Overview
A quick recap of everything that’s changed in America during the period of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum/Commonwealth, as well as problems colonists are facing going into the reign of King Charles II.
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Full text
English America had four times as many people in 1660 as it did in 1642. It now produced crops like sugar, had one colony with as many slaves as Englishmen, was held together by English trade networks, and had lost its autonomy to a mother country with an increasingly centralized government and imperial vision.
Introduction
We started our discussion of the English Civil War era with a mini-tour of the colonies in 1642, and now that we’ve finished it and are starting a brand new era with a brand new ruler, I thought it’d be a good time to sit back and do the exact same thing with the colonies in 1660 to get our bearings and see just how much things have changed.
The biggest thing that had changed, the thing that’s going to underpin our discussion of everything else, and which we will circle back to at the end of this episode, was the very nature of England as a burgeoning empire. In 1642, it wasn’t one. Every colony had been started and settled by a small group of private individuals, gambling their own lives and livelihoods on the project. Every colony that had survived had simply managed to endure, both physically and financially, until it found some sense of tenuous stability.
By 1660, this had changed, and colonies were redefined as projects by and for the nation of England. They were under the direct authority of the English government, with colonists directly subject to English laws and taxation, and even conscription for doomed military efforts, though they didn’t get a say in any of this. England, which had also established a standing army and navy, was also working to set up military bases which would ensure colonial compliance with their demands. For colonists, this change meant they’d gone from being semi-autonomous people accountable to their joint stock company or lord proprietor, to being second-class Englishmen, accountable to the English government, but with no say in it, subordinated to the government, with lesser rights than their contemporaries.
One of these laws, the most important in colonist eyes, was the Navigation Act of 1651. This forced colonists to trade exclusively with English ships. Trade with the more economically advanced Dutch had been what lifted the Chesapeake out of otherwise inescapable poverty, and it had been what helped Caribbean islands like Barbados transform into the fabulously wealthy “Sugar Isles.” In contrast, England’s merchants couldn’t pay prices as high as the Dutch, and they formed a small, politically connected monopoly which drove prices even lower. If colonists could only trade with them, they could sell tools and buy goods at prices which yielded them a tidy profit, while colonists couldn’t afford to survive.
This was the foundation of empire, though. The trade networks which brought the colonies together were centered around London, and they enriched England and made its capital a hub for world trade. England and its capital had both been financially falling behind the rest of Europe since the middle ages, and by the time of the Tudors and Stuarts, the problem had become one of the central issues monarchs faced. Now the solution had emerged – sugar. And tobacco, cotton, lumber, fish, indigo, and ginger. But really, sugar. It would have to be sold to English merchants, through English ports, with English taxes and tariffs. Colonists weren’t happy about this, but they had no say. They simply ignored the rules, continued trade with the Dutch, and waited for the king to repeal the law.
So what it meant to be a colonist had changed, and in colonist eyes, not for the better.
And like I said, the colonies now had four times as many inhabitants as they did before the wars. In 1642, England’s colonies had held about 51,000 people. In 1660, they had 200,000. And to go along with the idea that what it meant to be a colonist had changed for the worse, a huge percent of this migration had been involuntary.
Up until the wars, most colonists had gone under at least the pretense of their own free will. It wasn’t as simple as that. People were tricked, kidnapped, and oppressed to the point that leaving seemed a better option than staying, but officially, few people were actually forced to go to America. Most of the post-war arrivals, though, had been forced to the Americas in one way or another.
The first group of people, and the most disputably forced, were the “distressed cavaliers,” royalists who had lost everything, or more to the point had everything taken from them, for their support of the losing side of the war. After they’d fought the war, and helped fund the fight, they’d then faced sequestration and, if they got through all of that, finally the decimation tax … they had nothing left, and many had nowhere else to go. So, a lot of these people had turned to the Caribbean or Virginia, or perhaps Maine.
Another new group of people was slaves. Slavery had been virtually nonexistent in English colonies before the war. Indentured servitude was the preferred labor source. Colonies in the Chesapeake faced chronic population issues, and indentured servitude had the dual benefit of helping alleviate those. In an overpopulated England full of desperate people, the vast majority of potential colonists couldn’t afford to move, and indentured servitude enabled them to do that. English traders in Western Africa had specifically rejected the practice of slave trading, and used that rejection to differentiate themselves from the morally bankrupt, Catholic Spanish Empire. What African slaves and servants did exist in English America had largely come from privateering voyages, and been sold as servants in America by captains who didn’t know what to do with them.
By 1660, though, all of that had changed. In Barbados, which started growing sugar in the mid 1640s, slaves had gone from numbering a few hundred to comprising fully half of the island’s population, 20,000 in total. Unlike tobacco, cotton or indigo, sugar was overwhelmingly labor intensive, both in terms of the quantity of workers needed and the sheer difficulty of the work they had to do. Getting indentured servants to do this was difficult, if not impossible, and the Dutch had helped Barbados establish slaves as a labor source instead. This still wasn’t the case in other colonies, each of which still had a few hundred Africans each, but slavery had become integral to Barbados’s economy, and Barbados’s sugar had, thanks to the Navigation Acts, become integral to England’s economy.
So England’s Commonwealth government had replaced the Royalist leadership of its West African trading company, the Guinea Company, with Parliamentarian Puritans who were eager to dabble in the slave trade. And then, when they didn’t dabble enough, that government had explicitly ordered them to do whatever it took to get the Sugar Isles the slaves they needed to grow as much sugar as possible. Slave trading had gone overnight from being a practice the company rejected to being its main objective. So it was something that was actively being pushed within England and by some colonists. With slavery came slave revolts, and in response, Bermuda, which was becoming a refuge for free blacks, banned all black non-slaves to Eleutheria, in the Bahamas.
Numerically, though, the greatest number of these new, forced colonial residents were victims of the policy of transportation – prisoners of war, royalists, rebels, vagrants, vagabonds and especially the Irish. These people were forced en masse, by the tens of thousands, onto boats and shipped to the colonies to be indentured servants for seven, but in reality often closer to 10, years. Once their terms of indenture were over, they had to pay their own ship fare back across the Atlantic, and realistically this meant that most of them were stuck in the colonies for life.
It was theoretically a punishment, but realistically it was a form of persecution and a tool for forcing conformity, to intimidate everyone into thinking twice before voicing their opposition to what was happening, and thinking three times before trying to do anything about it. It frequently occurred without a trial, and was often a death sentence. Like I said, at the very least it meant you were unlikely to ever see your home or family again.
And as for the Irish, it was a big part of an ongoing effort to turn Ireland Protestant. This included sending lots of English people over to live in Ireland, rewarding them for service with big estates there, but even when you include the population increase from this influx of people, Ireland’s total population was reduced by more than half during this time period, going from 1.5 million to 616,000 overall. This means that the majority, a large majority, of the Irish Catholic population had been either killed or forcibly sent to America, where many died anyway.
Transportation was a new policy, and it was extremely unpopular in England and Scotland, a source of scandal which also opened the way for unscrupulous merchants and soldiers, including most scandalously of all those of Cromwell’s own regiment, to send even more people over to the colonies illegally, for their own profit. One interregnum Scottish rebel who had killed captured soldiers had prefaced his executions by telling them “that he had no Barbadoes to send them to, but would send them either to Heaven or hell.”
Transportation victims ended up in every American colony, but as the quote above implies, nowhere more than the English West Indies. Barbados and other island colonies had come to be seen as a place of lost liberty, of English enslavement, where the guaranteed rights of Englishmen which had been established in the Middle Ages, no longer applied.
And combined, like I said, these forces had quadrupled the population of England’s colonies. And this fourfold population increase had led to its own issues. First and foremost among these was the need for more land. Colonists in every mainland North American colony were sending explorers inland to find new places to settle. They were building roads and highways to enable this expansion.
And in essentially every North American colony, this expansion was leading to conflicts with local Indian tribes. Reservations were used, first in New England and then the Chesapeake. Wars had come and gone with local tribes in each of these colonies, and individual Englishmen in every colony had been put on trial for murdering Indians. In each of the colonies, these people had been convicted and most executed for their crimes, but it was a sign of the way things were changing.
Of course, in the Island colonies, land expansion was out of the question because there was no land to expand to. This meant that people were simply pushed out. The Sugar Isles saw plenty of original planters forced to leave, or even sell themselves as indentured servants, in order to survive an environment in which sugar production was leading to intense wealth consolidation. Suriname had been almost exclusively settled by people from Barbados, St. Kitts, Nevis and similar islands who needed a place to go. It was a mainland colony in South America, which gave it a little more room for expansion, and it was virtually unknown in England. This emerging dynamic increased the effects of tensions among colonists, and made exile of or land seizure from political opponents an extremely attractive idea.
And speaking of tensions among colonists, yet another byproduct of this rapid population increase was the clash among various peoples. There was always conflict in the colonies, because it was a stressful place, a new place, and a place where the stakes were quite literally life or death. And, it was already a tumultuous time, with people having very strong feelings about what was going on. Now, to add to all of that, there was a huge number of people very few of whom would have actually chosen to be there if they hadn’t been forced by brute strength, or possibly the necessity caused by the seizure of everything they owned.
Slave revolts had become a thing in Bermuda, Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean. Irish transportees fueled, and in some cases even led, these revolts. The Irish maintained their distinct identity, and they were more rebellious than their Scottish counterparts, who in turn were more rebellious than their English ones. And, they were treated accordingly. Irish terms of indenture grew, and there was nothing they could do about it. Scots clashed with local authorities, especially in New England where they were forced to live under Puritan regimes which they saw as oppressive and wrong.
Of the very few people to truly voluntarily go to America at this time, many were Quakers, who flooded every colony, evangelizing and destabilizing local governments and Churches as they went. The Baptist movement spread quickly in New England, and Presbyterians and Congregationalists, once allies, turned against each other. Witch trials were a new thing. And the list goes on.
So far, though, I’ve only discussed changes that affected English colonization as a whole, changes you would have expected to see in every colony, the new reality of being an English colonist. On top of that, each individual colony looked different, and we’re going to go through them in essentially the same order as we did before, North to South.
That means we start with Newfoundland, and while Newfoundland was never a particularly big or prosperous colony, it had emerged from the wars with a strained economy. The shipping which had sustained it had been cut by almost two-thirds during the war. This had weakened it enough for the French to start pushing into the area from Maine and Nova Scotia, where they had previously been based.
In addition to encroachments by the French, the colony was yet again facing ownership disputes within England. Its proprietor, David Kirke, had died in debtor’s prison after a series of events, including the sequestration of his estates for his royalist sympathies, which was followed by an invalid lawsuit by the government, which Kirke had won but had to make sacrifices to fight, followed by a lawsuit by Lord Baltimore, who was reasserting his old claim to the area. Baltimore had won this lawsuit, so he retook control of the colony while Kirke’s widow managed what was left of his estates and protected what she could of their wealth. After Kirke was out of the way, Cromwell had appointed his own commissioners to lead the colony, and they had the power to lead as governors. The first of these men was John Treworgie, a Maryland merchant. He was a competent leader who encouraged agriculture and shipbuilding, and who rebuilt some of the local trade with New England that Newfoundland had lost. The destabilization caused by this dispute, though, enabled the French to encroach further into Newfoundland.
South of Newfoundland was Maine, but Maine was no more. It was a part of Massachusetts, though a part in which most inhabitants didn’t agree with the Bay Colony’s religious or governmental ideology.
And that brings us to New England, which was thriving economically but facing some social changes which many of its founders would have considered a serious decline. It had emerged as a center of New World trade and shipbuilding, trading Virginian food, tobacco, cattle and horses for Barbadian sugar. English merchants did most of their real business with Caribbean colonies, and New England merchants made a nice profit filling in every gap they left within the Western Hemisphere.
But, as the region’s affluence increased, its piety was waning. In a top-down way, it maintained the tightly imposed community structure built in its early years, but the actual religious commitment of the new generation was significantly lower than that of the generation which had migrated from England. Plus, though it wasn’t frequently discussed, there was discomfort with the direction the English Commonwealth had taken, and to alleviate all of this, the region’s Churches had really pushed the idea that the return of Christ was imminent, and that it was their job to bring it sooner by purging sin from the world. The crux of this argument was Cromwell’s victories, so the Restoration of the monarchy was a pretty clear sign that this wasn’t going to happen.
And not all of New England was profiting equally from these trade networks. Rhode Island and Plymouth especially had shallow harbors, so they were falling economically behind places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where a third of New England shipbuilding took place in Salem, alone.
Connecticut and New Haven, as well as Rhode Island to a lesser extent, were also plagued by land disputes. All three colonies had started out as legally unrecognized offshoots of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but Rhode Island had at least sought some official recognition of its existence. Connecticut and New Haven, though, didn’t have charters, and New Haven was also plagued by conflict with the Dutch on the Delaware River. They were united in practical concerns, but ideologically they were extremely different, at least in the context of New England Puritanism. Connecticut had distinguished itself as being a particularly lenient colony, while New Haven was easily the most strict and uncompromising.
So, New England was fairly unique in that it’d come away from the wars relatively intact and also economically thriving, but there were some ongoing issues which hadn’t been addressed, as well as internal struggles.
But while New England had come away largely unscathed, the Chesapeake and Bermuda were hit harder by the war than anywhere else in English America. To stop trading with the Dutch would resubmerge the region into the same poverty which had characterized most of its existence, and its population had never become fully self-sustaining. They had ignored the Navigation Act, but relied on the newly restored king to reverse it.
The wars had sent a steady influx of people, most notably the distressed cavaliers, but the region still suffered from seasoning sickness, low life expectancy, late marriage ages thanks to indentured servitude, and a high male to female ratio. Even after evening out some during the war, there were three men for every woman, and that would remain the case for the rest of the century. The notion that the region could disappear still existed, with one man writing that such were the “odiums and cruell slander cast on these two famous countries of Virginia and Maryland [that they] are in danger to moulder away and come in time to nothing.”
Virginia and Maryland had been gradually planting more fruit trees and building better houses and other structures, but even if the quality of life was increasing, it was still rough. Virginia had the benefit of being largely politically united, especially after kicking out most of its puritans, but Maryland’s political and religious divisions had meant that the conflict there was more severe than in any other colony. The government had changed hands repeatedly and violently, with the Plundering Time and the Battle of the Severn, and even though Baltimore had emerged with legal control of the colony, the decades of conflict had forever destroyed his original vision. Now its government structure looked fairly similar to that of every other colony, with the exception of the fact that it had a “Toleration Act” requiring people to tolerate each other’s religious ideas, even those of the Catholics.
The only colony which was even arguably as torn apart by the wars as Maryland was Bermuda. Competing factions there had left society a shambles, and the colony which had once passed the first conservation legislation in the New World was struggling to prevent the extinction of its most important plant species. Even after stabilizing, it still dealt with witchcraft accusations and rampant crime, rapid governor turnover, neighbor spats, extreme vice, family dysfunction and slave and servant revolts. Colonists stole from each other, as well as luring unsuspecting ships onto the reefs surrounding the island and plundering them, a practice called wrecking.
It just wasn’t in complete freefall. Its trade with Barbados had resumed, as had its growing of tobacco, and complaints about the Somers Islands Company, the joint stock company which ran the colony. It was still poor, and was starting to look at whaling as a potential new industry, but this wasn’t going well.
Dysfunction in Bermuda had led to the establishment of another colony, Eleutheria, in the Bahamas, and this was one of the most desperately poor colonies in English America. By 1660, it was populated by some Independent Puritans who had been exiled or pushed out of Bermuda and refused to return even after being allowed to, as well as the free blacks who were given the choice of leaving Bermuda or becoming slaves, people kicked out of Bermuda for crimes like having illegitimate children, and Irish transportees who weren’t welcome in Bermuda after fomenting rebellion. Bermuda was a small island, and the Bahamas was the dumping ground for its undesirables, and there they built a desperately impoverished society, the poorest, in fact, in English America.
Colonists in Eleutheria also relied on fishing, and hunting seals, turtles and whales. Their attempts to grow crops for either sustenance or profit were unsuccessful, and poverty in the colony was so inescapable that settlers turned to a series of get rich schemes. Wrecking was again an example of this, but the idea of piracy was one that appealed to the colonists there. The big problem with piracy, though, was that shipbuilding in the Bahamas was also extremely basic.
Of Caribbean colonies, though, Eleutheria was pretty much unique in its poverty. The only other one which was truly struggling was Jamaica, the newest addition to the English empire, which had thus far been little more than a slaughterhouse for Irish people. A handful of people had by 1660 decided to try settling in Jamaica to try growing crops like sugar. These were people who had been pushed out of Barbados, Bermuda, and other island colonies. These people needed some place to go, the guerilla war in Jamaica had ended, and they were familiar with the region’s environment, so they, and I stress again a very small handful, decided to try their hand.
Most of the West Indies, though, were doing very, very well for themselves, and none more than Barbados. By weathering the early years of the war in harmony, Barbados had been able to establish itself as the sugar growing colony, and the richest place in the English speaking world. Every European luxury could be found in the homes of its elite, and it imported pretty much all its food so it didn’t have to waste space that could be used to grow sugar. Its population, once neutral, now skewed decidedly royalist, thanks to distressed cavaliers, transportation victims and aversion to the Navigation Act, but it also maintained a natural live-and-let-live attitude which no other colony rivaled. This made it the home of America’s Quaker movement, though Anglicans, Presbyterians and Independents also found a home there. It articulated and advocated for Revolutionary War-style liberties, including no taxation without representation.
Of course it wasn’t all good. Half its population was slaves, plenty more were indentured servants, and these people lived in horrifying conditions. Sugar was notoriously difficult to grow and process. It had also had slave rebellions, and such rebellions were a constant threat.
The rest of the Caribbean was starting to transition to growing sugar, though not all its colonies had. Some still grew indigo, tobacco, ginger, cotton, cattle and fish, each of which could sustain a colony with less labor, but also less opulence, than sugar.
And that pretty much concludes our journey through English America, but I do need to make a quick note of Scotland. I have been calling this the “English” empire, and “England’s” imperial trend, even though Scotland was part of the same country at this point and some historians refer to it as “Britain” and a “British Empire.” The reason I don’t is because Scotland was just a conquered country at this point. It had virtually no say in how England ran things, including its own country, rather than being an equal partner in a union. It had been conquered by Cromwell and run by Monck on his behalf. It wasn’t a colony, as English people certainly weren’t trying to move there in the way they were America and Ireland, but it was a conquered nation. Scotland was steadfastly devoted to the idea of the Restoration, though still less so in the Southwest than in the rest of the country.
So, Charles II had inherited a completely different England from the one that Charles I had lost. Not least, he inherited a sizable standing army and navy, which would have been both pragmatically and ideologically unthinkable in 1642, and the mere idea of which had been enough to spark a kerfuffle in 1640s Massachusetts.
State resources, like that standing army and navy, had now been used for colonial purposes, and to push colonists into submission to England’s government. International wars had been fought over colonization, and profiting from the colonies had become an issue of national policy. The government had redefined colonies as having been settled “at the cost and settled by the people and by the authority of this nation,” England as a whole, rather than the specific English people who had actually done it, claiming control of colonies that it had never actually worked to create, and then blowing off colonists and investors who pointed this out.
This fact hadn’t escaped colonial notice, and true to form, it was Barbados that articulated its disapproval first. “Certainly we all know that we now Inhabitants of the Island were and still are that People of England the which with great hazard of our persons and at our great costs and charges have settled and inhabited this place and shall we therefore be subjected to the wills of those that stay at home?”
And it was ideas like this which had fueled royalist sentiment in the colonies. Charles I had lost some stuff in America. Charles II had taken the throne of an empire. The question was what he’d do with it. Colonist hopes were unanimous. They wanted him to roll back all of the Commonwealth innovations – no more Navigation Act, no more submission to England like second class citizens, no more inability to profit from the projects they’d risked everything for. They’d be fine with either autonomy or equality, but nothing in between, or less.