When is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America: Crash Course US History #2

Hi, I'm John Green, this is the

crash

course

in US

history

, and today we're going to tell the story of how a group of brave Englishmen struck a blow against religious freedom and founded the greatest, freest, fattest nation. of the world. have you ever seen. These Brits walked into a barren land where there were no people, and they quickly invented the automobile, baseball, and Star Trek and we all lived happily ever after. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, if it's really that simple, I'll get an A in this class. Oh, me from the past, you are simply a delight.

So most Americans grew up hearing that America was founded by pale Englishmen who came here to escape religious persecution. And that's true for the small proportion of people who settled Massachusetts Bay and created what we now know as New England. But these pilgrims and Puritans, there is a difference, were not the first people, not even the first Europeans, to reach the only part of the world that we do not paint about. In fact, they were not the first English. The first English arrived in Virginia. Off topic, but how strange it is that the first permanent English colony in America was named not for Queen Elizabeth's epic but for her supposed chastity.

Anyway, those early English settlers weren't looking for religious freedom, they wanted to get rich. So the first successful English colony in America was founded in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. I say "successful" because there were two previous attempts to colonize the region. Both were epic failures. The most famous was the Roanoke Island colony created by Sir Walter Raleigh, famous because all the colonists disappeared leaving only the word "Croatoan" carved on a tree. Jamestown was a project of the Virginia Company, which existed to make money for its investors, something it never did. The hope was that they would find gold in the Chesapeake region like the Spanish had done in South America, so there were a disproportionate number of goldsmiths and jewelers there to invent that gold which of

course

did not exist.

Anyway, it turns out that the jewelers don't like farming, so much so that Captain John Smith, who soon took control of the island, once said they would rather starve than farm. So in the first year, half of the settlers died. 400 replacements arrived, but, by 1610, after a dreadful winter called "The Famine Time," the number of settlers had dwindled to 65. And word finally spread that the New World's one-year survival rate It was like 20% and it became more difficult. to find new settlers. But in 1618, a Virginia company devised a recruiting strategy called the headright system, which offered 50 acres of land for every person a settler paid to bring over.

And this allowed the creation of a series of large estates, most of which were worked and populated by indentured servants. Indentured servants were not entirely slaves, but rather a type of temporary slave. As if they could be bought and sold and had to do what their masters told them to do. But after seven to ten years of that, if they weren't dead, they were paid the freedom fee they hoped would allow them to buy their own farms. Sometimes that worked, but often the money wasn't enough to buy a farm or they were too dead to cash in.

Even more disturbing was that in 1619, just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown, the first shipment of African slaves arrived in Virginia. So the colony probably would have continued fighting if they hadn't found something that people really loved: tobacco. Tobacco had been cultivated in Mexico since at least 1000 BC. C., but Europeans had never seen it and it turned out to be a kind of "thanks for the smallpox, here's some lung cancer" gift from the natives. Interestingly, King James hated smoking. He called it "a custom repugnant to the sight and hateful to the smell," but he loved some tax revenue and nothing sells like drugs.

In 1624, Virginia produced more than 200,000 pounds of tobacco annually. In the 1680s, more than 30 million pounds a year. Tobacco was so profitable that settlers created huge plantations with very little town or infrastructure to hold the social order together, a strategy that always works brilliantly. Industry also structured Virginian society. First, most of the people who arrived in the 17th century, three-quarters of them, were servants. So Virginia became a microcosm of England: a small class of wealthy landowners sitting atop a mass of servants. That sounds a little dirty, but overall it was just sad. The society was also overwhelmingly male, because male servants were most useful in the tobacco fields and made up the largest proportion of immigrants.

In fact, they outnumbered women 5 to 1. The women who came were mostly indentured servants, and if they married, which they often did because they were in high demand, they had to wait until their period of service was over. . This meant a delay in marriage, which meant fewer children, which further reduced the number of women. Life was pretty hard for these women, but on the plus side, Virginia was kind of a swamp of pestilence, so their husbands often died, and that created a small class of widows or even single women who, because of their special status, they could make contracts. and own property, so that was fine, more or less.

OK. A few brief words about Maryland. Maryland was the second Chesapeake colony, founded in 1632, and was no longer a joint stock company. Maryland was an estate: a huge grant of land to a single individual named Cecilius Calvert. Calvert wanted to turn Maryland into a medieval feudal kingdom for his and his family's benefit, and he was no fan of the representative institutions that were developing in Virginia. Furthermore, Calvert was Catholic, and Catholics were welcome in Maryland, which was not always the case elsewhere. Speaking of which, let's talk about Massachusetts. So Jamestown may have been the first English colony, but Massachusetts Bay is probably better known.

This is largely because the settlers who arrived there were very recognizable by their beliefs and also by their hats. That's how it is. I mean the Pilgrims and the Puritans. And no, I'm not going to talk about Thanksgiving...that's a lie. I can't help it. But just to clarify the difference between pilgrims and puritans and also to talk about Squanto. God, I love me some Squanto. Let's go to the thought bubble. Most of the English men and women who settled in New England were super-Protestant Puritans who believed that the Protestant Church of England was still too Catholic with its kneeling archbishops, incense, and extravagant hats.

Particular Puritans, who, by the way, didn't call themselves that, other people did, who settled in New England, were called Congregationalists because they thought congregations should determine leadership and worship structures, not bishops. . The pilgrims were even more extreme. They wanted to separate more or less completely from the Church of England. So first they fled to the Netherlands, but apparently the Dutch were too corrupt for them, so they gathered investors and financed a new colony in 1620. They were supposed to land in Virginia, but in what perhaps should have been taken as a omen. , they deviated greatly from their course and ended up in what is now Massachusetts, founding a colony called Plymouth.

While still aboard their Mayflower ship, 41 of the approximately 150 colonists wrote and signed an agreement called the Mayflower Compact, in which they all agreed to follow "just and equal laws" that their elected representatives would draft. Since this was the first framework written for government in the US, it's a big deal. But anyway, the Pilgrims had the excellent luck of landing in Massachusetts with 6 weeks before winter, and they had the good sense not to bring much food or farm animals. Half of them died before the winter was over. The only reason they didn't all die was because the local Indians led by Squanto gave them food and saved them.

A year later, grateful that they had survived mainly thanks to the help of an alliance with the local chief Massasoit, and because the Indians had taught them how to plant corn and where to fish, the Pilgrims celebrated a great feast: the first Thanksgiving. . . Thanks thought bubble! And by the way, that party was on the fourth Thursday in November, not in mid-October as it is celebrated in some of these green areas that we call Not America. Anyway, Squanto was a pretty amazing character and not just because he helped save the Pilgrims. He discovered that almost his entire tribe, the Patuxet, had been wiped out by disease and eventually settled with the pilgrims on the site of his old village and then died... of disease because it's always ruining everything.

So the Pilgrims fought on until 1691,

when

their colony was absorbed by the larger and much more successful Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1629 by London merchants who, like the founders of the Virginia Company, hoped to make money. But unlike Virginia, the board of directors moved from England to the United States, which meant that in Massachusetts they had a greater degree of autonomy and self-government than in Virginia. Social unity was also much more important in Massachusetts than in Virginia. The religious mission of the Puritans meant that the common good was, at least initially, above the needs or rights of the individual.

Those different ideas in the North and South about the role of government would continue... until now. Oh God. Is it time for the mystery document? The rules are simple. I read the mysterious document that I had not seen before. If I do it right, they don't electrocute me with the pen, and if I do it wrong, yes. Alright. "We must be united in this work as one man, we must entertain each other with brotherly affection, we must be willing to reduce our superfluities (superfluities? I don't know), for the supply of other needs, we must maintain a family trade together with all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality,... for we must consider that we will be like a city on a hill, the eyes of all the people are upon us If we treat our god falsely in this work that we have undertaken and so he will; we will withdraw your current aid from us, we will be a

history

and a synonym throughout the world.

Alright, first thing I noticed: the author of this document has bad spelling or possibly wrote this before English was standardized. Also, a quite religious individual. And the community in question seems to embrace something close to socialism: reducing the superfluous to the needs of others. He also says that the community should be like a city on a hill, as a model for all. And thanks to that metaphor, I know exactly where it comes from: John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity." Yeah! Yeah! No punishment! This is one of the most important sermons in American history. It shows us how religious the Puritans were, but it also shows us that their religious mission was not really one of individualism but of collective effort.

In other words, the needs of the many exceed the needs of the few or the one. But this city-on-a-hill metaphor is the basis of a kind of American exceptionalism: the idea that we are so special and so godly that we will be a model for other nations, at least as long as, according to Winthrop, we get our act together. . Lest you think Winthrop's words were forgotten, they became the centerpiece of Ronald Reagan's farewell address in 1989. Well, New England cities were democratically governed, but that doesn't mean the Puritans were great proponents of equality or that everyone could participate in the government why not.

The only people who could vote or hold office were members of the church, and to be a full member of the church you had to be a "visible saint", so in reality power remained in the hands of the church elite. The same applied to equality. It was better than in the Chesapeake colonies or England, in terms of equality... er, quite unequal. As John Winthrop declared: "Some must be rich and some poor. Some high, eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection." Or as historian Eric Foner put it: "Inequality was considered an expression of God's will, and while some liberties applied to all inhabitants, there were separate lists of rights for free men, women, children, and servants." also slavery in Massachusetts.

The first slaves were registered in the colony in 1640. However, the Puritans really encouraged equality in one sense: they wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible. In fact, city councils could punish parents. not adequately instruct their children to make them literate, but

when

Roger Williams asked that citizens be able to practice any religion theychoose, so did Ann Hutchinson, who argued that church membership should be based on inward grace and. not in external manifestations such as church attendance, Williams founded Rhode Island, so it worked well for him, but Hutchinson, who was a double threat to Massachusetts because she was a woman who preached unorthodox ideas, was too radical and was banished even further.

Westchester, New York, where she and her family were murdered by Indians. Finally, someone who doesn't die of illness or hunger. That's why Americans like to think that their country was founded by religious freedom pioneers seeking freedom from the oppressive English. We have already seen that this is only partially true. For one thing, Puritan ideas of equality and representation were not particularly equitable or representative. In truth, the United States was also founded by indigenous people and Spanish settlers, and the early English colonies had nothing to do with religion; It was about money. We will see this tension between American mythology and history again next week and every week too.

Thanks for watching; See you next time. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, our script supervisor is Meredith Danko, associate producer is Danica Johnson, the show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and me, and our graphics team is Thought Bubble. If you have questions about today's video or anything about American history, ask them in the comments; The entire Crash Course team and many story professionals are there to help you. Thanks for watching Crash Course. Make sure you are subscribed and as we say in my hometown, "Don't forget to be awesome."