1.

Pre-Contact Native Americans and Early European Colonialization

Well before European encounter, the American societies' peoples had established
highly varied and sophisticated civilizations rooted in geography, ecology, and
indigenous culture. Their early ancestors had migrated over from Asia from 40,000 to
10,000 BCE across the Bering Land Bridge, creating regional peoples like the
Southwest Pueblo people who had mastered irrigations, river-lowland Mississippians
who had built massive mound cities like Cahokia, and Northeastern Iroquois
Confederacy—a politically evolved five-nation federation that influenced subsequent
democratic ideals. They had lived a form of Animism, a spirituality that conferred
spirituality on plant and animal life, river and forest, that had formied ceremonial life
and everyday conduct. At European encounter with Christopher Columbus at 1492,
there was a turning point, which initiated the Columbian Exchange—an exchange
across two continents of plants, animals, people, and disease. While the exchange
introduced European culture face to face with American crops like maize, tomato, and
tobacco—richly enriching the European diet and economies—catastrophic for Natives,
it had calamitous consequences for them. European pathogens like smallpox and
influenza swept up to 90% of the populations, weakening their societies and their
resistance severely. The vulnerability was exploited by the Spanish conquistadors,
Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, who overthrew powerful empires like Aztecs and
Incas, plundered gold and silver, and asserted dominion under the encomienda
regime, enslaving Natives as laborers on plantations and mines under the pretense of
religious conversions. Spanish brutality against the Natives is documented on
Bartolomé de Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a treatise
of 1552 condemning cruelty and dueños conversions. He was a practicing Catholic, but
his accounts helped popularize the "Black Legend" of Spain as unusually cruel and
legitimize subsequent English claims to colonization as superior. The Native Americans
were not mere helpless victims, though. Revisionist historians argue that the Native
peoples acted purposefully against colonization, negotiated with strategic alliances,
traded, and even exploited European rivalries at times. The Iroquois Confederacy, for
instance, retained relative autonomy with diplomatic ties and fur-trade alliances.
Nevertheless, the causal sequence of action initiated by European
colonization—following greed for money (Gold), religious conversion (God), and
national honor (Glory)—released unprecedented depopulation, cultural displacement,
and land loss onto the Native peoples, which facilitated the subsequent colonial
regime.

2. Colonial Society and Regions Between 1607 and 1754, thirteen individual colonies
were formed along the Atlantic seaboard by English settlers who, over time, came to
generate their own regional identities based on diversity of environment, religious
ideology, economies, and patterns of labor. New England was peopled by Puritans
envisioning a “City on a Hill,” as envisioned by John Winthrop, who founded colonies
such as Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth to pursue religious purity and communal
discipline. This highly theocratic plan resulted in close-knit society, town hall
assemblies, and early forms of democratic governance with documents such as the
Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which supplied
constitution-making precedent for self-government. The Chesapeake and Southern
colonies, which consisted of Virginia and South Carolina, were initiated with
economics- and plantation-economy-driven reasons with plantings of commodity crops
such as tobacco and rice at center stage. These colonies began with indentured
servitude, a method whereupon individuals—most characteristically poor men who were
English—volunteered to serve for a sequence of years for a free voyage to America.
When labor needs were found to be short and class tensions mounted (chronicled by
uprisings such as Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676), they turned to utilizing racial slavery,
which introduced a color-based caste society. Meanwhile, around the same periods, the
Middle Colonies, such as Pennsylvania and New York, became religiously and
ethnically diverse. Established by Quakers under William Penn, Pennsylvania
encouraged religious toleration, peaceful coexistence with Natives, and more
egalitarian arrangements for society. Everywhere, mercantile-based trade networks, a
policy of the British for regulating the commerce of the colonies for the mother
country, began to form.

Laws such as the Navigation Acts (1651–1673) restricted commerce to English markets
and ships, precipitating large-scale smuggling and pre-revolutionary resistance.
Colonial society was not rigid, however, with intellectual and religious movements
upsetting stability within the society. The First Great Awakening (1720s–1740s) is being
led by revivalists Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who challenged
established churches and a more individualized, emotional relationship with God. The
awakening brought religion to the masses, encouraged upward mobility, and made
people question authority—laying the groundwork for the political revolts that soon
followed. As enterprise opportunities expanded and society became diverse, colonies
became autonomous and gained a sense of self separate from but intertwined with
the powers of control and profit based in Britain.

3. European Rivalries and the French and Indian War

By the early 18th century, European competition for control of the Americas was on
the rise, and especially the rivalry between Britain and France, for whom imperial
ambitions clashed concerning land, trade, and alliances with Indians. The dispute
reached a peak with the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the American campaign
of the broader Seven Years' War. The war started as a dispute over Ohio River Valley
territory, where both the Britons and France had claims to rich land and valuable fur
networks of trade. A Briton mission at Fort Necessity led by a youthful George
Washington ended in failure, opening a world war that had eventually involved
colonial militiamen, Briton regulars, French regulars, and Indian allies. The Indians
were not spectators either, but allied pragmatically—most famously, the Algonquins
and Hurons with France, but the Iroquois with the Britons—depending on whom they
judged would best protect their land and commercial interests. The Britons, under
generals William Pitt, won decisive battles, and the Treaty of Paris (1763) gave them
control of French Canada and sweeping tracts of land to the east of the Mississippi
River. But victory sowed seeds of imperial overextensions and imperial discontent. To
control its new empire and finance its wars, Great Britain discarded its policy of
salutary neglect and began imposing tighter controls on economics, new bills, and
trade ordinances. The colonists, who had fought and died with their Briton
comrades-in-arms, counted on autonomy, not control. Moreover, the Britons' issuance
of the Proclamation Line of 1763, forbidding settlement to the west of the
Appalachians to preclude additional Indian troubles, outraged land-hungry settlers.
While intended to pacify the frontier, it sharpened colonial ire and restated British
agendas for imperial security at the expense of colonial autonomy. On causation, the
war transformed the balance of power in North America—France's departure, the
disappearance of bargaining leverage for the Natives, and the new British imperial
posture changed the way that the colonies envisioned themselves as a people. The
colonists came to see themselves as distinct stakeholders with rights and claims, but
Britain still viewed them as recalcitrant dependents to be ruled by a master plan. So
the war brought not peace, but the opening scene of the disintegration of the British
Empire in America.

4. Sources of Tension Among Groups

Native Peoples, Africans, and Europeans Colonial history was affected as much by
regional expansion and imperial rivalry as by recurring and shifting tensions within
the colonies along lines of cultural, social, and racial groupings. Perhaps most bloody
was that of Metacom’s War (also King Philip’s War, 1675-1678), a New England
settler-Indian war led by Wampanoag chief Metacom (also King Philip) at the head
of a coalition of Indians led by Wampanoag Indians. As settlements expanded, Indian
lands encroached on, treaties violated, and Indian autonomy eroded. Thousands of
Indians died, villages burned, and many Indians surviving subjugated or enslaved. The
war also solidified the image of the Native American as a “savage,” hardening lines of
race. So, too, did tension mark relations for the white settler with African laborers,
when indentured service yielded to permanent, hereditary bondage. Wishing class
rebellion would erupt, as it did at Bacon’s Rebellion, planters shifted from a
multi-racial labor force composed of servants toward African chattel slaves, hardening
rigid line of color. The slave trade across the Atlantic boomed, hardening racism both
into society and law. Tensions also manifested themselves within European
groups—Puritans persecuted dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and the
Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693 demonstrated how religious fear and suspicion along
lines of gender could divide a society. More than 20 people were executed on dubious
evidence, a product of generalized fear that rapid growth, claims to land, and zeal for
religiosity had engendered. Meanwhile, intolerance was exercised by few colonies.
Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 was an early experiment with limited religious
tolerance in America, as Pennsylvania Quaker society was, although tolerance was not
usually extended to non-Europeans or to non-Christians. Both legal and social
institutions evolved to establish hierarchies, but resistance did not cease. The enslaved
persons created maroon societies and resisted enslavement by sabotaging, rebelling,
and maintaining their own cultural forms. The native peoples went on negotiating
with, rebelling against, or subsisting alongside the colonists on their own terms. Amidst
all of it ferment, colonial America was clearly no melting pot of harmonious diversity
but a boiling crucible of contending identities, ambitions, and ideologies. The heritage
of those tensions—racial, religious, economic—would shape the age of revolution and
continue on into American history.

Perspective (17th-century Powhatan confederacy member):

We watched as the English built their stockade and traded for corn, but began soon
to enclose land which had been so long our shared territory. They have no
understanding of our kinship with the land—cutting it up and fencing it like cattle.
They cite their God as granting them the right to be there, but there are spirits, and
they did not discuss it with us. War was not our desire, but theirs to subdue and take
from us.

Primary Source:

Bartolomé de las Casas, “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (1552)

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/casas_destruction.p
df

Analysis:

Las Casas provides point-by-point denunciation of Spanish brutality on the Indians,