Sample Lesson Plan 4: AP American History

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BEGINNINGS (1491-1607)

1.4. Challenges to Catholic Spain and Other Colonial Beginnings

(Lecture Base)

Objectives:

  • Describe the tentative and sporadic nature of French and English colonial beginnings in the New World.
  • Discuss the English context for colonization, focusing on economic factors as well as the pretext that the conquest of Ireland provided for English colonizers.

NCHE Habits of Mind:

  • Comprehend the interplay of change and continuity, and avoid assuming that either is somehow more natural, or more expected, than the other
  • Grasp the power of historical causation, respect particularity, and avoid excessively abstract generalizations

NCHE Vital Themes and Narratives:

  • Values, Beliefs, Political Ideas, and Institutions
  • Patterns of Social and Political Interaction

Key Concepts:

  • European expansion into the Western Hemisphere caused intense social/religious, political, and economic competing in Europe and the promotion of Empire building.

Lecture Notes:

  1. Challenges to Spanish Dominance in America

Before the early 1600s, French and English activity in America was sporadic and tentative. This observation, however, does not mean that the two countries were uninterested in the New World. On the contrary, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, they did conduct early explorations of the North American continent.

  • For instance, in 1497, the Italian John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), sailing under the sponsorship of Henry VII, King of England in search of a Northwest Passage (a water route to the Orient through or around the North American continent), became the first European since the Viking voyages more than 4 centuries earlier to reach the mainland of North America, which he claimed for England.
  • As well, in 1524, the king of France authorized another Italian, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to undertake a mission similar to Cabot’s Endeavoring to duplicate the achievement of Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, who had five years earlier found a way around the southern tip of Southern America, Verrazzano followed the American coast from present-day North Carolina to Maine.
  • And, beginning in 1534, Jacques Cartier, also authorized by the king of France, mounted three expeditions to the area of the St. Lawrence River, which he believed might be the hoped-for Northwest Passage. He explored up the river as far as the site of Montreal, which he claimed for France.

Nonetheless, the French and English did not attempt to create permanent settlements in the region until the late 16th C after religious and political change as well as economic motivations had provided the impetus to test Spain’s domination of the New World.

Partially because of the rivalries developing from the discovery of the New World and partially due to the differences between Protestants and Catholics, the 16th century was a particularly violent time in both Europe and America. In France, for example, the religious persecution of the 1500s led some Huguenots (protestants) to look to America as a refuge.

  • In 1555, a group of wealthy Frenchmen sent Huguenot settlers to Brazil. When disputes occurred among the colonists, some returned to France; the Portuguese, who had claimed Brazil, killed or enslaved the majority who remained.
  • In 1562, Huguenots tried again, establishing Charlesfort on the South Carolina coast, in part to attack the Spanish silver fleet as it headed home. When the Spanish moved against the small French colony in 1564, they found it already abandoned.
  • But the Huguenots attempted another settlement that year, this one at Fort Carolina on the St. Johns River in northern Florida. The Spanish quickly destroyed it, murdering most of the settlers.

The French Huguenots’ incursions into what the Spanish had considered their land, led the Spanish to build a fort, which would become the settlement of St. Augustine, Florida, the first city in North America.

The English “sea dogs”—privateers unofficially supported by the Crown—learned a great deal about the New World from the Huguenots.

  • When the protestant Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne in 1558, seafarers and adventurers like John Hawkins, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh gained considerable favor and support.

The English, however, took their time before attempting to establish an American colony, as the Spanish remained a considerable threat. Thus, until the 1580s, English adventurers sought wealth by sea.

  • In 1562, for example, John Hawkins took three hundred Africans to Hispaniola without a license. The local Spanish officials allowed him to exchange the slaves for sugar and hides, because the colony needed the labor.
  • Hawkins made a second voyage, earning another handsome profit, this time mostly in silver. When the Spanish authorities protested, Elizabeth forbade further expeditions, but in 1567, she reversed her decision.
  • On his third voyage, Hawkins was conducting business in the harbor of San Juan de Ulua, Mexico, when the annual fleet arrived from Spain several weeks early and destroyed three of his ships. Hawkins and his cousin, Sir Francis Drake escaped with two badly damaged vessels.

While Hawkins stopped his interloping in Spanish trade after this debacle, other English adventurers continued their pursuit of wealth through piracy. The most famous was Sir Francis Drake.

  • Drake, for example, sailed around South America and raided the Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast of Central America before continuing on to California, which he claimed for England.
  • Afterwards, Drake returned to England by sailing around the world. Elizabeth had also been quietly investing in Drake’s highly profitable voyages. On his return from his round-the-world voyage, she openly showed her approval.

Angered by this, as well as by Elizabeth’s support of the protestant cause in Europe, Spain’s King Phillip II in 1588 dispatched a mighty fleet, the Spanish Armada, to conquer England.

  • As background, in 1581, the northern part of the Netherlands, composed of seven provinces, including Holland, declared its independence from Spain as the United Provinces. Phillip II of Spain had been carrying out his Inquisition in the region in an attempt to wipe out Protestantism.
  • When Elizabeth sent aid to the United Provinces in 1585, she was in effect declaring war on Spain.
  • In retaliation, Phillip sent his Armada of 130 ships and thirty thousand men to invade England. Instead, the Armada was defeated by the English navy and largely destroyed by storms in the North Sea.
  • This victory established England as an emerging power and moved the government a step closer to fully pursing overseas colonization.

Even before this victory, however, sea dogs, such as Humphrey Gilbert, were looking at establishing colonies as a way to create wealth.

  • On the basis of Cabot’s voyage in 1497, Elizabeth granted a charter to Gilbert in 1578, which allowed him to found a colony with his own funds.
  • It also guaranteed prospective colonists all the rights of those born and residing in England, setting an important precedent for future colonial charters.
  • But, his attempts to found a colony in Newfoundland ultimately failed, and he was lost at sea.

With the queen’s permission, Walter Raleigh, half-brother to Gilbert, turned his attention to a more southerly potion of the North American coastline, which he named Virginia in honor of England’s unmarried queen.

  • He selected as a site for the first settlement Roanoke Island, just off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
  • In 1585, the first group of settlers arrived at the island. After their ships returned home leaving them with short supplies, the colonists tried to force neighboring Indians to provide food. Quickly a pattern of hostility emerged between the English and the Native Americans.

Francis Drake saved the Roanoke colonists from starvation carrying them home in 1586.

A year later, Raleigh sent out another expedition. A group of 114 settlers—men, women, and children—landed in July 1587.

  • Shortly thereafter, Virginia Dare became the first English child born in America.
  • Later that year the expedition’s leader, John White, returned to England to secure additional supplies.
  • But, this time the war with Spain prevented ships from returning to Roanoke until 1590, when all that was left of the colony was the word “Croatoan,” carved on a tree.
  • The colonists may have moved to nearby Croatoan Island, or farther inland to live with Native Americans, but the fate of the “Lost Colony” has never been determined.
  • After this failure, Raleigh was forced by financial constraints to abandon his attempts to colonize Virginia.

The English did not colonize successfully in North America until the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Hampered by unrealistic expectations, inadequate financial resources, and the ongoing war with Spain, English interest in American colonization was submerged for 15 years.

  1. English Context for Colonization

In the 1500s and early 1600s, England was an intensely hierarchical society in which the king claimed divine right, or God-given authority, and the nobility and gentry dominated Parliament.

  • But, it was also a society that was undergoing turmoil and change.
  • Economic developments, for instance, had started to loosen English society, which gave individuals greater opportunity to change from one social class or occupation to another.

In particular, many peasants found it necessary to move geographically as the woolen industry expanded, causing landlords to raise more sheep. Because the worldwide demand for wool was growing rapidly, many landowners were finding it profitable to convert their land from fields for crops to pastures for sheep.

  • In what has been called the enclosure movement, landlords ended leases for tenant farmers living on their lands, confiscating common fields that peasant communities had shared for grazing their livestock and raising crops.
  • The landowners enclosed the commons with fences and hedges. In 1500, peasants had farmed 70% of arable landing England; by 1650, they farmed only 50%.
  • Thus, many tenants were forced from the land. Some went to London, where the population expanded from 55,000 in 1520 to 475,000 in 1670. Others signed up as colonists for America.
  • By removing land from cultivation, the enclosure movement also limited England’s ability to feed its population, which grew from 3 million in 1485 to 4 million in 1603.

Both because of the dislocation of farmers and the restriction of food supply, therefore, the nation had a serious problem of surplus population.

While this developing economy meant dislocation for many poor tenants, it spelled opportunity for merchants.

  • In particular, an emerging, powerful merchant class first found wealth in the woolen trade with Antwerp, in what is now Belgium.
  • Previously, England had exported little except raw wool; but new merchants helped create a domestic cloth industry that allowed them to begin marketing finished goods at home and abroad.

When this trade declined after 1550, merchants looked for alternative investments, which they found as war with Spain increased the demand for coal, lead, glass, ships, salt, iron, and steel.

  • As a result, investors formed joint-stock companies to explore trade routs and establish new markets. Put simply, these types of companies obtained capital by selling stocks.
  • These investments were risky, as shareholders were liable for all company debts. The stocks could also be immensely profitable, as in the case of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, which brought a 4,6000 % profit from silver and gold captured from Spanish ships.

Most importantly, as we will discuss later, joint-stock companies provided capital for the first permanent English colonies in America. Unlike the Spanish monarchy, the English Crown had little role in funding, or even governing, its first New World settlements.

As discussed previously, during this time European countries were also increasingly adopting the concept of mercantilism.

  • The mercantilist impetus rested on the assumption that the nation as a whole was the principle actor in the economy, not individuals.
  • Moreover, for mercantilists, the goal of economic activity was to increase the nation’s total wealth. Mercantilists believed that the world’s wealth was finite. One person or nation could grow rich only at the expense of another.
  • A nation’s economic health, then, depended on extracting as much wealth as possible from foreign lands and exporting as little wealth as possible from home.

Thus, many came to see colonies as a crucial source of goods that a country might otherwise have to buy from other nations.

In England, the mercantilistic program thrived at first on the basis of the flourishing wool trade. But, as mentioned, that market started to collapse in the 1550s, which forced many to look elsewhere for overseas trade and wealth. The establishment of colonies seemed to be a ready answer to that and other problems.

  • For instance, Richard Hakluyt, an Oxford clergyman and the outstanding English propagandist for colonization, argued that colonies would not only create new markets for English goods, they would also help alleviate poverty and unemployment by siphoning off the surplus population.
  • In particular, he contended that for the English poor there would be new work because of the prosperity the colonies would create.
  • He also maintained that colonial commerce would allow England to acquire products from its own new territories for which the nation had previously been dependent on foreign rivals, products such as lumber, naval stores, and above all, silver and gold.

III. The English in Ireland

England’s first experience with colonization came not in the New World, but in a land separated from Britain only by a narrow stretch of sea: Ireland.

  • The English had long laid claim to the island and had for many years maintained small settlements in the area around Dublin.
  • Only in the second-half of the 16th C, however, did serious efforts at large-scale colonization begin.
  • Through the 1560s and 1570s, would-be colonists moved through Ireland, capturing territory, and attempting to subdue the native population.

In the process, they developed many of the assumptions that would guide later English colonists in America.

The most important of these assumptions was that the native population of Ireland—approximately 1 million people, loyal to the Catholic Church, with their own language (Gaelic), and their own culture—was a collection of wild, vicious, and ignorant “savages.”

  • The Irish lived in ways that the English considered crude and they fought back against the intruders with a ferocity that the English considered barbaric.
  • Such people, the English argued, could not be tamed and they could not be assimilated into English society.
  • The English concluded that the native Irish population had to be isolated, and, if necessary, destroyed.

Whatever barbarities the Irish may have inflicted on the colonizers, the English more than matched in return.

  • Humphrey Gilbert, for instance, before his attempts at colonization in the New World, served for a time as governor of one Irish district and suppressed native rebellions with extraordinary viciousness.
  • Believing the native population to be somehow less human, Gilbert justified to himself and to others such atrocities as beheading Irish soldiers after they were killed in battle.

The Irish experience led the English to another important assumption about colonization: that English settlements in distant lands must retain a rigid separation from the native populations.

  • In Ireland, English colonizers established what they called “plantations,” which they considered to be trans-plantations of English society in a foreign land.
  • In many ways, then, the English in Ireland were not trying to simply rule a subdued population; they were attempting to replicate their own society peopled with emigrants from England itself.
  • They intended their new society to exist within a “pale of settlement,” an area physically removed from the natives.

That concept, too, they would take with them to the New World, even though, in Ireland, as later in America, the separation of peoples and the preservation of “pure” English culture proved impossible.

  1. Conclusion

By 1590, the Spanish had created an empire that extended from South American through the West Indies and Mexico.

  • With their growing empire, they were able to fund their European wars with American silver and gold.
  • As well, by this time, the Portuguese had developed an Atlantic slave trading system to send enslaved Africans to Brazil and New Spain.

An irony of colonization in America was the European nations at war in the Old World would come, in many aspects, to emulate one another in the New World. Although European nations ended up organizing colonization in various ways, there were important similarities.

  • In particular, the Spanish and Portuguese provided models for many later colonizers to adopt in expropriating land and labor from Africans and Indians.
  • Many Europeans also justified their behavior toward the people of America and Africa by emphasizing religious and cultural differences, ignoring much of what they had in common.

As we will soon see, when the English, French, and Dutch first settled in North America in the early 17th C, aspects of their goals were quite similar to those of Spain. They hoped to locate precious metals, find the elusive Northwest Passage, exploit Indian labor, extend Christianity to America, and expand the power of the state.

Assessment:

Key Questions:

  • How do the English and Spanish contexts for colonization compare? How do the causes of English and Spanish New World colonization engage each other? Finally, what conclusion can you draw from these observations?

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