Major Points for Review on Early Colonial America

Between last week's lecture and this week's readings, I have prepared some main ideas for you as you begin to make progress with your own studies and note-taking. I won't always put these together, but as you begin this journey, I want to help you to see how I pull some main ideas over the readings and discussions.

Early Colonial America

·       Native Americans are often depicted in very striking and contrasting ways. Some portray them as savages, desperately needing colonial intervention, religion, and modernization. Others depict them as overtly docile, wise, and in tune with the natural order. Both are wrong because Native Americans, like the Europeans, were diverse, complicated, and more complex than either dichotomy.
·       Both destroyed nature when it served them well
·       Both engaged in brutal wars/savage behavior (Spanish Inquisition)
·       Some differences: Ideology. Native Americans did not have the ideological beliefs that sent them on a great commission.
·       They did not have boats that could navigate the deep seas. Canoes would not be successful.
 Some differences that led to the decimation of Native American peoples: In other words, if they defeated the Spanish and the French, why couldn’t they defeat the English?

·     Many became farmers, growing maize, squash, and beans. They kept few burdensome animals, namely the dog. This provided little protein and malnourishment. Farming also brought them closer together in smaller quarters, allowing microbes to spread more quickly. And since they did not keep a variety of animals, they had little exposure to more complex microbes and diseases, and also less immunity. Dirt and germs can protect you.
·      Frequent invasions brought more and more diseases. Old World humans brought useful things to the New World, like horses and wheat, but they also brought diseases that the natives of North and South America had no immunities to. Historians call this transfer the Columbian Exchange, and it radically altered human history. Scholars still debate how many American natives died from disease brought by the Colombian Exchange, but estimates range from two-thirds to nine-tenths of the population—somewhere between 45 and 90 million people.  ·      Historians estimate that 90 percent of the population from Connecticut to Maine was wiped out. Thomas Morton wrote of the area around Boston so many had died so suddenly, countless bodies were left unburied. The woods were so full of bones and skulls that it seemed to him “a newfound Golgotha.”  ·      The epidemic affected European colonization in three major ways. First, it changed the natives’ attitudes toward Europeans. Previously confident and slightly hostile, the native tribes were now terrified of the Europeans and their god, who could wreak such terrible vengeance. During the Pilgrims’ first winter in Plymouth, for example, half of the colony died; the survivors were weak from malnutrition, exhaustion, and exposure. Yet the remaining Wampanoags assisted the colonists, rather than attacking them. Like the Indians, the Puritans interpreted the epidemic in religious terms. John Winthrop later described the epidemics as “miraculous,” a sign that God looked on their colony with special favor. This sense of providence has pervaded Americans’ image of themselves to this day.  ·      Second, the epidemic (and many smaller ones that followed) also weakened the native population and removed a major obstacle to British colonization.  ·      About 50 years after the epidemic, during King Philip’s War (which we will discuss this week,) the Native Americans nearly drove the Europeans out of New England. Had the epidemic not thinned the native population, the British might not have prevailed.  ·      Finally, the British pursued colonization on the cheap; the Pilgrims and other waves of settlers were usually underfunded and unprepared for the conditions in the New World. In New England, the natives had done all the hard work of clearing land and establishing farms, then conveniently disappeared. All the Pilgrims had to do was cut down the weeds and start planting. Without this boon, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly, if at all.  ·      Eventually, as European Americans spread out across the American continent in the 1700s and 1800s, they carried biological devastation to unsuspecting Native Americans all the way to California, repeating the cycle.