What is an American What makes an American American

1
What is an American? What makes an American
American?

• Isolation from Europe
• Hunger
• loneliness
• Crossing usually a one way ticket
• Americans are constantly evolving
• Changing as the nation changes
• What things make an American?

2
SPANISH SETTLEMENT

• Missions were established by Franciscan friars,
  backed by soldiers and royal financial support,
  among
• Pueblo Indians of the upper reaches of the Rio
  Grande
• northern Florida
• coastal regions of present-day Georgia and South
  Carolina
• GoalChristianize the Indians
• Friars baptized thousands of Indians and taught
  them
• how to use European tools
• grow European crops,
• raise domesticated animals
• Expected the Indians, for little or no
  compensation,
• to build maintain the missions
• till the fields
• serve the needs of the friars
• u

3
What made life in the Chesapeake so precarious?

• Southern part of English North America comprised
  three regions
• tidewater Virginia and Maryland Chesapeake
  Colonies
• low country the Carolinas (and eventually
  Georgia)
• back country a vast territory that extended
  from the fall line of the foothills of the
  Appalachians to the farthest point of western
  settlement

• High death rate due to hot moist climate
• of the 9000 colonists who came to Virginia nearly
  half died leaving only 5,000 by the 1630s
• Most newcomers had period of extreme sickness
  upon arrival
• Minimum of 2-3 fevers with ague pain, fever,
  extreme sweating
• Dry summers the worst
• Flow of the James River slowed
• Dense salt water came farther inland
• Blocked cleaner river water colonists drank
• Resulted in dysentery the bloody flux many
  died, or malaria, typhoid fever, etc.
• Average life for a white male 20 years old was
  another 25 years.
• Result
• Frequent remarriage
• Families with children from several different
  marriages
• Women easily found husbands (men outnumbered
  women three to two)
• Many men had to spend their lives alone or marry
  Indian women

4
The Lure of the Land

• Life centered on agriculture
• Grants of land were relied upon to attract
  settlers
• Labor to work land was vital
• Headright system Begun to pay colonists who had
  agreed to work for London company for 7 years in
  return for a share of profit.
• There was no profit, so they were given land.
  Surviving colonists given 100 acres.
• any head entering the colony to take 50 acres
  of unused land which they claimed by marking its
  boundaries, planting a crop and building a home
• May have to pay small annual payment, quitrent,
  to grantor ( a tax)
• Way for proprietors to have income
• Usually resented and hard to collect
• INDENTURED SERVANTS
• When could not afford passage came as indentured
  servants
• agreed to work for a stated period (usually about
  5 years) in return for their passage
• during indenture subject to strict control (women
  could not marry and time lost due to pregnancy
  was added to total time)
• received nothing beyond their keep (headright
  went to person who paid their passage)
• If survived, servant was free and usually
  entitled to an outfit (a suit of clothes, some
  farm tools, seed, perhaps a gun) and, in some
  colonies, land

5
Indentured Servants

• Over half the colonists came as servants and most
  servants became landowners
• Best land belonged to large planters
• Low tobacco prices and high local taxes kept most
  others in poverty
• Squatters people living on land they do not own
  and without permission
• Virginia society on the edge of class war by the
  1670s due to conflict between squatters (often
  former servants) and wealthy land owners
• squatters rights privilege of buying land
  without paying for improvements they had made.
• Indentured Servants costing too much
• Money and social class conflicts (wealthy land
  owners vs. indentured servants)
• Needed a new solution.

6
SOLVING THE LABOR SHORTAGE SLAVERY

• First Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619
  aboard a Dutch shipunknown how they were treated
• By 1640, some Africans were slaves
• By the 1660s local statutes had firmly
  established the institution of slavery in
  Virginia and Maryland
• Why treat as slaves?
• Heathens
• Skin colorblackness equated with dirt, the
  Devil, danger and death
• Spanish practices
• GROWTH OF SLAVERY
• New Netherland
• 1626 there were 11 slaves
• 1664 there were 700 slaves in a population of
  8000
• Virginia
• 1650 only 300 blacks
• As late as 1670 no more than 2,000
• White servants were more highly prized
• not as alien
• not as expensive

7
GROWTH OF SLAVERY

• 1670s indentured servants decreased
• improving conditions in England
• competition from other colonies
• 1672 Royal African Company made slaves more
  readily available
• 1689 war in Europe cut off the market for
  tobacco, causing prices to fall and making
  immigration less attractive
• Slavery became the permanent solution to the
  chronic labor shortage
• Advantage slaves and their offspring (who
  inherited their slave status from their mother)
  were forever barred from competing with whites
  for land or political power
• By 1700 nearly 30,000 slaves lived in English
  colonies

8
PROSPERITY IN A PIPE TOBACCO

• What does a society have to have to grow and
  prosper?
• Commodities something to sell or trade!

• Colonists had to find a market for products in
  the Old World in order to have the money to buy
  manufactured goods
• Answer was tobacco (originally brought from the
  West Indies by Spanish)
• English were originally leery of tobacco, which
  clearly contained some sort of habit forming drug
• By 1617, smokers drove the price of a pound of
  tobacco to 5 shillings
• At this point, the colonists were granted a
  monopoly and heavily encouraged

9
Tobacco

• Required only semi-cleared land and a hoe but
  lots of human labor
• A single laborer working two or three acres could
  produce as much as 1,200 pounds of cured tobacco
  which would result in a 200 profit in a good
  year
• As a result production went from 2,500 pounds in
  1616 to 30 million pounds by the late 17th
  century (400 pounds per capita)
• Increase in tobacco production led to a drastic
  drop in tobacco prices
• Small farmers found it increasingly difficult to
  make a living
• Wealthy were accumulating more land which allowed
  them to maintain high yields by permitting some
  fields to lie fallow
• The only option for small farmers was new
  landIndian land

10
Bacons Rebellion

• In 1676 conflict
• Governor William Berkeley and his Green Spring
  faction vs. western planters led by Nathaniel
  Bacon.
• Planters wanted approval to attack nearby
  Indians Governor refused
• Bacon had raised an army of 500 men
• Declared a traitor by Berkeley, Bacon and his
  followers murdered some peaceful Indians, marched
  on Jamestown and forced Berkeley to give him
  permission to kill more Indians

• In September, Bacon returned to Jamestown and
  burned it to the ground causing Berkeley to flee
• Bacon died of dysentery and a British fleet
  arrived to restore order
• RESULT Virginia society became wedded to slavery
  as an answer to its labor problemsclass
  divisions traded for racial ones
• 20 slaves land wealth

11
The Carolinas

• English and, after 1700, Scots-Irish settlers of
  the tidewater parts of Carolina also practiced
  agriculture
• tobacco in the future North Carolina
• rice (replacing furs and cereals in 1696) in what
  would become South Carolina
• Rice became a major cash crop
• 65 million tons were produced by eve of
  Revolution
• In the 1740s Eliza Lucas introduced indigo to
  South Carolina (did not compete for either land
  or labor with rice)
• Southern colonists bought manufactured goods by
  producing tobacco, rice, indigo, furs, and
  forest products such as lumber, tar, and resin
• Factors, agents in England and Scotland, managed
  the sale of crops, bought the required
  manufactures, and extended credit
• Small scale manufacturing did not emerge in South
  as it did in the North
• Retarded development of urban life

12
SOUTHERN SLAVERY

• Slave labor predominated on rice plantations of
  South Carolina
• 1730 3 out of every 10 people south of
  Pennsylvania was black
• In South Carolina blacks outnumbered whites 2 to
  1
• Slave regulations increased in severity as size
  of the black population increased
• Blacks had no civil rights under the codes for
  minor offenses, whippings were common
• for serious crimes blacks could be hanged or
  burned to death
• for sexual offenses or constant running away they
  could be castrated
• Acculturated slaves, those that could speak
  English, use European tools, perhaps practice a
  trade, were more valuable but also more likely to
  runaway or resist
• Field hands expressed dissatisfaction by
  pilferage, petty sabotage, laziness or feigned
  stupidity
• Slave rebellions were rare in the American South
  though fear of them was high