Colonial Worlds & New York — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · Why go at all

The short answer is pepper, and cloves, and nutmeg. Spices preserved food and disguised the taste of meat kept too long, and they came overland from south and southeast Asia through a chain of middlemen, each taking a cut. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 the chain became costlier and less reliable for western European buyers, and a sea route began to look worth the risk.

Portugal went first and went south. Under royal backing associated with Prince Henry, Portuguese captains worked down the African coast for decades; Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip in 1488, and Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. That is the sober answer to Columbus's proposal: Portugal already had a route that worked, which is partly why the Portuguese crown turned him down.

Spain's position was different again, and worse. Castile and Aragon had spent the fifteenth century at war on their own peninsula and had no foothold on the African route. For a crown shut out of the south, a western passage was not a wild idea but the only idea, which is why a proposal its own experts rejected on the geography could still get a hearing at court.

Behind the spices sat gold, and behind both sat a religious argument. The same monarchs who funded Columbus completed the conquest of Granada in 1492 and expelled Spain's Jews the same year. Expansion was understood by its backers as commerce and crusade at once, and the documents of the period say so openly rather than hiding it.

Part 2 · What made the voyages survivable

Ocean sailing needed ships that could work against the wind. The caravel was small, shallow and rigged with triangular lateen sails borrowed from Arab and Mediterranean practice, which let it sail much closer to the wind than a square rig and so beat its way home against the prevailing westerlies. A ship that can only run downwind is a one-way ship.

Finding your position was the other half. The magnetic compass, which reached Europe from China by way of the Islamic world, gave direction out of sight of land. The astrolabe and later the quadrant gave latitude by measuring the angle of the sun or the pole star. Longitude could not be measured reliably at sea for another two and a half centuries, so captains sailed to the right latitude and then ran east or west along it.

Ships also had to be provisioned for the unknown. Salt beef, hard biscuit and water in casks set a hard limit on how long a crew could stay at sea, and scurvy — which nobody yet understood — began to appear after roughly six to eight weeks without fresh food. That limit is why the distance argument in this unit's task was a matter of life and death rather than academic pedantry.

None of this was European invention from nothing. The compass is Chinese, the lateen sail Arab, the astrolabe Greek by way of the Islamic world, and the mathematics behind the tables likewise. The voyages were made possible by a long exchange of technique across Eurasia, which is a useful thing to notice before reading what the voyagers said about the people they met.

Part 3 · A claim, and who was bound by it

When a European captain went ashore, read a declaration and set up a cross or a pillar, he was performing a legal act — but only among Europeans. The ceremony told other Christian monarchs that this coast was spoken for. It had no standing with the people already living there, who were not party to it and in most cases were not present.

The framework came from Rome. Papal declarations in 1493 assigned newly encountered lands to Spain, and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 redrew the line by agreement between Spain and Portugal, dividing the globe along a meridian in the Atlantic. Two European courts partitioned continents whose inhabitants they had not met. This bundle of ideas, later called the doctrine of discovery, was still being cited by United States courts in the nineteenth century.

The practical effect in this region came later. Giovanni da Verrazzano entered New York harbour for France in 1524; Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for a Dutch company, came up the river that now carries his name in 1609. Hudson's voyage is why the Dutch claimed this valley and why the next unit is about New Netherland.

Part 4 · Reading what the explorers wrote

The accounts these men sent home are our main source for first contact, and they were written to be read by investors and monarchs. A captain reporting on a coast he hoped to be sent back to had reasons to describe it as rich, its people as friendly or as easily overcome, and his own conduct as careful. That does not make the accounts worthless, but it does tell you what to weigh.

Verrazzano's 1524 letter to the French king describes the people of the harbour, their clothing and their boats in detail, and is the earliest European description of the area. It is also a sales document addressed to the man paying for the next voyage. Both things are true at once, and the four questions from the first unit apply exactly.

Hudson's case shows how tangled the motives were. He was English, sailing in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company, under orders to find a northeast passage over Russia; he ignored them, turned west, and explored the river instead. The Dutch claim to this valley rests on an Englishman disobeying a Dutch instruction, which is a useful corrective to any neat story of national destiny.

Notice too what the sources cannot contain. No Lenape or Munsee account of watching those ships arrive survives in writing. What we have is one side's description of a two-sided meeting, which is the same problem you met with the Manhattan purchase and will meet again in every treaty in this course.

Part 1 · New England: thin soil, long winters, ships

The glaciers that covered New England stripped the soil and left the stone walls that still run through the woods there — those walls are field clearance, not decoration. With a short season and poor ground, a farm fed a family and produced a modest surplus, which meant farms stayed family-sized and holdings were divided among sons until there was not enough to divide.

So the region made its living from what it had instead. The cod fishery on the Grand Banks, timber from forests that England had long since cut down, and shipbuilding: by the eighteenth century a substantial share of British merchant tonnage was built in New England yards. Trade followed the ships, and Boston became a port before it was anything else.

That trade had a shape worth knowing. New England merchants carried fish, timber and provisions to the West Indies, sold them to sugar planters who grew nothing but cane, and brought back molasses to distil into rum. The profits of the Caribbean sugar islands — worked by enslaved people in conditions that killed them faster than anywhere on the mainland — paid for a great deal of New England's prosperity. A region with few enslaved people of its own was deeply tied to slavery's economy.

Settlement was by town. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, granted land to groups rather than individuals, and those groups laid out a village around a meeting house with fields beyond. Perhaps 20,000 people arrived in the Great Migration of the 1630s, and they came disproportionately in families rather than as single young men — which is why the population grew quickly by natural increase and why towns, schools and churches appeared so fast.

Part 2 · The Chesapeake and the South: one crop, and what it needed

Virginia nearly failed. The Jamestown settlers of 1607 looked for gold and starved in large numbers. What saved the colony was John Rolfe's tobacco in 1612 — a sweeter West Indian strain that sold in London, grew well in Chesapeake soil, and could be loaded straight onto ships from wharves on the tidal rivers.

Tobacco is demanding. It exhausts soil within a few years, so planters needed continual new land, pushing settlement inland and into conflict with the nations already there. It also needs many hands at particular moments of the year. Planters first met that with indentured servants from England; when that supply tightened, they turned to enslaved Africans, which is the subject of the next unit.

The pattern of settlement followed the crop as directly as the labour did. Tobacco is bulky and perishable, so a planter wanted his own landing on a navigable creek, which spread estates along the water rather than gathering them into villages. The Chesapeake built very few towns for more than a century; Virginia governed itself through county courts and parish churches because there was often no town to govern through.

Further south the crops changed again. Rice took hold in the Carolina lowcountry from the 1690s, grown in flooded fields using techniques and expertise that enslaved West Africans brought with them, and indigo followed. These were brutally unhealthy to work and enormously profitable, and South Carolina had a Black majority for much of the eighteenth century. By 1770 enslaved people were around 40 per cent of Virginia's population.

Part 3 · The middle colonies: the breadbasket, and everybody

Between the two sat the best farmland on the seaboard. Deep soil, a season long enough for grain, and the Hudson and Delaware to carry it out meant wheat, and the middle colonies exported so much of it that they were called the breadbasket. A wheat farm is bigger than a New England homestead and far smaller than a rice plantation, which produced a society of middling farmers rather than one of either smallholders or grandees.

They were also the most mixed. New York had been Dutch; Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn in 1681, admitted Quakers and then Germans, Scots-Irish, Welsh and Swedes in numbers. Philadelphia passed Boston to become the largest city in the colonies. Several languages and a dozen denominations lived in the same counties, which forced a practical tolerance that was not anyone's ideal so much as the price of getting along.

That mixture matters later. When thirteen colonies tried to agree on anything, the middle colonies were where disagreement was already normal, and the habits of compromise that the Constitutional Convention needed had been practised here for a century.

Part 4 · Pressure, not destiny

It is tempting to read this as climate deciding history, and that goes too far. Nothing in the weather required slavery. Rice could be grown by paid labour, as it was elsewhere; the Chesapeake used indentured Englishmen for decades before shifting. What climate and soil did was make certain crops profitable, and the profit made a particular labour system attractive to the people in a position to choose. The choosing was done by people, and they could have chosen otherwise.

You can see that the pressure was not absolute by looking at what varied anyway. Slavery existed everywhere, including New England and New York, where it was urban and domestic rather than agricultural. Quakers in Pennsylvania began arguing against it in the 1680s, in the same soil and climate as their neighbours.

The regions also knew they were different, and said so. New Englanders described Virginians as idle and grasping; Virginians thought New Englanders censorious and sharp in a bargain. Those opinions were exchanged in print well before independence was imagined, which is a useful reminder that the thirteen colonies were not a nation waiting to be born. They were separate societies with separate economies that would later have to be argued into acting together.

Hold both halves together. Geography explains why it was easier to get rich a particular way in a particular place, and it explains why three regions that began with similar settlers diverged so sharply. It does not excuse the decisions, and the people who made them had contemporaries telling them they were wrong.

Part 1 · A company, not a kingdom

Henry Hudson sailed up the river in 1609, looking for a passage to Asia and finding instead a waterway into the richest fur country in the northeast. Dutch traders followed almost at once; Fort Nassau, near present-day Albany, went up in 1614. The Dutch West India Company received its charter in 1621, the first permanent settlers arrived in 1624, and New Amsterdam was established at the tip of Manhattan in 1625.

The company's interest was the trade, and the trade ran on Haudenosaunee and Mahican hunting and carrying. That made the Dutch dependent on nations they could not dominate, and the relationship was negotiated rather than imposed — which did not prevent savage violence when the company's governors chose it, as in the killings at Pavonia in 1643 that set off years of war with the Lenape.

Slavery arrived with the company and not with the English. The Dutch West India Company brought enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam from the late 1620s and used them on public works — the wall that gives Wall Street its name, the roads, the fort. From 1644 the company granted some of them what it called half-freedom: release from bondage in exchange for an annual payment, with their children still held. New York's long history as a slaveholding city begins here, under the Dutch.

Getting farmers to come was the company's persistent problem. The Dutch Republic was the most prosperous country in Europe; few of its people wanted to emigrate. So the company recruited anyone it could — Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, English dissenters from New England, Sephardic Jews arriving in 1654 — which is how a Dutch colony came to be mostly not Dutch.

Part 2 · Patroons and the shape of the land

To get farms established, the company offered patroonships from 1629: a vast estate to anyone who would settle fifty adults on it at his own expense. Only one really worked — Rensselaerswyck, around Albany, which covered hundreds of thousands of acres under the Van Rensselaer family.

The tenants on such an estate did not own their farms. They held them on long leases, paying rent in produce and labour and owing the patroon various dues, in an arrangement closer to a European manor than to the freeholds of New England. The English kept it after 1664, and later governors granted more great estates on the same model.

A patroon's powers went beyond rent. He held the right to hold courts on his own land, to appoint local officials and to take a share of what tenants produced, which made him something close to a lord in a republic's colony. The Dutch Republic at home had no such institution, so the company exported to America an arrangement its own citizens had largely left behind.

The consequence ran long. Tenants on Hudson Valley estates were still paying rent to landlords' descendants in the nineteenth century, and the anti-rent wars of the 1840s — tenants resisting collection, sometimes violently — are a direct inheritance from a 1629 company regulation. The pattern of who owned the Hudson Valley was set before the English arrived.

Part 3 · Tolerance, of a sort

New Amsterdam's reputation for tolerance needs care. The official church was Dutch Reformed, and Peter Stuyvesant, director-general from 1647, tried hard to keep others out — he attempted to bar Jewish refugees in 1654 and moved against Quakers and Lutherans. He was overruled by his employers in Amsterdam, who pointed out that restricting worship was bad for business.

In 1657 a group of residents of Flushing, almost none of them Quakers themselves, signed a petition against Stuyvesant's ban on sheltering Quakers. The Flushing Remonstrance argued that the law of love extended to all and that the town's charter guaranteed liberty of conscience. Stuyvesant arrested several signers. The document is now read as an early American statement of religious freedom, and it is worth noticing that it came from a commercial colony and was resisted by its governor.

The comparison with Massachusetts is instructive rather than flattering to either. Massachusetts Bay banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and hanged four Quakers between 1659 and 1661 for returning after banishment. New Amsterdam jailed and expelled rather than executed, and its directors kept overruling its governor. Neither colony held that conscience was free; they differed in how far they would go, and in who had the final say.

So the tolerance was real in effect and reluctant in origin. People of many faiths lived and traded side by side because the company needed them to, not because anyone had decided that conscience was free. That is a weaker foundation than a principle, and it still produced a city where difference was ordinary.

Part 4 · 1664, and what survived it

In 1664 an English fleet appeared in the harbour. Stuyvesant wanted to fight; the inhabitants, who had an unfinished wall, little powder and no appetite for being bombarded over a trading company's charter, refused to support him. The colony surrendered without a shot and was renamed for the king's brother, the Duke of York.

The terms were generous, and that is the point. Dutch residents kept their property, their inheritance customs and their churches. Dutch remained in use in the Hudson Valley for generations; the last Dutch-language services in some congregations ran into the nineteenth century. Under English law a married woman's legal identity merged into her husband's, while Dutch practice had let her hold property and trade in her own name — and Dutch families in New York went on using prenuptial contracts to preserve that.

The handover also shows what a colony was worth to the people who ran it. The English returned Dutch holdings in Suriname and kept New Netherland in the settlement that followed, a trade both sides thought reasonable at the time: sugar was the prize and furs were not. The most valuable real estate in the modern world changed hands as the lesser half of a bargain about a sugar colony.

The rest is on the map. Breukelen became Brooklyn, Haarlem became Harlem, the Bronx carries Jonas Bronck's name and Yonkers a Dutch landholder's title. A colony that lasted forty years left the state its land pattern, its religious mixture and a good deal of its vocabulary.

Part 1 · Indentured servitude, and what it was not

Perhaps half of all Europeans who came to the mainland colonies in the seventeenth century arrived as indentured servants. The bargain was explicit: a merchant or planter paid the passage, and in exchange the servant worked without wages for a fixed term, commonly four to seven years, after which came freedom dues — often clothing, tools, sometimes land. The contract was written, registered and enforceable in court by both parties.

The conditions were often brutal. Servants could be beaten, sold on to another master, and had years added for running away or for a pregnancy. Many died before the term ended, particularly in the Chesapeake, where disease killed newcomers in appalling numbers. Nobody should read indenture as mild.

The supply of servants also explains the timing of the shift. English wages rose and population growth slowed in the later seventeenth century, so fewer people were desperate enough to sign away years of their lives, and those who did could demand better terms. At the same time the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1698 and the price of enslaved people fell. Planters facing a tightening market for one kind of labour and a cheapening market for another chose, and the law followed the choice.

But three things distinguished it absolutely from what slavery became. It ended. It was entered by contract rather than imposed by capture. And it was not inherited — the servant's children were born free. Each of those three protections was removed, by law, for Africans and their descendants over the following decades, and watching them go one at a time is the clearest way to see that the system was made rather than found.

Part 2 · Eighty years of statute

The decisive law came in 1662. Virginia's assembly declared that a child's condition followed that of the mother — in the Latin formula, *partus sequitur ventrem*. English common law had held the opposite, that status followed the father. The reversal did two things at once: it made slavery inheritable down the generations, and it meant that a child fathered by an enslaver on an enslaved woman was born his property rather than his heir.

Other gaps were closed in turn. In 1667 Virginia enacted that baptism did not confer freedom, removing the argument that a Christian could not be held as a slave and so severing conversion from liberty. Laws restricted free Black people's rights to vote, to testify, to own weapons and to employ white servants.

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 accelerated everything. Poor white settlers and Black Virginians, both enslaved and free, rebelled together against the colony's governor and burned Jamestown. The planter elite had just watched the two groups they most depended on make common cause, and the laws that followed pulled them apart — widening the privileges of poor whites while narrowing the position of all Black Virginians. Virginia's comprehensive slave code of 1705 gathered the whole structure into one statute.

Part 3 · Slavery in New York

Slavery was not a southern institution in this period; it was an American one. The Dutch West India Company brought enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in the 1620s, and under English rule the numbers grew sharply. By 1746 roughly a fifth of New York City's population was enslaved, the largest proportion of any city on the mainland outside Charleston.

The work was different from the plantation South — domestic service, dock work, carting, crafts, and farm labour on the Hudson Valley estates — and that changed the texture of it. Enslaved New Yorkers lived in their enslavers' houses in small numbers rather than in quarters of their own, which made family life harder to sustain and surveillance constant, but also put them in daily contact with one another in markets and on the waterfront.

The city's fear of what might come of that contact produced two notorious episodes. A revolt in 1712 left several white New Yorkers dead and ended in brutal executions. In 1741, after a series of fires, the city convicted itself into a panic over an alleged conspiracy and executed more than thirty people, most of them Black, on evidence that historians have regarded ever since as largely imagined.

Part 4 · Resistance that leaves fewer records

Revolt is visible because it produces trials, newspaper reports and executions. It was also rare, because the odds were hopeless and the reprisals fell on everyone nearby. Judging resistance by uprisings alone therefore measures the records rather than the people.

Most resistance was daily and deniable. Working slowly, misplacing tools, feigning illness, damaging equipment in ways that looked accidental — each cost the enslaver and carried a chance of being read as incompetence rather than defiance. Running away was common enough that newspapers carried columns of advertisements for it, and those advertisements are now among the richest sources we have, because to describe a runaway an enslaver had to describe a person: their scars, their skills, their languages, who they were likely heading toward.

Enslaved people also used the courts when any crack appeared. Freedom suits were brought in several colonies on grounds of descent from a free woman, of a promise made in a will, or of residence somewhere slavery was not lawful — the same argument the Scotts would make in Missouri two centuries later, which you will meet in chapter seven. Most failed. That they were brought at all, by people with no money and no standing, is itself the evidence.

The deepest resistance was the hardest to record. Keeping marriages and families together when the law recognised neither, holding onto names, languages and practices across generations, and raising children who knew they were owed something better — none of that generates a court record. It is visible mainly in what existed by the time anyone thought to look.

Part 1 · The power of the purse

Virginia's House of Burgesses first met in 1619, the earliest elected assembly in English America. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was a different thing — an agreement among passengers to form a civil body and obey its laws, signed because the ship had landed outside the bounds of its patent — but both became part of a habit of self-government that took root early.

In New England the town meeting handled local business directly: roads, the minister's salary, the common fields, the schoolmaster. Elsewhere counties were governed by appointed justices, and the elected assembly sat at the colonial capital. The forms varied; the fact of election did not.

The assemblies' real leverage was money. London appointed governors in the royal colonies, but the assemblies voted the revenue, and in several colonies they refused to grant a governor a permanent salary, voting it instead year by year. A governor who crossed the assembly could find himself unpaid. London tolerated this for decades largely because the colonies were profitable and distant, and intervening cost more than it was worth — an arrangement later called salutary neglect, and the thing whose end sets off the next chapter.

Part 2 · Counting who could vote

The property requirement is where the arithmetic bites. Take a town with 80 adult men. If the freehold requirement leaves 30 of them qualified, that is 37.5 per cent of adult men — well under half before anyone has considered turnout, weather or distance to the polling place.

Then count who actually voted. If 24 of those 30 turn out, participation among the eligible is high by modern standards, but 24 out of the original 80 adult men is 30 per cent. And adult men were themselves only about a quarter of the total population once women and children are counted, so the share of everyone living in the town who had any voice was in the region of one in thirteen.

The qualification also moved with the property market rather than with any principle. A requirement fixed in acres meant more men qualified as land was cleared and subdivided, and fewer as holdings consolidated; a requirement fixed in pounds let inflation quietly widen the franchise over decades. Nobody debated these shifts, because nobody had decided them. Who could vote drifted with the price of land.

The exclusions were not accidental and were defended openly. Property was held to give a man a stake and independence of judgement; a man without it was thought liable to vote as his landlord or employer told him. Women were excluded as represented by husbands or fathers. Enslaved people were property, and free Black men were barred by statute in colony after colony. Catholics and Jews faced disabilities in several colonies.

Part 3 · Religion, establishment and dissent

Most colonies had an established church supported by taxes — Congregational in most of New England, Anglican in Virginia and the South. Being outside it cost money and sometimes office, and in early Massachusetts the franchise itself was tied to church membership.

Dissent carved out exceptions, often by people who had been expelled. Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts, founded Rhode Island in 1636 with no established church at all. Maryland's Toleration Act of 1649 protected Trinitarian Christians — and prescribed death for denying the Trinity, which shows how narrow toleration could be while still being real. Pennsylvania admitted dissenters by design, and the Flushing residents of 1657 argued for conscience in a Dutch colony.

Religion also supplied the machinery of local life in ways that had nothing to do with belief. The parish recorded births and deaths, relieved the poor, and in Virginia its vestry of leading men effectively governed the neighbourhood. Attendance was compulsory in several colonies and fines were levied for missing it. For most colonists the church was the one institution they encountered every week, which is why a religious upheaval was never only religious.

Then in the 1730s and 1740s the Great Awakening swept the colonies: travelling preachers drawing enormous outdoor crowds, dividing congregations, and telling ordinary people that their own judgement about their salvation outranked their minister's. It produced new denominations, new colleges, and a habit of questioning established authority that was not confined to religion for long.

Part 4 · What the colonists meant by their rights

When colonists later claimed the rights of Englishmen, they meant something concrete that they had been exercising: trial by jury, no taxation except by a body you had a hand in electing, and an assembly that controlled the money. These were not abstractions imported from books but daily practice in Boston, Williamsburg and New York.

The John Peter Zenger trial in New York in 1735 shows the practice sharpening. Zenger printed criticism of the governor and was tried for seditious libel, where the law held that truth was no defence. His lawyer argued to the jury that a true statement could not be libel, and the jury acquitted against the judge's direction. It changed no statute, but it established something durable about what a New York jury would do.

The press those rights protected was growing fast. The colonies had roughly a dozen newspapers by 1750 and more than twice that by 1775, most of them four pages, printed weekly, and passed hand to hand in taverns and coffee houses so that each copy reached many readers. A colonial printer was also usually the postmaster, which meant news from other colonies arrived at his door. That network is how thirteen separate societies came to argue about the same grievances at the same time.

Hold this alongside the arithmetic from earlier. The same societies that practised jury trial, elected assemblies and a vigorous press also excluded most of the people living in them from any voice at all. Both are true, and the chapters ahead — a revolution fought for liberty by slaveholders, a constitution that counted some people as three-fifths of a person — make no sense unless both are held at once.