Sample Lesson Plan 3: AP American History

 

BEGINNINGS (1491-1607)

1.3. The Establishment of New Spain

(Lecture Base)

Objectives:

• Look at the establishment of the Spanish Empire in America; focus on the factors that contributed to this development and their eventual effects.

 

• Introduce methods for understanding and analyzing primary sources.

NCHE Habits of Mind:

• Understand how things happen and how things change, how humans intentions matter, but also how their consequences are shaped by the means of carrying them out, in a tangle of purpose and process

 

• Read widely and critically to recognize the difference between fact and conjecture, between evidence and assertion, and thereby to frame useful questions.

NCHE Vital Themes and Narratives:

• Civilization, Cultural Diffusion, and Innovation

 

• Values, Beliefs, Political Ideas, and Institutions

Key Concepts:

1.2 The arrival of Europeans in the Western Hemisphere in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries triggered extensive demographic and social changes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lecture Notes:

1. Spanish Invasion, 1519-1538

Because England and France showed only occasional interest in America before 1560 and Portugal focused on Asian trade and Brazil, the Spanish had little interference from other Europeans in exploring and colonizing the New World.

• By 1543, Spanish settlements extended south to Chile and north through Mexico. Spanish explorers had also crossed North America from Florida to California in what is now the southern United States.

 

• Spanish conquistadores started off advancing from island to island in the Caribbean and they then moved through Mexico and Central America.

 

• The Conquistadores expected to make their fortune in America and retire to Spain.

In contrast, the Spanish Crown had a more complicated set of goals in colonizing America: to enlarge its power among European nations, exploit the wealth of the New World, and convert the Native Americans to Christianity.

To conquer the Americas the Spanish monarchs used their powerful army, led by independent Spanish adventurers known as conquistadores.

• At first, the conquistadores confined their attentions to the Caribbean islands, where the European diseases they unwittingly carried with them devastated the local Indian populations.

 

• Since the conquistadores’ conquest of the Caribbean was creating a demographic catastrophe for Native Americans in the region, explores were eventually forced to begin raiding the American mainland to find sources of labor.
• And, after about 1510, the conquistadores fully turned their attention to the American mainland. In 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.

 

• That same year Juan Ponce de Leon explored Florida in search of gold and a fabled fountain of youth. He found neither but claimed Florida for Spain.

 

• In 1519, Hernando Cortes led his dramatic expedition against the Aztecs of Mexico. With an army of only six hundred, Cortes persuaded local Indian enemies of the Aztecs to join him. He marched to Tenochtitlan without opposition and seized the emperor, Moctezuma.

 

• Cortes was able to fully take the city in 1521 after smallpox had ravaged the Aztec capital. Thousands of local Indians who were enemies of the Aztecs assisted him and his troops. They rebuilt the city as Mexico City, the capital of New Spain. Cortes then sent troops to take Guatemala while rival conquistadores seized Honduras.

 

• Francisco Pizarro advanced to the south, preceded by smallpox, he was able to defeat the Incas of Peru by 1538 after a difficult struggle. Other conquistadores expanded into Argentina and Chile.

In North America, the Spaniards sought not only riches, but also a native population for the exploitation of labor.

• In 1528, Panfilio de Narvaez led a disastrous expedition through the Gulf Coast region from which only four of the original four hundred men returned.

 

• One of them, Cabeza de Vaca, brought with him a story of seven great cities full of gold (the “Seven Cities of Cibola”) somewhere to the north.

 

• In response to this, two Spanish expeditions explored the interior of North America. Hernando de Soto led a six hundred-man expedition (1539-1541) through what is now the southeastern United States penetrating as far west as Oklahoma and discovering the Mississippi River, on whose banks de Soto was buried.

 

• Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led an expedition (1540-1542) from Mexico, north across the Rio Grande and through New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Some of Coronado’s men were the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon.

Leaving substantial descriptions of their explorations, both expeditions increased Europe’s knowledge of the interior of North America and helped to assert Spain’s territorial claims to the continent.

The Spanish explorations opened the New World to European settlers. Hundreds of new villages were established throughout what would become the United States, primarily in the South from Florida through Texas and into California. In 1542, however, the initial period of Spanish expansion throughout the Americas came to a close.

• Without discovery of precious metals in the area, the Spanish had little reason to push farther into North America.

 

• Instead, they focused their major colonizing efforts on Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, where the richest silver deposit in the Americas was discovered in 1545.

1. Cultural Exchanges

Native Americans generally resisted full assimilation to Spanish culture. In many cases, they retained their languages, clothing, housing, agricultural methods, and, to a considerably extent, religion. The degree to which they blocked acculturation depended largely on class.

• The Spanish focused their attention on local Indian leaders (caciques) and their sons, with whom they interacted most frequently.

 

• Many caciques learned to speak Spanish, converted to Christianity, and adopted Spanish-style clothing. Their sons attended schools where they learned Latin and other advanced subjects.

 

• The common Indians avoided some Spanish ways of living and accepted others. They raised and ate chicken but grew wheat primarily to pay as tribute.

 

• They abhorred cattle but groups like the apaches quickly accepted the horse. Natives favored their digging sticks over the European plow, which required the use of draft animals and alteration in the assignment of fields.

The complexity of interaction between the Spanish and Native Americas can be seen most vividly in religion.

• The Europeans had a mandate from the pope to convert the “pagans” of America to Christianity. The missionaries also believed that it was an act of humanity to introduce the Indians to Catholicism.

 

• While many Indians consented to baptism and voluntarily built churches in every town, most Indians merged the European faith with rituals and beliefs of their traditional religions.

 

• This resulted in syncretism à the blending of two faiths. For example, some natives added the Christian God to their polytheistic system; others focused on the saints or the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rather than on one God.

 

• Indians also organized their own methods for raising money for church festivals and at times, they asserted their independence from the Spanish church authority.

 

While many colonial leaders often justified the subjugation of Indians because of what they presumed to be their “inferior” cultures and religion, a number of missionaries condemned such policies.

 

• For instance, Bartolome de las Casas, in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), described the atrocities in several colonies to inform the king of the “excesses which this New World has witnessed, all of them surpassing anything that men hitherto have imagined even in their wildest dreams.”

 

• As Spain’s control of the New World spread across the land, so did the rumors of the conquistadors’ cruel behavior toward the Indians.

 

• In this text, which we will talk more about in a moment, Casas was attempting not only to protect native lives but to also encourage Spanish leaders to condemn the harsh tactics of colonial authorities

 

Although the literature prompted Spanish leaders to make some reforms, it also started the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty that labeled the Spaniards as vicious, inhumane settlers who slaughtered thousands of Indians and enslaved the survivors.

 

III. New Spain: Government and Economy

The goal of the Spanish colonial government was to control and convert Native Americans and use their labor to exploit the wealth of the New World.

• The Spanish were only partly successful in imposing their rule over the Indians. The colonial government was most effective in central Mexico and the Andes, where the Spanish could substitute their rule for that of the Aztecs and Inca.

 

• Native Americans in northern Mexico, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and central Chile, who had never been subject to outside control, evaded Spanish rule.

 

• Many in the fringe areas, such as the Apaches, avoided Spanish domination altogether because their bans were highly mobile and autonomous.

 

The Spanish colonial administration was hierarchical and tied closely to Spain.

• Sovereignty, or supreme political power, rested in the monarch.

 

• The highest officials residing in America were the viceroys. In the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, the Spanish empire consisted of two viceroyalties: New Spain with its capital in Mexico City, and Peru, with its capital in Lima.

 

• The viceroyalties were divided into provinces, ruled by governors and audiencias, who advised the governors and functions as courts.

 

• In central Mexico and Peru, the Spanish viceroys, governors, and audiencias took power away from the ruling native elite. At the local level, however, native leaders often retained their positions.

 

• These caciques headed the Indian towns, collected tribute from households, and recruited forced laborers on demand of the Spanish authorities.

 

Spain pursued the economic policy of mercantilism, which held that nations had monopolistic rights to trade with their colonies.

 

• Under mercantilism, the primary goal of economic activity was to achieve a favorable balance of trade and the acquisition of materials (gold and silver).

 

• Colonies were to serve as markets for goods from the home country and provide raw materials, such as gold and silver, to increase the mother country’s wealth.

 

• Colonists had to obtain permission to build settlements and mines. They also had to pay taxes to the king and, if they found precious metals, they had to pay the royal fifth (the idea that the king had a right to one-fifth of all silver and gold).

 

In the 1540s, the Europeans located two immensely rich silver mines, one at Potosi in present-day Bolivia and the other at Zacatecas in Mexico.

 

• Between 1500 and 1650, about 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver officially reached Europe from the Americas. Production of silver greatly expanded in the 1570s with the introduction of mercury in the refining process.
• For Spain, the discovery of rich mines fulfilled its dreams in the New World. Spanish rulers used the bullion to pay for their European wars.

 

• American silver and gold also helped to create inflation throughout Europe, as the immense supply depressed their value and the prices of other goods increased.

 

• As well, merchants depended on the bullion to pay for luxuries from the East. Goods worth about one-half the value of the metal were returned to the colonies.

 

Because Spanish immigrants were few in number and had no intention of working in the mines or fields, they attempted to create ways to compel Native Americans to work for them.

 

• In 1500, the Spanish Crown ruled that only Indians captured in a “just war” could be forced into perpetual bondage. But, this judgment had little impact because conquistadores could define as hostile any natives who resisted capture.

 

• In 1513, the Spanish government drew up a document called the Requerimiento (or Requirement), which explorers read when they entered an Indian town for the first time.

 

• The Requerimiento informed the natives that they must either accept the Catholic faith and Spanish rule, or they would face war and be made slaves—“and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can.”

 

Even though Spain outlawed most Native American slavery in 1542, the Spanish government continued to use two types of forced labor systems to compel Native American labor. (1) With the encomienda system, Indians living on specified lands had to pay tribute to individual colonists and provide labor for which they received minimal wages.

 

• At first, this system included no official transfer of land to colonists, but as the numbers of Native Americans declined and the Spanish increased, the colonists were granted land, but not in the sense of private ownership.

 

• Rather, these colonists (men) were considered protectors of the land whose job it was to compel Native Americans to labor on it. While these colonists did not own the land, they were considered the owners of the products of the land.

 

Thus, while this system was not slavery per se, it did involve compulsory labor through which the protector of the land was supported by the forced labor of Native Americans.

 

(2) In the 17^th C, Spanish authorities developed the repartimiento system.

 

• In this arrangement, Indians were forced to work in mines, agriculture, or public works for several weeks, months, or even a year.

 

• For example, natives often labored for year-long stints at the Potosi silver mines in Bolivia. As the Indian population continued to decline, the Spanish attempted to increase the length and frequency of work periods.

 

As early as 1502, the Spanish had also begun looking to Africa to meet their insatiable labor demands.

 

• By this time, they had already begun purchasing Africans from Portuguese traders to work in Spain and on the sugar plantations of the Canary Islands.

 

• During the 16^th C, ships transported approximately 75 thousand Africans to Spanish America.

 

• The Spanish imported Africans to work on sugar plantations in the West Indies and coastal areas of the mainland where most Native Americans had died.

 

Assessment:

Key Questions…

• What were some of the competing interests that contributed to the establishment of New Spain? How can we understand the interplay between these interests? How, at times, did they work together and re-enforce each other? And, how did they work in opposition to each other?