How have historians views of Native Americans and their role in the European colonization of North America changed over time?
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. How have historians’ views of Native Americans and their role in the European colonization of North America changed over time?
2. Why do you think scholars changed their portrayal of Indians in early America so radically?
52 • CHAPTER 2
The Dominion of New England Before the creation of Navigation Acts, all the colonial governments except that of Virginia had operated largely independently of the crown, with governors chosen by the proprietors or by the colonists themselves and with powerful representative assemblies. Officials in London recognized that to increase their control over the colonies, they would have to increase British authority in order to enforce the new laws.
In 1675, the king created a new body, the Lords of Trade, to make recommendations for imperial reform. In 1679, the king moved to increase his control over Massachusetts. He stripped it of its authority over New Hampshire and chartered a separate, royal colony there whose governor he would himself appoint. And in 1684, citing the colonial assembly’s defiance of the Navigation Acts, he revoked the Massachusetts charter.
Charles II’s brother, James II, who succeeded him to the throne in 1685, went further. He created a single Dominion of New England, which combined the government of Mas- sachusetts with the governments of the rest of the New England colonies and later with those of New York and New Jersey as well. He appointed a single governor, Sir Edmund Andros, to supervise the entire region from Boston. Andros’s rigid enforcement of the Navigation Acts and his brusque dismissal of the colonists’ claims to the “rights of English- men” made him highly unpopular.
The “Glorious Revolution” James II, unlike his father, was openly Catholic. In addition, he made powerful enemies when he appointed his fellow Catholics to high offices. The restoration of Catholicism in England led to fears that the Vatican and the pope would soon overtake the country and that the king would support him. At the same time, James II tried to control Parlia- ment and the courts, making himself an absolute monarch. By 1688, the opposition to the king was so great that Parliament voted to force out James II. His daughter, Mary II, and her husband, William of Orange, of the Netherlands—both Protestants—replaced James II to reign jointly. However, James II went to Ireland, raised an army, and fought William but lost. He eventually left the country and spent the rest of his life in France. No Catholic monarch has reigned since. This coup came to be known as the “Glorious Revolution.”
When Bostonians heard of the overthrow of James II, they arrested and imprisoned the unpopular Andros. The new sovereigns in England abolished the Dominion of New England and restored separate colonial governments. In 1691, however, they combined Massachusetts with Plymouth and made it a single, royal colony. The new charter restored the colonial assembly, but it gave the crown the right to appoint the governor. It also replaced church membership with property ownership as the basis for voting and office- holding.
Andros had been governing New York through a lieutenant governor, Captain Francis Nicholson, who enjoyed the support of the wealthy merchants and fur traders of the province. Other, less-favored colonists had a long accumulation of grievances against Nicholson and his allies. The leader of the New York dissidents was Jacob Leisler, a German merchant. In May 1689, when news of the Glorious Revolution and the fall of Andros reached New York, Leisler raised a militia, captured the city fort, drove Nicholson into exile, and proclaimed himself the new head of government in New York. For two years, he tried in vain to stabilize his power in the colony amid fierce
TRANSPLANTATIONS AND BORDERLANDS • 53
factional rivalry. In 1691, when William and Mary appointed a new governor, Leisler briefly resisted. He was convicted of treason and executed. Fierce rivalry between what became known as the “Leislerians” and the “anti-Leislerians” dominated the politics of the colony for years thereafter.
In Maryland, many people wrongly assumed that their proprietor, the Catholic Lord Baltimore, who was living in England, had sided with the Catholic James II and opposed William and Mary. So in 1689, an old opponent of the proprietor’s government, the Protestant John Coode, led a revolt that drove out Lord Baltimore’s officials and led to Maryland’s establishment as a royal colony in 1691. The colonial assembly then established the Church of England as the colony’s official religion and excluded Catholics from public office. Maryland became a proprietary colony again in 1715, after the fifth Lord Baltimore joined the Anglican Church.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Britian touched off revolutions, mostly bloodless ones, in several colonies. Under the new king and queen, the representative assemblies that had been abolished were revived, and the scheme for colonial unification from above was abandoned. But the Glorious Revolution in America did not stop the reorganization of the empire. The new governments that emerged in America actually increased the crown’s potential authority. As the first century of English settlement in America came to its end, the colonists were becoming more a part of the imperial system than ever before.
CONCLUSION
The English colonization of North America was part of a larger effort by several European nations to expand the reach of their increasingly commercial societies. Indeed, for many years, the British Empire in America was among the smallest and weakest of the imperial ventures there, overshadowed by the French to the north and the Spanish to the south.
In the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, new agricultural and commercial societies gradually emerged—those in the South centered on the cultivation of tobacco and rice and were reliant on slave labor; those in the northern colonies centered on more traditional food crops and were based mostly on free labor. Substantial trading centers emerged in such cities as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charles Town, and a grow- ing proportion of the population became prosperous and settled in these increasingly com- plex communities. By the early eighteenth century, English settlement had spread from northern New England (in what is now Maine) south into Georgia.
But this growing English presence coexisted with, and often was in conflict with, other Europeans—most notably the Spanish and the French—in certain areas of North America. In these borderlands, societies did not assume the settled, prosperous form they were tak- ing in the Tidewater and New England. They were raw, sparsely populated settlements in which Europeans, including over time increasing numbers of English, had to learn to accommodate not only one another but also the substantial Indian tribes with whom they shared these interior lands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was a significant European presence across a broad swath of North America—from Florida to Maine, and from Texas to Mexico to California. No European power, however, controlled any major part of these large geographic regions. Yet changes were under way within the British Empire that would soon lead to its dominance through a much larger area of North America.