68 pages • 2 hours read
Alan TaylorAmerican Colonies: The Settling of North America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 6 Summary: “Virginia: 1570-1650”
Sixteenth-century England was in a difficult position socially and culturally. Unlike the purely monarchical societies of France and Spain, England’s royalty co-ruled with Parliament, a bicameral system of aristocrats (House of Lords) and gentry (House of Commons). Incursion of England’s powerful noble class on the land of the lower classes (enclosure) displaced thousands, leading to a rise in crime, violence, and hunger (120). To solve this issue the earliest English colonial promoters, the West Country men, proposed expanding outward and making the Americas a workhouse for the disenfranchised. In 1606 wealthy investors incorporated the Virginia Company, which James I chartered to colonize the mid-Atlantic seaboard between Florida and Acadia, then called Virginia. This type of colony, which belonged to private interests rather than the Crown, was called a proprietary colony. Colonies owned by the Crown were called royal colonies.
Since the French settled in Canada and the Spanish in the south, Virginia was still available for colonization. But early English settlements did not fare well. Poor choices of location, logistical failures in the delivering of supplies, and a preference for plundering valuable metals over establishing agricultural roots led to the failure of Roanoke (123-24) and the early foundering of Jamestown (129-31). Also problematic was the colonists’ outlook. Nobles and beggars alike were unused to the hard work of farming. They were even less motivated to work land that belonged not to them but to the Virginia Company (130). The starving inhabitants of Jamestown and their captain, John Smith, found it easier to demand food of the local Indians, around 30 groups united by their Algonquian language and their paramount chief, Powhatan.
Powhatan ruled over a kinship network of “tribes” that paid him tribute. He initially saw the English as just another group to subordinate (126-27). Cultural misunderstandings led to violence, with the English punishing both Indians and English defectors to the Indian lifestyle (132-33). Though the English fancied themselves as kinder than the Spanish and their Black Legend, they utilized the same brutal colonization techniques as they had employed in subduing the Irish back home (122-23; 132). The capture of Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas finally forced an uneasy peace treaty.
The colony remained a money sink for the Virginia Company until two critical changes were made. First, the company adopted a “head-right system,” which gifted men who could pay for their own passage with land of their own—private property. Second, in 1616 they finally settled on a profitable commercial crop to export back to England: tobacco (133-34). But the discovery came too late to save the company from bankruptcy, and in 1624 the Crown took control of Virginia as the first royal colony (136). In 1632 Maryland was founded as a proprietary colony and gifted to Lord Baltimore, who envisioned it as a religiously tolerant haven for Protestants and Catholics (136).
Two surprise attacks in 1622 and 1644 from the deceased Powhatan’s brother, Opechancanough, gave the English the flimsy cover they needed to eradicate the local natives, finally capturing and killing Opechancanough in 1646 (134-35). As in Mexico and Canada, a combination of bad faith agreements, starvation, and warfare decimated the Algonquian-speaking cultural groups.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Chesapeake Colonies: 1650-1750”
The colonies of Virginia and Maryland, collectively referred to as the Chesapeake, pioneered important philosophical developments for the Americas. While the line between noble and commoner was concrete in England, it was less so in the Chesapeake. There the great planters, middle-class men who could afford to run their own large farms, demanded to share power with the Crown (Virginia) or the Lord Proprietor (Lord Baltimore in Maryland). They refused to pay taxes unless represented. This decentralized power was unique to English colonies and “stood in marked contrast to the Spanish and French colonies, which permitted neither elected assemblies nor individual liberties” (14).
Poor men and occasionally women mortgaged their labor to wealthy landowners, the “great planters,” in exchange for passage to the Americas and land of their own. As indentured servants they were treated as little better than slaves, toiling in the tobacco crops under extreme conditions (143). But for survivors of the four-year labor period, there was a rare chance for social mobility and land ownership. Emigration surged from the 1630s through the mid-1660s.
But opportunity faded for the common planters after 1665, when a surplus of tobacco producers drove down tobacco prices in England (146). The wealthy planters, bolstered by Virginia’s governor William Berkeley, took advantage of hard times to buy up the smaller farms and establish a plantation society that disproportionately favored the wealthy. They also crushed the common planters under oppressive taxes (147). Frustrated freed servants who ventured into the frontier to find land and avoid taxation quickly became embroiled in turf wars with the local Susquehannock Indians. Because the elite class enjoyed profitable trade agreements with the Susquehannock, Berkeley quashed any plans for their eradication.
In Berkeley’s elitism, the young Nathaniel Bacon saw opportunity. A charismatic Englishman from the gentry class, he understood that he could appeal to the common planters in a bid for power for himself. In 1676 he began indiscriminately killing Indians against the order of Berkeley, who declared him guilty of treason. Bacon promised freedom and land to servants and freedman who joined his cause. Bacon’s Rebellion culminated in Bacon sieging and razing Jamestown. The rebellion required military intervention from the Crown, which believed the wealthy farm owners must be pushing the lower classes too hard.
Bacon’s Rebellion and the Crown’s interference scared the great planters into reversing many of their previous positions. In the 18th century they became anti-tax and pro-war with the Indians, effectively shifting common planters’ resentment from themselves to the Crown and the natives. As emigration dwindled, they increasingly turned to importing African slaves to work the tobacco plantations. Fearing both a slave uprising and pushback from common white planters at their increasingly stratified society, they pushed legislative and cultural changes equating blackness with slavery. In the process they introduced a new, destructive concept to the Americas: white racial solidarity. The ploy worked as, “[n]ewly obsessed with racial difference, Chesapeake whites felt more equal despite the growing inequality of their economic circumstances” (157).
Part 2, Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Chapters 6 and 7 introduce the first British colonies in the Americas: Virginia and Maryland, collectively referred to as the Chesapeake. After a difficult start, largely due to social and cultural factors that rendered them unwilling or unable to farm, the colonists finally settled into a plantation society. The Chesapeake specialized in one staple crop, tobacco, which tied its colonists to the destructive boom-or-bust cycles of the tobacco market. The Chesapeake pioneered enduring legacies for the American colonies, both positive and negative.
On the positive side, English culture enabled the development of representative government in the colonies. Though England was not strictly monarchical, its Parliament was hardly representative of common people. Wealthy lords, in fact, encroached on the lower classes to such an extent that they displaced people from their land and drove immigration. This ties in to the New World’s key appeal: the promise of social mobility. By entering indentured servitude, poor men with no opportunities in England had a shot at substantially improving their standard of living, as short and truncated as that period of opportunity was.
But the Chesapeake also introduced powerfully negative concepts to the American experiment. The “carrot” of liberty induced desperate people to sign up as indentured servants, bearing the “stick” of hard labor which enriched the wealthy. The lucky few who survived indentured servitude and gained their own property were primed, at all costs, to keep it: “In a world where dependence was the norm, independence was an especially cherished and vulnerable status” (139). Those who were denied the land owed to them were easily induced by Nathaniel Bacon to turn their anger outward to the Indians rather than inward to the rich planters. In the 18th century, recognizing a potential for class warfare, the elite planters successfully displaced lower-class resentment onto three outside parties: the Crown, Indians, and slaves. In doing so, they stoked the fires of a destructive new idea: white racial solidarity.
Paradoxically, the Chesapeake offered unheard of standards of freedom—but only for some white men. As Taylor succinctly illustrates, “Instead of establishing an enduring land of opportunity, the Chesapeake’s brief age of social mobility led to a plantation society of great wealth and increasing poverty” (146).
