Thirteen years after John Smith and the Jamestown settlers arrived in Virginia, a group of 102 English settlers who became known as the Pilgrims landed in the New World in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. They established the Plymouth Colony along the New England coast of Cape Cod Bay at the site of present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts. Their leader was William Bradford (1590–1657), who governed the colony for most of the next thirty years and wrote the first definitive history of early English settlement in the area.
Bradford was born in the town of Austerfield, Yorkshire, England. As a young man, he joined the Separatists, an illegal Puritan group that broke away from the national Church of England. Bradford fled to Holland in 1608 with a small band of fellow religious dissidents. Holland provided a haven from persecution for fourteen years, but the congregants struggled economically. In 1620, the Pilgrims voyaged to North America, first arriving in Provincetown and then ultimately settling in Plymouth. Unlike the English settlers in Virginia, who were mostly interested in turning a profit in the lucrative tobacco trade, the first settlers in New England came to the New World primarily to practice their religion in peace.
The Pilgrims’ first winter in New England was harrowing and nearly destroyed the colony. Half the population of settlers died. The next year, the desperate colonists made contact with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, whose members helped them survive on the new continent. Their harvest festival that autumn inspired the modern holiday of Thanksgiving. The Plymouth Colony generally maintained peaceful relations with local Native Americans and avoided involvement in the Pequot War (1636–1638).
The mythology surrounding the voyage of the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving often inflates the historical importance of the Pilgrims. Unlike the Puritans guided by John Winthrop (1588–1649), who settled a few miles north of Plymouth in Boston in 1630, the Pilgrim colony never prospered and was eventually absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691, seventy-one years after its founding. The final years of Bradford’s diaries bemoan the declining fortunes of his colony.
Still, the Pilgrims and Bradford left their mark on American culture, and the story of their triumph over hardship in their first winter in Plymouth has resonated with many generations of immigrants arriving in the United States.
1. Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, drowned in Provincetown Harbor just days before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth.
2. The menu at the famous first Thanksgiving, held in the fall of 1621 for fifty-one surviving Pilgrims and about ninety Wampanoags, included turkey, deer, and corn.
3. Bradford’s famous history of early New England, Of Plimouth Plantation, was not published until 1856, nearly 200 years after his death, but it became one of the leading historical sources on early New England.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was the largest armed conflict in North America in the era before the American Revolution. The war, called the Seven Years’ War in Europe and Canada, pitted Great Britain and its thirteen colonies against France and its Native American allies. Many Americans, including Major George Washington (1732–1799), fought for Britain during the war, gaining valuable military experience.
The British eventually won the war, but at a staggering financial cost. After the war ended, Britain’s enormous war debt would force King George III (1738–1820) and Parliament to levy taxes on the colonies, a move that outraged the American colonists and helped fuel demands for independence.
The roots of the war stretched back to the early 1600s, when French fur traders began arriving in North America. Although prosperous, the Canada colony in the empire of New France—including the present-day Canadian province of Quebec—never rivaled the British colonies in population, partly because the Roman Catholic French king did not allow French Protestants to settle in the colony.
Still, the two empires fought several large, inconclusive colonial wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because their Canada colony was so small, the French frequently enlisted Native Americans as military allies.
The French and Indian War started in 1754 over a border dispute in western Pennsylvania, but the fighting quickly spread across North America and soon involved French and British armies and their allies across the globe. In the Americas, most of the battles took place in Canada, culminating in the surrender of Montreal to the British in 1760. At the end of the war in 1763, the British formally gained control of French colonies in North America under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.
The war ended the official French presence in Canada and strengthened the worldwide power of the British Empire. But it would have many unintended consequences. War had forced the British colonials to work together in response to the external threat. Instead of thirteen disparate colonies, many Americans began to think of themselves as a single, united country.
1. As a young British officer in the French and Indian War, Washington surrendered Fort Necessity to the French in 1754—the first and only time in his military career Washington would be forced to capitulate to the enemy.
2. Under the terms of the treaty, the French were allowed to retain only two tiny islands off the coast of Canada, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.
The founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683) was an early champion of religious freedom who was banished from Massachusetts for his beliefs. In Rhode Island, Williams established a colony where religious dissenters, Quakers, Baptists, and Jews were permitted to practice their religion free from government interference, a rarity in the world of the seventeenth century.
A Puritan minister born in London, Williams fled to America in 1630 to avoid persecution by the official Church of England. However, he quickly discovered that his new home of Massachusetts was no more tolerant of dissent than England. Although a believing Puritan, Williams sympathized with dissidents and supported the separation of church and state, a heretical opinion that quickly got him banished from theocratic Massachusetts.
To avoid deportation to England, Williams fled south, and with land provided by the Narragansett Indians established the city of Providence on Narragansett Bay in 1636. Other religious exiles from Massachusetts, including Anne Hutchinson, quickly joined his colony, which was formally chartered with a secular government in 1644.
Rhode Island was the first English colony in the New World to allow freedom of conscience, a concept the Founding Fathers would later enshrine in the Bill of Rights. Whereas Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, Williams welcomed them in Rhode Island. Although he stepped down from the colony’s presidency in 1657, he remained active in its affairs for the rest of his life. His famous book The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution (1644) explains his beliefs about religious freedom.
When the future of Rhode Island was threatened by King Philip’s War in 1675, Williams came out of retirement to lead the Providence militia in defending the city. After his death, he was buried in the city and is today celebrated as an early proponent of secular democracy and religious freedom.
1. Rhode Island is not actually an island. It got its name when an Italian explorer remarked that an island in Narragansett Bay looked like the Greek island of Rhodes. Williams himself gave the name Rode Island, which he said meant Isle of Roses, to what is now called Aquidneck Island, in Narragansett Bay.
2. To this day, the official name of Rhode Island is State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations—ironically, the longest official name for the smallest of the fifty US states.
3. Williams published a sequel to his book in 1652 titled The Bloudy Tenet Yet More Bloudy.
In American history, the term mercantilism refers to the set of stifling economic rules imposed on the thirteen colonies by the British government before the Revolution. Mercantilist policy was designed to squeeze every penny of revenue out of the colonies to enrich the Crown and expand the British Empire. However, by taxing and restricting American trade, mercantilism contributed to the growing discontent of many middle-class American merchants in the decades preceding the Revolution.
The British Empire of the eighteenth century included not just the thirteen North American colonies but also parts of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. From the perspective of policymakers in London, one of the primary purposes of this colonial archipelago was to generate profit. Seeking to keep wealth within the empire, the British restricted imports. At the same time, other European powers pursued similar policies in their own empires.
For colonial Americans, British mercantilism had many negative everyday consequences, including higher prices for many consumer goods. For example, the price of tea in colonial America was artificially inflated due to taxes that protected Britishcontrolled tea suppliers in India from foreign competition.
Two documents published in 1776 mounted a systemic challenge to British mercantilism. The first was the Declaration of Independence, which, among other things, denounced the Crown “for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.” The second major document was The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1723–1790). Smith, a Scottish economist who is considered the intellectual founder of capitalism, attacked mercantilism as shortsighted and ultimately ineffective and called instead for “free trade” of goods across international borders.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the impact of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, the United States, and the rest of the world would be profound. Although in practice trade remains fettered by tariffs and taxes today, the explicitly mercantilist British system of the colonial era was dismantled by the Revolution and American independence.
1. Smith popularized the word mercantilist as a scornful term to criticize British economic policies of his day.
2. For his role in creating modern capitalism, Smith’s portrait was put on the British £20 banknote in 2007.
Founded by Puritan settlers in 1630, the city of Boston quickly became the political, intellectual, and economic capital of the British Empire’s North American colonies. Perched on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, Boston was the most influential urban center in colonial America and is sometimes called the Cradle of Liberty for the role its citizenry played in fomenting the American Revolution.
By modern standards, colonial Boston was never very large. As of 1700, seventy years after its founding, the city’s population was only about 7,000; it was still under 20,000 at the time of the Revolution. However, as the capital of Massachusetts, Boston was home to many of the most important institutions of colonial America, including Harvard University and most of the biggest banks in the colonies. Additionally, Boston’s excellent port enabled the city to grow into a major center for fishing, shipbuilding, and Atlantic commerce during the eighteenth century.
The rise of Boston, however, led to tension with the city’s old guard of Puritan clergymen. To the Puritans, Boston was the anchor of a religious community, a “city on a hill” whose religious unity should be enforced by any means necessary. As late as 1692, supposed witches were hanged in Massachusetts. Puritan ministers of the early eighteenth century like Cotton Mather (1663–1728) fought unsuccessfully to preserve the city’s vanishing Puritan character.
The new class of merchants that replaced the Puritans would play a crucial role in agitating against British rule in the 1760s. Two Bostonians, John Hancock (1737–1793) and Samuel Adams (1722–1803), were the leaders of the patriot cause and masterminds of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. By the end of the Revolution, Boston remained a major commercial center but had ceded its place as the nation’s largest city to New York.
1. Boston was named after a town in Lancashire, England, where many Puritan ministers were born.
2. After the American Revolution, the old guard of Protestant Bostonians were sometimes referred to—ironically, in light of later baseball revalries—as Yankees.
3. Boston was originally referred to as Shawmut, the American Indian name for the peninsula on which it was built.
Before Noah Webster (1758–1843) published his famous dictionary in 1828, American spelling and grammar were notoriously chaotic. Even a refined American of the eighteenth century like Abigail Adams usually spelled words however she wished, with little regard for consistency. For example, in one 1774 letter hectoring her husband for not writing more often, Adams wrote, “I judg you reachd Phylidelphia last Saturday night …”
Webster, a Connecticut-born teacher and a stickler for rules, was horrified by the anarchic writing habits of his compatriots. A milestone in the maturation of American English, his dictionary and grammar for the first time imposed some discipline on the language by standardizing spelling, grammar, and capitalization.
A veteran of the American Revolution, Webster had graduated from Yale in 1778 and finished his first book, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, in 1783. The book, like all of Webster’s works, had an explicitly nationalistic purpose. Deeply patriotic, Webster believed the new nation needed a truly American language, free from the influence of British aristocrats. It was Webster who pruned the u from colour and changed the British spelling of theatre to the American (and therefore correct) spelling theater.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, but it was merely a prelude to his masterpiece, the two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language published twenty-two years later. For the dictionary—which contained 70,000 entries, including never-before-seen words like chowder and squash—Webster learned 26 languages and modernized the spelling of hundreds of words.
Twenty years of labor on the dictionary nearly bankrupted Webster, and the volume was a commercial disappointment in his lifetime. However, over the years his dictionary became recognized as the most authoritative manual of American English and has been in print in revised form ever since.
1. Not all of Webster’s changes caught on; for instance, he proposed to change the spelling of tongue to tung.
2. Webster was a fervent Federalist and edited two party newspapers in New York City, the American Minerva and the Herald.
3. Webster also had a brief political career, representing New Haven in the Connecticut state legislature for five years beginning in 1800.
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States, was written in 1814 by Maryland lawyer Francis Scott Key. Set to the melody of an English drinking song, the patriotic tune was an instant hit, and Congress officially decreed it the national anthem in 1931.
Key, a prominent attorney and amateur poet, wrote the anthem’s lyrics under peculiar circumstances. During the War of 1812 (which actually lasted into December 1814), the British attacked Washington, DC, sacking the city and burning down the White House. Next they targeted Baltimore, about forty miles north of the capital, and its imposing fortress, Fort McHenry, which guarded the city’s harbor.
Before the beginning of that battle in September 1814, Key had been selected to meet the British commander aboard his warship in Baltimore harbor to discuss the release of a prisoner of war. The British agreed to release the prisoner but insisted that Key remain at sea aboard a neutral ship behind the British fleet until after the battle to prevent him from sharing information with the Americans about British preparations.
Forced to watch the fighting from eight miles out at sea, the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” describe Key’s impressions of the battle as it unfolded. The British bombardment—“the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”—would last for twenty-five hours before the invaders gave up. As the smoke cleared, Key excitedly peered through the haze over Fort McHenry to see the red, white, and blue flag still fluttering in the morning breeze—a sign of American victory.
The British, unsuccessful in their attack on the fort, allowed Key to return to shore that day, and his poem was immediately published in local newspapers. It was reprinted nationally and for the next century would be played at many patriotic events. Major League Baseball made it the de facto national anthem by selecting the song to be played before baseball games, and Congress later made the selection official.
1. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was a distant relative of Francis Scott Key.
2. The lyrics to the original song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” begin “To Anacreon in Heav’n / Where he sat in full glee.”
3. Fort McHenry’s original flag, sewed by Baltimore seamstress Mary Pickersgill, is in the custody of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.