Transcript
Whose Hands?
1623–1630
In 1623, Richard Frethorne, a young servant on a Virginia tobacco plantation, begged his parents to buy out his contract.
Richard Frethorne I haue eaten more in day at home then I haue allowed me here for a Weeke.
Richard Frethorne the Answeare of this letter wilbee life or death to me
In February 1624, Virginia's list of the dead included a Richard Frethram from his plantation.
In 1627, on Barbados, a new English colony in the Caribbean, nineteen-year-old Henry Winthrop was planting tobacco too.
Henry Winthrop here is but 3 score of christyanes and fortye slaues of negeres and Indyenes.
Henry Winthrop send me ouer sum 2 or 3 men that they be bound to searue me
His father, John Winthrop, a lawyer in England, wrote back:
John Winthrop I sent you allso 2: boyes (for men I could gett none)
In 1630, John Winthrop sailed for New England himself, to build a colony devoted to God.
Our Principall Wealth
Virginia and Maryland · 1607–1700
By 1750, English colonies ran along the coast from New England to Georgia, with more on islands in the Caribbean.
The first was Virginia, where a group of London investors called the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607.
For years Jamestown lost money, until John Rolfe's sweet Caribbean tobacco, planted in 1612, sold so well that settlers grew it in the streets.
Tobacco needed many hands and wore out the soil, so planters kept clearing fields on land they took from the Powhatan of eastern Virginia. Ships sailed up the deep rivers of the Chesapeake Bay to each planter's dock, so Virginians spread along the riverbanks and built few towns.
Most workers came as indentured servants, young English men and some women who agreed to work four to seven years in return for passage. Under the headright system, whoever paid a migrant's fare got fifty acres, so a planter gained land with every servant he brought over.
In July 1619, Virginia's colonists elected the House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in English America, and wealthy planters came to dominate it.
That fall, its Speaker, John Pory, explained Virginia's wealth in a letter home:
John Pory All our riches for the present doe consiste in Tobacco
John Pory Our principall wealth (I should have said) consisteth in servants
In August 1619, a month before Pory's letter, a privateer traded about twenty Africans, taken from a Portuguese slave ship, for food at Point Comfort.
In 1634, the Calverts, a Catholic noble family, founded Maryland, a second tobacco colony, as a refuge for English Catholics. When Protestants came to outnumber the Catholics, Maryland's 1649 Act of Toleration protected all who believed in Jesus but ordered death for denying the Trinity.
In 1662, Virginia ruled that a child's status followed the mother's, so enslaved women's children were born enslaved.
Still, in 1671, Governor William Berkeley reported far more servants than slaves in Virginia:
Sir William Berkeley two thousand black slaves, six thousand christian servants, for a short time
Later in the century, fewer English servants came, and slave traders brought more Africans to the Chesapeake. By 1700, slavery had replaced servitude as the main labor system in Virginia and Maryland.
Back in 1635, two ships registered passengers in London, the Primrose bound for Virginia and the Increase for New England.
Switch between their lists and compare the passengers' ages.
A Citty vpon a Hill
New England · 1620–1640
The Increase was part of the Great Migration, when about twenty thousand English people moved to New England in the 1630s. Most were Puritans, Protestants who wanted to purify the Church of England, and King Charles I's bishops were punishing their ministers.
Unlike Virginia's young servants, they came mostly as families, and they settled close together in towns around Boston. In 1620, the Pilgrims, Separatists who had left the Church of England, founded Plymouth, south of Boston, and signed the Mayflower Compact to govern themselves.
The Puritans' leader was Henry's father, John Winthrop, who brought about a thousand settlers to Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and founded Boston. He told them God had bound them together in a covenant, a sacred agreement:
John Winthrop wee must delight in each other, make others Condicions our owne, reioyce together, mourne together, labour and suffer together
John Winthrop wee shall be as a Citty vpon a Hill, the eies of all people are vppon vs
Puritan families built small farming towns around a meetinghouse, which they used as both church and town hall.
Women did much of the household work: spinning, sewing, preserving food, and tending gardens and animals.
Rocky soil and a short growing season kept farms small, so New Englanders also fished, cut timber, built ships and traded. In 1702, the Boston minister Cotton Mather told of a preacher who reminded fishermen that they had come for religion, and one of them answered:
Unnamed coastal settler Sir, you are mistaken, you think you are preaching to the people at the Bay; our main end was to catch fish.
Each town ran its own affairs in a town meeting, where men debated and voted on roads, fences and taxes. The towns also elected deputies to the General Court, the colony's lawmaking assembly.
Only freemen could vote for them, and Massachusetts admitted only male church members as freemen. Massachusetts let its towns govern themselves, but it demanded that everyone follow one approved church.
Hold Up Your Hands
Massachusetts and Rhode Island · 1635–1644
In Boston, a midwife named Anne Hutchinson held meetings where dozens of neighbors discussed the week's sermons. She accused most of the colony's ministers of teaching that good behavior could earn salvation. In Massachusetts, church and government worked together, so the colony's leaders treated her challenge as a threat to public order.
In November 1637, the General Court put her on trial at Newtown, today's Cambridge.
Anne Hutchinson So to me by an immediate revelation.
Thomas Dudley How! an immediate revelation.
Anne Hutchinson You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul
Thomas Dudley What is the scripture she brings?
William Coddington for here is no law of God or man broken
John Winthrop let them hold up their hands.
John Winthrop you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society
Anne Hutchinson I desire to know wherefore I am banished?
John Winthrop Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.
Every man who voted to banish her held an elected seat, but no woman in Massachusetts could vote.
Compare who could vote in England and in three colonies.
A larger share of men could vote in Massachusetts than in England, but Anne Hutchinson, like every woman, could not.
Hutchinson moved south to Aquidneck Island, near Providence, which another exile, Roger Williams, had founded in 1636.
Williams, a minister banished in 1635, taught that government had no right to control what anyone believed. Rhode Island, the colony he founded, let Catholics, Quakers and Jews worship freely, a wider freedom than Maryland granted to Christians alone.
The Holy Experiment
Pennsylvania and the Middle Colonies · 1656–1730
Rhode Island also took in Quakers, members of a radical new English religious group, the Society of Friends. Quakers believed God's inner light lived in every person, so they had no ministers, let women preach and bowed to no one.
Massachusetts banished Quakers and hanged four who kept coming back, among them Mary Dyer, a friend of Anne Hutchinson. In 1660, the court offered to spare her life if she would leave Massachusetts for good.
Mary Dyer Nay, I cannot, for in obedience to the Will of the Lord God I came; and in his Will I abide faithful to the Death.
On June 1, 1660, Massachusetts hanged her on Boston Common.
Charles II became king of England in 1660, and afterward he paid his supporters with huge grants of American land. In 1663, eight of them received Carolina, south of Virginia, and in 1664 his brother James's fleet seized Dutch New Netherland, which became New York.
In 1681, to repay a debt to William Penn's late father, the king gave Penn the Lenape homeland west of the Delaware River. Penn, a Quaker, wanted a refuge for people of every faith:
William Penn there may be room there, tho not here, for such an holy experiment.
Under Penn's laws, anyone who believed in God could worship freely, though only Christians could hold office.
Pennsylvania's deep, fertile soil was ideal for wheat, and farm families grew far more than they could eat. With New York, New Jersey and Delaware, it formed the middle colonies, which drew English, Dutch, German and Scots-Irish settlers of many faiths.
In 1687, New York's governor, Thomas Dongan, tried to list his colony's churches and gave up:
Thomas Dongan in short, of all sorts of opinions there are some, and the most part of none at all.
Pennsylvania's freedom had limits: in 1688, four Quakers in Germantown, near Philadelphia, signed a protest against slavery.
Francis Daniel Pastorius Here is liberty of conscience wch is right and reasonable; here ought to be likewise liberty of the body, except of evildoers
Their Quaker meetings refused to take a stand, and Penn himself owned enslaved people.
Millers ground the wheat into flour, and ships from Philadelphia carried it to the sugar islands of the Caribbean. The planters there grew almost nothing but sugar, so they bought their bread from the mainland.
Sugar Island
Barbados and New England · 1637–1680
Back in 1637, the Desire sailed from Salem, Massachusetts, with Pequot captives from a war in what is now Connecticut, to sell in the Caribbean.
In February 1638, the Desire came home, and Governor Winthrop listed its cargo in his journal:
John Winthrop some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes, etc.
On Barbados, where Henry Winthrop had planted tobacco, planters switched to sugarcane in the 1640s. The island never froze, so cane grew all year, and by the 1660s Barbados was the richest colony in English America.
Planters forced enslaved Africans to cut the cane in the heat and to boil its juice day and night. By 1680, enslaved people outnumbered the island's white residents nearly two to one.
In 1675, enslaved Africans on Barbados had planned a rising, but planters learned of the plot and executed its leaders. A pamphlet written by their enemies reported what an enslaved man named Tony said as he faced execution:
Tony If you Roast me to day, you cannot Roast me to morrow
The same pamphlet claimed that many of the condemned believed death would carry them home. With no land left on Barbados for new plantations, planters had begun looking north to the mainland.
A Colony of a Colony
The Carolinas · 1670–1750
In 1670, English colonists and planters from Barbados founded Charles Town, in the new colony of Carolina.
In the 1690s, planters found their fortune in rice, which thrived in Carolina's long, hot summers and freshwater swamps. Many enslaved Africans came from West African regions where people had grown rice for centuries, and they knew the work.
By 1708, enslaved Africans and enslaved Native people together outnumbered the colony's white settlers.
Choose a crop to see who controlled the working day.
Under the task system, enslaved workers who finished their assigned job could spend the rest of the day on gardens, family and worship. Where they were the majority, they built Gullah culture, with its own language blending English and African words. They kept African traditions like the ring shout, a worship dance, and coiled grass baskets for winnowing rice.
Around 1740, Eliza Lucas, a teenager running her father's plantations near Charles Town, began testing indigo, a plant used to make blue dye.
Eliza Lucas I make no doubt Indigo will prove a very valueable commodity in time
Enslaved workers did the heavy, foul-smelling work at the vats, and by the 1750s indigo was Carolina's second-biggest export.
Rice and indigo made South Carolina's coastal planters some of the richest men in British America, and they controlled its assembly, the Commons House.
North Carolina had few good harbors, so most settlers worked smaller tobacco and food farms, much like Virginia's. Some held servants or enslaved workers, but large plantations were far less common there than in South Carolina.
The Last Colony
Georgia · 1732–1751
In 1732, Britain chartered one more colony south of Carolina, Georgia, and put it in the hands of trustees in London. Their leader, James Oglethorpe, founded Savannah in 1733 as a buffer against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for England's poor.
By 1735, the trustees had banned slavery and rum, and they gave Georgia no elected assembly.
Many Savannah settlers watched Carolina planters grow rich across the river, and in 1738 they told the trustees what kept them poor:
Savannah petition · staged reading The Want of the Use of Negroes, with proper Limitations;
In January 1739, Scottish Highlanders at Darien, a town on the Spanish border, sent the trustees a petition against slavery. They warned that enslaved people would flee to Spanish Florida, which promised them freedom, and that slavery would hurt poor white workers.
Darien petition · staged reading It is shocking to human Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity should be sentanc'd to perpetual Slavery;
Settlers were already smuggling in enslaved people, and in 1750 the trustees gave up. Slavery became legal in Georgia on January 1, 1751, and planters soon copied Carolina's rice plantations.
By midcentury, English America had four regions: New England, the middle colonies, the Chesapeake, and the plantation South with the West Indies.
Pick a region and recall its crop and its workers.
The Chesapeake and the middle colonies both grew rich by selling farm crops overseas, tobacco from one and wheat from the other. Georgia had Carolina's climate from the start, but the trustees allowed slavery only after settlers demanded it.