New Spain1500-1600

• By 1550 Spain dominated the lands and peoples around the Caribbean and deep into both North and South America

• Other European counties were afraid of their growing strength and wealth

• They claimed the Spanish were unusually cruel to the natives

• All Europeans were arrogant and cruel in their treatment of natives—the Spanish simply got a head start on them

Conquests

• Spanish needed replacement workers for the Taino to toil in their gold mines, cattle ranches, and sugar plantations

• They raided the mainland of Central America, seizing natives to sell to miners and planters

• Due to high mortality rates, they expanded their slave raiding to the villages from the Gulf Coast to Venezuela to South Carolina

• It was from these captives that the Spanish learned of the rich and populous Aztec empire in Central America

• They had cities with stone temples and palaces, and fields of maize, squashes, and beans

• They also demanded tributes from their people for sacrifices to their gods

Aztecs

Hernán Cortéz

• Younger son born into the hildago class• Trained as a lawyer• Subordinate commander in the conquest of

Cuba, he acquired plantations, gold mines, and a burning ambition for more wealth and power

• He invaded the Aztec empire on his own authority and defied his superior, the governor of Cuba

• Cortéz won the support of the people who were tired of giving tributes to the Aztecs

• Cortéz’s army with all their apparatus—cannons, muskets, steel armor, swords, and horses—alarmed the Aztec emperor

• The Spanish ended up killing the emperor and fighting with the Aztec’s for over four months

• The post-conquest poems indicate that the survivors of the conquest had become disillusioned with their old religion and were likely candidates for conversion to Christianity.

Francisco Pizarro

• With a mere 180 men, Pizarro conquered the Inca empire of Peru in the 1530s

• In the 1340s the Spanish forces conquered the Mayan

• While they had superior technology, spreading disease was their single most advantage

• The conquistadores took heart from the epidemics as a confirmation that God favored their triumph

• Plunder, slaves, and tributes were their just deserts for forcing pagans to accept Christianity and Spanish rule

• Indians who failed to accept Spanish rule and Christian conversion deserved the deaths and/or harsh punishments they received from a “just” war

Dominican Friars

• Friars argued that peaceful persuasion would be more effective in converting the natives to Christianity and Hispanic civilization

• The Indians should entirely surrender their traditional culture to adopt the uncompromising ways and beliefs of their conquerors.

• Priests oversaw the destruction of native temples, prohibited most traditional dances, and obligated natives to build new churches and adopt the rituals of the Catholic faith

• Many Indians did so in public, but continued to venerate their old idols in secret

• Mexican Indians privately nurtured a mythic understanding of the Spanish conquest as cosmically insignificant and ephemeral—of no more enduring significance that the many previous cycles of rising and falling native powers

• Having experienced the Aztecs and Toltecs previously, the natives of Mexico expected to outlast their Spanish masters

• Because of the internal nature of native resistance, the Friars could achieve no more than a compromise in matters of faith and practice

Colonists

• During the 16th century, the New World drew about 250,000 Spanish emigrants

• Early in the 16th century almost all emigrants were young single men

• By the 1570s the number of women increased but remained less than a third of the total

• Male emigrants usually took wives or concubines among the Indian population which created mixed offspring known as mestizos

• The increasing racial and cultural complexity of New Spain challenged the stark and simple dualities of the conquest:– Spaniard and Indian– Christian and pagan– Conqueror and conquered• The colonial authorities developed a complex new

racial hierarchy known as the castas which ranked people from the pure African and Indian at the bottom, through multiple gradations of mixtures to the pinnacle of the pure Spaniard.

• The higher castas enjoyed greater legal privileges at the expense of the lower

• By 1574, there were 121 chartered towns in the Americas

• Charters entrusted local power to cabildos or town councils where all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class—the wealthy

• Towns were arranged around a central plaza where the wealthiest lived

Wealth

• The quickest way to obtain American wealth was to steal it on the high seas

• The Dutch, English, and French all encouraged private investors to attack and plunder Spanish ships

• In the 1550s, French pirates extended their raids into the Caribbean

• Spanish developed galleons in response

Sir Francis Drake

Spanish Armada

• Wanted to seize control of the English Channel and permit an invasion by Spanish troops posted in the Netherlands

• Consisted of 130 warships carrying 2,431 cannon and 22,000 sailors and soldiers

• The smaller English ships were faster and more mobile

• This win emboldened the English to escalte their maritime predator activities

Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca

• 1527—Vaca left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to occupy the mainland of North America

• After a hurricane off Cuba, they secured a new boat and departed for Florida.

• The expedition landed near Tampa Bay is March 1538 and claimed the land as the lawful possession of the Spanish empire

• The expedition was a disaster

• The party overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida when they took their leader hostage

• After being pursued by the natives, the surviving members were reduced to living in a coastal swamp and living off the flesh of their horses

• In late 1528, they built several rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail for Cuba

• A hurricane dumped the 80 survivors close to what is now Galveston, Texas

• Initially welcomed, the Indians blamed them when half the natives died from disease

• Over the next four years he transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and a healer

• By 1532 only four of the original expedition were still alive

• They headed west and south hoping to reach an outpost of the Spanish Empire in Mexico

• In July 1536 they finally encountered a group of fellow Spaniards—who were amazed at the sight of Cabeza de Vaca in the company of Indians

• Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, he returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a more generous policy upon the crown

• He served as a Mexican territorial governor byt was accused or corruption—probably because of his enlightened treatment toward Indians

• He returned to Spain and, after a pardon, served as a judge in Seville until his death

Hernando de Soto

• Led 600 in 1539 through the heartland of the Mississippian culture which is now Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and east Texas

• They carried little food with them—they expected to take maize, beans, and squash from the Indians

• Soto brought along 300 sets of iron collars and chains to enslave Indians as his porters

• He seized local chiefs to hold as hostages to extort ransoms of maize, women, porters, and guides

• They were unable to find great resources of gold and silver

• They left a trail of corpses, mutilations, ravaged fields, emptied storehouses, and charred towns in their wakes

• Soto died in 1542 and because he had told Indians he was immoral, the men tried to hide his death

• The remaining men built boats in 1543 to descend the Mississippi and sail southwest

• Soto’s expedition introduced diseases that decimated the natives

• By 1600 the region’s population had collapsed to a small fraction of its former numbers

• When the French explorers arrived in the 1670s, they found few Indians

• The only group that survived the Soto expedition were the Natchez people—they would later be known at the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee

Florida

• French stole half of the Spanish royal revenue from the new world in the late 1550s

• They focused on the channel that ran between Florida and the Bahamas

• Ships were also wrecked by treacherous shoals and storms

• Calusa Indians scavenged the wrecks for metals and took castaways as slaves

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés

• Spanish crown established a fortified colony along the Atlantic coast of Florida

• Avilés was known as a resourceful and ruthless naval officer

• Spanish learned in 1565 that the French had established a small base in Florida—Ft. Caroline at the mouth of the St. Johns River

• The Spanish, horrified by the fact the French were Protestant, attacked and killed all the French

• Avilés founded St. Augustine on the coast 40 miles south of the former Ft. Caroline

• In 1570 he established a short-lived Jesuit mission on the Chesapeake Bay; he also settled other towns in Florida which failed due to attacks by the French and the Indians

• The Spanish finally established towns in Florida by using the Franciscan mode of pacification

New Mexico

• Spanish returned to the Rio Grande to practice a similar program of pacification as used in Florida

• Spanish were afraid of other countries taking over

• Secular colonists were hoping to find silver

Canada and Iroquoia

• English, French, & Dutch needed their own colonies

• Northern America offered a safer setting

• Jacques Cartier colonized along St. Lawrence River

• Fur trade and fishing became valuable northern commodities