Early Colonies 1607 - 1690 Flashcards
The English, French, Dutch, and Spanish each engaged in significant colonial efforts. This deck describes their attempts to establish permanent outposts in the New World, the arrival of the settlers, Jamestown and Plymouth Bay, and the birth of religious liberty in British North America. (40 cards)
Describe:
What is the Renaissance?
The Renaissance (meaning rebirth) was a rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans that were 1,500 years old.
The main reason these texts survived so long for Europeans to discover was that Arabic peoples had translated them from Greek, and so Europeans translated many of these ancient texts from Arabic.
What was the effect of the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of Constantinople?
Constantinople served as the trade gateway between Europe and Asia. Following its conquest by the Turks in 1453, Europeans had to find alternative trade routes to gain access to Asian goods, promoting exploration.
This is because Christian monarchs didn’t want to pay the jizya, which was a tax placed on non-Muslim merchants travelling through Constantinople.
What was the primary focus of Portuguese exploration?
The Portuguese were primarily interested in trade with Asia, and during the early 1400s, Prince Henry the Navigator funded exploration expeditions primarily to access these markets.
In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India.
Complete the sentence:
In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella completed the conquest of Spain from the Moors by successfully capturing _____.
Granada
Granada was the last Moorish outpost in Spain, and its conquest unified the country under one monarchy. Its conquest allowed the Spanish monarchy to focus on other military adventures, such as the conquest of North America.
What country established a fortress at St. Augustine, Florida as a lookout to protect its Caribbean sea routes?
Spain
Founded in 1565, close to the location where Ponce de León first discovered Florida as he sought the Fountain of Youth, St. Augustine was the oldest continually occupied city in North America.
Besides Mexico and Central and South America, what other locations did the Spanish colonize?
The Spanish also colonized Texas, New Mexico, Florida, and California. These states are all found in the southern part of the United States.
Explain the circumstances that caused the Pueblo Revolt.
In 1680, a group of Pueblo natives in modern-day New Mexico, led by Popé, a Pueblo religious leader, revolted against Spain, driving the Spanish from the colony of Santa Fe de Nuevo México.
Among the reasons for the revolt, besides forcing Catholicism on the Pueblo people, was that the Spanish had been especially cruel to the natives.
For example, Spanish Conquistador Juan de Onate had ordered that one leg be chopped from every man over fifteen and the rest of the population be enslaved, setting a pattern of cruelty that lasted 80 years.
For more info on the Pueblo Revolt, click here.
Where did the French focus their colonial efforts?
The French colonial efforts focused on the area around the St. Lawrence River, where they founded the colony of Quebec in 1608. French exploration was dominated by the fur trade.
The French efforts were driven by fashion. Beaver skin proved easy to make into hats, and beaver skin hats were a staple of the fashionable French gentleman for two centuries.
How did the French interact with the Native Americans?
Most contact between the Indians and the French was peaceful.
Relatively few French settlers arrived in the New World and their primary focus was on trade, mainly trading manufactured goods and weapons for furs.
What is a joint-stock company?
In a joint-stock company, funds are contributed into a common pool by investors who share in the company’s profits and losses.
Without joint-stock companies, English colonization would have been far more difficult. These joint-stock companies provided the money for the early colonization of North America by the English because the investors in the company were eager to discover gold, just like the Spanish had done in modern-day Mexico (Aztecs) and Peru (Inca).
What was the first permanent English colony in the New World?
Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607, was England’s first permanent colony in the New World.
The Virginia Company, a joint-stock company, received a charter from King James I. A previous colony at Roanoke mysteriously disappeared, but the Jamestown colony survived despite disease and poor planning.
What problems affected the Jamestown Colony?
Jamestown’s problems included:
- Disease: the colony was built in a low-lying, marshy area.
- Food shortages: many settlers wanted to search for gold instead of growing crops or hunting.
- Labor shortages: many former merchant settlers were unused to physical labor.
Under John Smith’s policy of “no work, no food” Jamestown’s conditions improved for a while, but then deteriorated during the “starving time.”
What is a royal charter?
A royal charter was a grant from the King of England giving special privileges, such as self-government, to a colony, company, or individual person.
If you were given a royal charter, it would mean that you would be in charge of a piece of land that could be ruled however you wanted, so long as you were loyal to the King and managed the land well.
Although the Virginia Company had a royal charter to establish a colony at Jamestown in 1607, that Royal Charter was taken away by the King in 1624, which allowed the English government to have direct control over those lands.
What two modern-day states were part of the Chesapeake Colonies?
Virginia and Maryland
Virginia and Maryland were among the 2 most highly populated colonies out of the original 13.
How did tobacco influence the Chesapeake and North Carolina colonies?
The labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco led to the growth of slavery in the Chesapeake colonies.
How did the Chesapeake Colonies attain almost all of their wealth?
By using enslaved peoples from Africa, owners of tobacco plantations could keep their operating costs low.
To ensure that their enslaved Africans could not run away and thus protecting their long-term economic power, white enslavers helped create laws that established the legal basis for slavery. These laws would remain for nearly 200 years.
Who founded the New England Colonies?
Puritans founded the New England colonies.
Puritans were people who came to North America to have more “religious freedom”. But, ironically enough, they wanted the freedom to write laws that would limit people’s religious freedom from the New England colonies.
Explain who the Puritans were.
The Puritans sought to “purify” Christian religious practices and were a religious threat to the Church of England.
As a result, a smaller group of these Puritans, known as Separatists, sought to leave the Church of England entirely, and thus migrated to North America and settled in the New England Colonies.
English monarch Henry VIII founded the Church of England to divorce his wife, free from papal interference. As the religious embodiment of the King, any threat to the Church of England was a threat to the King himself, so he welcomed the idea of Puritan departure.
How did democracy function in Massachusetts?
All male members of the Puritan church had the right to elect the governor, the governor’s assistants, and a representative assembly.
Why were the English able to colonize the New England colonies so easily?
Disease wiped out 90% of the Native Americans from the heavily wooded New England area.
So as English settlers spread inland, they would find large areas of cleared land that had been previously used for planting by the deceased Native Americans.
So, in effect, all the English had to do was remove the weeds and plant their crops on the cleared land.
What was indentured servitude?
Under indentured servitude, a person’s passage to the New World was paid in advance and in exchange for several years of labor.
Colonists, primarily in Maryland and Virginia, used indentured servants to fill labor shortages prior to using enslaved people on a massive scale. Most indentured servants died before obtaining freedom.
How did slavery develop in Virginia?
As Historian Edward T. O’Donnell puts it, Virginia transformed “from a society with slaves to a Slave Society in the 1660s”.
- By 1662, all enslaved mothers’ children were declared enslaved by the colonial government of Virginia.
- By 1667, baptism could no longer free an enslaved person
- By 1669, enslavers could legally kill an enslaved person since that person was their property
It took the Chesapeake region, and Virginia in particular, almost 100 years to legally implement full chattel slavery as we commonly understand it today.
3,000 enslaved peoples in the Chesapeake region in 1680. It increased to 16,000 by 1700, and 210,000 people were enslaved by 1775.
What was Bacon’s Rebellion?
After Native Americans had attacked frontier settlements in Virginia, with no response from the Virginia colonial government, a poor white farmer named Nathaniel Bacon gathered a small army of free and indentured farmers to make a counter-attack against the Native peoples who had attacked them.
This small army of free and indentured farmers was unique because it was a multi-racial group, containing both Black and White people.
When Governor Berkley declared that Bacon and his followers were rebels and traitors, Bacon turned his sights to Jamestown, burning the city to the ground in 1676. Bacon and his followers believed that Virginia’s government in Jamestown was too heavily influenced by wealthy landowners.
What were the major effects of Bacon’s Rebellion?
- End of indentured servitude as a form of bondage, since it was viewed as too risky since White people would be willing to work with Black people to fight the wealthy.
- Creation of laws that ensured slavery would be intergenerational and a good financial investment for White landowning elites.
