New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapter 7-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapter 7-ConclusionChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “New Nomads and True Nomads”

Chapter 7 describes the mass movement of people. It considers Colonial America “a world in perpetual motion” (154). Contrary to myth, most Indigenous Americans were not nomadic, but were agriculturalists with powerful ties to the land. They also had extensive knowledge of their homeland and in some cases their continent. The European invasion brought Indigenous Americans into contact with thousands of settlers who differed from one another in meaningful ways. The Scotch-Irish, for instance, who emigrated in large numbers in the 18th century, harbored longstanding hostility toward the English and had a history of moving—or being forced—from one place to another. This “massive movement” of Scotch-Irish and others over a period of three centuries “was a momentous event in human history” (140). Its impact on Indigenous communities triggered not one mass exodus but a series of displacements that occurred at different times and in different places.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Crossing and Merging Frontiers”

Individuals, by choice or coercion, moved between cultures. The colonial frontier “operated as a sponge as often as a palisade, soaking up rather than separating people and influences” (155). European traders often lived among the tribes with whom they traded–Sir William Johnson with the Mohawk, for instance, and Alexander Cameron with the Cherokee. Indigenous Americans took thousands of European captives, some of whom, when offered freedom, chose to remain with the tribes. Other Europeans simply ran away, chose to live with the tribes, and even fought alongside them in war.

Indigenous Americans also moved into and out of European communities. Some, including the famous Pocahontas, visited Europe. Others lived and worked freely in colonial towns. Many more were enslaved, captured by rival tribes and sold to Europeans. These daily exchanges, voluntary or otherwise, produced new dialects, as well as an expanded English language that, in its modern American form, includes more than one thousand words derived from Indigenous languages.

Chapter 9 Summary: “New Peoples and New Societies”

Chapter 9 examines the societies that developed post-contact. It also considers the extent of Native influence on the dominant American society that emerged at the end of the 18th century. Post-contact societies became more centralized. Originally, many Indigenous societies were decentralized; they organized themselves into “tribes” only as a response to the European invasion and subsequent dislocations. Many post-contact societies were also a mix of Indigenous Americans and Europeans. Although colonial legislatures often tried to segregate communities along racial lines, intermarriage did occur, often with the approval of noteworthy individuals such as John Lawson and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom encouraged intermarriage so as to become one people. In New Spain, intermarriage occurred with such frequency that Spaniards created new categories and words for people of plural ancestry.

Some have argued that Iroquoian ideas of government influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution. While there is no evidence for such influence, there also is no doubt that some early U.S. leaders, including Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, recognized much value in Indigenous societies. The Founding Fathers, for instance, feared centralized power, which they equated with tyranny. In Indigenous societies, they saw decentralization. They also saw their own ideas of liberty and egalitarianism in practice.

Conclusion Summary: “New Americans and First Americans”

For three centuries, Europeans and Indigenous Americans became more like one another. As a result, European settlers became a new people, distinct from those they had left behind in Europe. In short, “much of America’s early history makes no sense without Indians” (199).

Chapter 7-Conclusion Analysis

Modern histories and especially modern popular culture often depict the colonial period as a time of hardened “racial” attitudes and impenetrable boundaries. The truth, however, is more complicated.

In the same way that Indigenous Americans did not see themselves in monolithic terms, Europeans did not always identify with other Europeans, nor did they exclusively fail to appreciate aspects of Indigenous society that they deemed superior to their own. Scotch-Irish emigrants, for instance, likely had more in common with Indigenous Americans than with the English, whom they had detested for centuries. In fact, many Scottish settlers in the mid-18th century had been driven out of their homeland in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion; they and Native tribes shared similar displacement experiences.

Meanwhile, war turned thousands of people into captives. Calloway observes that between 1689 and 1763, when England and France were at war on at least four different occasions and for many years at a time, “more than sixteen hundred people were abducted from New England alone” (158). Many captives suffered, though some had a different experience. Eunice Williams, for instance, daughter of the Reverend John Williams and perhaps New England’s most famous captive, chose to remain with her captors and eventually married a Mohawk (Kanienʼkehá꞉ka) man. Mary Jemison, abducted as a teenager in 1758, also married and continued to live among the Seneca people. Captivity narratives, published in Europe and North America, became an early genre of American literature.

In the 19th century, Americans became obsessed with what they saw as the “problem” of “racial” mixing. Some colonial legislatures tried to prevent marriages between Europeans and Indigenous American peoples, but not everyone in early America viewed it with alarm. In fact, Samuel de Champlain in the early 17th, John Lawson in the early 18th, and Thomas Jefferson in the early 19th century all encouraged intermarriage between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Many Virginians in early America traced their ancestry to Pocahontas, as tens of thousands still do today.

In the present-day Southwest, Spanish authorities tried in vain to keep Europeans and Indigenous Americans separate. Calloway does not insist or imply that colonial America constituted a prejudice-free paradise. He does show, however, that Indigenous-European contact resulted in a far greater degree of intermixing than modern stereotypes suggest.

When thoughtful Europeans looked to the frontier, they saw communities of Indigenous Americans whom John Lawson described as “the freest People in the World” (193). In some respects, the modern debate over possible Iroquois contributions to the U.S. Constitution obscures much broader and more fundamental influences. British colonists transformed themselves into Americans and then to American citizens in part because they equated centralized power with oppression. Indigenous communities enjoyed a degree of decentralized autonomy that European communities, either in Europe or the colonies, could not match. European institutions prioritized material progress and centralization of power. When they declared independence, American citizens tried to preserve the best parts of their institutional heritage while embracing the freedom their Indigenous neighbors enjoyed.