used the fish to teach the hungry colonists how to fertilize corn, by layering dead herring in with the seed. The resulting crop fueled festivities the following fall, at a celebration now known as the first Thanksgiving.

"That story that everyone learns as a kid?" says David Gould, environmental manager of Plymouth, Massachusetts, who oversees modern-day Town Brook. "This was that brook. These were those fish."

But Town Brook-which helped support commercial life in Plymouth well into the 20th century-has been ailing for many decades now. Because of multiple dams constructed along the 1.5-mile stream, the historic herring runs have dwindled. Hundreds of thousands of fish once reached their spawning grounds each spring; today hardly any complete the journey on their own. To sustain the run, a state agency trucks thousands of additional herring to the head of the stream, where they are released to reproduce.

The town is now trying to restore the storied but struggling waterway. One of the six mostly defunct dams along the tiny snippet of river has been completely removed and another significantly lowered; the removal of two more could happen as early as this summer. The absence of these dams, and the help of recently improved fish ladders-artificial passages that let fish swim over dams-would let tens of thousands of herring breed unaided.

River restoration advocates hope the brook will be a model for other Northeastern waterways, which, from Pennsylvania to Maine, are constricted by an estimated 26,000 dams, many of them no longer in use because industry has moved elsewhere, but still blocking the passage of species like herring, Atlantic salmon and shad. Opponents of dam removal say that the effort to save fish obliterates too much local history.

It was the brook that enticed the first settlers to Plymouth. The Mayflower initially landed in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. But the hundred-odd Pilgrims were wary of the scarcity of fresh water on the sandy peninsula, especially since their supplies of beer, the preferred puritanical refreshment, were running low.

They rounded the tip of the cape and sailed across to mainland Massachusetts, where they spied what one person later described as "a very sweet brook," fed by cool springs of "as good water as can be drunk." The brook's mouth was a convenient salt marsh, where the colonists could anchor their boats. And not far from where the brook met the sea was what would later become an extremely famous rock.

The settlers built their houses close by, and an early encounter with the Indians occurred "across the valley of Town Brook," Nathaniel Philbrick wrote in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. "The Indians gestured for them to approach. The Pilgrims, however, made it clear that they wanted the Indians to come to them." Along with water and fish, the brook supplied eels (Squanto, for one, knew how to trample them out of the mud) and plenty of waterfowl, which flocked to the little pond at its source that they called, rather grandly, Billington Sea.

The colonists soon discovered even more uses for the brook. Almost totally dependent on European imports when they first arrived, they needed to manufacture necessities, and dams provided power. The first corn mills were built along the brook in the 1630s-prior to that, the Pilgrims pounded corn into flour by hand.

Other water-powered mills followed, to treat wool and, later, produce leather and snuff. The Town Brook's mills became still more important after the Revolutionary War. Since much of the town fishing fleet was captured or sunk in the Revolution (the remainder was mostly finished off in the War of 1812), the locals were eager to find land-based employment in the mills, which soon focused on iron production and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, making everything from nails to shovels.

But wildlife suffered. The dams and their millponds raised water temperatures in parts of the stream and decreased dissolved oxygen levels, and primitive fish ladders didn't allow many herring through. Eventually, much of the mill industry moved to the South and the dams fell into disrepair - yet the fish were still cut off from their spawning grounds.

"At one point there were seven dams over the course of a mile and a half," says David Gould, the environmental manager. "That's a lot of obstructions for a fish to migrate through in such a short distance. That's simply devastating to a population."

The initial dam removal, in 2002, was the first of its kind in coastal Massachusetts. The community has also worked on modernizing fish ladders, diverting polluted storm water flows, and preserving land around the Billington Sea.

Most New England dams are quite small compared with their western counterparts-perhaps 10 to 20 feet tall. But to fish, "even a two-foot dam is a barrier," says Brian Graber, director of the Northeast river restoration program of American Rivers, a nonprofit group involved with the Town Brook project. Throughout New England, removing aging dams is usually much cheaper than updating them, and many of the region's dams are becoming safety hazards. In one town or another, "We're having public safety emergencies pretty much every time there's a big storm," Graber says.

At the moment, New England dams are being demolished at the rate of a dozen per year. Scores are currently being considered for destruction in Massachusetts alone. Yet removing the dams-which can mean draining historic millponds, not to mention bulldozing and replanting river channels-changes the aesthetics of rivers and eliminates structures that may trace their roots back centuries.

Some worry that removing Town Brook's dams will erase an important chapter of history. In its present form, the brook "is a microcosm of the evolution of American life" across four centuries, telling the story of how religious refugees became farmers and fishermen, then millworkers, and finally, suburban commuters, says Jim Baker, a Plymouth historian and author of Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. "There's plenty of brooks around and plenty of fish. But once you take out history, it's never coming back."

These sentiments are common in lesser-known communities throughout New England. Many times "a dam was built and the town grew around the business," explains Eric Hutchins, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries biologist involved with the Town Brook project. "It's often a place where grandparents worked and children played. A lot of these towns get their names from dams."

On Town Brook, a compromise of sorts has been struck. Though the restoration team hopes to remove or lower five of the six dams, they currently have no plans for the most historic structure-the dam at the site of a 1636 mill, where a re-created gristmill still operates today. Workers instead installed a state-of-the-art aluminum fish ladder, carefully lining it with stone to blend in with the mill, a popular tourist site.

But these days, Gould notes, the strengthening herring run is a tourist attraction all on its own.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Waterway That Brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com In the spring of 1621, Plymouth Colony's Town Brook-the main water supply for the newly arrived Pilgrims-filled with silvery river herring swimming upstream to spawn. Squanto, the Indian interpreter, famously used the fish to teach the hungry colonists how to fertilize corn, by layering dead herring in with the seed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Pilgrims - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find out more about the history of The Pilgrims, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

# data[].attributes.body
In December 1620 a small ship called the Mayflower arrived at present-day Massachusetts with a load of "Saints" and "Strangers" who didn't call themselves 'Pilgrims" (That label was added in the 18th century.)  The "Saints" were the Separatists who wanted to separate from the Anglican Church because it bore too much resemblance to the corrupt Catholic Church. (King Henry VIII had not changed the doctrine of the Catholic Church when he split in the 1530s...he only allowed himself to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry the beautiful Anne Boleyn.)  The Separatists had been living in Holland for several years by the time they decided their children were becoming too "Dutch." They left Leiden and sailed back to Plymouth, England to hire a ship and crew to take them to the New World so that they could worship without persecution.
Click on this link to find more amazing information about the people that we know today as "the Pilgrims!'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Plimoth Plantation is a not-for-profit 501 (c)3 organization, supported by admissions, grants, members, volunteers, and generous contributors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New archaeological evidence and forensic analysis reveals that a 14-year-old girl was cannibalized in desperation

smithsonian.com

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia's Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the " Starving Time." But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

"The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete," says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. "Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain."

Much is still unknown about the circumstances of this grisly meal: Who exactly the girl researchers are calling "Jane" was, whether she was murdered or died of natural causes, whether multiple people participated in the butchering or it was a solo act. But as Owsley revealed along with lead archaeologist William Kelso today at a press conference at the National Museum of Natural History, we now have the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas. "Historians have gone back and forth on whether this sort of thing really happened there," Owsley says. "Given these bones in a trash pit, all cut and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered for consumption."

It's long been speculated that the harsh conditions faced by the colonists of Jamestown might have made them desperate enough to eat other humans-and perhaps even commit murder to do so. The colony was founded in 1607 by 104 settlers aboard three ships, the Susan Constant, Discovery and Godspeed, but only 38 survived the first nine months of life in Jamestown, with most succumbing to starvation and disease ( some researchers speculate that drinking water poisoned by arsenic and human waste also played a role). Because of difficulties in growing crops-they arrived in the midst of one of the worst regional droughts in centuries and many settlers were unused to hard agricultural labor-the survivors remained dependent on supplies brought by subsequent missions, as well as trade with Native Americans.

By the winter of 1609, extreme drought, hostile relations with members of the local Powhatan Confederacy and the fact that a supply ship was lost at sea put the colonists in a truly desperate position. Sixteen years later, in 1625, George Percy, who had been president of Jamestown during the Starving Time, wrote a letter describing the colonists' diet during that terrible winter. "Haveinge fedd upon our horses and other beastes as longe as they Lasted, we weare gladd to make shifte with vermin as doggs Catts, Ratts and myce...as to eate Bootes shoes or any other leather," he wrote. "And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes."

Despite this and other textual references to cannibalism, though, there had never been hard physical evidence that it had occurred-until now. Kelso's team discovered the girl's remains during the summer of 2012. "We found a deposit of refuse that contained butchered horse and dog bones. That was only done in times of extreme hunger. As we excavated, we found human teeth and then a partial human skull," says Kelso.

Kelso brought them to Owsley for a battery of forensic tests, including microscopic and isotope analysis. "We CT scanned the bones, then replicated them as virtual 3D models and then put them together, piece by piece, assembling the skull," Owsley says. Digitally mirroring the fragments to fill in the missing gaps allowed the team to make a 3D facial reconstruction despite having just 66 percent of the skull.

The researchers used this reconstruction, along with the other data, to determine the specimen was a female, roughly 14 years old (based on the development of her molars) and of British ancestry. Owsley says the cut marks on the jaw, face and forehead of the skull, along with those on the shinbone, are telltale signs of cannibalism. "The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption. These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used," says Owsley. "The person that was doing this was not experienced and did not know how to butcher an animal. Instead, we see hesitancy, trial, tentativeness and a total lack of experience."

Skulls from the end of the last Ice Age show signs of being tampered with and dissected by humans, providing evidence for the theory that during desperate times, early humans resorted to cannibalism.

He's probably one of the researchers best qualified to make this judgment. As one of the country's most prominent physical anthropologists, he's analyzed many cannibalized skeletons from ancient history, and as an accomplished forensic investigator who works with the FBI, he's also worked on much more recent cases, such as one of the victims of 1980s serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. In total, he estimates that he's examined more than 10,000 bodies during his career, oftentimes people who were killed in tragic circumstances, including victims of 9/11 and journalists who were kidnapped and murdered in Guatemala. Most of his time, though, is spent working on more inspiring cases, such as the 9,000-year-old "Kennewick Man" discovered in Washington State, and the mysterious remains of ancient Easter Islanders. "I love the moments when you come up with something that you're just totally in awe of," he told Smithsonian magazine when he was named one of "35 Who Made a Difference." "Something that gives you an overwhelming sense of wow!"

Owsley speculates that this particular Jamestown body belonged to a child who likely arrived in the colony during 1609 on one of the resupply ships. She was either a maidservant or the child of a gentleman, and due to the high-protein diet indicated by his team's isotope analysis of her bones, he suspects the latter. The identity of whoever consumed her is entirely unknown, and Owsley guesses there might have been multiple cannibals involved, because the cut marks on her shin indicate a more skilled butcher than whoever dismembered her head.
Sign up for our free newsletter to receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
It appears that her brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles were eaten, with the brain likely eaten first, because it decomposes so quickly after death. There's no evidence of murder, and Owsley suspects that this was a case in which hungry colonists simply ate the one remaining food available to them, despite cultural taboos. "I don't think that they killed her, by any stretch," he says. "It's just that they were so desperate, and so hard-pressed, that out of necessity this is what they resorted to."

Kelso's team of archaeologists will continue to excavate the fort, searching for other bodies that might help us learn about the conditions faced by some of the country's first European colonists. This might be the first specimen that provides evidence for cannibalism, but Owsley is pretty sure there are more to come. Percy's letter also describes how, as president of the colony, he tortured and burned alive a man who had confessed to killing, salting and eating his pregnant wife-so the remains of this woman, along with other victims of cannibalism, may still be waiting to be found underground. "It's fairly convincing, now that we see this one, that this wasn't the only case," he says. "There are other examples mentioned here and there in the literature. So the only question is: Where are the rest of the bodies?"

About Joseph Stromberg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia's Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the " Starving Time."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
History of Jamestown | Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, VA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
History of Jamestown, Virginia, settled in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On May 13, 1607 three English ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery with approximately 144 settlers and sailors, will land and plant the first permanent English colony in North America. Established by the Virginia Company of London this settlement would be called Jamestown, after king James I. On June 15, 1607 the fleet commander Captain Christopher Newport will return to England leaving 104 settlers. Taken from "The Proceedings - of the English Colony in Virginia since their First beginning form England in the Year of Our Lord 1606 till this Present 1612, with All their Accidents that befell them in their Journeys and Discoveries" the following is a list of the names of those known 104 settlers.

Adling (or Adding), Henry - Gentleman
Alicock (or Alikock), Jeremy (or Jerome) - Gentleman - died August 14, 1607
Archer, Gabriel - Captain, Gentleman - died Winter 1609-1610
Asbie, John - died August 6, 1607
Beast (or Best), Benjamin - Gentleman - died September 5, 1607
Behothland (or Behethand, Beheland), Robert - Gentleman - died 1628
Brinto (or Brinton), Edward - Mason, Soldier
Brookes, Edward - Gentleman - died April 7, 1607
Brookes, John - Gentleman
Browne, Edward - Gentleman - died August 15, 1607
Brunfield, James - Boy
Bruster (or Brewster), William - Gentleman - died August 10, 1607
Capper, John
Cassen (or Cawsen), George - Laborer - died December 1607
Cassen, Thomas - Laborer
Cassen, William - Laborer
Clovill, Ustis (or Eustace) - Gentleman - died June 7, 1607
Collier, Samuel - Boy - died 1622
Cooke, Roger - Gentleman
Cooper (or Cowper), Thomas - Barber
Crofts, Richard - Gentleman
Dixon, Richard - Gentleman
Dods, John - Laborer, Soldier
Emry, Thomas - Carpenter - died December 1607
Fenton, Robert - Gentleman
Flower (or Flowre), George - Gentleman - died August 9, 1607
Ford, Robert - Gentleman
Frith, Richard - Gentleman
Galthrope (or Halthrop, Calthrop), Stephen - Gentleman - died August 15, 1607
Garret, William - Bricklayer
Golding (or Goulding), George - Laborer
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Anthony, (Cousin) - Gentleman - died January 7, 1609
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Anthony, (Cousin) - Gentleman
Gosnold (or Gosnoll), Bartholomew - Captain, Councilor - died August 16, 1607
Gower (or Gore), Thomas - Gentleman - died August 16, 1607
Harrington, Edward - Gentleman - died August 24, 1607
Herd, John - Bricklayer
Houlgrave, Nicholas - Gentleman
Hunt, Robert - Master, Preacher, Gentleman - died before 1609
Jacob, Thomas - Sergeant - died September 4, 1607
Johnson, William - Laborer
Kendall, George - Captain, Councilor - died December 1, 1607
Kingston (or Kiniston), Ellis - Gentleman - died September 18, 1607
Laxton (or Laxon), William - Carpenter
Laydon, John - Laborer, Carpenter
Loue (or Love), William - Tailor, Soldier
Martin, John, (Senior), Captain, Councilor - died June 1632
Martin, John, (Junior), Gentleman - died August 18, 1607
Martin, George - Gentleman
Midwinter, Francis - Gentleman - died August 14, 1607
Morish (or Morris), Edward - Gentleman, Corporal - died August 14, 1607
Morton, Matthew - Sailor
Mounslie, Thomas - Laborer - died August 17, 1607
Mouton, Thomas - Gentleman - died September 19, 1607
Mutton, Richard - Boy
Peacock (or Peacocke, Pecock), Nathaniel - Boy
Penington, Robert - Gentleman - died August 18, 1607
Percy (or Percie, Percye), George - Master, Gentleman - died 1632
Pickhouse (or Piggas), Drue - Gentleman - died August 19, 1607
Posing (or Pising), Edward - Carpenter
Powell, Nathaniel - Gentleman - died March 22, 1622
Profit, Jonas - Fisherman
Ratcliffe (or Sicklemore), John - Captain, Councilor - died November 1609
Read, James - Blacksmith, Soldier - died March 13, 1622
Robinson, John (or Jehu) - Gentleman - died December 1607
Rods (or Rodes, Roods), William - Laborer - died August 27, 1607
Sands, Thomas - Gentleman
Short, John - Gentleman
Short, Edward - Laborer - died August 1607
Simons, Richard - Gentleman - died September 18, 1607
Skot (or Scot), Nicholas - Drummer
Small, Robert - Carpenter
Smethes, William - Gentleman
Smith (or Smyth), John - Captain, Councilor - died June 1631
Snarsbrough, Francis - Gentleman
Stevenson, John - Gentleman
Studley (or Stoodie), Thomas - Gentleman - died August 28, 1607
Tankard, William - Gentleman
Tavin (or Tauin), Henry - Laborer
Throgmorton (or Throgmortine), Kellam (or Kenelme) - Gentleman - died August 26, 1607
Todkill, Anas - Soldier
Vnger (or Unger), William - Laborer
Waller (or Waler), John - Gentleman - died August 24, 1607
Walker, George - Gentleman
Webbe, Thomas - Gentleman
White, William - Laborer
Wilkinson, William - Surgeon
Wingfield, Edward Maria - Master, Councilor President - died 1613
Wotton, Thomas - Gentleman, Surgeon, - died April 28, 1638

"With diverse others to the number of 105"

Mariners and others known to have been with the expedition that established Jamestown on May 13, 1607.

Browne, Oliver - Mariner
Clarke, Charles - Mariner
Collson (or Cotson), John - Mariner
Crookdeck, John - Mariner
Deale, Jeremy - Mariner
Fitch, Mathew - Mariner - died July 1609
Genoway, Richard - Mariner
Godword, Thomas - Mariner
Jackson, Robert - Mariner
Markham, Robert - Mariner
Nelson, Francys - Captain - died Winter 1612-1613
Poole, Jonas - Mariner - died 1612
Skynner, Thomas - Mariner
Turnbrydge (or Turbridge), Thomas - Mariner
Newport, Christopher - Captain, Councilor - died 1617
Tyndall, Robert - Mariner, Gunner
White, Benjamyn - Mariner
Danynell
Stephen

There were 144 persons in the expedition including those 104 who remained in Virginia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The First Residents of Jamestown - Historic Jamestowne Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On May 13, 1607 three English ships the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery with approximately 144 settlers and sailors, will land and plant the first permanent English colony in North America. Established by the Virginia Company of London this settlement would be called Jamestown, after king James I.

# data[].attributes.headline
The First English Settlers in the "New World"

# data[].attributes.subject
The First English Settlers in the "New World"

# data[].attributes.body
The colonists settled in 1607 at Jamestowne in the new colony of Virginia. Read more...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River.

Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years brought Jamestown to the brink of failure before the arrival of a new group of settlers and supplies in 1610.

Tobacco became Virginia's first profitable export, and a period of peace followed the marriage of colonist John Rolfe to Pocahontas, the daughter of an Algonquian chief. During the 1620s, Jamestown expanded from the area around the original James Fort into a New Town built to the east. It remained the capital of the Virginia colony until 1699.

English Settlement in the New World

After Christopher Columbus' historic voyage in 1492, Spain dominated the race to establish colonies in the Americas, while English efforts, such as the "lost colony" of Roanoke, met with failure. In 1606, King James I granted a charter to a new venture, the Virginia Company, to form a settlement in North America. At the time, Virginia was the English name for the entire eastern coast of North America north of Florida; they had named it for Elizabeth I, the "virgin queen." The Virginia Company planned to search for gold and silver deposits in the New World, as well as a river route to the Pacific Ocean that would allow them to establish trade with the Orient.

Roughly 100 colonists left England in late December 1606 on three ships (the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery) and reached Chesapeake Bay late the next April. After forming a governing council-including Christopher Newport, commander of the sea voyage, and Captain John Smith, a former mercenary who had been accused of insubordination aboard ship by several other company members-the group searched for a suitable settlement site. On May 13, 1607, they landed on a narrow peninsula-virtually an island-in the James River, where they would begin their lives in the New World.

Surviving the First Years

Known variously as James Forte, James Towne and James Cittie, the new settlement initially consisted of a wooden fort built in a triangle around a storehouse for weapons and other supplies, a church and a number of houses. By the summer of 1607, Newport went back to England with two ships and 40 crewmembers to give a report to the king and to gather more supplies and colonists. The settlers left behind suffered greatly from hunger and illnesses like typhoid and dysentery, caused from drinking contaminated water from the nearby swamp. Settlers also lived under constant threat of attack by members of local Algonquian tribes, most of which were organized into a kind of empire under Chief Powhatan.
READ MORE: What Was Life Like in Jamestown?
An understanding reached between Powhatan and John Smith led the settlers to establish much-needed trade with Powhatan's tribe by early 1608. Though skirmishes still broke out between the two groups, the Native Americans traded corn for beads, metal tools and other objects (including some weapons) from the English, who would depend on this trade for sustenance in the colony's early years. After Smith returned to England in late 1609, the inhabitants of Jamestown suffered through a long, harsh winter known as "The Starving Time," during which more than 100 of them died. Firsthand accounts describe desperate people eating pets and shoe leather. Some Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism. George Percy, the colony's leader in John Smith's absence, wrote:

"And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpse out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows."

In the spring of 1610, just as the remaining colonists were set to abandon Jamestown, two ships arrived bearing at least 150 new settlers, a cache of supplies and the new English governor of the colony, Lord De La Warr.

Growth of the Colony

Though De La Warr soon took ill and went home, his successor Sir Thomas Gates and Gates' second-in command, Sir Thomas Dale, took firm charge of the colony and issued a system of new laws that, among other things, strictly controlled the interactions between settlers and Algonquians. They took a hard line with Powhatan and launched raids against Algonquian villages, killing residents and burning houses and crops. The English began to build other forts and settlements up and down the James River, and by the fall of 1611 had managed to harvest a decent crop of corn themselves. They had also learned other valuable techniques from the Algonquians, including how to insulate their dwellings against the weather using tree bark, and expanded Jamestown into a New Town to the east of the original fort.

A period of relative peace followed the marriage in April 1614 of the colonist and tobacco planter John Rolfe to Pocahontas, a daughter of Chief Powhatan who had been captured by the settlers and converted to Christianity. (According to John Smith, Pocahontas had rescued him from death in 1607, when she was just a young girl and he was her father's captive.) Thanks largely to Rolfe's introduction of a new type of tobacco grown from seeds from the West Indies, Jamestown's economy began to thrive. In 1619, the colony established a General Assembly with members elected by Virginia's male landowners; it would become a model for representative governments in later colonies. That same year, the first Africans (around 50 men, women and children) arrived in the English settlement; they had been on a Portuguese slave ship captured in the West Indies and brought to the Jamestown region. They worked as indentured servants at first (the race-based slavery system developed in North America in the 1680s) and were most likely put to work picking tobacco.
READ MORE: 5 Myths About Pocahontas
Powhatans After Pocahontas

Pocahontas' death during a trip to England in 1617 and the death of Powhatan in 1618 strained the already fragile peace between the English settlers and the Native Americans. Under Powhatan's successor, Opechankeno, the Algonquians became more and more angry about the colonists' insatiable need for land and the pace of English settlement; meanwhile, diseases brought from the Old World decimated the Native American population. In March 1622, the Powhatan made a major assault on English settlements in Virginia, killing some 350 to 400 residents (a full one-quarter of the population). The attack hit the outposts of Jamestown the hardest, while the town itself received advance warning and was able to mount a defense.

In an effort to take greater control of the situation, King James I dissolved the Virginia Company and made Virginia into an official crown colony, with Jamestown as its capital, in 1624. The New Town area of Jamestown continued to grow, and the original fort seems to have disappeared after the 1620s. Though the Powhatan people continued to mount a resistance (Opechankeno, by then in his 80s, led another great rebellion in 1644), the colony continued to grow stronger, and his successor Necotowance was forced to sign a peace treaty that ceded most of the Powhatans' land and forced them to pay an annual tribute to the colonial governor.

Bacon's Rebellion

Bacon's Rebellion was the first rebellion in the American colonies. In 1676, economic problems and unrest with Native Americans drove Virginians led by Nathaniel Bacon to rise up against Governor William Berkeley. Colonists, enraged at declining tobacco prices and higher taxes, sought a scapegoat in local tribes who still periodically sparred with settlers and lived on land they hoped to obtain for themselves.

A July 1675 raid by the Doeg tribe sparked retaliation, and when Governor Berkeley set up a meeting between the two quarreling parties, several tribal chiefs were murdered. In 1675, the General Assembly declared war on "hostile" tribes and forbid traders from working with them. Conveniently, trade was restricted to friends of Berkeley's.
READ MORE: Why America's First Colonial Rebels Burned Jamestown to the Ground
Bacon, a distant relative of Berkeley's, led a volunteer militia and demanded that the Governor give him a commission to fight Native Americans. Berkeley refused, so Bacon raided and killed them on his own. Governor Berkeley named Bacon a rebel, but that didn't stop Bacon from being elected as a burgess and returning to Jamestown to surround the statehouse with his army.

Bacon's rallying cry was his "Declaration in the Name of the People," which charged that Berkeley was corrupt and "protected, favoured and Imboldened the Indians against his Majesties loyall subjects." Bacon's forces drove Governor Berkeley from the capital and set fire to Jamestown on September 19, 1676. Bacon died of dysentery in October, and armed merchant ships from London, followed by forces sent by King Charles II, soon put down the resistance.

Jamestown Abandoned

In 1698, the central statehouse in Jamestown burned down, and Middle Plantation, now known as Williamsburg, replaced it as the colonial capital the following year. While settlers continued to live and maintain farms there, Jamestown was all but abandoned.

Jamestown Island housed military posts during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. In the 20th century, preservationists undertook a major restoration of the area. The National Park Service now administers it as part of the Colonial National Historical Park called "Historic Jamestowne." The Jamestown Rediscovery archeological project, begun in 1994, examines artifacts uncovered at the settlement to gain a better understanding of daily life in the first permanent English colony in the New World.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Food

The Algonquian people of the Eastern Woodlands were hunter-gatherers, meaning they relied on collecting edible plants and hunting wild animals as their main source of food.

Tobacco

Corn

Farming

They were too far north to rely solely on horticulture; however, some groups did farm.

The Mi'kmaq's grew tobacco.

Ottawa, Abenaki, and Algonquin grew corn, beans, and squash.

Hunting

The people of the Eastern Woodlands became very skilled hunters and fishermen because they lived in forested areas and were usually close to water.

During the winter, when the lakes were frozen over, were spent hunting larger game and trapping smaller animals.

In the summer months, they would focus a lot of their time on fishing. They would hunt too.

In the fall and winter, most of the families moved, following the animals they needed to hunt. Because there was a lot of snowfall in the area, the hunters would use snowshoes as a way of traveling.

The most important animal to the Eastern Woodlands Hunters was the white-tailed deer. White-tailed deer were hunted for their meat, but the skins were also dried and used in making their houses and clothing.

They also hunted:

raccoon

bear

squirrel

beaver

moose

seal

caribou

whale

The types of animals that they hunted depended on the region where they were living and what wildlife was available to them. For example, the coastal people were able to hunt for seals and whales, while the people in the northern regions were unable to do so, but they could hunt for caribou and moose.

Moose Hunt in winter

Fishing in Canoes

Preparing the Meat

Algonquin family tends to the fire

There were two ways to prepare the meat.

The first way was to cook it, by either roasting or boiling it over a fire, and then eat it right away.

The second method was to smoke-dry the meat, as a way to preserve it, and then save it to eat at a future time when they were short on fresh meat.

Fishing

Spear fishing in a lake

They spent a lot of time fishing, particularly in the St. Lawrence area, the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic coast.

So they often put their villages close to good fishing grounds.

The inland people fished in rivers and lakes and their diet included a lot of freshwater fish.

The coastal people, like the Mi'maqs, took advantage of the ocean and caught a lot of eels, mulloscs, and crustaceans, in addition to eating a lot of saltwater fish, like cod, smelt, and salmon.

Roles of Men and Women

Men hunting deer in camouflage

In Eastern Woodlands society it was solely the man's responsibility to hunt and fish.

The women were in charge of farming (if they did any), and gathering various wild berries, nuts, tubers and other plants to eat from nearby forests.

Around the Great Lakes region in Ontario, the women also harvested wild rice in the fall and maple sap in the spring to make maple sugar.

Along the coastal region, it was the woman's responsibility to collect shellfish and mussels from the ocean. They would then have clambakes, where they ate clams, oysters, lobsters, mussels, and other shellfish wrapped in seaweed and cooked over a fire pit.

Tools

Ojibwa deadfall

Most tools that the Eastern Woodlands Hunters used were made of wood or bark.

For hunting larger animals they used bows and arrows and lances, and for smaller animals they used traps, snares, and deadfalls.

For fishing, they used hooks, weirs, leisters, and nets, all of which they made themselves from forest material.

Cooking was done in containers made of wood and bark, mainly from birch trees.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Eastern Woodland Hunters - Food / Hunting / Tools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Food The Algonquian people of the Eastern Woodlands were hunter-gatherers, meaning they relied on collecting edible plants and hunting wild animals as their main source of food. Tobacco Corn Farming They were too far north to rely solely on horticulture; however, some groups did farm. The Mi'kmaq's grew tobacco.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Eastern Woodlands Indians were native American tribes that settled in the region extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Mississippi River in the west and from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. (The Woodlands Indians are sometimes divided further into the Northeastern Indians and the Southeastern Indians.) A majority of Eastern Woodlands tribes spoke Iroquoian or Algonquian. The Iroquois speakers included the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Huron. The Iroquoian tribes were primarily deer hunters but they also grew corn, squash, and beans, they gathered nuts and berries, and they fished. The Algonquian speakers included the Abenaki, Chippewa (or Ojibwa), Delaware, Mohegans (or Mohicans), and Pequot. The Algonquian tribes also cultivated corn, beans, and squash. While the northerly tribes relied more heavily on hunting, the tribes that settled in the fertile region of the Ohio River Valley and southward through the Mississippi Delta (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Natchez, and Seminole) developed a farming and trading economy. These groups were also Mound Builders they erected huge earthworks as burial grounds.

The Eastern Woodlands Indians traveled on foot and in birch-bark canoes. In the north, they wore deerskin clothing and they painted their faces and bodies. In the southern region, they wore little clothing and they often tattooed their bodies. The Eastern Woodlands Indians of the north lived predominately in dome-shaped wigwams (arched shelters made of a framework of poles and covered with bark, rush mats, or hides) and in long houses (multi-family lodges having pole frames and covered with elm shingles). The tribes in the south lived in wattle and daub houses (wooden framed houses covered with reed mats and plaster). The Eastern Woodlands Indians built walls and fences around villages for protection. Warfare sometimes broke out among the tribes. The Indians used bows and arrows as well as clubs to defend themselves and their lands.

The Eastern Woodlands tribes that lived along the Atlantic Coast were the first native Americans that had contact with Europeans. Friendships were made; alliances forged; land deals struck; and treaties signed. But as settlers in increasing numbers encroached on tribal lands, conflicts arose. These conflicts were between white settlers and the Indians and between Indians and other Indians, as native inhabitants took sides in the conflicts. The Huron and some Algonquian groups allied themselves with the French. The fierce Iroquois League (made up of the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca tribes) sided with the British. When the American colonies waged a battle for freedom from Great Britain, the American Revolution (177583) divided the tribes of the Iroquois League. All but the Oneida allied themselves with the British. In the 1800s many Eastern Woodlands tribes were forced off their native lands by the U.S. government and were settled in Oklahoma and other western states. The 183839 migration of the Cherokee Nation is known as the Trail of Tears because not only did the Indians reluctantly leave their homeland, but many died along the way.

See also: Choctaw, Corn, Iroquois, Trail of Tears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
eastern woodlands indians
the eastern woodlands indians were native american tribes that settled in the region extending from the atlantic ocean in the east to the mississippi river in the west and from canada in the north to the

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EASTERN WOODLANDS INDIANS The Eastern Woodlands Indians were native American tribes that settled in the region extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Mississippi River in the west and from Canada in the north to the

# data[].attributes.headline
The Indigenous People Before European Colonization (Part II)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Indigenous People Before European Colonization (Part II)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Featured

Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt. After siding with the French [...]
Read more Read more about Native American History Timeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Native American History: Tribes, Timeline & Reservations | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about Native American tribes and leaders like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Tecumseh, and events like the Trail of Tears, the French and Indian War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the American Indian Movement (AIM).

# data[].attributes.headline
The Indigenous People Before European Colonization

# data[].attributes.subject
The Indigenous People Before European Colonization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Arctic

The Arctic culture area, a cold, flat, treeless region (actually a frozen desert) near the Arctic Circle in present-day Alaska, Canada and Greenland, was home to the Inuit and the Aleut. Both groups spoke, and continue to speak, dialects descended from what scholars call the Eskimo-Aleut language family.

Because it is such an inhospitable landscape, the Arctic's population was comparatively small and scattered. Some of its peoples, especially the Inuit in the northern part of the region, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra. In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were a bit more settled, living in small fishing villages along the shore.

Did you know? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are about 4.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the United States today. That's about 1.5 percent of the population.

The Inuit and Aleut had a great deal in common. Many lived in dome-shaped houses made of sod or timber (or, in the North, ice blocks). They used seal and otter skins to make warm, weatherproof clothing, aerodynamic dogsleds and long, open fishing boats (kayaks in Inuit; baidarkas in Aleut).

By the time the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, decades of oppression and exposure to European diseases had taken their toll: The native population had dropped to just 2,500; the descendants of these survivors still make their homes in the area today.

The Subarctic

The Subarctic culture area, mostly composed of swampy, piney forests (taiga) and waterlogged tundra, stretched across much of inland Alaska and Canada. Scholars have divided the region's people into two language groups: the Athabaskan speakers at its western end, among them the Tsattine (Beaver), Gwich'in (or Kuchin) and the Deg Xinag (formerly-and pejoratively-known as the Ingalik), and the Algonquian speakers at its eastern end, including the Cree, the Ojibwa and the Naskapi.

In the Subarctic, travel was difficult-toboggans, snowshoes and lightweight canoes were the primary means of transportation-and population was sparse. In general, the peoples of the Subarctic did not form large permanent settlements; instead, small family groups stuck together as they traipsed after herds of caribou. They lived in small, easy-to-move tents and lean-tos, and when it grew too cold to hunt they hunkered into underground dugouts.

The growth of the fur trade in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the Subarctic way of life-now, instead of hunting and gathering for subsistence, the Indians focused on supplying pelts to the European traders-and eventually led to the displacement and extermination of many of the region's native communities.

The Northeast

The Northeast culture area, one of the first to have sustained contact with Europeans, stretched from present-day Canada's Atlantic coast to North Carolina and inland to the Mississippi River valley. Its inhabitants were members of two main groups: Iroquoian speakers (these included the Cayuga, Oneida, Erie, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora), most of whom lived along inland rivers and lakes in fortified, politically stable villages, and the more numerous Algonquian speakers (these included the Pequot, Fox, Shawnee, Wampanoag, Delaware and Menominee) who lived in small farming and fishing villages along the ocean. There, they grew crops like corn, beans and vegetables.

Life in the Northeast culture area was already fraught with conflict-the Iroquoian groups tended to be rather aggressive and warlike, and bands and villages outside of their allied confederacies were never safe from their raids-and it grew more complicated when European colonizers arrived. Colonial wars repeatedly forced the region's Indigenous people to take sides, pitting the Iroquois groups against their Algonquian neighbors. Meanwhile, as white settlement pressed westward, it eventually displaced both sets of Indigenous people from their lands.

The Southeast

The Southeast culture area, north of the Gulf of Mexico and south of the Northeast, was a humid, fertile agricultural region. Many of its natives were expert farmers-they grew staple crops like maize, beans, squash, tobacco and sunflower-who organized their lives around small ceremonial and market villages known as hamlets. Perhaps the most familiar of the Southeastern Indigenous peoples are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, sometimes called the Five Civilized Tribes, some of whom spoke a variant of the Muskogean language.

By the time the U.S. had won its independence from Britain, the Southeast culture area had already lost many of its native people to disease and displacement. In 1830, the federal Indian Removal Act compelled the relocation of what remained of the Five Civilized Tribes so that white settlers could have their land. Between 1830 and 1838, federal officials forced nearly 100,000 Indigenous people out of the southern states and into "Indian Territory" (later Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi. The Cherokee called this frequently deadly trek the Trail of Tears.

The Plains

The Plains culture area comprises the vast prairie region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, from present-day Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Before the arrival of European traders and explorers, its inhabitants-speakers of Siouan, Algonquian, Caddoan, Uto-Aztecan and Athabaskan languages-were relatively settled hunters and farmers. After European contact, and especially after Spanish colonists brought horses to the region in the 18th century, the peoples of the Great Plains became much more nomadic.

Groups like the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho used horses to pursue great herds of buffalo across the prairie. The most common dwelling for these hunters was the cone-shaped teepee, a bison-skin tent that could be folded up and carried anywhere. Plains Indians are also known for their elaborately feathered war bonnets.

As white traders and settlers moved west across the Plains region, they brought many damaging things with them: commercial goods, like knives and kettles, which Indigenous people came to depend on; guns; and disease. By the end of the 19th century, white sport hunters had nearly exterminated the area's buffalo herds. With settlers encroaching on their lands and no way to make money, the Plains natives were forced onto government reservations.

The Southwest

The peoples of the Southwest culture area, a huge desert region in present-day Arizona and New Mexico (along with parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and Mexico) developed two distinct ways of life.

Sedentary farmers such as the Hopi, the Zuni, the Yaqui and the Yuma grew crops like corn, beans and squash. Many lived in permanent settlements, known as pueblos, built of stone and adobe. These pueblos featured great multistory dwellings that resembled apartment houses. At their centers, many of these villages also had large ceremonial pit houses, or kivas.

Other Southwestern peoples, such as the Navajo and the Apache, were more nomadic. They survived by hunting, gathering and raiding their more established neighbors for their crops. Because these groups were always on the move, their homes were much less permanent than the pueblos. For instance, the Navajo fashioned their iconic eastward-facing round houses, known as hogans, out of materials like mud and bark.

By the time the southwestern territories became a part of the United States after the Mexican War, many of the region's native people had already been killed. (Spanish colonists and missionaries had enslaved many of the Pueblo Indians, for example, working them to death on vast Spanish ranches known as encomiendas.) During the second half of the 19th century, the federal government resettled most of the region's remaining natives onto reservations.

The Great Basin

The Great Basin culture area, an expansive bowl formed by the Rocky Mountains to the east, the Sierra Nevadas to the west, the Columbia Plateau to the north, and the Colorado Plateau to the south, was a barren wasteland of deserts, salt flats and brackish lakes. Its people, most of whom spoke Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan dialects (the Bannock, Paiute and Ute, for example), foraged for roots, seeds and nuts and hunted snakes, lizards and small mammals. Because they were always on the move, they lived in compact, easy-to-build wikiups made of willow poles or saplings, leaves and brush. Their settlements and social groups were impermanent, and communal leadership (what little there was) was informal.

After European contact, some Great Basin groups got horses and formed equestrian hunting and raiding bands that were similar to the ones we associate with the Great Plains natives. After white prospectors discovered gold and silver in the region in the mid-19th century, most of the Great Basin's people lost their land and, frequently, their lives.

California

Before European contact, the temperate California area had more people than any other North American landscape at the time, with approximately 300,000 people in the mid-16th century. It's estimated that 100 different tribes and groups spoke more than 200 dialects. These languages were derived from the Penutian (the Maidu, Miwok and Yokuts), the Hokan (the Chumash, Pomo, Salinas and Shasta), the Uto-Aztecan (the Tubabulabal, Serrano and Kinatemuk) and the Athapaskan (the Hupa, among others). Many of the "Mission Indians" who were driven out of the Southwest by Spanish colonization also spoke Uto-Aztecan dialects.

Despite this great diversity, many native Californians lived very similar lives. They did not practice much agriculture. Instead, they organized themselves into small, family-based bands of hunter-gatherers known as tribelets. Inter-tribelet relationships, based on well-established systems of trade and common rights, were generally peaceful.

Spanish explorers infiltrated the California region in the middle of the 16th century. In 1769, the cleric Junipero Serra established a mission at San Diego, inaugurating a particularly brutal period in which forced labor, disease and assimilation nearly exterminated the culture area's native population.

The Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast culture area, along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to the top of Northern California, has a mild climate and an abundance of natural resources. In particular, the ocean and the region's rivers provided almost everything its people needed-salmon, especially, but also whales, sea otters, seals and fish and shellfish of all kinds. As a result, unlike many other hunter-gatherers who struggled to eke out a living and were forced to follow animal herds from place to place, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest were secure enough to build permanent villages that housed hundreds of people apiece.

Those villages operated according to a rigidly stratified social structure, more sophisticated than any outside of Mexico and Central America. A person's status was determined by his closeness to the village's chief and reinforced by the number of possessions-blankets, shells and skins, canoes and even slaves-he had at his disposal. (Goods like these played an important role in the potlatch, an elaborate gift-giving ceremony designed to affirm these class divisions.)

Prominent groups in the region included the Athapaskan Haida and Tlingit; the Penutian Chinook, Tsimshian and Coos; the Wakashan Kwakiutl and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka); and the Salishan Coast Salish.

The Plateau

The Plateau culture area sat in the Columbia and Fraser River basins at the intersection of the Subarctic, the Plains, the Great Basin, California and the Northwest Coast (present-day Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon and Washington). Most of its people lived in small, peaceful villages along streams and riverbanks and survived by fishing for salmon and trout, hunting and gathering wild berries, roots and nuts.

In the southern Plateau region, the great majority spoke languages derived from the Penutian (the Klamath, Klikitat, Modoc, Nez Perce, Walla Walla and Yakima or Yakama). North of the Columbia River, most (the Skitswish (Coeur d'Alene), Salish (Flathead), Spokane and Columbia) spoke Salishan dialects.

In the 18th century, other native groups brought horses to the Plateau. The region's inhabitants quickly integrated the animals into their economy, expanding the radius of their hunts and acting as traders and emissaries between the Northwest and the Plains.

In 1805, the explorers Lewis and Clark passed through the area, followed by increasing numbers of white settlers. By the end of the 19th century, most of the remaining members of Plateau tribes had been cleared from their lands and resettled in government reservations.

Photo Galleries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Native American Cultures - Facts, Regions & Tribes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Native Americans, also known as American Indians and Indigenous Americans, are the indigenous peoples of the United States. By the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than 50 million Native Americans were already living in the Americas - 10 million in the area that would become the United States.