The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675
Page 1
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Bernard Bailyn
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Bailyn, Bernard.
The barbarous years: the peopling of British North America : the conflict of civilizations, 1600–1675 / Bernard Bailyn.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi Book—T.p. verso.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96082-5
1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 2. Canada—History—To 1763 (New France) 3. Immigrants—North America—History—17th century. 4. North America—Civilization—17th century. 5. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—17th century. I. Title.
E191.B35 2012
973.2—dc23 2012034223
Cover design by Jason Booher
v3.1
FOR
LOTTE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps and Illustrations
Introduction
PART I Foundations
CHAPTER 1 The Americans
PART II Conquest: The Europeans
CHAPTER 2 Death on a Coastal Fringe
CHAPTER 3 The “Hammerours’ ” Regime
CHAPTER 4 Recruitment, Expansion, and Transformation
CHAPTER 5 “A Flood, a Flood of Bloud”
CHAPTER 6 Terra-Maria
CHAPTER 7 The Chesapeake’s New World
CHAPTER 8 The Dutch Farrago
CHAPTER 9 Carnage and Civility in a Developing Hub of Commerce
CHAPTER 10 Swedes, Finns, and the Passion of Pieter Plockhoy
CHAPTER 11 God’s Conventicle, Bradford’s Lamentation
CHAPTER 12 The New-English Sionists: Fault Lines, Diversity, and Persecution
CHAPTER 13 Abrasions, Utopians, and Holy War
CHAPTER 14 Defiance and Disarray
PART III Emergence
CHAPTER 15 The British Americans
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Large Map Images
Maps and Illustrations
MAPS
map1 Major Indian trails leading west and north from Chesapeake Bay
map2 Tsenacommacah—the center of the Powhatan chiefdom
map3 Origins of free immigrants to the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century
map4 The Netherlands
map5 Augustine Herrman’s map of Virginia and Maryland (1673)
map6 Sources of Swedish and Finnish settlers on the Delaware River
map7 Swedish and Dutch forts and trading stations on the Delaware River, 1638–55
map8 Farming regions of England, 1500–1640
map9 English origins of New England settlers: distribution by regions
map10 Expansion of New England settlements, 1650–80
ILLUSTRATIONS
2.1 George Percy, portrait by Herbert Luther Smith [Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society (1854.2)]
2.2 George Sandys, portrait by Cornelius Janssen [Courtesy of the Bodley Head, London, and the Estate of Lt.-Col. George O. Sandys]
2.3 Capt. John Smith [Courtesy of the Houghton Library—Hyde Collection, Harvard University]
3.1 Sir Thomas West, Third Lord De La Warr, portrait by Wybrandt de Geest [With kind permission from the Earl De La Warr. Photo courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation]
3.2 Sir Thomas Dale [Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund. Photo: Travis Fullerton. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts]
4.1–4.2 Recommendations for women shipped to Virginia 1620–21, from the Ferrar Papers [Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge]
5.1 The Massacre of the Settlers, engraved by Matthaeus Merian [The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Museum Purchase]
7.1 Sir William Berkeley, engraving by English school, seventeenth century [Private collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality]
7.2 Lady Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell [Courtesy of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem]
8.1 Pieter Stuyvesant, portrait attributed to Hendrick Couturier [Collection of the New-York Historical Society]
8.2 Title page of Adriaen Van Der Donck’s Description of New Netherland [Photo courtesy of Houghton Library—Hyde Collection, Harvard University]
9.1 Cornelis Steenwyck [Collection of the New-York Historical Society (1856.1)]
9.2 “Visscher View,” Nicholaes Visscher, Novi Belgii Novaeque Angliae…, Amsterdam, c. 1656. [Photo courtesy of Harvard University Map Collection]
9.3 Nieuw Amsterdam (Dutch trading couple) [Courtesy I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations]
10.1 Johan Printz, copy of a contemporary painting by an unknown artist [The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, David McNeely Stauffer Collection (1095)]
10.2 Burn-Beating, painting by Eero Järnfelt, 1893 [Courtesy of the Museum of Finnish Art Ateneum, Helsinki. Photo: The Central Art Archives/Hannu Aaltonen]
11.1 William Bradford’s Hebrew glossary [William Bradford, History of the Plimoth Plantation…(facsimile edition, London and Boston, 1896). Photo courtesy of Harvard College Library]
11.2 William Bradford’s A Dialogue or 3rd Conference [Proceedings of the Massachusettes Historical Society (Boston, 1869–70). Photo courtesy of Harvard College Library]
12.1 John Winthrop, Sr. [Courtesy American Antiquarian Society]
12.2 John Winthrop, Jr. [School of Sir Peter Lely (1618–80), oil on canvas, © Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston /The Bridgeman Art Library International. Photo courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library International]
13.1 Pequot fort at Mystic, Connecticut [Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Archives and Special Collections]
Introduction
THIS BOOK IS a major part of a project I set out some years ago, to give an account of the peopling of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Publication began with a sketch of aspects of the subject as a whole (The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction), which traced the broad outlines of the European population movements that resulted in the repeopling of the eastern borderlands of North America. That book concluded with a view of an emerging North American society that mingled barbarism and gentility, and that contained strange, at times bizarre, distensions of familiar European forms of life.
There followed a study of the movements of some ten thousand immigrants from Britain to America in the years 1773–76. The statistical base of that book, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, was made possible by the survival of a complete register of departures from the British Isles in those pre-Revolutionary years. From the register’s 350 closely written folio sheets one could reconstruct the predominant socioeconomic charact
eristics of this entire migrant population, the geographical contours of their wanderings, the new communities they formed, modeled on what they recalled of those they had left behind, and the transatlantic communication networks they created.
The present book precedes Voyagers in time. It first sketches the world of the native Americans in eastern North America before the arrival of significant numbers of Europeans, then recounts in regional narratives the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa, and concludes with a sketch of the transformed world of British North America after seventy-five years of conquest. It is an account of the fortunes of the founding generations of Europeans and their conflicted involvements with the indigenous peoples. But though contemporary population estimates and local censuses of particular groups appear throughout the book, it has no comprehensive statistical base. The data do not exist. Much is known, however, of the migrants’, and to a lesser degree the natives’, backgrounds, behavior, enterprises, and common experiences; and in the scattered sources one can find some evidence, however fragmentary, of their inner lives, their motives, beliefs, fears, and aspirations.
Of one characteristic of the immigrant population there can be no doubt. They were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland; and they moved out to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even those who came from England—the majority of the immigrant population of the founding years—fitted no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, bearing with them diverse lifestyles. They came from the commercialized, modernizing southeast, especially the great conurbation of London; from remote, isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from enterprising towns in the midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds; and they represented the entire spectrum of Christian communions, from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Anglican Episcopacy, Puritan Calvinism, Arminianism, Anabaptism, Millenarianism, and semimystical Quakerism. For England in the seventeenth century was composed of a multitude of regional and religio-ideological subcultures, which would meld and re-form in the open environment of the colonies. And the English mingled with other Europeans, clashed at times savagely with the indigenous peoples whose worlds they exploited but did not understand, and formed networks of association stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to western Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, all part of the immense socio-economic structure of Atlantic civilization.
HERBERT BUTTERFIELD REMARKED that history should be both a study and a story. What follows are studies within stories, long familiar stories and new stories of the early years of British North America—narratives of how the land was peopled and then repeopled and with what results. I have attempted to tell these stories with new details of individual lives, however obscure, and within a broad pan-Atlantic framework. At the heart of these narratives is the struggle of the Europeans, low and high born, to re-create, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before. But their experiences were not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. In this, British and Dutch America was not different from Spanish or Portuguese America. The British and Dutch overseas conquests were as brutal as those of the other conquering nations, in certain places and at certain times as genocidal. All the people involved—native Americans, Europeans, latterly Africans—struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured in what mattered. All—native Americans, Europeans, and Africans—felt themselves dragged down or threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. All sought to restore the civility they once had known.
Later generations, reading back into the past the outcome they knew, would gentrify this early passage in the peopling of British North America; but there was nothing genteel about it. It was a brutal encounter—brutal not only between the Europeans and the native peoples, despite occasional efforts at accommodation, and between Europeans and Africans, but among the Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them. In the process they created new vernacular cultures and social structures similar to but confusingly different from what had been known before, yet effective in this outback of European civilization.
My aim is to recount their experiences as simple narratives that have beginnings and developments but no inevitable outcomes; to identify individuals wherever possible, their personalities, appearances, fortunes, and passions; to reach back into their prior experiences; and to suggest the involvements of this emerging world with the larger scenes of Atlantic history.
B. B.
CHAPTER 1
The Americans
1
THEY LIVED crowded lives. Few in number by modern demographic standards, even before European diseases tore through their villages like the wrath of God, their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient, and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories, and purposes, that surrounded them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible, these vital spirits inhered in the heavens, the earth, the seas, and everything within. They drove the stars in the sky and gave life and sensibility to every bird, animal, and person that existed, and they were active within the earth’s materials—rocks, hills, lakes, and rivers—and in the wind, the cold, the heat, and the seasons.
These purposeful, powerful spiritual forces that crowded the Indians’ world required respect; care had to be taken not to offend them. One must act prudently, obey ancient precepts, learn complex prescriptions, and take advice from the gracious and sage. There were right ways and wrong ways. There were life-giving empowerments and tangles of prohibitions. When the rules were broken, people suffered.1
The earth’s generosity, on which survival depended, could be jealously withheld. Profligacy, waste, irreverence could offend. Though a community’s life depended on the success of the hunt, one might not slaughter animals recklessly. They too were protected by patron spirits, by “elder brothers,” by soul spirits of their kind capable of retribution for insults and wanton killings; they too had rights to life and, properly, only limited reasons for dying. Hunting therefore had its rituals: was in itself a form of ritual—a religious, at times a mystic, rite essential not only for survival but also for the maintenance of order and balance in the world. So the Micmacs in Nova Scotia, out of respect for their prey, strove to prevent any drop of beaver blood from falling on the ground, and when that animal’s flesh was boiled into soup, they were careful never to allow the broth to drip into the fire. They refused to eat the embryos of moose for fear of their mothers’ retribution. Bones had to be disposed of with care. To treat these remains crudely, to throw them to the dogs or toss them about randomly, would offend the animals’ kin and their presiding spirits, who would thereafter prevent their easy capture. So too the creative spirits, who watched jealously over the success of procreation, might resent the punishment of children and remove them from human hands; children were treated indulgently.2
Since the myriad, immanent spirits were everywhere alert, everywhere sensitive and reactive, the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise, and the rules of behavior had to be finely drawn. Propitiating the anima of beavers, who were greatly respected, was especially demanding, and there were significant distinctions: those that were trapped had to be treated differently from those that were otherwise killed. There were special rules for dealing with birds and animals caught in nets; the sex of captured animals mattered in their treatment. Respectful of the animals’ spirits, Penobscot hunters would not eat the first deer or moose they killed each season,
the Chipaways in the north offered up to ritual the first fish caught in a new net, and Eastern Abenaki boys had to give away their first kill, however small. And everywhere great attention had to be given to the ways that bears, patrician animals, were killed and consumed. Before or after bears were slain (it made no difference which, since in either case their spirits were alive), they had to be addressed with ceremonial honor and with apologies for the necessity of killing them; their carcasses had to be disposed of reverentially.3
In this magico-animist world taboos abounded. To obey them would minimize offenses and so help maintain stability; to violate them would lead to disaster. The possible effects of women’s “uncleanliness” and their procreative processes had to be strenuously controlled. When menstruating, Micmac women were not allowed to eat the flesh of beavers, whose spirits would be insulted, nor drink out of common kettles. Huron women, when pregnant, were excluded from the area of the hunt since they would frustrate the capture of any animals they happened to glance at. And childless women were banished when bear meat was being brought in and consumed.4
The universe in all its elements, animate and inanimate, was suffused with spiritual potency—manitou, the Algonquian peoples called it—that empowered each entity to function in its distinctive way and that embraced all of life’s diversity in an ultimately unified and comprehensive state of being. Children, Calvin Martin writes, were taught “that nothing was profane.” There were few gradations in value or levels of superiority among animate things; nor were any species truly alien or any objects completely insensate. Animals no less than men belonged to “nations,” lived in communal dwellings, conferred together sociably, danced and played together, fought in familiarly human ways, and acted in everything they did according to rules and precepts no less judicious and spiritually self-protective than those that shaped the behavior of men. The dignity of trees had to be acknowledged when they were felled, sometimes by sprinkling tobacco, which had peculiar powers, on the ground around them. The west wind—the seasons—thunder—too had purposes.5