Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (10 page)

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

F
ATHER
J
ACQUES
M
ARQUETTE,
June 17, 1673, describing his travels down the Mississippi:

Behold us, then, upon this celebrated river, whose singularities I have attentively studied. The Mississippi takes its rise in several lakes in the North. Its channel is very narrow at the mouth of the Mesconsin [Wisconsin], and runs south until is affected by very high hills. Its current is slow because of its depth. . . . We met from time to time monstrous fish, which struck so violently against our canoes, that at first we took them to be large trees which threatened to upset us. We saw also a hideous monster; his head was like that of a tiger, his nose was sharp, and somewhat resembled a wildcat; his beard was long; his ears stood upright; the color of his head was gray, and his neck black. He looked upon us for some time, but as we came near him our oars frightened him away. . . . We considered that the advantage of our travels would be altogether lost to our nation if we fell into the hands of the Spaniards, from whom we could expect no other treatment than death or slavery.

Jacques Marquette (1637–75) was a French explorer and Roman Catholic missionary in North America. When he and French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet went down the Mississippi River, they were probably the first whites to explore the upper Mississippi and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin. The Indians often talked about a great river called the Mississippi, a word that meant “big river” in their language. At that time, little was known about North America, and Marquette thought the river might flow into the Pacific Ocean.

In May 1673, Marquette, Jolliet, and five other men set out in two canoes and eventually reached the Mississippi and realized that it flowed south. They decided that the river probably flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, rather than into the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, they met many friendly Indians. But when the men reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, they encountered hostile Indians. A friendly Indian told Marquette that whites lived farther south on the river. The explorers realized these people must be Spaniards who had settled along the Gulf of Mexico. Marquette and Jolliet feared that the Indians and Spaniards would attack them. Having learned the course of the river, they turned back and traveled up the Mississippi to the Illinois River and from there to the Kankakee River. They journeyed overland from the Kankakee to the Chicago River and on to Lake Michigan. Their journey had taken about five months.

In 1674, Marquette set out from near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, to establish a mission among the Kaskaskia Indians near Ottawa, Illinois. But he became ill and died in the spring of 1675.

Why is Pennsylvania the Quaker State?

While the French were making their claims, the English carved out another major colonial territory in 1682, virtually completing the quilt that would become the original thirteen colonies. This was the “holy experiment” of William Penn, one of the most fascinating characters in America’s early history. Although the colony, which was named for its founder’s father, and its chief city, Philadelphia (City of Brotherly Love), quickly became vibrant centers of commerce and culture, it was primarily founded to allow the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a place to worship, and to permit religious tolerance for all.

A highly individualistic left-wing Protestant sect founded in England by George Fox around 1650, the Friends had an impact on America far greater than their numbers would suggest. But life was never simple for them, in England or the colonies. Fox believed that no ministry or clergy was necessary for worship, and that the word of God was found in the human soul, not necessarily in the Bible, eliminating almost all vestiges of organized religion, including church buildings and formal liturgy. In a Friends meeting, members sat in silent meditation until the “inward light,” a direct spiritual communication from God, caused a believer to physically tremble or quake, the source of the group’s commonly used name. Fox also took literally the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” beginning a long tradition of Quaker pacifism.

Of course, these notions did not sit well with either the religious or the political authorities, and the Quakers were vigorously persecuted from the beginning. Three thousand English Quakers were imprisoned under Charles II. In America, where freedom to worship had been the ostensible motivating force for many colonists, every colony but Roger Williams’s Rhode Island passed strident anti-Quaker laws. The worst of these was in Puritan Massachusetts, where a number of Quakers were hanged when they returned to Boston after having been banished. Back in England, William Penn, the son of a prominent and powerful admiral, became a zealous follower of Fox in 1667, and his devotion, expressed in a tract entitled
The Sandy Foundation Shaken
, earned Penn a stint in the Tower of London. Released through his father’s influence, Penn became a trustee of the Quaker community in West Jersey and later, with an inheritance and a proprietary grant from the Duke of York (in payment of debts owed Penn’s father), Penn took possession of the territory that would become Pennsylvania.

As with other proprietary grants of colonial territory, Pennsylvania already belonged to somebody, namely the Indians who lived there. But Penn, unlike many other early founders, believed in the rights of the Indians, and on a journey to America in 1682 he negotiated a price for Pennsylvania. Like many colonial chapters, Penn’s Indian dealings are obscured by mythology. In a famous painting, Penn is depicted making a treaty under the elm tree at Shackamaxon, a treaty that didn’t exist. Part of the deal was known as the Walking Purchase, in which Penn vowed to take only as much land as a man could walk in three days. Penn took a leisurely stroll. (Penn’s successors were not as charitable. His son hired three runners to head off at a good pace, and the Indians were forced to relinquish a good bit more of their hunting grounds.)

The new colony faced few of the privations that the first generation of colonists had suffered. In the first place, the territory was already settled by the Swedes who had begun New Sweden, and food was plentiful. Besides the English Quakers, the colony attracted many Dutch and German Quakers and other sects lured by Penn’s promise of religious tolerance and the generous terms offered by Penn for buying the new colony’s extensive lands. In 1683, for instance, a group of Mennonite families from the Rhineland founded the settlement of Germantown. By 1685, the colony’s population numbered nearly 9,000.

Penn’s liberal religious views were mirrored in his political beliefs. He developed a plan for a colonial union, and his Frame of Government provided a remarkably progressive constitution for the colony, which included selection of a governor (at first, Penn himself) by ballot. By 1700, Philadelphia trailed only Boston as an American cultural center, possessing the second colonial printing press, the third colonial newspaper, the Penn Charter school, and the colony’s best hospital and charitable institutions, all a legacy of Penn’s Quaker conscience.

Penn himself fared not nearly as well. He became embroiled in political and financial feuds, even being accused of treason by William and Mary. He lost possession of the colony for a period, but regained it in 1694. Money problems landed him in debtors’ prison, and a stroke left him incapacitated. But his legacy of practical idealism marks Penn as one of America’s early heroes. And the Quaker traditions of nonviolence and social justice that he established left indelible marks on American history as Quakers stood in the forefront of such movements as Abolitionism, Prohibition, universal suffrage, and pacifism.

What were the thirteen original colonies?

With Pennsylvania quickly established, all but one of the thirteen future states were in place by the end of the seventeenth century. In order of settlement, they were as follows:

Chapter Two
Say You Want a Revolution

What was King Philip’s War?

What was Nat Bacon’s Rebellion?

Who were the witches of Salem?

What was the Great Awakening?

What was John Peter Zenger on trial for?

Who fought the French and Indian War?

What do sugar and stamps have to do with revolutions?

What was the Boston Massacre?

What was the Boston Tea Party about?

What was the First Continental Congress? Who chose its members, who were they, and what did they do?

What was “the shot heard ’round the world”?

Milestones in the American Revolution

The Patriots

The Soldiers

What was
Common Sense
?

What exactly does the Declaration of Independence say? What did Congress leave out?

Why is there a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot?

What were the Articles of Confederation?

Betsy Ross: Did she or didn’t she?

How did the colonies win the war?

What did America win?

S
omebody dumped some tea into Boston Harbor. Somebody else hung some lights in a church steeple. Paul Revere went riding around the countryside at midnight. Jefferson penned the Declaration. There were a few battles and a rough winter at Valley Forge. But George Washington kicked out the British.

That’s the sum of the impression many people keep of the American Revolution. It was not that simple or easy.

This chapter highlights some of the major events in the colonial period leading up to the War of Independence, along with the milestones in the political and military victory over England.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

An account of the battle against the Pequot Indians, from G
OVERNOR
W
ILLIAM
B
RADFORD’S
History of the Plymouth Plantation
:

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. . . .

What was King Philip’s War?

We tend to think of the colonial period after the early “starving time” as a rather calm era in which Yankee resourcefulness and the Puritan work ethic came to the fore, forging a new American character that would burst forth into nationhood in 1776.

Overlooked in this view is the genocidal campaign carried out against the Indians by the Pilgrim fathers and other colonists. The English, French, and Dutch could be as ruthlessly cruel and deadly as the worst of the conquistadores. In 1643, for instance, following the murder of a Dutch farmer, the governor of New Amsterdam ordered the massacre of the Wappinger, a friendly tribe that had come to the Dutch seeking shelter. Eighty Indians were killed in their sleep, decapitated, and their heads displayed on poles in Manhattan. A Dutch lady kicked the heads down the street. One captive was castrated, skinned alive, and forced to eat his own flesh as the Dutch governor looked on and laughed.

In New England, the first of two Indian wars was fought against the Pequot, a powerful Mohican clan treated by the English as a threat. Urged on by Boston preachers and using a trumped-up murder charge as a pretext, the Puritans declared all-out war on the Pequot in 1637.