1. 1492Columbus reaches the Bahamas
2. 1519Cortes lands in Mexico
3. 1607Jamestown founded by the Virginia Company
4. 1619House of Burgesses; first Africans in Virginia
5. 1620Separatists found Plymouth; Mayflower Compact
6. 1630Puritans found Massachusetts Bay
7. 1676Bacon's Rebellion burns Jamestown
8. 1680Pueblo Revolt drives Spain from New Mexico
9. 1730s-1740sFirst Great Awakening revivals
10. 1739Stono Rebellion in South Carolina

A populated hemisphere, and what fed it.

About thirty-five thousand years ago enough of the world’s water was locked in ice to drop sea levels and expose Beringia, a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. People crossed it roughly fifteen to sixteen thousand years ago and spread south over the following millennia. When the last Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago the bridge flooded, and the Americas developed in isolation from Eurasia. That isolation is not a piece of scene-setting. It is the reason the hemisphere had no cattle, no horses, and — because the great killers of the Old World are diseases that crossed to humans from domesticated animals — almost no inherited immunity to smallpox, influenza, measles, or typhus.

The single most important development on this side of the ocean was agricultural. Native farmers domesticated maize and bred it larger, and during the first millennium CE they combined it with beans and squash into what is called three-sister farming. The three plants are complementary in a way that is worth stating precisely, because the whole argument rests on it: corn stalks give the bean vines something to climb, the beans fix nitrogen back into soil the other two deplete, and squash spreads across the ground to hold moisture and crowd out weeds. Together they supply most of what a diet needs.

That is why the large states are in Mesoamerica and the Andes and the villages are north of the Rio Grande. The Americas held about fifty-four million people in 1492 — an estimate, and a contested one — with the great majority in Central and South America. Present-day Canada and the United States together held perhaps ten million.

North America’s largest society had also already passed its peak. The Mississippian culture built earthen mounds and, at Cahokia near modern St. Louis, a city of about twenty-five thousand — the largest in pre-Columbian North America, and roughly a sixth of Tenochtitlan. Cahokia and the other large Mississippian centers were abandoned between about 1100 and 1300, most likely under the same environmental pressures: deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion. They left no writing, so what is known comes from archaeology.

The society the English would eventually have to reckon with in the northeast was the Iroquois Confederacy — Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga and Mohawk, joined by the Tuscarora only in the eighteenth century, after Europeans had arrived. Villages were permanent; women farmed and men hunted; descent ran through the mother’s line, and a longhouse held the related families of a single matrilineage. Confederacy decisions required unanimity, a procedure later American writers would point to admiringly. The Iroquois were also expansionist and effective, and after contact they fought mourning wars whose purpose was to take captives and adopt them — a direct response to populations falling faster than they could be replaced.

A blocked road east, and the ocean as a detour.

Europeans did not sail west because they had grown strong. They sailed west because the route they had been using was closing. Asian spices, silk and luxury goods had come overland along the Silk Road; the collapse of the Mongol Empire broke that road into a series of successor states each taking its own cut, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries put a consolidated power athwart the eastern Mediterranean. Going around was a response to a problem, not an expression of confidence. The Norse had reached Newfoundland around 1000 CE and the settlement faded within a generation, leaving no working memory in Europe at all.

• Trade, blocked. The overland routes were now expensive and politically fragmented. A sea route to Asia would bypass every middleman at once.
• Social mobility, absent. European society distributed standing by birth. For a second or third son with no inheritance coming, and for anyone born outside the nobility, the New World was the only ladder on offer.
• Religion, redirected. The Reconquista ended in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia after nearly eight centuries. That released both a missionary impulse and a generation of young men trained for frontier warfare — and the crown had good reason to point them somewhere other than Spain.
• The crown’s cut. Spain took one-fifth of everything its explorers seized, plus revenue from mines and resources. Sponsorship was an investment with a stated rate of return.
• Technology. The caravel could sail closer to the wind and carry provisions for an ocean crossing. The magnetic compass and the mariner’s astrolabe made position-finding out of sight of land a repeatable craft. Gunpowder was a force multiplier against societies that had neither horses nor steel.

Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492 and later Hispaniola, and maintained for the rest of his life that he had arrived in Asia. It was Amerigo Vespucci who recognized the landmass as a separate continent, which is why the hemisphere carries his name and not Columbus’s.

The Columbian Exchange

What followed was less a conquest than a biological merger of two hemispheres that had been apart for ten thousand years, and its consequences dwarf the intentions of anyone involved.

Two empires fall, and a labor system takes their place.

In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the unmapped world along a meridian, Portugal east and Spain west — an arrangement that gave Brazil to Portugal and, essentially by accident, the rest of the hemisphere to Spain. The men who took it were conquistadors: private soldier-adventurers operating under royal license, funding their own expeditions against a share of the proceeds.

Hernando Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with a few hundred men and destroyed an empire of millions. The explanation is not European superiority, and the details refuse to support that reading. The Tlaxcala, long subject to Aztec tribute and ritual warfare, allied with him and supplied the army that made the campaign possible. Smallpox arrived with the Spanish and moved through Tenochtitlan during the siege. Montezuma II died in Spanish custody in circumstances still disputed.

Francisco Pizarro’s task in 1531 was easier still. Smallpox had run ahead of him down the Andes and killed the emperor Huayna Capac, and his sons Atahualpa and Huascar had fought a civil war over the succession. Pizarro arrived within weeks of Atahualpa’s victory, ambushed him, accepted a room filled with gold as ransom, and executed him regardless. The factions Atahualpa had just beaten made willing partners.

The system that followed was the encomienda: a grant of Native laborers to a Spanish settler who was, in theory, to protect and Christianize them in exchange for their work. In practice it was slavery, and it was recognized as such at the time. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, himself a former encomendero, spent decades documenting its abuses; Spain eventually restricted the system, though enforcement across an ocean amounted to a suggestion.

Nor was Spanish control north of Mexico ever as solid as the maps suggest. It rested on Native allies, and where it did not, it broke. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Spanish out of New Mexico entirely, killing missionaries and burning churches; Diego de Vargas retook Santa Fe in 1692, about twelve years later, and the reconquest was substantially finished by 1696.

Who paid, who went, and what they wanted from the people already there.

The most useful comparison in this unit is not which power was crueler. It is that each answered three questions differently — who financed the colony, who actually emigrated, and what the colonizers needed Native people for — and that those answers determined everything else, including how the wars went.

England’s start was slow and largely piratical. Elizabethan privateers — state-licensed pirates, Francis Drake the most celebrated — robbed Spanish treasure ships and in doing so demonstrated to English investors how much money the New World held. The first attempt at settlement, at Roanoke in 1585 under Walter Raleigh, was gone without explanation when its organizer returned.

Jamestown, founded by the Virginia Company in 1607, nearly went the same way. The settlers had come for gold, there was no gold, and men who expected to find it would not farm. The site was malarial. Of roughly eight thousand people who went to Virginia in the first two decades, about twelve hundred were alive there in 1625 — a mortality rate above eighty percent. What eventually saved the colony was not discipline but a crop: John Rolfe’s introduction of a marketable strain of tobacco gave Virginia something Europe would buy.

The Powhatan Confederacy dominated the region, and coexistence gave way to a series of wars running from about 1610. The second ran 1622–1632, opening with Opechancanough’s attack; the third ran 1644–1646 and ended with a treaty that made the Powhatan tributaries of Virginia. The Confederacy was broken as a political power — though the people were not extinguished, and descendant nations including the Pamunkey and Mattaponi are still here.

The Dutch, briefly: successful merchant traders with outposts worldwide, of which the Hudson Valley was one. New Amsterdam became New York when the English took it in 1664 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

The same country, two soils, two societies.

English people left for three reasons: investors wanted returns, poor people wanted land — enclosure was privatizing the commons they had farmed, and primogeniture left younger sons with nothing to inherit — and dissenters wanted to worship without being punished for it. Those motives sorted themselves geographically, and the sorting produced two societies so different that the rest of American history is partly an argument between them.

Separatists and Puritans are not the same people

Both groups were Calvinists, and Calvinism is worth stating exactly, because its whole social architecture follows from one doctrine. In Catholicism a person may be saved through faith or through works; in most Protestant traditions through faith. Calvinism holds predestination — salvation is settled before birth and nothing done on earth changes it. What that produced was not passivity but a lifetime of looking for evidence of one’s own election, and a church in which those who could narrate a conversion experience became full members, or visible saints, with the right to vote and take communion.

The two groups differed on what to do about the Church of England, which they agreed retained too much of Catholicism. Separatists concluded it was beyond saving and left it; they sailed on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth in 1620, signing the Mayflower Compact, an agreement by forty-one adult men to submit to the will of the majority. Puritans — the much larger group — wanted to purify the Church from within, not leave it. They founded Massachusetts Bay at Boston in 1630 with a royal grant and a joint-stock company behind them, and between 1630 and 1642 the Great Migration carried a substantial English emigration outward, most of it to the West Indies, a good deal to the Chesapeake, and a large share to New England.

Massachusetts understood itself as a city on a hill, a model society whose success would convert the world by example. Roughly forty percent of adult men could vote there — far more than anywhere in Europe, and far short of a democracy. And it was not a theocracy: the church did not govern, and secular officers were elected separately. But everyone paid taxes to the Congregational church whether they belonged to it or not, and the ministers’ moral authority did work that no statute had to.

It also could not tolerate dissent. Anne Hutchinson taught antinomianism — if salvation is predestined, then earthly law has no bearing on it — and was tried and expelled in 1638, a woman whose offense was in large part instructing men. Roger Williams argued that the church had to separate from the state entirely and that colonists had no right to land they had not bought from its owners. Banished, he founded Providence in 1636 and purchased its land from the Narragansett. Rhode Island became the most religiously tolerant colony in English America — and its neighbors called it the sewer of New England for exactly that reason.

The wars followed the same logic as Virginia’s. In the Pequot War of 1636–1638 settlers wanted Pequot land and the Narragansett fought alongside the English. In King Philip’s War of 1675–1676, Metacom — son of Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag, called King Philip by the English — fought against continual land seizure and against the praying towns that were dissolving Native communities into English ones. It was proportionally among the deadliest wars in American history. Metacom was killed at Mount Hope in August 1676, and Native military power in New England ended with him. In both wars, Native disunity decided the outcome.

Puritan New England’s religious intensity then declined by its own mechanism. Full membership required a public conversion narrative; fewer people, and particularly fewer men, offered one; membership shrank. The Halfway Covenant of 1662 extended partial membership to the baptized children of non-members, which kept the churches populated at the cost of blurring the line between the elect and everyone else. The Salem witch trials of 1692 — twenty executed — look less like pure religious hysteria on close reading than like a community tearing along an economic seam: the accused clustered among families tied to Salem’s growing market economy, the accusers among subsistence farmers inland.

Politically, the crown eventually pushed back. Massachusetts lost its charter in 1684, and in 1686 the Dominion of New England consolidated the northern colonies under Governor Edmund Andros, who suppressed town meetings and ruled without an assembly. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposed James II; the colonists overthrew Andros in 1689, the new monarchs declined to back him, and the Dominion dissolved. The charter Massachusetts received in 1691 shifted the vote from church membership to property, opened it to non-Puritans, and absorbed Plymouth.

Slavery was not the starting condition. It was built.

This is the most important argument in Unit 1, and it depends on holding two things apart that are usually collapsed together: the existence of slavery, and the fusion of slavery with race. The first was old. The second was made in the English colonies, within living memory, and the sources show it being made.

Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, the same year the colony’s settlers convened the House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in English America. For decades afterward the legal line between an enslaved African and an indentured European was genuinely unclear. Some early Africans in Virginia completed terms of service, held land, sued in court, and in some cases owned enslaved people themselves. That is not a curiosity. It is evidence that the racial order which looks permanent by 1750 had not yet been written.

The colony’s first labor answer was indentured servitude: passage across the Atlantic in exchange for four to seven years of work, ending in freedom dues that generally included land. The headright system paid the other side of the bargain, granting fifty acres to whoever financed a servant’s passage — so the wealthy had a direct incentive to import laborers in bulk. Roughly one hundred thousand indentured servants came to the Chesapeake between 1607 and 1700. In the 1630s and 1640s a servant who survived had a real chance of ending up a landowner. By the 1670s the good land was gone, and what the system produced instead was a large population of armed, landless, angry free men.

In 1676 they rose. Bacon’s Rebellion is misread if it is taken for a poor man’s revolt: Nathaniel Bacon was wealthy and was Governor William Berkeley’s own cousin. The grievances were land and the vote. Berkeley had forbidden attacks on Native people — he ran a profitable trade with them, and he had no interest in his colony’s poor acquiring farms — and a 1670 statute had raised the property bar for voting, stripping poor white men of a political voice they had previously held. The rebels burned Jamestown. Bacon died of dysentery and the rising collapsed.

Six pressures, all pointing the same way

The codes were imported rather than invented: Barbados wrote the first English slave code, and the Caribbean model traveled to the mainland with Barbadian settlers who founded South Carolina. The West Indies are the extreme case of everything the plantation system tends toward — sugar and nothing else, no room for a small farmer, a population roughly four Black people to every white one, and total dependence on the mainland colonies for food. Poor whites squeezed out of the islands carried both their ambitions and those codes north.

The Carolinas show the transition in miniature. Both colonies began by enslaving Native people and exporting them to the West Indies — between 1670 and 1720 more Native slaves left Charleston than African slaves arrived. The Yamasee and Tuscarora wars ended that, nearly destroying South Carolina in the process and, once again, turning on which Native nations sided with the colonists. Afterward there were not enough Native people left to enslave, and the colony turned to rice, to African labor, and to a planter aristocracy. North Carolina, settled by poor Virginians looking for land, grew tobacco and stayed conspicuously less aristocratic.

On the Middle Passage itself the mortality rate ran around twenty percent. Captives were most often taken in the African interior by African rulers or raiders and sold at coastal forts for textiles and manufactured goods. In 1739 the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina — led by a literate, militarily experienced Congolese man called Jemmy — was put down by the militia, and the colony’s answer was to tighten the codes further: restrictions on movement, a renewed ban on literacy, and a requirement that any manumission pass the legislature. Freeing an enslaved person became, by design, almost impossible.

Numerous, young, self-governing, and largely unsupervised.

The colonial population grew from about 300,000 in 1700 to about 2.5 million by 1775, and most of that was natural increase rather than immigration — roughly 400,000 free immigrants and about the same number of enslaved Africans arrived across the period, against a total growth of 2.2 million. The colonists doubled about every twenty-five years. The average age in 1775 was sixteen. Ninety percent lived rurally; there were only four cities of consequence — Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston — and none held more than about thirty-five thousand people.

The population was also becoming less English. Germans settled heavily in Pennsylvania, reaching about a third of that colony — the “Pennsylvania Dutch” are Germans, Deutschmisheard — and kept their language and customs. The Scots-Irish, coming from Scotland and from the Ulster plantations, took up land along the Appalachian frontier and brought with them a durable suspicion of central authority. Both groups were drawn to the Middle Colonies, which had no established church, the most religious toleration, and the most ethnic variety in English America — plus the wheat that made them the bread colonies, feeding the sugar islands that grew nothing but sugar.

The economy was overwhelmingly agricultural — about nine in ten colonists farmed — and overwhelmingly local. Land transport was slow and expensive, water transport was cheap, and most goods were sold within a few miles of where they were made. The Navigation Acts were meant to channel all of it through Britain, banning trade with other European powers. Colonists ignored them and smuggled, particularly with the Spanish Caribbean, and Britain declined to press the point — the long stretch of lax enforcement known as salutary neglect. A generation of Americans grew accustomed to being left alone.

The First Great Awakening

By the early 1700s ministers had grown scholarly and their sermons dull, and ordinary people had grown somewhat more liberal and somewhat less certain about predestination. The revival that answered both, running through the 1730s and 1740s, was led by Jonathan Edwards in western Massachusetts, preaching hellfire and old-school Calvinism, and by the British evangelist George Whitefield, whose open-air revivals drew thousands. It was emotional to a degree that scandalized the settled clergy, and it split them: old lights against the emotionalism, with Harvard and Yale behind them, and new lights for personal and mystical experience of the divine, founding Princeton, Brown and Rutgers. Into the gap came the Methodists and Baptists.

Literacy followed the same religious logic. Calvinism required that everyone be able to read the Bible, so New England built schools and achieved literacy rates well above the South’s, where education was far less common. The press that literacy supported produced the period’s emblematic legal case: in 1735 the New York printer John Peter Zenger was prosecuted for seditious libel after criticizing the royal governor, and the jury acquitted him. Zenger had come from the Palatinate as a boy and been apprenticed for eight years — a former indentured servant standing at the center of an early argument about freedom of the press.

How the colonies were actually governed

There were three kinds of colony. Royal colonies — eight of them by 1757 — had governors appointed by the crown. Proprietary colonies (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware) had governors chosen by the proprietor. Self-governing Rhode Island and Connecticut elected their own. Every one of them had a bicameral legislature, and in every one of them the lower house was elected and held the power to tax.

So the thirteen colonies in 1754 remained strikingly heterogeneous: different national origins, different churches, different economies, different labor systems. But they were converging in ways that mattered — a shared revival, a shared language of self-government, a shared habit of ignoring imperial regulation, and a shared appetite for land across the mountains. Unit 2 begins when Britain, having won a war for that land, decides to start paying attention.