Chapter 3 and 4 Web Study Guide

Here's a general outline on Chapters 3 and 4 I found online and think it's pretty decent and a good summary for review

General Outline

Just as the English established a set of goals and strategies for their first outpost on Chesapeake Bay, so too did the native Indians of that region pursue their own aims and interests. The werowance (or chief) Powhatan had recently consolidated the region's Indians into a powerful confederacy. Powhatan used the new English newcomers to advance his own longstanding objectives. Although he considered the new colonists a nuisance, Powhatan welcomed trade goods and English weapons as a means to consolidate his political authority and to fend off challenges from the Piedmont tribes.

English Society on the Chesapeake
After Powhatan's death, the English presence proved more threatening to than supportive of his confederacy's control over the Chesapeake. As the tobacco crop began to boom, the Virginia Company transported an increasing number of white settlers into Virginia; some were free men and women, but the vast majority were indentured servants, who signed labor contracts that committed their work and its products to a master for a certain number of years. The spread of English plantations built by this growing population encroached on tribal lands. Mounting tensions finally exploded in 1622 into full-scale armed conflicts between whites and Indians, resulting in appalling casualties on both sides, as well as a determination, on the part of the English, to destroy the "savage" Indians.

Another casualty of these hostilities was the Virginia Company itself, the joint-stock company that had overseen the early settlement of the colony. The King dissolved the company after an investigation revealed that mortality rates from disease and the abuse of servants far exceeded the casualties of the Indian war. Virginia then became a royal colony.

As the price of tobacco leveled off, a more coherent social and political order took shape in Virginia. Even so, tensions remained high, fueled by resentment at the settlement of Maryland, a proprietary colony ruled by the Calvert family. Maryland's tobacco economy competed with Virginia's, and led to the outbreak of another Indian war in 1644. Meanwhile, England did little to ease friction or direct development in the region because it became distracted by domestic political upheavals that culminated in its Civil War. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, Charles II launched a more consistent and watchful colonial policy. That year Parliament passed the first in a series of Navigation Acts designed to regulate colonial trade in ways that benefited England.

Chesapeake Society in Crisis
The Navigation Acts only intensified the forces propelling Chesapeake society toward a crisis. Local elites became divided and jealous, while freed servants and small planters found diminishing opportunities for themselves. Religious hatred and a renewal of hostilities with the Indians raised tensions further. Two civil wars resultedÐBacon's Rebellion in Virginia and Coode's Rebellion in Maryland.

Only the conversion from servitude to slavery as the region's dominant labor system finally eased the divisions within white society in the Chesapeake. As slavery became more cost effective, the growing presence (and implicit threat) of African Americans bonded whites of all classes and religions, and a racist consensus emerged. With their profits now secured by the exploitation of black rather than white labor, a new Chesapeake "gentry" encouraged the development of a prosperous and deferential small planter class.

From the Caribbean to the Carolinas
As the tobacco economy evolved in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, a booming sugar economy also transformed the Caribbean into a slave-based plantation society. Land scarcity on the English island of Barbados fostered the settlement of South Carolina, another proprietary colony.

More prosperous than either North Carolina (its poor neighbor) or Virginia, South Carolina still remained vulnerable to attack from the neighboring French and Spanish. As with other proprietary colonies, South Carolina became divided by chronic political factions. The colony's social instability, which resulted from ethnic and religious diversity, high mortality rates, and strained relations with local Indian tribes, compounded these political squabbles. Worsening Indian relations resulted in the devastating Yamasee War in 1715, which brought the colony to the brink of dissolution and ended proprietary rule.

Reconstituted as a royal colony after 1729, South Carolina recovered its former prosperity by exporting rice and later indigo. Greater social and political harmony ensued mainly because whites recognized the need to unify against the threat posed by the slaves who supplied the skilled labor on plantations and who by this time constituted a majority of the inhabitants within the colony. At the same time, the founding of Georgia, a colony that developed a comparable economy and social structure, provided a buffer between South Carolinians and Spanish Florida.

The Spanish Borderlands
As the English colonies in southern North America took shape, the Spanish extended their empire into the American Southwest, scattering military garrisons and cattle ranches throughout the region. To incorporate the Indians into colonial society as docile servants and pious farmers and artisans, the Spanish relied on missions staffed by Dominican and Franciscan priests.

Despite the weakening of their populations by European diseases, the Indians still managed to defy Spanish cultural imperialism through a series of uprisings, the most successful of which was the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico. Like the English in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, the Spanish in the Southwest encountered sustained resistance to their expansionism from Indian cultures. As a result, the hopes of empire or independence held by red, white, and black inhabitants suffered continual cruel defeats during the seventeenth century.

Chapter 4

Religion played a crucial role in shaping northern colonial settlement in North America. In Canada, the Catholic Counterreformation added a missionary zeal to early French exploration and colonization efforts. French Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, helped to win acceptance for French soldiers, traders, and settlers among the native Indians of the Canadian interior. Perhaps most importantly, French colonists, who remained few in number, did not threaten Indian claims to land and political authority. At the same time, the impact of the Reformation in England played a major part in motivating the settlement of Puritan New England and later, the Quaker exodus to Pennsylvania. The Founding of New England While the French slowly established a fur trade, agricultural communities, and religious institutions in Canada, radical Puritans fleeing persecution and "corruption" in England planted more populous settlements between Maine and Long Island. The first New England settlers, the Separatists or "Pilgrims," were humble English farmers and craftsmen who had fled religious persecution in England and settled in the Netherlands. Concerns that their children were adopting Dutch customs prompted them to settle the Plymouth colony in 1620. A larger wave of Puritan migration first reached the shores of what became the colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Led by John Winthrop, an English landowner and gentleman, this group of Puritan migrants was wealthier and more prominent than the Pilgrim Separatists. They differed, too, in continuing to regard themselves as members of the Church of England. Indeed, members of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony hoped that their settlement would become a model for social and religious reform back in England. New England Communities Although the Pilgrim Separatists of Plymouth and the Congregationalists of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut differed in some ways, the New England colonies were more notable for their similarities. The distinguishing features of early New England society included rapid population growth through natural increase, large families headed by patriarchal fathers, reliance on subsistence agriculture and widespread land ownership, a rough economic equality, and an absence of bound labor. These economic and social factors lent stability to early New England society. So did the shared commitment to Puritanism, the organization of churches, and a strong tradition of self-government at both the town and colony level. In all of these respects, New England contrasted strikingly with the early American South. Despite its coherence and order, early New England did not lack conflict. Devout New Englanders often fought bitterly over the proper definition of Puritanism, while contests between white and Indian settlements erupted into violent confrontations--the Pequot War and Metacomet's War--as expansion proceeded westward. The Middle Colonies The Middle Colonies shared with New England comparable agrarian economies, systems of free labor, and patterns of rapid population growth. Unlike New England, however, all of the Middle Colonies were ruled by proprietary governments, like those in Maryland and South Carolina. Consequently, representative government remained weaker and civic life more embattled. Ethnic and religious antagonisms compounded the political strife in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Unlike homogeneously English and Puritan New England, the population of the Middle Colonies included a patchwork of diverse ethnic groups and religious denominations. In New York, for example, English Anglicans and Puritans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, Scandinavian Lutherans, and African Americans, both enslaved and free, adhering to West African tribal religions joined the Dutch Calvinist settlers who had founded the colony as New Netherlands in 1624. Relations between whites and Indians in the Middle Colonies also developed differently. While the Puritans sought to subdue the New England tribes, New Yorkers conciliated the powerful league of the Iroquois in order to maintain a competitive edge over the French for the fur trade. And for many decades, Quaker Pennsylvanians coexisted peaceably with the Lenni Lenapes. Pennsylvania's Quakers practiced far greater tolerance toward both Native Americans and religious dissenters than did Puritan New Englanders. Even so, both Puritans and Quakers hoped to create religious utopias and representative governments in North America, model societies in which rulers, chosen by popular consent, promoted piety and morality. Adjustment to Empire The later Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, attempted to centralize England's American empire. Their efforts created serious disruptions of political life in every northern colony except newly established Pennsylvania. The crown's experiment in centralization, the Dominion of New England, ended with the Glorious Revolution in 1688: James II went into exile and was replaced on the throne by William and Mary. New England weathered these years of political instability without severe internal turmoil. New Yorkers, however, responded with violence and vicious political infighting in the wake of Leisler's Rebellion. The dismantling of the Dominion greatly reduced the tensions between England and its colonies. For more than half a century, English monarchs gave up efforts to impose a strict, centralized administration on America. All of the colonies continued to enjoy relative independence under an imperial policy of "benign neglect."