History of the USA

History of the USA

United States, history of the

Many peoples have contributed to the development of the United States of

America, a vast nation that arose from a scattering of British colonial

outposts in the New World. The first humans to inhabit the North American

continent were migrants from northeast Asia who established settlements in

North America as early as 8000 BC and possibly much earlier (see NORTH

AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY). By about AD 1500 the native peoples of the areas

north of the Rio Grande had developed a variety of different cultures (see

INDIANS, AMERICAN). The vast region stretching eastward from the Rocky

Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean was relatively sparsely populated by tribes

whose economies were generally based on hunting and gathering, fishing, and

farming.

VIKINGS explored the North American mainland in the 10th and 11th centuries

and settled there briefly (see VINLAND). Of more lasting importance,

however, was the first voyage (1492-93) of Christopher COLUMBUS, which

inaugurated an age of great European EXPLORATION of the Western Hemisphere.

Various European states (including Spain, France, England, the Netherlands,

and Portugal) and their trading companies sent out expeditions to explore

the New World during the century and a half that followed.

The Spanish claimed vast areas, including Florida, Mexico, and the region

west of the Mississippi River, although they concentrated their settlement

south of the Rio Grande. The French explored much of the area that became

Canada and established several settlements there. Of most significance,

however, for the subsequent development of the United States, was the

English colonization of the region along the Atlantic coast.

BRITISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA

At the end of the period of turmoil associated with the Protestant

Reformation in England, the English people became free to turn their

attention to some other matters and to seek new opportunities outside their

tiny island. Internal stability under Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) and an

expanding economy combined with a bold intellectual ferment to produce a

soaring self-confidence. Ireland experienced the first impact: by the

beginning of the 17th century it had been wholly subjugated by the English.

Scottish and English Protestants were dispatched to "colonize" where the

savage Irish, as they were called, had been expelled, especially in the

northern provinces. Then, entrepreneurs began to look to North America,

claimed by England on the basis of the voyages of discovery of John CABOT

(1497-99).

The Chesapeake Colonies

The English had failed in their attempts in the 1580s to found a colony at

ROANOKE on the Virginia coast. In 1606, however, the LONDON COMPANY,

established to exploit North American resources, sent settlers to what in

1607 became JAMESTOWN, the first permanent English colony in the New World.

The colonists suffered extreme hardships, and by 1622, of the more than

10,000 who had immigrated, only 2,000 remained alive. In 1624 control of

the failing company passed to the crown, making Virginia a royal colony.

Soon the tobacco trade was flourishing, the death rate had fallen, and with

a legislature (the House of Burgesses, established in 1619) and an

abundance of land, the colony entered a period of prosperity. Individual

farms, available at low cost, were worked primarily by white indentured

servants (laborers who were bound to work for a number of years to pay for

their passage before receiving full freedom). The Chesapeake Bay area

became a land of opportunity for poor English people.

In 1632, Maryland was granted to the CALVERT family as a personal

possession, to serve as a refuge for Roman Catholics. Protestants, as well,

flooded into the colony, and in 1649 the Toleration Act was issued,

guaranteeing freedom of worship in Maryland to all Trinitarian Christians.

The New England Colonies

In 1620, Puritan Separatists, later called PILGRIMS, sailed on the

MAYFLOWER to New England, establishing PLYMOUTH COLONY, the first permanent

settlement there. They were followed in 1629 by other Puritans (see

PURITANISM), under the auspices of the MASSACHUSETTS BAY COMPANY, who

settled the area around Boston. During the Great Puritan Migration that

followed (1629-42), about 16,000 settlers arrived in the Massachusetts Bay

Colony. The Puritans set out to build a "city on a hill" intended to

provide a model of godly living for the world. Strict Calvinists, strongly

communal, and living in closely bound villages, they envisioned a God

angered at human transgressions, who chose, purely according to his

inscrutable will, a mere "righteous fragment" for salvation. Dissidents of

a Baptist orientation founded Rhode Island (chartered 1644). In 1639,

Puritans on what was then the frontier established the Fundamental Orders

of Connecticut, the first written constitution in North America; the colony

was chartered in 1662. The settlements in New Hampshire that sprang up in

the 1620s were finally proclaimed a separate royal colony in 1679. Plymouth

later became (1691) part of the royal colony of Massachusetts.

The Restoration Colonies

A long era (1642-60) of turmoil in England, which included the Civil War,

Oliver Cromwell's republican Commonwealth, and the Protectorate, ended with

the restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II. An amazing

period ensued, during which colonies were founded and other acquisitions

were made. In 1663, Carolina was chartered; settlement began in 1670, and

from the start the colony flourished. The territory later came under royal

control as South Carolina (1721) and North Carolina (1729).

In 1664 an English fleet arrived to claim by right of prior discovery the

land along the Hudson and Delaware rivers that had been settled and

occupied by the Dutch since 1624. Most of NEW NETHERLAND now became New

York colony and its principal settlement, New Amsterdam, became the city of

New York. New York colony, already multiethnic and strongly commercial in

spirit, came under control of the crown in 1685. New Jersey, sparsely

settled by the Dutch, Swedes, and others, was also part of this English

claim. Its proprietors divided it into East and West Jersey in 1676, but

the colony was reunited as a royal province in 1702.

In 1681, Pennsylvania, and in 1682, what eventually became (1776) Delaware,

were granted to William PENN, who founded a great Quaker settlement in and

around Philadelphia. Quaker theology differed widely from that of the New

England Puritans. Believing in a loving God who speaks directly to each

penitent soul and offers salvation freely, Quakers found elaborate church

organizations and ordained clerics unnecessary.

Indian Wars

In 1675 disease-ridden and poverty-stricken Indians in New England set off

against the whites. Almost every Massachusetts town experienced the horror

of Indian warfare; thousands on both sides were slaughtered before King

Philip, the Wampanoag chief, was killed in 1676 and the war ended.

Virginians, appalled at this event, in 1676 began attacking the

Occaneechees despite the disapproval of the royal governor, Sir William

BERKELEY. Then, under Nathaniel Bacon, dissatisfied and angry colonists

expelled Berkeley from Jamestown and proclaimed Bacon's Laws, which gave

the right to vote to all freedmen. Royal troops soon arrived to put down

the uprising, known as.

Along the Mohawk River in New York, the Five Nations of the IROQUOIS LEAGUE

maintained their powerful confederacy with its sophisticated governing

structure and strong religious faith. Allies of the English against the

French along the Saint Lawrence River, they dominated a vast region

westward to Lake Superior with their powerful and well-organized armies.

The FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS, a series of great wars between the two European

powers and their Indian allies, ended in 1763 when French rule was

eradicated from North America and Canada was placed under the British

crown.

18th-Century Social and Economic Developments

In the 1700s the British colonies grew rapidly in population and wealth. A

formerly crude society acquired a polished and numerous elite. Trade and

cities flourished. The 250,000 settlers who had lived in the mainland

colonies to the south of Canada in 1700 became 2,250,000 by 1775 and would

grow to 5,300,000 by 1800. Settlement expanded widely from the coastal

beachheads of the 17th century into back-country regions with profoundly

divergent ways of life.

Several non-English ethnic groups migrated to the British colonies in large

numbers during the 18th century. By 1775, Germans, who settled primarily in

the Middle Colonies but also in the back-country South, numbered about

250,000. They were members of the Lutheran and German Reformed (Calvinist)

churches or of pietist sects (Moravians, Mennonites, Amish, and the like);

the pietists, in particular, tended to live separately, avoiding English-

speaking peoples. From the 1730s waves of Scots-Irish immigrants, numbering

perhaps 250,000 by the time of the Revolution, swelled the ranks of the non-

English group. Forming dense settlements in Pennsylvania, as well as in

New York's Hudson Valley and in the back-country South, they brought with

them the Presbyterian church, which was to become widely prominent in

American life. Many of these immigrants were indentured servants; a small

percentage were criminals, transported from the jails of England, where

they had been imprisoned for debt or for more serious crimes. The colony of

Georgia was granted in 1732 to reformers, led by James OGLETHORPE, who

envisioned it as an asylum for English debtors, as well as a buffer against

Spanish Florida. Georgia, too, was colonized by many non-English people.

The Growth of Slavery

Slaves from Africa were used in small numbers in the colonies from about

1619 (see BLACK AMERICANS; SLAVERY). After British merchants joined the

Dutch in the slave trade later in the 17th century, prices tumbled and

increasing numbers of black people were transported into the southern

colonies to be used for plantation labor. Slaves were also used in the

northern colonies, but in far fewer numbers. The survival rates as well as

birthrates tended to be high for slaves brought to the North American

mainland colonies--in contrast to those transported to the West Indies or

to South America.

The expansion of slavery was the most fateful event of the pre-

Revolutionary years. Virginia had only about 16,000 slaves in 1700; by 1770

it held more than 187,000, or almost half the population of the colony. In

low country South Carolina, with its rice and indigo plantations, only

25,000 out of a total population of 100,000 were white in 1775. Fearful

whites mounted slave patrols and exacted savage penalties upon

transgression in order to maintain black passivity.

Meanwhile, on the basis of abundant slave labor, the world of great

plantations emerged, creating sharp distinctions in wealth among whites.

Southern society was dominated by the aristocracy; however, whites of all

classes were united in their fear of blacks. Miscegenation was common,

especially where slaves were most numerous, and mulattos were regarded as

black, not white. An almost total absence of government in this sparsely

settled, rural southern environment resulted in complete license on the

part of owners in the treatment of their slaves. Paradoxically, the ideal

of liberty--of freedom from all restraints--was powerful in the southern

white mind.

Religious Trends

As transatlantic trade increased, communication between the colonies and

England became closer, and English customs and institutions exerted a

stronger influence on the Americans. The aristocracy aped London fashions,

and colonials participated in British cultural movements. The Church of

England, the established church in the southern colonies and in the four

counties in and around New York City, grew in status and influence. At the

same time, in both Britain and America, an increasingly rationalistic and

scientific outlook, born in the science of Sir Isaac NEWTON and the

philosophy of John LOCKE, made religious observance more logical and of

this world. Deism and so-called natural religion scoffed at Christianity

and the Bible as a collection of ancient superstitions.

Then from England came an upsurge of evangelical Protestantism, led by John

Wesley (the eventual founder of the Methodist church; see WESLEY family)

and George WHITEFIELD. It sought to combat the new rationalism and foster a

revival of enthusiasm in Christian faith and worship. Beginning in 1738,

with Whitefield's arrival in the colonies, a movement known as the GREAT

AWAKENING swept the colonials, gaining strength from an earlier outbreak of

revivalism in Massachusetts (1734-35) led by Jonathan EDWARDS. Intensely

democratic in spirit, the Great Awakening was the first intercolonial

cultural movement. It vastly reenergized a Puritanism that, since the mid-

1600s, had lost its vigor. All churches were electrified by its power--

either in support or in opposition. The movement also revived the earlier

Puritan notion that America was to be a "city on a hill," a special place

of God's work, to stand in sharp contrast to what was regarded as corrupt

and irreligious England.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

By the middle of the 18th century the wave of American expansion was

beginning to top the Appalachian rise and move into the valley of the Ohio.

Colonial land companies looked covetously to that frontier. The French,

foreseeing a serious threat to their fur trade with the Indians, acted

decisively. In 1749 they sent an expedition to reinforce their claim to the

Ohio Valley and subsequently established a string of forts there. The

British and the colonists were forced to respond to the move or suffer the

loss of the vast interior, long claimed by both British and French. The

French and Indian War (1754-63) that resulted became a worldwide conflict,

called the SEVEN YEARS' WAR in Europe. At its end, the British had taken

over most of France's colonial empire as well as Spanish Florida and had

become dominant in North America except for Spain's possessions west of the

Mississippi River.

Rising Tensions

A delirious pride over the victory swept the colonies and equaled that of

the British at home. Outbursts of patriotic celebration and cries of

loyalty to the crown infused the Americans. The tremendous cost of the war

itself and the huge responsibility accompanying the new possessions,

however, left Britain with an immense war debt and heavy administrative

costs. At the same time the elimination of French rule in North America

lifted the burden of fear of that power from the colonists, inducing them

to be more independent-minded. The war effort itself had contributed to a

new sense of pride and confidence in their own military prowess. In

addition, the rapid growth rate of the mid-18th century had compelled

colonial governments to become far more active than that of old,

established England. Because most male colonists possessed property and the

right to vote, the result was the emergence of a turbulent world of

democratic politics.

London authorities attempted to meet the costs of imperial administration

by levying a tax on the colonials; the STAMP ACT of 1765 required a tax on

all public documents, newspapers, notes and bonds, and almost every other

printed paper. A raging controversy that brought business practically to a

standstill erupted in the colonies. A Stamp Act Congress, a gathering of

representatives from nine colonies, met in New York in October 1765 to

issue a solemn protest. It held that the colonials possessed the same

rights and liberties as did the British at home, among which was the

principle that "no taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent,

given personally or by their representatives." In March 1766, Parliament

repealed the Stamp Act; it passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its

complete sovereignty over the colonies.

Thereafter the transatlantic controversy was rarely quiet. The colonists

regarded the standing army of about 6,000 troops maintained by London in

the colonies after 1763 with great suspicion--such a peacetime force had

never been present before. British authorities defended the force as

necessary to preserve peace on the frontier, especially after PONTIAC'S

REBELLION (1763-65), which had been launched by the brilliant Indian leader

Pontiac to expel the British from the interior and restore French rule. In

another attempt to quell Indian unrest, London established the Proclamation

Line of 1763. Set along the crest of the Appalachians, the line represented

a limit imposed on colonial movement west until a more effective Indian

program could be developed. The colonists were much angered by the

prohibition. Historical memories of the use of standing armies by European

kings to override liberty caused widespread suspicion among the colonists

that the soldiers stationed on the Line of 1763 were to be employed not

against the Indians, but against the colonials themselves should they prove

difficult to govern.

Indeed, for many years colonists had been reading the radical British

press, which argued the existence of a Tory plot in England to crush

liberty throughout the empire. Surviving from the English Civil War of the

previous century was a profound distrust of monarchy among a small fringe

of radical members of Britain's Whig party, primarily Scots and Irish and

English Dissenters--that is, Protestants who were not members of the Church

of England. As members of the minority out-groups in British life, they had

suffered many political and economic disadvantages. Radical Whigs insisted

that a corrupt network of Church of England bishops, great landlords, and

financiers had combined with the royal government to exploit the community

at large, and that--frightened of criticism--this Tory conspiracy sought to

destroy liberty and freedom.

In the cultural politics of the British Empire, American colonists were

also an out-group; they bitterly resented the disdain and derision shown

them by the metropolitan English. Furthermore, most free colonists were

either Dissenters (the Congregationalists in New England and the

Presbyterians and Baptists in New York and the South); or non-English

peoples with ancient reasons for hating the English (the Scots-Irish); or

outsiders in a British-dominated society (Germans and Dutch); or

slaveowners sharply conscious of the distaste with which they were regarded

by the British at home.

A divisive controversy racked the colonies in the mid-18th century

concerning the privileges of the Church of England. Many believed in the

existence of an Anglican plot against religious liberty. In New England it

was widely asserted that the colonial tie to immoral, affluent, Anglican-

dominated Britain was endangering the soul of America. Many southerners

also disapproved of the ostentatious plantation living that grew out of the

tobacco trade--as well as the widespread bankruptcies resulting from

dropping tobacco prices--and urged separation from Britain.

The current ideology among many colonists was that of republicanism. The

radicalism of the 18th century, it called for grounding government in the

people, giving them the vote, holding frequent elections, abolishing

established churches, and separating the powers of government to guard

against tyranny. Republicans also advocated that most offices be elective

and that government be kept simple, limited, and respectful of the rights

of citizens.

Deterioration of Imperial Ties

In this prickly atmosphere London's heavy-handedness caused angry reactions

on the part of Americans. The Quartering Act of 1765 ordered colonial

assemblies to house the standing army; to override the resulting protests

in America, London suspended the New York assembly until it capitulated. In

1767 the TOWNSHEND ACTS levied tariffs on many articles imported into the

colonies. These imports were designed to raise funds to pay wages to the

army as well as to the royal governors and judges, who had formerly been

dependent on colonial assemblies for their salaries. Nonimportation

associations immediately sprang up in the colonies to boycott British

goods. When mob attacks prevented commissioners from enforcing the revenue

laws, part of the army was placed (1768) in Boston to protect the

commissioners. This action confirmed the colonists' suspicion that the

troops were maintained in the colonies to deprive them of their liberty. In

March 1770 a group of soldiers fired into a crowd that was harassing them,

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