Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (9 page)

Williams and his wife came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. After refusing an invitation to become the minister of the church in Boston because he opposed its ties to the Church of England, he became the minister of the church at nearby Salem. There, many people favored his desire to have a church that was independent of the Church of England and of the colonial government. But Williams gained a reputation as a troublemaker when he argued that the royal charter did not justify taking land that belonged to the Indians, and he declared that people should not be punished for religious differences. When threatened by authorities, he fled into the wilderness in 1636, and Narragansett Indians provided Williams with land beyond the borders of Massachusetts where he founded Providence, later the capital of Rhode Island.

Williams established a government for Providence based on the consent of the settlers and on complete freedom of religion. In 1643, American colonists organized the New England Confederation without including the Providence settlement or other settlements in Rhode Island, because of disagreement with their system of government and of religious freedom.

Williams’s most famous work,
The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution
(1644), stated his argument for the separation of church and state. He wrote it as part of a long dispute with John Cotton, the Puritan leader of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it explained his belief that the church had to be spiritually pure to prepare corrupt and fallen human beings for eternity, and that governments were for earthly purposes only. From 1654 to 1657, Williams was president of the Rhode Island colony. In 1657, he contributed to Rhode Island’s decision to provide refuge for Quakers who had been banished from other colonies, even though he disagreed with their religious teachings. Williams earned his living by farming and trading with the Indians. He went on missionary journeys among them and compiled a dictionary of their language. While he had always been a close friend of the Indians, he acted as a captain of the Providence militia and fought against the Indians during King Philip’s War (see Chapter 2, p. 49). He died in 1683.

Who started New York?

The Englishmen who were quickly populating the Atlantic seaboard from the Carolinas to New England had no monopoly on the New World. French and Dutch explorers had also been busy, and both nations were carving out separate territories in North America. The Dutch founded New Netherlands in the Hudson Valley of present-day New York State, basing their claims upon the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609.

An Englishman, Hudson was hired by a Dutch company that wanted to find the Northeast Passage, the sea route to China along the northern rim of Asia. In 1609, Hudson set off instead, aboard the
Half Moon
, for the northwest alternative. Sailing down the Atlantic coast, he entered Chesapeake Bay before making a U-turn and heading back north to explore the Hudson River as far upriver as Albany. Noting the absence of tides, he correctly assumed that this route did not lead to the Pacific. (As noted, the ill-fated Hudson had even worse luck. During another voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, Hudson’s crew mutinied in 1611 and put their captain into an open boat in Hudson Bay.)

England was flexing its new muscles in the early 1600s, but it was the Dutch who had become the true world power in maritime matters by building the world’s largest merchant marine fleet. There was literally not a place in the known world of that day in which the Dutch did not have a hand in matters. Amsterdam had become the busiest and richest city in the European world. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company was formed with the aim of taking over trade between Europe and the New World, and the Dutch soon took from the Portuguese control of the lucrative slave and sugar trades. Fort Orange, the site of present-day Albany, took hold as a fur trading outpost in 1624. Two years later, the trading village of New Amsterdam, later to be renamed New York, was established at the mouth of the Hudson. The Dutch West India Company did more than trade and set up colonies. In 1628, the Dutch admiral Piet Hein captured a Spanish treasure fleet, pirating away enough silver to provide company shareholders with a 75 percent dividend.

Did the Indians really sell Manhattan for $24?

The first Dutch settlers to arrive on the narrow, twelve-mile-long island of Manhattan didn’t bother to pay the Indians for the land they chose for their settlement. But when Peter Minuit arrived in the spring of 1624 and was chosen as leader of the settlement, he quickly met with the local Indian chiefs. Before them he set a sales agreement for all of Manhattan Island and two boxes of trade goods—probably hatchets, cloth, metal pots, and bright beads—worth sixty Dutch guilders. At the time, that equaled 2,400 English cents, which has come down in history as the famous $24 figure.

From its inception, Dutch New Amsterdam was far less pious and more rowdy than Puritan New England. As a trading outpost it attracted a different breed of settler, and unlike Boston, taverns in New Amsterdam quickly outnumbered churches. As few Dutch settlers were lured to the new colony by the promise of low pay to work on West India Company farms, the company welcomed settlers from any nation, and by 1640, at least eighteen languages were spoken in New York, a polyglot tradition that was to continue throughout the city’s history.

Must Read:
The Island at the Center of the World
by Russell Shorto.

How did New Amsterdam become New York?

The Dutch got New York cheap. The English went them one better. They simply took it for nothing. Why pay for what you can steal?

Dutch rule in America was not long-lived, but it was certainly influential in the stamp it put on the future New York. It was the Dutch who erected, as a defense against Indians, the wall in lower Manhattan from which Wall Street takes its name. And what would some Dutch burgher think of finding today’s Bowery instead of the tidy
bouweries
, or farms, that had been neatly laid out in accordance with a plan drawn up in Amsterdam? Besides the settlement on Manhattan island, the Dutch had also established villages, such as Breukelen and Haarlem. And early Dutch and Walloon (Belgian Protestant) settlers included the ancestors of the Roosevelt clan.

New Amsterdam developed far differently from the English colonies, which held out the promise of land ownership for at least some of its settlers. Promising to bring over fifty settlers to work the land, a few wealthy Dutch landholders, or
patroons
, were able to secure huge tracts along the Hudson in a system that more closely resembled medieval European feudalism than anything else, a system that continued well after the Revolution and that contributed to New York’s reputation as an aristocratic (and, during the Revolution, loyalist) stronghold.

New Amsterdam became New York in one of the only truly bloodless battles in American history. As the two principal competing nations of the early seventeenth century, England and Holland sporadically came to war, and when Charles II reclaimed the throne in 1661 after the period of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, he asserted English rights to North America. Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York, the largest and richest territorial grant ever made by an English monarch. It included all of present New York, the entire region from the Connecticut to the Delaware rivers, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the present state of Maine. In 1664, four English frigates carrying 1,000 soldiers sailed into New York Harbor. The Dutch and other settlers there, unhappy with the administration of the West India Company, gladly accepted English terms despite Peter Stuyvesant’s blustery call to resist. Without a shot fired, New Amsterdam became New York.

The Duke of York in turn generously created a new colony when he split off two large tracts of land and gave one each to two friends, Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, an area that would become New Jersey. Also gained as part of this annexation was a settlement known as New Sweden. Established in 1638 by Peter Minuit (dismissed earlier as governor of New Amsterdam and now in Swedish employ), and centered on the site of Wilmington, Delaware, New Sweden had fallen to the Dutch under Stuyvesant in 1655. (Although this Swedish colony had little lasting impact on American history, the Swedes did make one enormous contribution. They brought with them the log cabin, the construction destined to become the chief form of pioneer housing in the spreading American frontier of the eighteenth century.)

The English exercised a surprisingly tolerant hands-off policy in ruling the former New Amsterdam. Life as it had been under Dutch rule continued for many years.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

J
ACQUES
C
ARTIER
(1491–1557), French explorer, on the Hurons:

The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call Cudouagny, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells that what the weather will be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars. . . . After they had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that Cudouagny was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven, Who gives everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell. . . .

When did the French reach the New World?

French attempts to gain a piece of the riches of the New World began in earnest with Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1534, another expedition in the ongoing search for a China route. Cartier’s explorations took him to Newfoundland, discovered by Cabot almost forty years earlier, and up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sailing as far as the Huron Indian villages of Stadacona (modern Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal). In 1541, Cartier’s attempt to settle a colony failed and he returned to France. In 1564, during France’s religious civil wars, a Huguenot colony was established on the coast of Florida near present-day Jacksonville. The colony, Fort Caroline, was completely destroyed and its inhabitants massacred in 1565 by the Spanish under the command of Admiral Pedro Menéndez, the founder of Saint Augustine, Florida. The slaughter of the French Protestants signaled the end of France’s attempts to settle the future United States and they shifted their attention north.

While cod fishermen from France, as well as England and Portugal, continued to make temporary settlements around Newfoundland, the French also began some early fur trading with Indians that would provide France with the real economic impetus for its colonizing efforts. In 1600, Tadoussac, a French trading post on the St. Lawrence, was founded.

The key mover in the French era of exploration was Samuel de Champlain, who founded Quebec in 1608, the year after Jamestown was settled. Champlain made friends with the Algonquian and Huron Indians living nearby and began to trade with them for furs. The two tribes also wanted French help in wars against their main enemy, the powerful Iroquois Indians. In 1609, Champlain and two other French fur traders helped their Indian friends defeat the Iroquois in battle. After this battle, the Iroquois were also enemies of the French. The Huron lived in an area the French called Huronia. Champlain persuaded the Huron to allow Roman Catholic missionaries to work among them and introduce them to Christianity. The missionaries, especially the Jesuit order, explored much of what is now southern Ontario.

Like the Dutch in New Amsterdam, the French explorers who started New France were primarily interested in trading, as opposed to the English settlers of New England and Virginia, who were planting farms and permanent communities.

An inevitable head-to-head confrontation between England and France, already the two great European powers, over sovereignty in the New World existed almost from the beginning of the colonial period. A Scots expedition took a French fort in Acadia, and it was renamed Nova Scotia (New Scotland). Then, in 1629, an English pirate briefly captured Quebec. While New England and the other English colonies were taking in thousands of new settlers during the massive immigration of the mid-seventeenth century, the French were slow to build a colonial presence, and settlers were slow to arrive in New France. Worse for France than the threat of English attack were the Iroquois, the powerful confederacy of five tribes of Indians in New York, and the best organized and strongest tribal grouping in North America at the time. The Iroquois were sworn enemies of France’s Indian trading partners, the Huron and Algonquian Indians, and a long series of devastating wars with the Iroquois preoccupied the French during much of their early colonial period.

But if the French failed as colony builders, they excelled as explorers. Led by the
coureurs de bois
, the young French trappers and traders, Frenchmen were expanding their reach into the North American heartland. One of these, Medard Chouart, mapped the Lake Superior–Hudson Bay region and then sold the information to the English, who formed the Hudson Bay Company to exploit the knowledge. An even greater quest came in 1673, when Louis Jolliet and the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette set out from Lake Michigan and eventually reached the Mississippi, letting the current carry them down into the American South as far as the Arkansas River. Based on these expeditions, the French laid a claim in 1671 to all of western North America in the name of King Louis XIV, the Sun King, a claim reexerted in 1682 by La Salle, a young French nobleman who named the province Louisiana in honor of his king. From the outset, the English would contest this claim. The stage was set for an epic contest over a very substantial prize—all of North America. La Salle, like Hudson, was another of history’s glorious losers. In 1684, at the head of another expedition, La Salle mistook the entrance to Matagorda Bay, in Texas, for the mouth of the Mississippi. He spent two years in a vain search for the great river. Tired of the hardships they were forced to endure, La Salle’s men mutinied and murdered him in 1687.