Give Me Liberty: Old Worlds and New - PDF

PHYSICAL/POLITICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES POLITICAL MAP OF THE WORLD LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES MAPS CHAPTER 1 The Atlantic World, ca. 13004 North America, ca. 15007 Trade Routes Stretching from Europe and Africa to Asia, 1400s16 Early European Voyages19 Early Spanish Conquests and...

PHYSICAL/POLITICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES POLITICAL MAP OF THE WORLD LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES MAPS CHAPTER 1 The Atlantic World, ca. 13004 North America, ca. 15007 Trade Routes Stretching from Europe and Africa to Asia, 1400s16 Early European Voyages19 Early Spanish Conquests and Explorations in the Americas27 New France and New Netherland, ca. 165037 CHAPTER 2 The Chesapeake, ca. 164054 The Northeast, ca. 1640 75 CHAPTER 3 Eastern North America in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries93 Diversity in the European Settlements, Atlantic Coast of North America, 1760113 CHAPTER 4 Atlantic Trading Routes135 The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, 1460–1770137 European Empires in North America, Mid-Eighteenth Century164 North America in 1750168 Eastern North America after the Peace of Paris, 1763172 CHAPTER 5 The Revolutionary War in New England and the Middle States, 1775– 1781207 The Revolutionary War in the South, 1775–1781209 European and U.S. Claims in North America, 1783211 CHAPTER 6 Loyalism in the American Revolution231 CHAPTER 7 Western Ordinances, 1784–1787255 European Claims and Selected Native Nations, 1780s–1790s257 Ratification of the Constitution275 Disputed Territory, 1795281 CHAPTER 8 The Presidential Election of 1800303 The Louisiana Purchase309 The War of 1812321 CHAPTER 9 The Market Revolution: Roads and Canals, 1840329 The Market Revolution: Western Expansion, 1800–1820332 The Market Revolution: The Spread of Cotton Cultivation, 1820–1840335 Major Cities, 1840338 Cotton Mills, 1820s340 CHAPTER 10 The Missouri Compromise, 1820378 The Americas, 1830381 The Presidential Election of 1828385 Nineteenth-Century Indian Removals395 Remaining in the East397 CHAPTER 11 Enslaved Population, 1860410 Size of Slaveholdings, 1860416 Distribution of Free Blacks, 1860422 Major Crops of the South, 1860426 Slave Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World434 CHAPTER 12 Utopian Communities, Mid-Nineteenth Century446 CHAPTER 13 The Trans-Mississippi West, 1830s–1840s481 The Mexican War, 1846–1848485 Gold-Rush California488 Continental Expansion through 1853492 The Compromise of 1850495 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854498 The Railroad Network, 1850s500 The Presidential Election of 1856502 The Presidential Election of 1860513 CHAPTER 14 The Secession of Southern States, 1860–1861524 The Civil War in the East, 1861–1862527 The Civil War in the West, 1861–1862529 The Emancipation Proclamation534 The Civil War in the Western Territories, 1862–1864544 The Civil War, 1863555 The Civil War, Late 1864–1865561 CHAPTER 15 The Barrow Plantation571 Sharecropping in the South, 1880575 Reconstruction in the South, 1867–1877601 The Presidential Election of 1876602 CHAPTER 16 The Railroad Network, 1880609 U.S. Steel: A Vertically Integrated Corporation613 The Industrial West632 Indian Reservations, ca. 1890642 Political Stalemate, 1876–1892645 CHAPTER 17 Populist Strength, 1892657 The Presidential Election of 1896660 The Spanish-American War: The Pacific682 The Spanish-American War: The Caribbean682 American Empire, 1898685 CHAPTER 18 Socialist Towns and Cities, 1900–1920707 CHAPTER 19 The Panama Canal Zone741 The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1941742 Colonial Possessions, 1900744 World War I: The Western Front749 Prohibition, 1915: Counties and States That Banned Liquor before the Eighteenth Amendment (Ratified 1919, Repealed 1933)755 Europe in 1914777 Europe in 1919778 CHAPTER 21 Columbia River Basin Project, 1949826 The Tennessee Valley Authority832 The Dust Bowl, 1935–1940833 CHAPTER 22 World War II in the Pacific, 1941–1945875 World War II in Europe, 1942–1945877 Wartime Army and Navy Bases and Airfields881 Japanese American Internment, 1942–1945897 CHAPTER 23 Cold War Europe, 1956922 The Korean War, 1950–1953923 CHAPTER 24 The Interstate Highway System956 The Presidential Election of 1960989 CHAPTER 25 The Vietnam War, 1964–19751015 CHAPTER 26 Center of Population, 1790–20101040 The Presidential Election of 19801068 The United States in the Caribbean and Central America, 1954–20041077 CHAPTER 27 Eastern Europe after the Cold War1089 Immigrant Populations in Cities and States, 1900 and 20191099 Origin of Largest Immigrant Populations by State, 1910 and 20131103 The Presidential Election of 20001113 U.S. Presence in the Middle East, 1947–20191120 CHAPTER 28 Below the Poverty Line, 20141145 TABLES AND FIGURES CHAPTER 3 Table 3.1 Origins of Free and Unfree Newcomers to British North American Colonies, 1700–1775111 CHAPTER 4 Table 4.1 Slave Population as Percentage of Total Population of Original Thirteen Colonies, 1770142 CHAPTER 7 Table 7.1 Population of the United States, 1790282 CHAPTER 9 Table 9.1 Population Growth of Selected Western States, 1810–1850 (Excluding Indians)334 Table 9.2 Total Number of Immigrants by Five-Year Period342 Figure 9.1 Sources of Immigration, 1850346 CHAPTER 11 Table 11.1 Growth of the Enslaved Population412 Table 11.2 Slaveholding, 1850 (in Round Numbers)412 Table 11.3 Free Black Population, 1860421 CHAPTER 14 Figure 14.1 Resources for War: Union versus Confederacy525 CHAPTER 16 Table 16.1 Indicators of Economic Change, 1870–1920608 CHAPTER 18 Table 18.1 Rise of the City, 1880–1920697 Table 18.2 Immigrants and Their Children as Percentage of Population, Ten Major Cities, 1920701 Table 18.3 Percentage of Women 14 Years and Older in the Labor Force, 1900–1930702 Table 18.4 Sales of Passenger Cars, 1900–1925703 CHAPTER 19 Table 19.1 The Great Migration770 CHAPTER 21 Figure 21.1 Unemployment, 1925–1945849 CHAPTER 22 Table 22.1 Labor Union Membership880 CHAPTER 25 Figure 25.1 Percentage of Population below Poverty Level, by Race, 1959– 19691006 CHAPTER 26 Table 26.1 Rate of Divorce: Divorces of Existing Marriages per 1,000 New Marriages, 1950–19801046 Table 26.2 The Misery Index, 1970–19801055 Figure 26.1 Real Average Weekly Wages, 1955–19901057 Table 26.3 Percentage of Adult Male Population Ever Incarcerated, 1974– 20011076 CHAPTER 27 Figure 27.1 Incarceration Rates, 1970s–2010s1096 Figure 27.2 Adult Men and Women in the Labor Force, 1950–20191100 CHAPTER 28 Figure 28.1 Portrait of a Recession1134 Figure 28.2 Covid-19 Cases and Deaths in the United States, 20201164  CHAPTER 1 OLD WORLDS AND NEW FOCUS QUESTIONS What were the major patterns of Native American life in North America before Europeans arrived? How did Native American and European ideas of freedom differ on the eve of contact? What impelled European explorers to look west across the Atlantic? What happened when the peoples of the Americas came in contact with Europeans? What were the chief features of the Spanish empire in the Americas? What were the chief features of the French and Dutch empires in North America? In 1534, Mi’kmaq Indians rowed a fleet of more than forty canoes out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence to meet Frenchman Jacques Cartier’s ship. Cartier was frightened until he realized that the pointed sticks the Mi’kmaqs were waving at his men had animal skins attached to them. They were signaling that they wanted to trade. Six years later and over 1,000 miles to the south, the Cacica (female leader) of Cofitachequi, a Native province in what is now South Carolina, heard that an army of foreigners had entered her country. She gathered other leaders and went out to meet them with gifts: tanned leather hides, blankets, salt, and food. She placed a necklace of pearls on the army’s commander, Spaniard Hernando de Soto. Everywhere in the Americas that Europeans went, Native people met them with their own diplomatic rituals and invitations to make trading and military alliances. Although Europeans sometimes called the Americas a “new world” that Christopher Columbus “discovered,” the nations and peoples of the Americas composed a world just as fully developed as those in the “old world.” Fortunately for Europeans, trade with these newcomers was exactly what many of them wanted. Human communities have always interacted. For centuries before the conquest of the Americas, Europeans had intersected with Muslim populations in North Africa and Eurasia; indeed, the very idea of Europe as a distinct community arose out of such encounters. But since the voyages of Columbus, the interconnection of cultures and peoples has taken place on a global scale. Crops new to each hemisphere crossed the Atlantic and Pacific, reshaping diets and transforming the natural environment. Building on long-standing trade with North Africa and beyond, West Africans traded with Europeans who came to their Atlantic coasts. But in Africa, Europeans built a slave trade that gave them a supply of unfree labor with which they exploited the fertile lands of the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, of approximately 10 million men, women, and children who crossed to the Americas between 1492 and 1820, the vast majority, about 7.7 million, were enslaved Africans. Long before Columbus sailed, Europeans had dreamed of a land of abundance, riches, and ease beyond the western horizon. Once this “discovery” had taken place, they invented an America of the imagination, projecting onto it their hopes for a better life. Here, many believed, would arise unparalleled opportunities for riches, or at least liberation from poverty. Europeans envisioned America as a religious refuge, a society of equals, a source of power and glory. They searched for golden cities and fountains of eternal youth. Some sought to establish ideal communities based on the lives of the early Christian saints or other blueprints for social justice. Some of these dreams of riches and opportunity would indeed be fulfilled. To many European settlers, America offered a far greater chance to own land and worship as they pleased than existed in Europe, with its rigid, unequal social order and official churches. Yet the conditions that enabled millions of settlers to take control of their own destinies were made possible by the debasement of millions of others. The Americas became the site of many forms of unfree labor, including indentured servitude, forced labor, and one of the most brutal and unjust systems ever devised, plantation slavery. The conquest and settlement of the Western Hemisphere opened new chapters in the long histories of both freedom and slavery. There was a vast human diversity among the peoples thrown into contact with one another in the Americas. Exploration and settlement took place in an era of almost constant warfare among European nations, each racked by internal religious, political, and regional conflicts. Native Americans and Africans consisted of numerous nations and other polities with their own languages and cultures. They were as likely to fight one another as to unite against the European newcomers. All these peoples were changed by their integration into the new Atlantic economy. The complex interactions of these old worlds—Western Europe, North America, and West Africa— would make a new world that would change them all. CHRONOLOGY 7000 BCE Agriculture develops in Mexico and Andes ca. 900 CE Ancestral Puebloans and Huhugam begin to build planned towns ca. 1000–1400 Height of the Huhugam 1050–1200 Height of Cahokia ca. 1200 Rise of Mali and Benin ca. 1400 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) League established 1434 Portuguese explore sub-Saharan African Coast 1492 Reconquista of Spain Spain expels Muslims and Jews Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas 1502 First African slaves transported to Caribbean islands 1517 Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses 1519 Hernán Cortés arrives in Mexico 1528 Las Casas writes the first volume of his History of the Indies 1530s Pizarro’s conquest of Peru 1542 Spain proclaims the New Laws abolishing Indian slavery 1608 Champlain establishes Quebec 1609 Hudson claims New Netherland 1610 Santa Fe established 1680 Pueblo Revolt AN OLD WORLD: NORTH AMERICA The most striking feature of Native American society at the time Europeans arrived was its sheer diversity. Each group had its own political system and set of religious beliefs, and North America was home to hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. Indians did not define “America” as a continent or hemisphere. They did not think of themselves as a single people, and Native Americans still today identify primarily as separate nations. Identity centered on the immediate social group—a family, clan, town, nation, or confederacy. When Europeans first arrived, many Indians saw them as simply one group among many. Their first thought was how to use the newcomers to enhance their standing in relation to other Native peoples rather than to unite against them. The sharp dichotomy between “Indians” and “white” persons did not emerge until later in the colonial era. The Settling of the Americas During the Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago, bands of hunters and fishers crossed the Bering Strait via a land bridge. Others arrived by sea from Asia or Pacific islands earlier or later than the Bering migrants (exact dates are very difficult to measure). Around 14,000 years ago, when glaciers began to melt at the end of the last Ice Age, the Bering land link became submerged under water, separating the Western Hemisphere from Asia. Some Native American creation stories tell of migrations, but others describe creations within their homelands, of ancestors who fell from the sky or came into the world from a hollow log. THE ATLANTIC WORLD, ca. 1300  The Americas, Western Europe, and West Africa on the eve of colonization. There were countless human settlements on all four continents. People lived on farms, in villages and towns, and in cities, including the cities marked on the map. However people got there originally, the Americas were an ancient homeland to Native Americans by the time Europeans arrived. The hemisphere had witnessed many changes during its human history. First, the early inhabitants and their descendants spread across the two continents. Around 9,000 years ago, at the same time that agriculture was being developed in Mesopotamia, it also emerged in modern-day Mexico and the Andes and then spread to other parts of the Americas. Throughout the hemisphere, maize (corn), squash, and beans formed the basis of agriculture. Politics and Power in Native North America The Medieval Warm Period that began around the year 950 allowed the expansion of agriculture and the rise of cities in North America, much as it did in Europe and West Africa. The longer growing seasons and more predictable weather of the era were ideal for farming, and large-scale farming made urban living possible. The largest city north of Mexico was Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis. In the year 1200, Cahokia’s central city was home to some 12,000 people, plus a large population in outlying dependent cities, towns, and farms. Cahokia was a major manufacturing and trading center, whose prominence influenced other people throughout the Mississippi Valley to build their own cities and dependent provinces—what archaeologists call “Mississippian civilizations.” Mississippian leaders ruled their realm from the large houses, halls, temples, and council chambers built on top of a central mound. Native people built scores of cities and thousands of mounds during the Mississippian era. Most of them have been destroyed, but Cahokia’s central mound is still ten stories tall, even after centuries of erosion. Ancestors of Native peoples of the arid Southwest, including the Ancestral Puebloans and the Huhugam, constructed elaborate irrigation systems in order to farm in the desert. They built great planned towns with large multi-family dwellings and conducted trade with groups as far away as central Mexico and the Mississippi Valley. Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, stood five stories high and had more than 600 rooms. Like Mississippians, an elite class of leaders arose in large southwestern civilizations.  A modern visualization of Cahokia in the Mississippi River Valley, the largest Native American urban center in what is now the United States. The Medieval Warm Period ended around 1250, and a colder and less predictable era called the Little Ice Age began. Large-scale agriculture became more difficult, and large centralized societies and urban populations became harder to sustain. Leaders’ positions may have become more tenuous during droughts and the shorter growing seasons. It is hard to know exactly what happened, but oral histories and archaeological evidence indicate a period of growing distrust in powerful leaders and centralized political systems. People moved out of Mississippian and southwestern cities into smaller-scale, more ecologically sustainable towns and surrounding farms. When Spanish explorers came to the Southwest, they called some people the Pueblo Indians because they lived in towns, or pueblos. Spanish explorers in the sixteenth-century Southeast saw Mississippian cities, but the largest of them had already fallen. Mississippian descendants built smaller-scale, kin-based communities that mixed agriculture, hunting, and trade. Across North America, most Native people created a relatively egalitarian politics that emphasized consensus. Towns confederated with related towns but resisted powerful leaders. In some places, larger confederacies formed to bring order to local regions or to fight together against a common enemy. In present-day New York and Pennsylvania, five nations—namely, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas —formed a Great League of Peace. They called their league the Haudenosaunee, “the people of the longhouse.” (Their enemies called them the Iroquois, which probably meant something like “snakes.”) Each year the Haudenosaunee Great Council, with male representatives chosen by the women of the five nations, met to coordinate dealings with outsiders. In the Southeast, the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Catawba nations each eventually united dozens of towns in loose alliances. Economics and Trade in Native North America By the 1500s, Native leaders generally led through persuasion and reciprocity. A successful leader needed to have connections to outsiders and the ability to trade and make alliances with foreign peoples, thus bringing in valuable goods and ideas. Exchange networks crossed North America, carrying local goods such as food, plant dyes and medicines, pottery, and quarried rock of various kinds. Trade networks also distributed goods from far away, including shell beads from the coasts, copper from the Great Lakes region, and mica from the Appalachians. Although trading networks spanned the continent, Native Americans remained diverse. In eastern North America, hundreds of peoples inhabited towns and villages scattered from the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Canada. They lived on corn, squash, and beans, supplemented by fishing and hunting deer, turkeys, and other animals. On the densely populated Pacific coast, hundreds of distinct groups resided in independent villages and lived primarily by fishing, hunting sea mammals, and gathering wild plants and nuts. As many as 25 million salmon swam up the Columbia River each year, providing them with abundant food. On the Great Plains, with its herds of buffalo, many groups were hunters (who tracked animals on foot before the arrival of horses with the Spanish) part of the year while living in agricultural communities in the river valleys when they were not on the hunt. Numerous land systems existed among Native Americans. Generally, however, specific families or towns had the right to farm on certain lands, and nations or confederacies claimed specific areas for hunting, fishing, and gathering. Indians saw land as a resource that particular people had the right to use but not as an economic commodity that could be bought and sold. In the nineteenth century, the Sauk leader Black Hawk explained: “The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate as far as necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil.” Few if any Native societies believed a piece of land could be fenced off and allotted forever to a single individual or family. NORTH AMERICA, ca. 1500  The Native population of North America at the time of first contact with Europeans consisted of numerous peoples and nations with their own languages, religious beliefs, and economic and social structures. This map gives a sense of the large numbers of nations. By necessity, it leaves many out and includes some names that people did not call themselves in 1500. Nor were Native Americans devoted to the accumulation of wealth and material goods. However, status certainly mattered. Leaders tended to come from certain families or clans, and they often controlled access to resources. But their reputation and influence rested on their ability to distribute goods with their followers rather than hoarding them for themselves. Generosity was among the most valued social qualities, and gift giving was essential. Trade, for example, meant more than a commercial transaction—it was accompanied by elaborate ceremonies of gift exchange. Under normal circumstances no one in Native societies went hungry or experienced the extreme inequalities of Europe. “There are no beggars among them,” reported the English colonial leader Roger Williams of Indians around New England.  The Village of Secoton, a drawing by John White. A central street links houses surrounded by fields of corn. In the lower part, dancers take part in a religious ceremony. Native societies were highly gendered but much more equal than the system of gender relations in Europe. In most Native communities, women had responsibility for farming and running the households, including literally building the houses. Although diplomatic leaders were usually men, women generally made the decisions about food cultivation, storage, and preparation. They participated in councils, especially when matters within the realm of women were being considered, including going to war and making peace because of women’s roles in life-giving and in providing food for battle and diplomacy. Many North American societies were matrilineal—that is, tracing descent through the mother’s line and making children members of the mother’s family or clan, not the father’s. Women generally had some power over their own sexuality and marriage, including divorce. Religion in Native North America For the diverse Native societies of North America, as for people all around the world in the medieval and early modern eras, religion was not simply a matter of spiritual doctrines and practices, but also systems of belief that permeated every aspect of people’s lives. Their lives were steeped in religious ceremonies often directly related to farming and hunting. Spiritual power, they believed, suffused the world, and sacred spirits could be found in all kinds of living and inanimate things—animals, plants, trees, water, and wind. Through religious ceremonies, they aimed to harness the aid of powerful supernatural forces to serve human interests. Religious ceremonies sought to engage the spiritual power of nature to secure abundant crops or fend off dangerous spirits. Towns or clans also held elaborate religious rites, participation in which helped to define the boundaries of community membership. Those who seemed to possess special abilities to invoke supernatural powers—namely, shamans, medicine men, and other religious leaders—held positions of respect and authority. They did not make a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural, or secular and religious activities. A major difference with Christianity, as well as with Judaism and Islam, was that Native North American religions were inclusivist. In theory at least, Christians were supposed to be exclusively Christian, rejecting all other religions’ beliefs and practices as idolatry and blasphemy. Inclusivist religions, in contrast, allowed adherents to incorporate new religious beliefs and practices as part of a larger effort to make sense of the world. This fundamental difference between inclusivist and exclusivist ways of seeing religion would lead to grave misunderstandings when Christian missionaries tried to convert Native Americans. Slavery and Freedom in Native North America And what of liberty as the Native inhabitants of North America understood it? Many Europeans saw Indians as embodying freedom. The Haudenosaunee, wrote one colonial official, held “such absolute notions of liberty that they allow of no kind of superiority of one over another, and banish all servitude from their territories.” But most colonizers quickly concluded that the notion of “freedom” was alien to Indian societies. Early English and French dictionaries of Indian languages contained no entry for “freedom” or liberté. Nor, wrote one early trader, did Indians have “words to express despotic power, arbitrary kings, oppressed or obedient subjects.” Of course, Native Americans whose ancestors had been part of Mississippian or other hierarchical societies in previous generations did know about the dangers of excessive power. Unlike Europeans, they had rejected that way of life to develop societies with the kind of freedom that they valued. Europeans considered Indians barbaric in part because they did not appear to live under established governments or fixed laws or have the proper respect for authority. “They are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint,” wrote one religious missionary. In a sense, they seemed too free, lacking the order and discipline that Europeans considered the hallmarks of civilization. When Giovanni da Verrazano described the Indians as living in “absolute freedom,” he did not intend this as a compliment. The familiar modern understanding of freedom as personal independence, often based on ownership of private property, had little meaning in Native societies. But Indians certainly had their own ideas of freedom. Although individuals were expected to think for themselves and did not always have to go along with collective decision making, men and women judged one another according to their ability to live up to widely understood ideas of appropriate behavior. Far more important than individual autonomy were kinship ties, the ability to follow one’s spiritual values, and the well-being and security of one’s community. Group autonomy and self-determination, and the mutual obligations that came with a sense of belonging and connectedness, took precedence over individual freedom. Indeed, the emphasis on consensus-building (rather than dictatorial decision making or majority rule) at times required someone with a dissenting point of view simply to leave a council meeting or diplomatic negotiation rather than continue to argue. The Haudenosaunee League held its leaders and representatives to a high standard: “Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people.... Neither anger nor fury shall find lodgment in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.” Like medieval and early modern people around the globe, many Native North American societies practiced small-scale slavery, mostly enslavement of war captives. Captives had none of the rights or privileges of members of a society. Ripped from their own societies and families, they could be forced to labor or traded away. But slavery was not inheritable, and captives could become full members of the society that adopted them. Glossary Great League of Peace An alliance of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations, originally formed at least 400 years ago. Each year the Haudenosaunee Great Council, with male representatives chosen by the women of the five (and later six) nations, met to coordinate dealings with outsiders. The League was a major force in the 1600s and 1700s. AN OLD WORLD: WEST AFRICA Politics and Power in West Africa Like Native Americans and Europeans, West Africans did not consider themselves all one people. West Africans spoke dozens of different languages and hundreds of dialects. They lived under a variety of different political systems. In the late medieval and early modern eras, most West Africans lived in towns centered on kinship and run by elders. As in Native America, women in many parts of West Africa were responsible for farming and land management. Some parts of West Africa were ruled by large empires. Gaining power in the thirteenth century, the Mali empire became the largest in West Africa, with major cities at Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu. To the south was the smaller kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria. Its capital, Edo, was an imposing city whose craftspeople produced bronze sculptures that still inspire admiration for their artistic beauty and superb casting techniques. Economics and Trade in West Africa The wealth of West African empires was built on trans-Saharan trade. Starting around the year 1000, Muslim traders from North Africa and the Middle East crossed the Sahara to trade with West Africa. Camel caravans carried spices, silks, and cotton south to exchange for West African products, including textiles, gold, copper, grains, nuts, and art. From North Africa, West African products reached markets in the Middle East, Asia, and Western Europe, inspiring interest among the Portuguese in establishing direct trade by sailing to West Africa. Although connected to trading networks and regional politics, most West Africans farmed, herded, and fished locally for their living. The rice, millet, peas, okra, melons, and yams that they cultivated would spread around the world in the coming centuries, along with the products of the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Religion in West Africa North African traders also brought Islam to West Africa. The native religions of West Africa were well established and, like those in North America, inclusivist. Over time, many West Africans converted to Islam, in many cases blending older beliefs, practices, and rituals of planting and harvesting with Islamic doctrine. Leaders who converted to Islam built grand mosques in cities like Jenne. Slavery and Freedom in West Africa In addition to such products as textiles and gold, trans-Saharan trade also included enslaved people, usually war captives, criminals, or debtors. Slaves in West Africa generally worked within the households of their owners or on public works projects. They had well-defined rights, such as owning property and marrying free persons. It was not uncommon for African slaves to acquire their freedom. As in most parts of the world, slavery was one of several forms of labor, not the basis of the economy as it would become in large parts of the Americas under colonization. Many of West Africa’s rulers were converts to Islam, which forbade enslaving fellow Muslims. It allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims taken in war, as long as the owner provided religious instruction to the slave. Thus slavery was war-based and religion-based, but not race-based and not necessarily inherited. AN OLD WORLD: WESTERN EUROPE Politics and Power in Western Europe Europe had been devastated by the ending of the Medieval Warm Period, famine, and the Black Death. It lost perhaps as much as half its population over the course of the fourteenth century. Whereas North Americans generally decentralized their societies and rejected authoritarian leaders in response to the crises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, European monarchies grew in power and size. Wars and strategic marriages created expansive states, including Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. They were ruled by dynasties that passed the crown through patrilineal lines of succession. Early modern European societies were extremely hierarchical, with marked gradations of social status ranging from the king and hereditary aristocracy down to the urban and rural poor. Inequality was built into virtually every social relationship. The king claimed to rule by the authority of God. Persons of high rank demanded deference from those below them. Within families, men exercised authority over their wives and children. In England, the legal doctrine known as “coverture” required that when a woman married she surrendered her legal identity, which became “covered” by that of her husband. She could not own property or sign contracts in her own name, control her wages if she worked, write a separate will, or, except in the rarest of circumstances, go to court seeking a divorce. The husband conducted business and testified in court for the entire family. He had the exclusive right to his wife’s “company,” including domestic labor and sexual relations. Everywhere in Europe, family life assumed male dominance and female submission. Indeed, political writers of the sixteenth century explicitly compared the king’s authority over his subjects with the husband’s authority over his family. Both were ordained by God. To justify this argument, they referred to a passage in the New Testament: “As the man is the head of the woman, so is Christ the head of the Church.” Neither kind of authority could be challenged without threatening the fabric of social order. In Europe, women’s freedoms were dramatically more restricted than in North America or West Africa. Economics and Trade in Western Europe As in North America and West Africa, most Western Europeans were farmers. The Medieval Warm Period had allowed them to expand agriculture into previously marginal areas, but the Little Ice Age again contracted farming. When European populations rose after the ravages of the Black Death, the fertile lands of the Americas seemed ideal for feeding the excess population. Western Europe had only recently connected to the centuries-old trade route that stretched from the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Middle East to South Asia and China. The European conquest of the Americas would begin as an offshoot of the quest for a sea route to West Africa, India, China, and the islands of the East Indies, the sources of gold, silk, tea, sugar, spices, porcelain, and other luxury goods that Europeans had come to value. Religion in Western Europe States in Western Europe had converted to Christianity by the early Middle Ages and were officially Catholic until the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation created Protestantism. As in North America and West Africa, religion was intertwined with daily life. Cathedrals were the center of towns, and calendars for schools, governments, and courts were set by the cycle of church festivals and fast days. Yet, as with Islam in West Africa, older religious traditions survived and blended with Christianity, despite its official theology of exclusivism. Many Europeans continued to believe in witches, demons, and magic. Commercial and religious motives—namely, the desire to eliminate Islamic intermediaries and win control of the lucrative trade for Christian Western Europe—combined to inspire the quest for a direct route to West Africa and Asia. The marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille in 1469 united their warring kingdoms. In 1492, they completed the reconquista—that is, the “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors, African Muslims who had occupied part of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. To ensure Spain’s religious unification, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Muslims and Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. They hoped that ocean trade would circumvent Muslim merchants and perhaps even convert Asians to Christianity, who might help the Christian monarchs seize Jerusalem from Muslim control. Slavery and Freedom in Western Europe On the eve of colonization, Europeans held numerous ideas of freedom. Some were as old as the city-states of ancient Greece, while others arose during the political struggles of the early modern era. Some laid the foundations for modern conceptions of freedom, whereas others are quite unfamiliar today. Freedom was not a single idea but a collection of distinct rights and privileges, many enjoyed by only a small portion of the population. One conception common throughout Europe was that freedom was less a political or social status than a moral or spiritual condition. Freedom meant abandoning the life of sin to embrace the teachings of Christ. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” declares the New Testament, “there is liberty.” In this definition, servitude and freedom were mutually reinforcing, not contradictory states, since those who accepted the teachings of Christ simultaneously became “free from sin” and “servants to God.” “Christian liberty” had no connection to later ideas of religious toleration, a notion that scarcely existed on the eve of colonization. Because religious systems of belief permeated every aspect of people’s lives, religion was closely tied to a person’s economic, political, and social position and ability to enjoy basic rights. Every nation in Europe had an established church that decreed what forms of religious worship and belief were acceptable. Dissenters faced persecution by the state as well as condemnation by church authorities. Religious uniformity was thought to be essential to public order; the modern idea that a person’s religious beliefs and practices are a matter of private choice, not legal obligation, was almost unknown. The religious wars that racked Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centered on which religion would predominate in a kingdom or region, not the right of individuals to choose a church in which to worship. The equating of liberty with devotion to a higher authority suggested that freedom meant obedience to law. Aristotle had described the law as liberty’s “salvation,” not its enemy. The identification of freedom with the rule of law did not, however, mean that all subjects of the crown enjoyed the same degree of freedom. In hierarchical European societies, liberty came from knowing one’s social place and fulfilling the duties appropriate to one’s rank. Most men lacked the freedom that came with economic independence. Even in places where some officials were elected, property qualifications and other restrictions limited the electorate to a minuscule part of the adult male population. The law required strict obedience of employees, and breaches of labor contracts carried criminal penalties. European ideas of freedom still bore the imprint of the Middle Ages, when “liberties” meant formal, specific privileges such as self-government, exemption from taxation, or the right to practice a particular trade, granted to individuals or groups by contract, royal decree, or purchase. One legal dictionary defined a liberty as “a privilege... by which men may enjoy some benefit beyond the ordinary subject.” Only those who enjoyed the “freedom of the city,” for example, could engage in certain economic activities. Numerous modern civil liberties did not exist. The law decreed acceptable forms of religious worship. The government regularly suppressed publications it did not like, and criticism of authority could lead to imprisonment. Personal independence was reserved for a small part of the population, and this was one reason why authorities found “masterless men”—those without regular jobs or otherwise outside the control of their social superiors—so threatening. Nonetheless, every European country that colonized the Americas claimed to be spreading freedom—for its own population and for Native Americans. Slavery was central to the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, and it survived for centuries in northern Europe after the collapse of the Roman empire. Germans, Vikings, and Anglo-Saxons all held slaves. In the Mediterranean world, trade in Slavic peoples survived into the fifteenth century. (The English word “slavery” derives from “Slav.”) The Spanish and Portuguese took Muslim war captives during their reconquista and bought slaves from North African traders. As Europeans began to colonize in the Atlantic, they would look to slavery more and more for labor. Glossary reconquista The “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors completed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. CONTACT Chinese and Portuguese Navigation At the beginning of the fifteenth century, one might have predicted that China would establish the world’s first global empire. Between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Zheng He led seven large naval expeditions in the Indian Ocean. The first convoy consisted of 62 ships that were larger than those of any European nation, along with 225 support vessels and more than 25,000 men. On his sixth voyage, Zheng explored the coast of East Africa. China was already the world’s most important trading economy, with trade routes dotting the Indian Ocean. Zheng’s purpose was not discovery, but to impress other peoples with China’s might. Had his ships continued westward, they could easily have reached North and South America. But as a wealthy land-based empire, China did not feel the need for overseas expansion, and after 1433 the government ended support for long-distance maritime expeditions. It fell to Portugal, situated on the western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, far removed from the overland route to Asia, to take advantage of new techniques of sailing and navigation to begin exploring the Atlantic. The development of the caravel, a ship capable of long-distance travel, and of the compass and quadrant, devices that enabled sailors to determine their location and direction with greater accuracy than in the past, made it possible to sail down the coast of Africa and return to Portugal. Portugal and West Africa Until 1434, no European sailor had seen the coast of Africa below the Sahara. But in that year, a Portuguese ship brought a sprig of rosemary from West Africa, proof that one could sail beyond the desert and return. Little by little, Portuguese ships moved farther down the coast, in 1485 reaching Benin. The Portuguese and their African trading partners established fortified trading posts on the western coast of Africa. The profits reaped by these Portuguese “factories”—so named because merchants were known as “factors”—inspired other European powers to follow in their footsteps. TRADE ROUTES STRETCHING FROM EUROPE AND AFRICA TO ASIA, 1400s  Europeans longed to trade with Asia and Africa without having to pass through the Italian city-states and Middle Eastern empires that controlled the overland route. Portugal also began to colonize Madeira, the Azores, and the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, which lie in the Atlantic off the African coast. Sugar plantations worked by Muslim captives and slaves from Slavic areas of Eastern Europe had flourished in the Middle Ages on Mediterranean islands like Cyprus, Malta, and Crete. Now, the Portuguese established plantations on the Atlantic islands, eventually replacing the Native populations with thousands of enslaved men and women from Africa, setting an ominous precedent. Soon, the center of sugar production would shift again, to the Western Hemisphere. The coming of the Portuguese, soon followed by traders from other European nations, accelerated the buying and selling of captives within West Africa. At least 100,000 Africans were transported to Spain and Portugal between 1450 and 1500. In 1502, the first Africans were shipped to islands in the Caribbean. The transatlantic slave trade, and its impact on Africa, will be discussed in Chapter 4. Having reached West Africa, Portuguese mariners pushed their explorations ever southward along the coast. Bartholomeu Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope at the continent’s southern tip in 1487. In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed around it to India, demonstrating the feasibility of a sea route to the East. With a population of under 1 million, Portugal established a vast trading empire, with bases in India, southern China, and Indonesia. It replaced the Italian city-states as the major European commercial partner of the East. But six years before da Gama’s voyage, Christopher Columbus had, he believed, discovered a new route to China and India by sailing west. The Voyages of Columbus On October 12, 1492, the Taíno (Arawak) people on one of the islands that today are called the Bahamas saw a strange sight. They were island people who were accustomed to vessels approaching from far away, but these ships were built in an unusual shape and had sails to catch the wind. The men wore armor made of metal and, after rowing to shore in smaller boats, raised a flag and spoke loudly in an unfamiliar language. These strangers did seem at least to know how to trade, and their needles and other pieces of metal seemed interesting and useful. The expedition’s leader, Christopher Columbus, was a seasoned mariner and fearless explorer from Genoa, a major port in northern Italy. Columbus had for years sailed the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, studying ocean currents and wind patterns. Like nearly all navigators of the time, Columbus knew the earth was round. But he drastically underestimated its size. He believed that by sailing westward he could relatively quickly cross the Atlantic and reach Asia. No one in Europe knew that two giant continents lay 3,000 miles to the west. The Vikings, to be sure, had sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland around the year 1000 and established a settlement, Vinland, at a site now known as L’Anse aux Meadows. But this outpost was abandoned after a few years and had been forgotten, except in Norse legends. Columbus relied on a number of sources for his estimate of the size of the globe, including Marco Polo’s account of his visit by land to China in the thirteenth century and, as a devout Catholic, the Bible. Most of Columbus’s contemporaries, however, knew that he considerably underestimated the earth’s size, which helps to explain why he had trouble gaining backers for his expedition. Eventually, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain agreed to become sponsors, along with bankers and merchants of Spain and the Italian city-states, who desperately desired to circumvent the Muslim stranglehold on eastern trade. Columbus set sail with royal letters of introduction to Asian rulers, authorizing him to negotiate trade agreements. After exploring the islands of the Bahamas, Hispaniola (today the site of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Cuba in 1492, Columbus returned the following year with seventeen ships and more than 1,000 men to establish a Spanish outpost. Before he died in 1506, Columbus made two more voyages to the Americas, in 1498 and 1502. He went to his grave believing that he had discovered a westward route to Asia. The explorations of another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, along the coast of South America between 1499 and 1502 made plain that a continent entirely unknown to Europeans had been encountered. These lands would come to bear not Columbus’s name but one based on Vespucci’s—America. Vespucci also realized that the Native inhabitants were not residents of the East Indies as Columbus had believed, although the name “Indians,” applied to them by Columbus, has endured to this day. Columbus’s Landfall, an engraving from La lettera dell’isole (Letter from the Islands). This 1493 pamphlet reproduced, in the form of a poem, Columbus’s first letter describing his voyage of the previous year. Under the watchful eye  of King Ferdinand of Spain, Columbus and his men land on a Caribbean island, while local Taínos flee. Exploration and Conquest The technique of printing with movable type, invented in the 1450s by the German craftsman Johannes Gutenberg, made possible the rapid spread of information in Europe, at least among the educated minority. News of Columbus’s achievement traveled quickly. One writer hailed him as “a hero such as the ancients made gods of.” Others were inspired to follow in his wake. John Cabot, a Genoese merchant who had settled in England, reached Newfoundland in 1497. Soon, scores of fishing boats from France, Spain, and England were active in the region. Pedro Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal in 1500. But the Spanish took the lead in exploration and conquest. Inspired by a search for wealth, national glory, and the desire to spread Catholicism, Spanish conquistadores, often accompanied by religious missionaries and carrying flags emblazoned with the sign of the cross, radiated outward from Hispaniola. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa trekked across the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean from the Americas. Between 1519 and 1522, Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world, encountering Pacific islands and peoples previously unknown to Europe. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but his fleet completed the journey, correcting once and for all Columbus’s erroneous assessment of the earth’s size. In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of mainland Mexico and, at the urging of people he met there, decided to march on the great city of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, whose wealth and power rested on domination of numerous subordinate peoples nearby. The Aztecs were violent warriors who engaged in the ritual sacrifice of captives. This practice thoroughly alienated their neighbors who were delighted to have the Spaniards as allies. EARLY EUROPEAN VOYAGES  Christopher Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing, in 1492, was soon followed by voyages of exploration by English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian explorers. Their thousands of warriors joined forces with the several hundred heavily armed Spaniards, plus horses, giant mastiff dogs, and smallpox, which spread from the Spaniards into the crowded city of Tenochtitlán. A few years later, Francisco Pizarro conquered the great Inca kingdom centered in modern-day Peru, similarly using brute force and taking advantage of rivalries within the kingdom. Soon, treasure fleets carrying cargoes of gold and silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru were traversing the Atlantic to enrich the Spanish crown. The Columbian Exchange The transatlantic flow of goods and people, sometimes called the Columbian Exchange, altered millions of years of evolution. Plants, animals, and cultures that had evolved independently on separate continents were now thrown together. Products introduced to Europe, Africa, and Asia from the Americas included corn, tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, tobacco, and chili peppers, while people brought to the Americas wheat, rice, sugarcane, peaches, watermelons, horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep. Europeans also carried germs previously unknown in the Americas. It is impossible to know how much damage European diseases did in the Americas. Smallpox helped Hernán Cortés take Tenochtitlán, and diseases certainly assisted Europeans in their conquests of North America. But trying to determine the pre- 1492 population of the Americas—or even the population in the following two centuries—yields wildly different estimates. Some scholars have applied death rates in Tenochtitlán and Hispaniola across the entirety of both continents, deducing with no direct evidence that the population of the Americas declined by as much as 90 percent in the 150 years after 1492. One problem with assuming massive death rates—besides the lack of evidence—is that focusing on the indirect harm caused by disease can deflect attention from the direct violence that accompanied colonialism. Disease hit the hardest when colonizers were simultaneously cutting off access to food and water, driving people from their homes, or forcing people into slavery or missions. Importantly, Native people actively responded to illness and attempted to curb its spread. Many instituted quarantines for sick individuals, isolated themselves from colonial settlements, and treated patients with basic nursing—remedies that were as effective as anything Europeans had at their disposal in the same era. Glossary caravel A fifteenth-century European ship capable of long-distance travel. conquistadores Spanish term for “conquerors,” applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by Indigenous peoples in central and southern America as well as the current states of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Tenochtitlán The capital city of the Aztec empire; the city was built on marshy islands on the western side of Lake Tetzcoco, which is the site of present-day Mexico City. Aztec The Mesoamerican empire ruled by the Mexica people that was defeated by the Spanish under Hernán Cortés and his Native allies, 1519–1528. Columbian Exchange The transatlantic flow of goods and people that began with Columbus’s voyages in 1492. THE SPANISH EMPIRE By the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain had established an immense empire that reached from Europe to the Americas and Asia. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans, once barriers separating different parts of the world, now became highways for the exchange of goods and the movement of people. Spanish galleons carried gold and silver from Mexico and Peru eastward to Spain and westward to Manila in the Philippines and on to China. Sixteenth-century Native Americans in Florida practice several healing techniques, including smoking tobacco. The Spanish empire included the most populous parts of the Americas and the regions richest in natural resources. Stretching from the Andes Mountains of South America through present-day Mexico and the Caribbean and into Florida and the southwestern United States, Spain’s empire exceeded in size the Roman empire of the ancient world. Its center in North America was Mexico City, a magnificent capital built on the ruins of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán that boasted churches, hospitals, monasteries, government buildings, and the Americas’ first university. Unlike the English and French empires, Spanish America was essentially an urban civilization, an “empire of towns.” For centuries, its great cities, notably Mexico City, Quito, and Lima, far outshone any urban centers in other colonies and most of those in Europe. Governing Spanish America To rule this vast empire, the Spanish crown established a system of government headed by lawyers and bureaucrats. Authority originated with the king and flowed downward through the Council of the Indies—the main body in Spain for colonial administration—and then to viceroys in Mexico and Peru and other local officials in America. The Catholic Church also played a significant role in the administration of Spanish colonies, frequently exerting its authority on matters of faith, morals, and treatment of the Indians. Successive kings kept elected assemblies out of Spain’s empire. Royal officials were generally appointees from Spain, rather than criollos, or creoles, as persons born in the colonies of European ancestry were called. The imperial state was a real and continuous presence in Spanish America. But given the vastness of the empire, local municipal councils, universities, merchant organizations, and craft guilds enjoyed considerable independence. Colonists in Spanish America “The maxim of the conqueror must be to settle,” said one Spanish official. The government barred non-Spaniards from emigrating to its American domains, as well as non-Christian Spaniards, including Jews and Moors. But the opportunity for social advancement drew numerous colonists from Spain—225,000 in the sixteenth century and a total of 750,000 in the three centuries of Spain’s colonial rule. Some came as laborers, craftsmen, and soldiers. Others came as government officials, priests, professionals, and minor aristocrats, all ready to direct the manual work of Indians, since living without having to labor was a sign of noble status. The most successful of these colonists enjoyed lives of luxury similar to those of the upper classes at home. Young Woman with a Harpsichord, a colorful painting from Mexico in the early 1700s, depicts an upper-class woman. Her dress, jewelry, fan, the cross around her neck, and the musical instrument all emphasize that while she lives in the colonies, she embodies the latest in European fashion and culture. Although persons of European birth, called peninsulares, stood atop the social hierarchy, they never constituted more than a tiny proportion of the population of Spanish America. Unlike in the later British empire, Native inhabitants always outnumbered European colonists and their descendants in Spanish America. The Spanish forced tens of thousands of Indians to work in gold and silver mines, which supplied the empire’s wealth, and on large-scale farms, or haciendas, controlled by Spanish landlords. Although the Spanish introduced livestock, wheat, and sugar, the main agricultural crops were the same ones grown before colonization—namely, corn, beans, and squash. Large areas remained under Native control. Like the French empire and unlike the English, Spanish authorities granted Indians certain rights within colonial society and hoped for their eventual assimilation. In contrast, Spaniards seldom questioned the enslavement of Africans. From the early 1500s, the Spanish demand for enslaved labor fueled the Atlantic slave trade. The Spanish crown ordered wives of colonists to join them in America and demanded that single men marry. But with the population of Spanish women low at first, many single Spanish men married and had children with Native women. As early as 1514, the Spanish government formally approved of such marriages, partly as a way of bringing Christianity to the Native population. By 1600, mestizos (persons of mixed origin) made up a large part of the urban population of Spanish America. Over time, Spanish America evolved into a hybrid culture, part Spanish, part Native, and in some areas part African, but with a single official faith, language, and governmental system (although Native languages survived). In 1531, a Nahua Indian, Juan Diego, reported seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary, speaking the Nahuatl language and looking like an Indian, near a Mexican village. Miracles began to be reported, and a shrine was built in her honor. The Virgin of Guadalupe would come to be revered by millions as a symbol of the mixing of Native and Spanish cultures, and later of the modern nation of Mexico. Christianity and Conquest What allowed one nation, the seventeenth-century Dutch legal thinker Hugo Grotius wondered, to claim possession of lands that “belonged to someone else”? This question rarely occurred to most of the Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the wake of Columbus’s voyage, or their monarchs. Following the exclusivist mandate of Christianity, they expected the people they encountered in America to abandon their own beliefs and traditions and embrace those of the newcomers. Failure to do so reinforced the conviction that these people were uncivilized “heathens” (non- Christians). Europeans brought with them not only a long history of using violence to subdue their internal and external foes but also missionary zeal to spread the benefits of their own civilization to others, while reaping the rewards of empire. Spain was no exception. The establishment of its empire in America took place in the wake of Spain’s own territorial unification, the rise of a powerful royal government, and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in 1492. To further legitimize Spain’s claim to rule the Americas, a year after Columbus’s first voyage Pope Alexander VI divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal, declaring that most of the Americas belonged to Spain and most of Africa belonged to Portugal. Of course, the people who lived in those places did not agree. The pope justified this pronouncement by requiring Spain and Portugal to spread Catholicism. European Christians became religious rivals in the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation divided the Catholic Church. In 1517, Martin Luther, a German priest, posted his Ninety-Five Theses, which accused the church of worldliness and corruption. Luther wanted to cleanse the church of abuses such as the sale of indulgences (official dispensations forgiving sins). He insisted that all believers should read the Bible for themselves, rather than relying on priests to interpret it for them. His call for reform led to the rise of new Protestant churches independent of Rome and plunged Europe into more than a century of religious and political strife. Spain, the most powerful bastion of orthodox Catholicism, redoubled its efforts to convert Indians to the “true faith.” National glory and religious mission went hand in hand. Convinced of the superiority of Catholicism to all other religions, Spain insisted that the primary goal of colonization was to save Indians from heathenism and prevent them from falling under the sway of Protestantism. The aim was neither to exterminate nor to remove Indians, but to transform them into obedient, Christian subjects of the crown. Indeed, lacking the later concept of “race” as an unchanging, inborn set of qualities and abilities, many Spanish writers insisted that Indians could in time be “brought up” to the level of European civilization. To them, this transition would require not only the destruction of Native political structures but also a transformation of their economic and spiritual lives. Religious orders established missions throughout the empire, and over time millions converted to Catholicism. Native Rights and Freedoms in the Spanish Empire Spaniards agreed that Indians should become Catholics, but they argued over the balance between conversion and profits. The conquistadores often used brutal violence to force Native men and women to submit to them, violence that many Christians found inconsistent with the mandate to convert and “civilize” Indians. As early as 1537, Pope Paul III, who hoped to see Indians become devout subjects of Catholic monarchs, outlawed their enslavement (an edict never extended to apply to Africans). His decree declared Indians to be “truly men,” who must not be “treated as dumb beasts.” Starting in the 1520s, the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote accounts of brutal Spanish atrocities toward the Native people of the Caribbean islands. Las Casas’s father had sailed on Columbus’s second voyage, and he himself had participated in the conquest of Cuba. But in 1514 Las Casas freed his own Indian slaves and began to preach against the injustices of Spanish rule. Las Casas’s writings denounced Spain for causing the death of millions of innocent people. He narrated in shocking detail the “strange cruelties” carried out by “the Christians,” including the burning alive of men, women, and children and the imposition of forced labor. The Indians, he wrote, had been “totally deprived of their freedom and were put in the harshest, fiercest, most terrible servitude and captivity.” Las Casas insisted that Spain had no grounds on which to deprive them of their lands and liberty. “The entire human race is one,” he proclaimed, and while he continued to believe that Spain had a right to rule in America, largely on religious grounds, he called for Indians to enjoy “all guarantees of liberty and justice” from the moment they became subjects of Spain. “Nothing is certainly more precious in human affairs, nothing more esteemed,” he wrote, “than freedom.” Yet Las Casas also suggested that importing slaves from Africa would help to protect the Indians from exploitation. Four Racial Groups, taken from a series of paintings by the eighteenth-century Mexican artist Andrés de Islas, illustrates the racial mixing that took place in the Spanish empire and some of the new vocabulary invented to describe it. First: The offspring of a Spaniard and Indian is a mestizo. Second: A Spaniard and a mestiza  produce a castizo. Third: The child of an Indian and a mestiza is a coyote. Fourth: The child of an Indian man and African woman is a chino. Largely because of Las Casas’s efforts, Spain in 1542 issued a proclamation that became known as the New Laws, commanding that Indians no longer be enslaved. And the government established the repartimiento system, whereby Native towns were required to provide a fixed amount of labor each year on Spanish mines or farms. As tributary towns, they were ruled by Native leaders and lived according to their own laws and customs, as long as they paid their annual tribute. Las Casas’s writings, translated into several European languages, contributed to the spread of the Black Legend—the image of Spain as a uniquely brutal and exploitative colonizer. In reality all empires were highly exploitative. But the Black Legend would provide a potent justification for other European powers to challenge Spain’s predominance in the Americas. Influenced by Las Casas, the eighteenth-century French historian Guillaume Thomas Raynal would write of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, “Tell me, reader, whether these were civilized people landing among savages, or savages among civilized people?” Exploring North of Mexico While the Spanish empire centered on Mexico, Peru, and the West Indies, the hope of finding a new kingdom of gold soon led Spanish explorers into new territory. In 1508, Spain established the first permanent colony in what is now the United States. That first colony was not, as many people believe, at Jamestown, Virginia, or St. Augustine, Florida, but on the island of Puerto Rico, now a U.S. “commonwealth.” Unlike many other places Europeans explored north of Mexico, Puerto Rico had gold; Juan Ponce de León, who led the colony, sent a considerable amount to Spain, while keeping some for himself. In 1513, Ponce de León embarked for Florida, in search of wealth, slaves, and a fountain of eternal youth, only to be repelled by Calusa Indians. In 1528, another Spanish expedition seeking plunder landed in Florida, but the men became separated from their ships, and only four of them made it back to Mexico. For seven years, the four survivors wandered through the lands of Native peoples from Florida to the desert of the Southwest and northern Mexico. One, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, wrote an account of his adventures, including tales told by Native inhabitants of the seven golden cities of Cibola, somewhere over the horizon.  In this engraving, sixteenth-century Timucuas, Native people of northern Florida, are transporting food they have grown to the public storehouse. One of the four survivors was an enslaved African named Esteban. After walking all the way to Mexico with Cabeza de Vaca in 1536, Esteban returned north, leading the expedition of Friar Marcos de Niza. Esteban went farther north than Niza, becoming the first African and first non-Indian to explore parts of northern Mexico and Arizona and the Pueblos of New Mexico. In the late 1530s and 1540s, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast as far north as present-day Oregon, and expeditions led by Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and others marched through the Gulf region and the Southwest, fruitlessly searching for another Mexico or Peru. Coronado followed Esteban’s path to the interior of the continent, reaching as far north as the Great Plains, and became the first European to encounter the immense herds of bison that roamed the West. The Coronado and de Soto expeditions, really mobile communities with hundreds of adventurers, priests, slaves, and livestock, spread devastation among Native communities. But they were unsuccessful in their quest for riches, and most of them— including de Soto—did not make it out alive. Florida and the Spanish The Indigenous peoples of Florida were the first to face Spanish colonization in what is now the continental United States. Spain hoped to establish a military base in present-day Florida to combat pirates who threatened the treasure fleet that each year sailed from Havana for Europe loaded with gold and silver from Mexico and Peru. Spain also wanted to forestall French incursions in the area. In 1565, Philip II of Spain authorized the nobleman Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to lead a colonizing expedition to Florida. Menéndez destroyed a small outpost at Fort Caroline, which a group of Huguenots (French Protestants) had established in 1562 near present-day Jacksonville. Menéndez and his men massacred the French colonists and went on to establish Spanish forts on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and at St. Augustine, Florida. The latter remains the oldest site in the continental United States continuously inhabited by European settlers and their descendants. EARLY SPANISH CONQUESTS AND EXPLORATIONS IN THE AMERICAS By around 1600, New Spain had become a vast empire stretching from the modern-day American Southwest through Mexico and Central America and into the former Inca kingdom in South America. This map shows early Spanish exploration, especially in the present-day United States. The Spanish did not fulfill their ambitions for Florida. After destroying the French Fort Caroline, they established forts from present-day Miami into South Carolina, as well as a Jesuit mission on Chesapeake Bay. Yet by 1574, Native people had destroyed all of these attempts besides St. Augustine and Santa Elena, near modern-day Port Royal, South Carolina. Frustrated at large expenses and no profits, in 1587 the government in Spain ordered Santa Elena abandoned and the inhabitants resettled (over their vocal protests) at St. Augustine. Having found no gold and little to attract Spanish settlers, the crown invited Franciscan missionaries to establish missions, including among the Guales north of St. Augustine in what is now Georgia, the Timucuas in central Florida, and the Apalachees in the Florida panhandle. Many Native communities were interested in the missionaries, who brought useful goods and had compelling spiritual ideas that the inclusivist nature of Indigenous religions allowed them to incorporate. Some Native leaders or communities were able to increase their power in the region by establishing permanent connections to Spanish trade. But people who lived in or near missions also found they were subjected to violence and to European diseases that wreaked havoc on the crowded mission communities. In some places, they reached compromises that allowed the Spanish missionaries to stay. In others, the Native people threw them out. Beginning in 1597, Guale Indians planned and launched an attack on missions in their province. One Guale explained the attacks by noting that the missionaries had sought to eliminate “our dances, banquets, feasts, celebrations, and wars.... They persecute our old people by calling them witches.” Guales and their allies ransacked missions and killed missionaries. Spanish troops and neighboring Native enemies of the Guales fought against them until the Guales agreed to peace. In general, Florida remained a Native-dominated place with an isolated post and few missions. As late as 1763, Spanish Florida had only 4,000 inhabitants of European descent. The Southwest and the Spanish Coronado’s exploration of the Southwest was a disaster for everyone involved. Its violence repelled possible Native allies in the Southwest, and the failure to find riches decreased Spanish interest in the north. Half a century later, the Spanish returned to the Pueblos on the Rio Grande to attempt a permanent colony called New Mexico. In 1598, Juan de Oñate led a group from Mexico of several hundred soldiers, Franciscan missionaries, and colonists, many of whom were the descendants of the early Spanish conquistadores and Native women from central Mexico. Rather than establishing their own town and farms on the Rio Grande, Oñate and his followers violently moved into the Pueblos. They demanded that Native people feed and work for them, killing and raping those who did not comply. Fighting back was difficult because the Pueblos were not one people but instead inhabited over eighty independent towns and spoke six different languages. Finally, the people of the pueblo of Acoma had enough, and they killed a Spanish patrol that included Oñate’s nephew. In the ensuing battle, Oñate’s forces killed an estimated 800 of Acoma’s men, women, and children and captured over 500 more to keep as slaves, cutting off one foot of the adult men. In response to protests from the missionaries and Native leaders of the Pueblos, authorities in Mexico City in 1606 deposed and punished Oñate. In 1609, they ordered the New Mexican colonists to establish a separate town and grow their own food. In the future, only married soldiers were to be stationed in New Mexico to reduce the likelihood of sexual violence. The Franciscan missionaries stayed, but most of the colonists left. Founded around 1610, the colonial town of Santa Fe would be the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest, but it remained a small settlement, surrounded by Native peoples. The Pueblo Revolt Some Native people left their Pueblos to build new towns farther from the Spanish. Others saw benefits in Spanish alliance, including new tools and crops and the protection of Spanish forces against their Apache and Navajo enemies. Many also found Catholicism appealing and welcomed the missionaries as a counterbalance to the depredations of soldiers and settlers. Many accepted baptism, even as they continued to practice their old religion, adding Jesus, Mary, and the Catholic saints to their already rich spiritual pantheon. But as the Inquisition—the persecution of non- Catholics—became more and more intense in Spain, so did the friars’ efforts to stamp out traditional religious ceremonies in New Mexico. By burning Native sacred objects and threatening Native religious leaders, the missionaries alienated far more Indians than they converted. A prolonged drought that began around 1660 and the authorities’ inability to protect the villages and missions from attacks by Navajos and Apaches added to local discontent. The Pueblo peoples came together under the inspiring leadership of a man named Popé. A religious leader born around 1630 in San Juan Pueblo, Popé was one of forty- seven Indians arrested in 1675 for “sorcery”—that is, practicing their traditional religion. Four of the prisoners were hanged, and the rest, including Popé, were brought to Santa Fe to be publicly whipped. After this humiliation, Popé returned home and began holding secret meetings in Pueblo communities. VOICES OF FREEDOM From BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS, HISTORY OF THE INDIES (1528) Las Casas was the Dominican priest who condemned the treatment of Indians in the Spanish empire. His widely disseminated writings helped to establish the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty. The Indians [of Hispaniola] were totally deprived of their freedom and were put in the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the fields. But our Spaniards gave no such opportunity to Indians and truly considered them perpetual slaves, since the Indians had not the free will to dispose of their persons but instead were disposed of according to Spanish greed and cruelty, not as men in captivity but as beasts tied to a rope to prevent free movement. When they were allowed to go home, they often found it deserted and had no other recourse than to go out into the woods to find food and to die. When they fell ill, which was very frequently because they are a delicate people unaccustomed to such work, the Spaniards did not believe them and pitilessly called them lazy dogs and kicked and beat them; and when illness was apparent they sent them home as useless.... They would go then, falling into the first stream and dying there in desperation; others would hold on longer but very few ever made it home. I sometimes came upon dead bodies on my way, and upon others who were gasping and moaning in their death agony, repeating “Hungry, hungry.” And this was the freedom, the good treatment and the Christianity the Indians received. About eight years passed under [Spanish rule] and this disorder had time to grow; no one gave it a thought and the multitude of people who originally lived on the island... was consumed at such a rate that in these eight years 90 per cent had perished. From here this sweeping plague went to San Juan, Jamaica, Cuba and the continent, spreading destruction over the whole hemisphere. From FRIAR MARCOS DE NIZA’S ACCOUNT OF HIS VOYAGE WITH ESTEBAN (1539) In the 1520s and 1530s, after the conquest of Mexico City, Spanish conquistadores raided Native lands to the north for captives to sell as slaves. In part due to Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Spanish monarchs outlawed Indian slavery in their empire. In 1539, Friar Marcos de Niza traveled north from Mexico City to spread the news that the slave raids would stop and priests would come instead. His guide was Esteban, an African man who had been enslaved by the Spanish. Esteban had journeyed from Florida through Texas to northern Mexico with the man who owned him under Spanish law, Andrés Dorantes, as well as Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Still technically enslaved to Dorantes, Esteban now set off to lead Niza through northern Mexico to Arizona and New Mexico. Niza begins his account by explaining that two different Native groups will accompany him, Esteban, and another priest, Father Onoratto. The first are northern Indians, whom the Spanish had previously captured in the north and held in bondage near Mexico City. The Viceroy of Mexico has freed them to return home. The second group is Opatas of northwestern Mexico who came to offer to accompany Niza and Esteban as they returned the formerly enslaved people to their homes. I took with me, as my colleague, Father Onoratto, and Dorantes’ Negro Esteban and certain Indians whom the lord Viceroy freed and bought for this purpose and whom the governor of New Galicia, Francisco Vasques de Coronado turned over to me, as well as many Indians [who] came to the valley of Culiacán expressing great joy, because the freed Indians assured them that the governor sent us ahead to let them know about their freedom and that people would not be enslaving them or making war on them or mistreating them, and that this was the wish and the order of his Majesty. With this company I made my journey... and on the way I found much welcome and many offerings of things to eat... and they made houses of straw mats and branches for me along the way where no people were living. I stayed in Petatlan for three days because my colleague Father Onoratto had fallen ill. I had to leave him there and, as I had been instructed, continue my journey, led by the Holy Spirit through no merit of my own and accompanied by the above-mentioned Esteban, Dorantes’ Negro, and some of the freed Indians and many people of the region, who received me with welcome and rejoicing and triumphal arches and who gave me of their food, which wasn’t much, because, they said, they had had no rain for three years and because the Indians of that region were more intent on hiding than on sowing, for fear of the Christians, who up until then had been making war on them and enslaving them.... QUESTIONS 1. Why does Las Casas, after describing the ill treatment of Indians, write, “And this was the freedom, the good treatment and the Christianity the Indians received”? 2. Why did the Native peoples greet Niza and Esteban with “welcome and rejoicing”? 3. What ideas of freedom are apparent in the two documents? Under Popé’s leadership, Indians of the Pueblos joined in a coordinated uprising. Some 2,000 warriors destroyed isolated farms and missions, killing 400 colonists, including 21 Franciscan missionaries. They then surrounded Santa Fe. The Spanish had no choice but to abandon the town. Most of the Spanish survivors, accompanied by several hundred Christian Indians, made their way south out of New Mexico. Within a few weeks, a century of colonization in the area had been destroyed. The Pueblo Indians had reestablished the freedom lost through Spanish conquest. The Pueblo Revolt was a complete victory over the Spanish. The victors turned with a vengeance on all symbols of European culture, uprooting fruit trees, destroying cattle, burning churches and images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and wading into rivers to wash away their Catholic baptisms. They rebuilt their places of worship, called “kivas,” and resumed sacred dances the friars had banned. “The God of the Spaniards,” they shouted, “is dead.” The Pueblo Revolt helped to inspire revolts across northern Mexico. Other Native towns that had experienced similar troubles with the Spanish struck back in attempts to regain their independence. Apache bands took advantage of the fighting to expand their raids across the region. While the Spanish never gave up their ambitions to colonize northern Mexico, their hold on it was always tenuous. Yet at the same time, cooperation among the Rio Grande Pueblos evaporated. By the end of the 1680s, warfare had broken out among several Pueblos, even as Apache and Navajo raids continued. Popé died around 1690. In 1692, the Spanish launched an invasion that eventually reestablished the colony of New Mexico. Some communities welcomed them back as a source of military protection. And Spain had learned a lesson. In the eighteenth century, colonial authorities adopted a more tolerant attitude toward traditional religious practices and made fewer demands on Indian labor. Glossary creoles Persons born in the Americas of European ancestry. hacienda Large-scale farm in the Spanish empire worked by Native American laborers. mestizos Spanish word for persons of mixed Native American and European ancestry. Las Casas, Bartolomé de A Catholic missionary who renounced the Spanish practice of coercively converting Indians and advocated their better treatment. In 1552, he wrote A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, which described the cruel treatment of the Indians by the Spanish. repartimiento system Spanish labor system under which Indians were legally free and able to earn wages but were also required to perform a fixed amount of labor yearly; replaced the encomienda system. Black Legend  Idea that the Spanish empire was more oppressive toward Indians than other European empires; used as a justification for English imperial expansion. Pueblo Revolt Uprising in 1680 by allied Pueblo led by Popé that temporarily drove Spanish colonists out of New Mexico. Ninety-Five Theses The list of moral grievances against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther, a German priest, in 1517. Indians [of Hispaniola] The author is referring to the Indigenous peoples of the island of Hispaniola. Hispaniola or “little Spain” was the name given to the island that encompasses present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The island was divided in the late seventeenth century following conflicts between the French and Spanish. such work The Taìno enjoyed a complex and thriving community before the arrival of the Spaniards. However, the Spaniards forced the Taìno to work in gold mines, preventing them from planting the crops that they relied on for generations. The grueling forced labor, coupled with the diseases such as smallpox that the Spanish brought with them, drastically cut their populations by as much as 90 percent. this sweeping plague Here Las Casas is referring to Spanish rule and the mistreatment of Native peoples throughout the region as Spain gained control of more islands in the Caribbean. Negro Esteban Although he had recently completed a long journey after surviving a shipwreck off the coast of present-day Florida, Esteban, a man of African (Moorish) descent, led the expedition, despite still being enslaved by another member of the expedition, Andrés Dorantes. the lord Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza served as the viceroy, or governor, of New Spain. It was Mendoza who organized De Niza’s voyage northward seeking riches and reassuring the Native peoples that they would no longer be kidnapped and sold into slavery. more intent on hiding than on sowing It was this treatment that Las Casas described in his History of the Indies (1528) that resulted in the starvation of countless Native peoples. THE FRENCH AND DUTCH EMPIRES If the Black Legend inspired a sense of superiority among Spain’s European rivals, the precious metals that poured from the Americas into the Spanish treasury aroused the desire to try to match Spain’s success. The establishment of Spain’s American empire transformed the balance of power in the world economy. The Atlantic replaced the overland route to Asia as the major axis of global trade. During the seventeenth century, the French, Dutch, and English established colonies in North America. England’s mainland colonies, to be discussed in the next chapter, consisted of agricultural settlements with growing populations whose hunger for land produced incessant conflict with Native peoples. New France and New Netherland were primarily commercial ventures that, like Spanish Florida and New Mexico, never attracted large numbers of colonists. Because French and Dutch settlements were more dependent than the English on Indians as trading partners and military allies, Native Americans exercised more power and enjoyed more freedom in their relations with these settlements. French Colonization The first of Spain’s major European rivals to embark on New World explorations was France. The French initially aimed to find gold and to locate a Northwest Passage—a sea route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. But early French explorers were soon disappointed, and North America came to seem little more than a barrier to be crossed, not a promising site for settlement or exploitation. For most of the sixteenth century, only explorers, fishermen, pirates preying on Spanish shipping farther south, and, as time went on, fur traders visited the eastern coast of North America. French efforts to establish settlements in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia failed, beset by Native resistance and inadequate planning and financing. Not until the seventeenth century would France, as well as England and the Netherlands, establish permanent settlements in North America. The explorer Samuel de Champlain, sponsored by a French fur-trading company, founded Quebec in 1608. In 1673, the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and the fur trader Louis Joliet located the Mississippi River, and by 1681 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, had descended to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the entire Mississippi River valley for France. On European maps, New France eventually formed a giant arc along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers. But the colonial population would remain small and dependent on Native alliances. By 1700, the number of white inhabitants of New France had risen to only 19,000. With a far larger population than England, France sent many fewer emigrants to the Western Hemisphere. The government at home feared that significant emigration would undermine France’s role as a European great power and might compromise its effort to establish trade and good relations with Native Americans. Unfavorable reports about America circulated widely in France. Canada was widely depicted as an icebox, a land of “savage” Indians, a dumping ground for criminals. Most French who left their homes during these years preferred to settle in the Netherlands, Spain, or the West Indies. The revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had extended religious toleration to French Protestants, led well over 100,000 Huguenots to flee their country. But they were not welcome in New France, which the crown desired to remain an outpost of Catholicism. The Fur Trade The viability of New France, with its small white population and emphasis on the fur trade rather than agricultural settlement, depended on friendly relations with Native nations. The French prided themselves on adopting a more humane policy than their imperial rivals. “Only our nation,” declared one French writer, “knows the secret of winning the Indians’ affection.” Lacking the need for Indian labor of the Spanish and the voracious appetite for land of the English colonies, and relying on Indians to supply furs to trading posts, the French and their Native allies worked out a complex series of military, commercial, and diplomatic connections, the most enduring alliances between Indians and Europeans in colonial North America. The Jesuits, a missionary religious order, did seek, with some success, to convert Indians to Catholicism. Unlike Spanish missionaries in early New Mexico, they allowed Christian Indians to retain a high degree of independence and much of their traditional social structure, and they did not seek to suppress all traditional religious practices. Indians who converted to Catholicism were promised full membership in French colonial society. In fact, however, it was far rarer for Natives to adopt French ways than for French settlers to become attracted to the “free” life of the Indians. Native Americans required French traders to follow their rules. The first French trading partners along the St. Lawrence River were Innus (Montagnais), Algonquins, and Wendats (Hurons), who recruited French trade and demanded good prices for furs. (Algonquins were a nation within the large linguistic grouping known as Algonquian.) When the French established Quebec, it was on Algonquin land and because Algonquin leaders invited them. As Champlain recognized, “my enterprises and discoveries... seem to be possible only through their means.” These allies of the French also insisted that the French join their military alliance against their enemy: the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) League, discussed previously. Thus Innus, Algonquins, and Wendats drew the French into a major war that they did not want. It is no surprise that Native Americans wanted European trade. They incorporated European goods into their existing ways of life, using copper kettles as well as ceramic pots, adding wool blankets to animal skins and furs, and using guns for some tasks and bows and arrows (sometimes tipped with brass) for others. Some Native women married the single French men who came to New France and incorporated them and their children into Native communities. The Dutch Empire In 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman employed by the Dutch East India Company, sailed into New York Harbor searching for a Northwest Passage to Asia. Hudson and his crew became the first Europeans to sail up the river that now bears his name. Hudson did not find a route to Asia, but he did encounter Lenapes, Munsees, and Mahicans more than willing to trade furs for European goods. He claimed the area for the Netherlands, and his voyage planted the seeds for what would eventually become a great metropolis, New York City. When the powerful Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee League learned about the Dutch, they and their Mahican allies persuaded them that the most lucrative fur trade would be on the Hudson River near present-day Albany. By 1614, Dutch traders had established an outpost there at Fort Orange. Ten years later, the Dutch West India Company, which had been awarded a monopoly of Dutch trade with America, settled colonists on Manhattan Island. These ventures formed one small part in the rise of the Dutch overseas empire. In the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands dominated international commerce, and Amsterdam was Europe’s foremost shipping and banking center. The small nation had entered a golden age of rapidly accumulating wealth and stunning achievements in painting, philosophy, and the sciences. The Dutch invented the joint stock company, a way of pooling financial resources and sharing the risk of maritime voyages, which proved central to the development of modern capitalism. With a population of only 2 million, the Netherlands established a far- flung empire that reached from Indonesia to South Africa and the Caribbean and temporarily wrested control of Brazil from Portugal. Dutch Freedom The Dutch prided themselves on their devotion to liberty. Indeed, in the early seventeenth century they enjoyed two freedoms not recognized elsewhere in Europe—freedom of the press and of private religious practice. Even though there was an established church, the Dutch Reformed, individuals could hold whatever religious beliefs they wished. Amsterdam became a haven for persecuted Protestants from all over Europe, including French Huguenots, German Calvinists, and those, like the Pilgrims, who desired to separate from the Church of England. Jews, especially those fleeing from Spain, also found refuge there. Other emigrants came to the Netherlands in the hope of sharing in the country’s prosperity. During the seventeenth century, the nation attracted about half a million migrants from elsewhere in Europe. Many of these newcomers helped to populate the Dutch overseas empire. Freedom in New Netherland Despite the Dutch reputation for cherishing freedom, New Netherland was hardly governed democratically. New Amsterdam, the main population center, was essentially a fortified military outpost controlled by appointees of the Dutch West India Company. Although the governor called on prominent citizens for advice from time to time, neither an elected assembly nor a town council, the basic unit of government at home, was established. In other ways, however, the colonists enjoyed more liberty, especially in religious matters, than their counterparts elsewhere in North America. Dutch women enjoyed far more independence than in other colonies. Unlike in England and its colonies, under Dutch law, married women retained their separate legal identity. They could go to court, borrow money, and own property. Men were used to sharing property with their wives. Their wills generally left their possessions to their widows and daughters as well as sons. Margaret Hardenbroeck, the widow of a New Amsterdam merchant, expanded her husband’s business and became one of the town’s richest residents after his death in 1661. Enslaved men and women in New Netherland were able to establish some rights for themselves as well. The Dutch dominated the Atlantic slave trade in the early seventeenth century, and they introduced slaves into New Netherland as a matter of course. By 1650, the colony’s 500 slaves outnumbered those in the Chesapeake. But in the 1640s a petition by a group of enslaved Africans persuaded the Dutch West India Company to institute a system of “half- freedom”—that is, they were required to pay an annual fee to the company and work for it when called upon, but they were given land to support their families. Enslaved people worked on family farms or for household or craft labor, not on large plantations as in the West Indies. The Dutch and Religious Toleration New Netherland attracted a remarkably diverse population. As early as the 1630s, at least eighteen languages were said to be spoken in New Amsterdam, whose residents included not only Dutch settlers but also Africans, Belgians, English, French, Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians. Of course, these settlers adhered to a wide variety of religions. NEW FRANCE AND NEW NETHERLAND, ca. 1650  On European maps, New France and New Netherland were large land claims, but in reality they were a few trading posts and small settlements surrounded by Native nations. The Dutch long prided themselves on being uniquely tolerant in religious matters compared to other European nations and their empires. It would be wrong, however, to attribute modern ideas of religious freedom to either the Dutch government and company at home or the rulers of New Netherland. Both Holland and New Netherland had an official religion, the Dutch Reformed Church, one of the Protestant national churches to emerge from the Reformation. The Dutch commitment to freedom of conscience extended to religious devotion exercised in private, not public worship in nonestablished churches. It did not reflect a willing acceptance of religious diversity. Coastal Native Americans were adept mariners. This detail from the earliest known engraving of New Amsterdam (1627) depicts Dutch and Lenape Indian boats in the harbor. The West India Company’s officials in the colony, particularly Governor Petrus Stuyvesant, were expected to be staunch defenders of the Dutch Reformed Church. When Jews, Quakers, Lutherans, and others demanded the right to practice their religion openly, Stuyvesant adamantly refused, seeing such diversity as a threat to a godly, prosperous order. Under Stuyvesant, the colony was more restrictive in its religious policies than the Dutch government at home. Twenty-three Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654 from Brazil and the Caribbean. Referring to them as “members of a deceitful race,” Stuyvesant ordered the newcomers to leave. But the company overruled him, noting that Jews at home had invested “a large amount of capital” in its shares. As a result of Stuyvesant’s policies, challenges arose to the limits on religious toleration. One, known as the Flushing Remonstrance, was a 1657 petition by a group of English settlers protesting the governor’s order barring Quakers from living in the town of Flushing, on Long Island. Although later seen as a landmark of religious liberty, the Remonstrance had little impact at the time. Stuyvesant ordered several signers arrested for defying his authority. Nonetheless, it is true that the Dutch dealt with religious pluralism in ways quite different from the practices common in other European empires. Religious dissent was tolerated—often grudgingly, as in the case of Catholics—as long as it did not involve open and public worship. No one in New Netherland was forced to attend the official church, nor was anyone executed for holding the wrong religious beliefs (as would happen in Puritan New England around the time of the Flushing Remonstrance). New Netherland and the H