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Transcript
Welcome back, everyone! First, thank you so much for your patience the past few weeks. And without further ado, it’s time to cover the war that changed America.
Introduction
Today, to start our series, I thought I’d start with an overview of what exactly English America looked like on the eve of civil war, 1642. Since we haven’t covered some colonies in months, and since this is the first multi-colony series, and because I suspect some people will be interested in this topic who weren’t interested in previous ones, I thought it was a good idea to give a quick recap, and tie up some loose ends. Plus, it’ll be convenient when we reach the end of the series to be able to look back and see just how much America changes over the course of the war. And, finally, it’s the briefest of introductions to non-future-US colonies whose histories I’ll also be discussing a little bit over the course of this series, because I really think it’s more effective to treat the Americas as a theater of the war, giving a little more context of the various implications of the war affected colonies, because so much of this era is under-documented. And also because it’s completely fascinating.
But, without further expounding on reasons for my content choices, let’s get to the content, itself.
When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, England had about 51,000 people spread across colonies in North America and the Caribbean. There’s no way to get a really precise figure, but that’s a scholarly estimation. And arbitrarily going from North to South, our first colony is Newfoundland. Snuggled among the hilly, rocky shores of modern Canada, there had been a multi-national European presence on Newfoundland since the 16th Century, mostly seasonal fishermen. In terms of the English presence on the Island, most of the ships and their captains were from the West Country, hiring crews on a yearly basis, and filling as many merchant ships as possible with cod before returning for the winter. Sometimes, crews would leave members behind at fledgling settlements over winter so they had more room to transport fish. And, by 1642, there were a small handful of permanent settlements, most notably Ferryland, where colonists built, owned and maintained boats, maintained and protected shore facilities, continued to catch fish, and cut wood, trap furs, and provide services and supplies to the migratory fishing crews. In summer, Newfoundland served as a base for fishing activities as far south as Cape Cod, but in winter there was only the tiniest of populations. By 1642, there were about 200 people living there full time, plus whatever crews stayed behind every year. George Calvert, First Lord Baltimore’s first colony had been the Avalon Colony in Newfoundland, but by 1637, the King had, rightfully or wrongfully, deemed Avalon abandoned and given the proprietorship to the Earls of Pembroke and Holland, and David Kirke, who was now governor of the colony, and took leadership of its future development. He allowed the French and Dutch to fish there with a 5% tax, and organized English activities around his own plans and ventures. His goal was essentially to give order to what had previously been a thoroughly informal, but reasonably effective, society. As you can imagine, this was resented by the more established fishermen, but it’s also worth noting that ideologically, politically and on matters of religion, Kirke and his predecessors were closely aligned.
Just south of Newfoundland were a series of villages and outposts in the area we now call Maine. Similarly remote, Maine had a handful of English fishing and fur trading outposts along the coast, with a combined 500 English settlers. And, similarly to Newfoundland, it had an international presence, though Maine’s fur traders had more contentious relationships because of the amount of money involved. And the biggest conflict was in French Acadia between rival French traders, Charles la Tour, and Charles d’Aulnay. Its Lord Proprietor was Ferdinando Gorges, who remained hostile to Massachusetts claims in New England, and it was governed by his nephew, Thomas. Now, while Ferdinando was and continued to be a steadfast Royalist, his nephew was not. Thomas was a puritan, and had even spent a fair amount of time in Boston. But, on the whole, the Maine population shared their Proprietor’s beliefs and sympathies.
And moving South, we reach the region which, for convenience’s sake, I’ll be referring to as New England. Technically, Maine is a part of New England, but in the 1640s, it was separated from the ideologically intertwined and largely unified colonies south of it. They shared a common goal and history that Maine simply didn’t, despite their governor’s sympathy for it, so from now on, when we refer to New England, we’ll be talking about Massachusetts Bay, New Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, Rhode Island, and Fort Saybrook. Unlike the small, informal settlements to the north, if you lived in New England, you lived in a town. In fact, you probably lived in a town with people who had moved over from England with you, as the vast majority of emigration to New England involved pastors taking their congregations with them. In fact, with the exception of Plymouth and Rhode Island, lone Puritans weren’t even allowed to set out on their own in New England. The focus was on community, and inhabitants embraced a variant of Puritanism which advocated for community liberty, with little or no emphasis on individual liberty.
By far the largest of these New England colonies was the colony of Massachusetts Bay, which was actually by this point by far the largest colony in English America, with about 13,000 people. It was the original Puritan colony in 1630, envisioned and advertised as a model Puritan society who could use their example and their prayers to further the cause of reformation in England. And, helping it achieve this was the fact that it was simultaneously legally recognized, and essentially self-governing through a little bit of strategic wording on its charter. The king hadn’t noticed the anomaly before they’d taken their charter to New England, where they essentially used it as the foundation for their own government system.
Of New England colonies, Massachusetts was the second strictest, but only the second because it did have to accommodate the sheer quantity of people who’d moved there. As we’ve seen, and as we will see, Puritanism wasn’t a totally unified ideology. So when people with slightly different views came to Massachusetts, it stretched its notions of propriety ever-so-slightly to accommodate that. They’d still ended up in battles, and exiling plenty of heretics, while malcontents moved to and founded other New England colonies, but there were definitely people with differences there, united for a common cause. Though relatively affluent, Massachusetts was in the middle of an economic downturn in 1642, because a lot of its economy had been built on selling things like cattle to newcomers. When the political situation started to look more hopeful for puritans in England, immigration had essentially stopped. Massachusetts had built the foundation of trade and industry, but none of this was developed enough to actually sustain the economy.
Bordering Massachusetts Bay was New England’s oldest colony, Plymouth. Plymouth’s story, as we all know, started in 1620 with the Pilgrims, a group of Brownists, and in addition to their core congregation, they had a significant group of people who they referred to as Strangers who embraced a wide variety of beliefs, from more standard Puritanism, to more radical Brownism, to Anglicanism. Brownism was essentially a type of puritanism, but one which advocated separation from the Church of England instead of activism within it. But by 1642, Plymouth was a very different place than it had originally been. In the years since John Robinson’s death, and the foundation of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth had started to adhere to a more standard variation of the Puritan model. Most of the strangers had left, some to Massachusetts, a few to Newfoundland, but most to England or Virginia. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims had to navigate life in what was no longer a wilderness, and without the guidance of their deeply important pastor. Its original history, in which it had had to accommodate people of different beliefs, and Robinson’s lingering influence had made it a place that was much more amenable to individual migration, and much more tolerant of a variety of beliefs and behaviors so long as they stayed within the Calvinist framework. So, the majority of Plymouth’s population was now comprised of people seeking more tolerance than other New England colonies were willing to provide, though without being the radicals who came to comprise Rhode Island. Puritans, but of a mellower stripe.
And there were enough of these people that Plymouth had now expanded to include four towns totalling about 2,500 people, but Plymouth was still a relatively poor colony, less affluent than any other New England colony except parts of Rhode Island. Its land was infertile, its harbor was inferior, and its early debt continued to linger. Not to mention that the Pilgrims had never been particularly affluent, either in England or in Leiden. And the fur trading posts which had been supposed to support them economically had been taken, either by the French or sadly Puritan newcomers. Their main economic asset was now the ability to sell cattle and land to newcomers, because Poconoquet/Wampanoag sachem Massasoit had agreed only to sell land to them, enabling them to buy land cheap and sell it at up to a 500% markup. And as cattle and land became the economic assets, even the original Brownist congregation started to disperse, leading William Bradford to lament that they were choosing prosperity over their original vision. By 1642, they were even considering moving their capital to a new town at a better harbor, even though this was still on land reserved for the Indians, and the location was too small to accommodate Plymouth’s whole congregation, meaning even more decentralization. It was on the verge of, and would soon complete, the full transition from Brownist congregation to Puritan colony.
Skipping Rhode Island for a minute, the next colony west of Plymouth was Connecticut, which had been founded by ministers, most notably Thomas Hooker, whose vision of Puritan society clashed with that of Massachusetts Bay enough that they’d moved to a place out of its control. Some of their differences were theological, and some were political, but in short, the ministers and congregations who formed the Connecticut River Towns wanted a less severe society than that developing in Massachusetts. They were less strict in terms of religion, and wanted a more democratic government, with codified laws, the right for non-Church members to vote, and less legal discretion for judges and magistrates, who they viewed as a source of arbitrary power. In fact, it was the only Puritan colony apart from Plymouth to allow non-Church members to vote. Connecticut’s milder citizens came largely from the West Country, one of the most steadfastly Anglican and Royalist regions of England, where puritans of any sort were a distinct minority, and a place which supplied far more people to Virginia than it did New England. Its governor was John Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop Jr.
These factors, combined with good land and harbors, made Connecticut one of the more affluent colonies in the region. But, it had no charter, meaning no official state recognition or permission to settle. It was what could most accurately be referred to as a squatter colony, deriving its supposed legitimacy from Indian land purchases and informal agreements with the Englishmen who held the patents for the land. It was totally self governing, and totally illegitimate in its legal standing. But, it valued its independence to the point that it had refused to join multiple attempted New England Confederations which it feared would subordinate it to Massachusetts.
Next is Saybrook, but Saybrook was neither a flourishing nor a contentious or eventful colony apart from its role in the Pequot War, and by 1644, it would sell itself to Connecticut in a peaceful and mutually beneficial transaction. How dull, let’s move on.
And moving on brings us to New Haven, which was in a similar position to Connecticut economically, and also legally in that it had no charter. And, similarly to Connecticut, its relatively small number of colonists had the same area of origin within England, but for New Haven, this was London. And in contrast to Connecticut which was particularly lenient, New Haven was extraordinarily strict. In fact, its entire religious and political system was essentially based on the principle of taking what John Cotton said, and applying it as strictly as possible. This wasn’t possible in Massachusetts, but with a population of only about 800 people, it was doable in New Haven. Its leading minister, John Davenport, was most ideologically and theologically aligned with Hugh Peter, and in fact was one of Peters’ followers. And in fact, it had been Peters who suggested the location of Quinnipiack to Davenport and governor Theophilus Eaton. So not only did they only allow Church members to vote, that policy was written into the unchangeable group of laws its government was based on. It was a foundational principle of New Haven. Adding its small population to its strict Church and government policies, multiple towns didn’t even have 12 people qualified for full, voting citizenship. And because of this, they didn’t use juries at all, allowing magistrates to decide the bigger cases with complete discretion, and deputies decided smaller cases the same way. There was only one way in which New Haven was less strict than other colonies, and that’s that neither it nor Plymouth had sumptory laws regarding extravagant clothing. One observer said the reason for this was simple. Plymouth was too poor for that to be an issue, and New Haven was too rich.
And they were rich. With a strong, London mercantile tradition, they had left Massachusetts for two reasons, a stricter society, and more economic opportunity, dreaming of building up intercolonial and transatlantic commerce. And in addition to a particularly nice harbor, they had found fertile land, and a strategic location for beaver trading and whaling.
And that brings us to the region which, for clarity, brevity and sanity’s sake, I will be calling Rhode Island. More more accurately dubbed a pariah colony than a puritan one, this region consisted of four towns of New England outcasts, with a combined population of about 600. It wasn’t exactly a colony, and like most of the colonies we’ve discussed it had no charter in 1642. Each town was a distinct, self-governing community, and by choice or by rejection, they were the most independent colony in a North America which was already pretty autonomous. Even the least radical of its citizens were there because they’d in some way rejected the established order, and had some level of distrust of power, and anti-authoritarianism. These were the people who rejected Puritan legalism every bit as much as they rejected Anglican formalism. They were anabaptists, antinomians, and would soon be baptists and quakers – all sects which emphasized the Holy Spirit, erring on the side of too little structure rather than too much. There’s actually an interesting callback to be made here, as the person who had introduced these ideas into English society had been John Smyth, the pastor who had traveled to the Netherlands with John Robinson and the Pilgrims, but split once they’d gotten there because Robinson was more traditional, and Smyth was more radical. So while Puritan New England was hard at work building a theocracy, Rhode Island was full of people who were willing to leave everything behind, and even live in shocking poverty, to grow in a personal relationship with God. And politically, they were also unorthodox, subordinating all executive and judicial power to the legislature, and reserving the most important powers to the towns instead of the central authorities, including the power to initiate legislation.
Two of these towns, Providence and Shawomet were on the Mainland, with their main figure obviously being Roger Williams. These towns were religiously radical, and thoroughly impoverished. They had no artisans, and lived in clumsily built wooden houses along a rough main street. They raised pigs and goats, which formed the foundation of their diet along with game, fish and corn. It was just a very rough and poor existence, with only the barest of essentials for survival.
And on Aquidneck or Rhode Island, though, existed Portsmouth and Newport, which had some of the finest estates of New England, with beautiful brick houses nestled in rolling hills which grew every type of food imaginable. Horses, cattle, sheep, barley, wheat, oats, rye and barley, hemp, flax, apples cheese, butter, honey, venison, fowl, fish, wild berries and nuts. They had multiple artisans, and a wealthy, educated citizenry. They also had a budding shipbuilding industry that was already allowing them to trade with Barbados. Led primarily by William Coddington, they were less religiously radical than the Mainlanders, mostly people banished for their support of Anne Hutchinson, Henry Vane and John Wheelwright in the Antinomian Controversy. And, they were interested in a closer relationship with the other New England colonies, though they were told they would not be accepted as an independent colony and would have to be absorbed by Massachusetts or Connecticut first. So Rhode Island really was an extremely unique, and extremely disliked, part of New England.
New England out of the way, let’s go down to the oldest region of English America, and also the most ideologically opposed to New England, the Chesapeake. It’s kind of funny, but within the bounds of the future US were the region which would be most loyal to the king, and that which would be most loyal to Parliament. The first colony to proclaim Parliament, and the last colony to proclaim Charles II, and the last colony to proclaim Parliament, and the one colony which installed its restoration government before Charles II even reached England.
The biggest, oldest and most Royalist colony in the Chesapeake was, of course, Virginia, with a population of about 10,000, give or take. It was also America’s only crown colony, meaning the only one under direct royal control instead of that of a joint stock company or lord proprietor. Unlike the towns of New England, Virginia was characterized by widely dispersed tobacco farms, many of which were left vacant by the abandonment or death of their owners. It was a place where even the wealthiest lived poorer and rougher than many of the poor in England, and where illness reduced life expectancy to the lowest in the English speaking world. There are dozens of statistics to illustrate this, but one of the ones that sticks with me is that 75% of children lost at least one parent by the time they reached adulthood, and marriages only lasted an average of 7 years before one partner died. In this rough environment, alcohol abuse was an issue, but theft really wasn’t. Its population was dispersed enough that even if it had wanted to impose severe behavioral restrictions like New England, those laws would have been impossible to enforce. It was a relationship-based society instead of a community-based one. And this really extended throughout the Chesapeake, but it was first, and perhaps most pronounced in Virginia.
Now, Virginia was predominantly an Anglican colony, and while there was a fair amount of Puritan thought, little of it was as extreme as that found in Massachusetts. For lots of people who might have called themselves puritans outside of New England, puritanism really meant adding puritan-style services, sermons and spontaneous prayer to the use of the Church of England Prayer Book and sacraments. Most of the strict puritan thought was concentrated at the colony’s Northern border, where John West and John Utie had settled. And those were the only Virginians who really supported Parliament.
Economically, it had always struggled, but now it was allowed to trade with the Dutch, and the Dutch paid about 20x as much for tobacco as English merchants did. This had finally enabled it to become prosperous enough that its governor, Berkeley, could successfully administer policies requiring that people build brick houses, and grow a variety of food crops to create a well-rounded diet. So now they had apples, peaches, livestock, breweries, herbs like thyme, marjoram and rosemary growing in abundance, for the first time ever. Berkeley also started requiring that ships trading in the colony who sold alcohol there, bring in 10x the value in necessary goods. For the first time in its 35 year history, Virginia was something better than hell on earth, a slaughterhouse, a more efficient way of killing people. And that gets to the heart of its royalism.
Virginia’s greatest fear was that a new joint stock company would be put over it. It was absolutely desperate to remain a crown colony. There were some people who wanted to reconstitute the Virginia Company, and Parliament was willing to entertain those ideas, but the king had maintained Virginia as a royal colony through the duration of his reign. And their experience with the Virginia Company had been horrific. Its second greatest fear was losing its legislature. King Charles had been the only leader Virginia ever had who had respected both of those things, or respected the colonists at all. There were criticisms of the King in Virginia, for instance Thomas Powell remarked that “Kings in former times went to war, but this king is fitten for a lady’s lap,” but the criticisms were widely rejected, and even where accepted, they paled in comparison to the loyalty Virginia felt to the king. And when William Berkeley came, a man who himself was deeply loyal to the king, he quickly became the best governor Virginia had ever had. The King had listened to Virginia, and allowed policies which allowed it to prosper, like allowing trade with the Dutch. But, if you asked the average Virginian to give up food, their crown colony status or their legislature, they’d give up the food. They were that desperate to maintain the system that they credited to Charles I.
Virginia’s nearest colonial relative was Bermuda, which had been founded just three years later, getting its colonial legislature just a year after Virginia, and its history intimately connected with that of Virginia, involving many of the same people on both sides of the Atlantic. But, there were a few differences, environment being one which had pushed the tiny Bermuda to pass the first conservation legislation in the New World. Its tobacco was worse quality than that of Virginia, but similar to Virginia it hadn’t been successful in really diversifying its economy and moving away from what was in England a worthless weed. But, the biggest difference was that Bermuda was still run by a joint stock company, with some of the same investors as those of the old Virginia Company, especially the Earl of Warwick. While its colonists were demographically and culturally similar to those in Virginia, Warwick’s leadership had definitely inserted a larger Puritan element, though again one which was mostly less extreme than that of New England. Like Virginia, there was frustration, gambling, brawling and drinking, and they’d dealt with more poor leadership than good. Poor conditions had pushed a fair number of colonists to either St. Lucia or Virginia.
And, the third and most different Chesapeake colony was Maryland, under Lord Proprietor Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore. And, his brother, Leonard, was governor. It was specifically founded as a haven where Catholics could live without religious persecution, though it was not an officially Catholic colony, which they would never have been able to get away with. So, while most of Maryland’s leadership was Catholic, there were a handful of Protestant leaders, mostly friends of the Calvert family, and many of the artisans and servants, who were getting their freedom in ever greater numbers, were protestant, and mostly Puritan. And, it had a puritan settlement on Kent Island, whose residents had moved there from Virginia a year before Baltimore got the patent for the land which became Maryland. So with a very small Anglican group in the middle, Maryland was largely comprised of Catholics and Puritans. It was the smallest Chesapeake colony, with only about 600 surviving people, and suffered from many of the same problems as Virginia, poverty, illness, low life expectancy, and the inability to successfully diversify its economy.
And, south of the Chesapeake was a group of fledgling colonies in the Caribbean. This had begun with a long string of failed colony attempts in Guiana whose only real accomplishment was when former Jamestown resident Matthew Morton became the first Englishman to travel the length of the Amazon River over the course of 13 months in an Indian canoe. But the Spanish and Portuguese were pretty adamant the English not settle in South America, and by diplomacy, attack or seige, they ensured it didn’t happen.
But, Guiana had united a lot of the people who would become active in Caribbean colonization, including the Earls of Pembroke, Carlisle, Holland and of course Warwick. And it was one of the Guiana settlers, Thomas Warner, who ended up setting up the first successful English Caribbean colony on St. Christopher, which the English called St. Kitts. And it was from Warner’s colony of St. Kitts that the successful English Caribbean colonies had sprung. Despite abnormally frequent hurricanes and a major Spanish attack, St. Kitts had grown big enough and fast enough that its population quickly spread. Nevis, Montserrat, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Antigua and assorted smaller islands, most of the Lesser Antilles, were under Lord Proprietor James Hey, the Earl of Carlisle, with Warner governor and John Jeafferson as his deputy, populated by people moving away from St. Kitts. And yes, John Jeafferson is probably the ancestor of Thomas.
But, there was a conflict in the Caribbean centered around the island of Barbados. Because, when a captain named Henry Powell had stopped by St. Kitts, and some of his sailors had mentioned Powell’s intention to colonize Barbados, Warner rushed back to England to ensure Carlisle’s patent included Barbados. And only after that did Powell arrive in England and realize what had happened, after which he quickly found a backer named William Courteen to organize investment from England, and rushed back to Barbados to get his colony started before Warner could start his. Courteen got the Earl of Pembroke to be his and Powell’s patron and sponsor, and Pembroke’s patent also included Trinidad, and Fonseca, alias St. Bernard, which didn’t even exist. A while later, Pembroke sold his patent to the Earl of Warwick. So, now the Caribbean was divided, and Barbados was in two different patents to two different people, under two different spellings, with two different groups of colonists actually settled on the Island claiming that theirs was the legitimate claim. Conflict about this had, a few years before, led to a show trial and execution, two people being kidnapped and chained to a ship’s mast for a month, and the theft of multiple thousands of pounds worth of tobacco, and at one point become so all-consuming and violent that planting was neglected, food ran short and the colony went through a year-long starving time. While their masters had bickered and fought, the servants had stopped working and indulged in the classic colonial escapism, drinking. In England, the King had settled the conflict in Carlisle’s favor, but to no effect on Barbados.
For a while, Henry Hawley, brother of Maryland official Jerome, had been governor of the Island, appointed by Carlisle, but then shifting his allegiance to Warwick when Carlisle withdrew his commission, and Warwick let him continue as governor, now vying to keep his position against Carlisle’s new appointee, Henry Huncks, which he’d done by purging troublesome officials and acting as Warwick’s nominee to call the first Assembly, thereby appealing to settlers who hadn’t liked Carlisle. But then Huncks had shown his authority, and sent Hawley back to England where he was charged with and then exonerated from 13 barely believable charges in 1641. And Huncks was soon replaced by Philip Bell, the old Bermuda and Providence Island governor, and a man that both Carlisle and Warwick could agree on for the job. So in 1641, he had moved there as a governor, yet again of a divided colony.
So, by 1642 St. Kitts and Barbados were the main colonies, with settlements on multiple other islands which closely resembled those on St. Kitts. Colonists in all the colonies grew tobacco as their main commodity, because it was the perfect crop for a new colony. It wasn’t particularly labor intensive, and there were plenty of people available who could teach settlers how to grow it. They also planted cotton, for a similar reason. And for food they had corn, yams, cassava, plantains, oranges, lemons, limes and pomegranates, plus fish, and feral pigs. And more than anywhere else in the Americas, colonists across nationalities had close relationships and connections, closer in many cases than they did with their home governments. They shared islands freely, and were united in enmity of the Spanish and fear of the Carib Indians, their Buccanneers fought together, and they dealt with the same hurricanes and experimented with the same commodities. But, because the Dutch economy was so much more developed, it definitely ended up driving most economic development in the region. It wasn’t yet a prosperous life, but it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant one, and we have some vivid images of what life was like there from a man named Henry Colt, who unfortunately was executed by the Spanish in 1632. He had tried to set up a colony with his son organizing things from England, and sending back tobacco, pines, plantains, guavas, prickly pears and pepper. He told his son that he’d considered sending his grandson a parrot, “but they be curst and biting.”
So that’s a summary of English America on the verge of war. No colony yet had many Africans, and every colony had a few. Only in Rhode Island were they specifically not slaves, and only in Massachusetts and Connecticut was slavery codified in any way, something which had been done after the Pequot War. No colony was doing particularly well economically, though most had reason for optimism. And, most colonies were operating with a large degree of independence from England. There wasn’t much English oversight, and colonists had the same legal status as Englishmen in the home country. They were all subjects of the Crown, though perhaps those choosing to live under proprietary lords, or work for joint stock companies. There was no empire, there was a kingdom and dominions, a hodgepodge of different colonial projects done by the king’s subjects. And on the subject of religion, it’s worth noting just how hard it was to get to America. If people in England loved the English Book of Common Prayer, Americans outside of New England depended on it. If your pastor died, if he left, if one couldn’t be recruited, if you couldn’t afford one, if you lived too far away from a population center – your entire religious life would revolve around readings from the Bible and Prayer Book. Puritans outside of New England mostly supplemented Prayer Book readings with things like spontaneous prayer and sermons, but they rarely sought to replace them. The Prayer Book was almost as ubiquitous in America as the Bible, itself.
But, in 1642, after years of growing conflict, King Charles I and his Parliament finally went to war. Next week, we’ll look at how that happened, and how colonists reacted.