The New World Encounters the Old and The Old World Comes to

America

• The Vikings Had Been There, Done That, and the Native Americans were Doing

• Most historians agree that the Vikings arrived somewhere along the coast of North America during the Tenth Century.

• Vikings were farmers as well as seafarers and the primary reason for their explorations was to locate new farm lands and a new world to settle in to escape some of the problems of the old.

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• Around the same time the Vikings were exploring in the New World, the Mississippian Native American civilization reached its peak, about 300 years before Columbus. The central city of their civilization, Cahokia, was located near present day Collinsville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.

• The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas had developed civilizations in Central and South America before Columbus

• The Mississippian Indians established extensive trade networks that reached from New Orleans and as far north as the Great Lakes. They were farmers and environmentalists.

• Scholars speculate that the Mississippian civilization declined because of unabated population growth, unregulated urbanism and in breeding.

• Woodland Indians also had established themselves in other parts of North America. The Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations developed a governmental system that the framers of the United States Constitution would later adopt.

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• The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas had developed civilizations in Central and South America before Columbus

The European vs. Indian World Views

• Europeans and Indians held drastically different views of nature and their place in the natural world.

• Europeans believed that the Bible gave them permission to subdue and rule nature and natural creatures. They considered nature a savage beast that needed to be tamed and since the Native Americans lived in harmony with nature, they considered the Native Americans “savages: who needed to be civilized.

• Europeans believed in the private ownership of land, while Native Americans believed that it belonged to the entire tribe or in communal ownership.

• Native Americans had already developed their own religions and rituals, but they were vastly different from the European religious beliefs.

• The Europeans brought technology in the form of guns and manufactured goods to the new world and they also brought diseases that decimated Indian populations. Europeans encouraged Indian dependence on these innovations.

• Many Europeans came to the new world with a greed for gold, land, and other riches, a lust for power, and a determination to convert the Native peoples.

Why did Europeans Leave Europe? • There had been a renewal of European trade and

commerce in the 500 years between Leif Ericsson and Columbus.

• The Roman Catholic Church which united Medieval Europe and the civilization of Islam encouraged trade between Europe and China and India especially the spice and silk trades.

• Intellectual and cultural shifts inspired by the invention of the printing press created a more literate population and sparked interest in exploration.

• Advances in navigation and naval architecture helped Europeans explore more extensively. The compass, the caravel and gunpowder gave the Europeans the technological might to meet the new world.

• The Portuguese mariners like Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama, led the exploration of Africa and the Mediterranean and India.

• They came to America for glory, adventure, status, power and profit.

• Christopher Columbus, a Genoese adventurer and explorer, convinced Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain to finance three small vessels at a total cost of about $50,000 modern day dollars.

• Columbus outfitted his three small ships and on August 3, 1492, he and his crew left Spain. Ten weeks later they arrived at the Caribbean Island of San Salvador, although they believed they had reached the Indies.

• Columbus made three other voyages and explored the Caribbean, surveyed its major islands, and touched the mainland of the Americas at several points.

The Columbian Exchange• The Columbian Exchange was the interaction of

culture, products, ideas, and diseases that altered the lives of new and old world peoples.

• Europeans quickly extinguished all traces of Native America self rule.

• Native Americans and Europeans exchanged diseases like measles, syphilis and smallpox.

• Europeans introduced herds of sheep and cattle that destroyed the Native American farming environment.

•Europeans attempted to destroy Indian culture.•Europeans introduced “fire water.”•Europeans introduced slavery and enslaved many of the Native American peoples.•By 1500, Europeans began a migration to the New World that would eventually attract about 100 million people across the Atlantic Ocean.

From the Journal of Christopher Columbus

,,,,Your Highnesses commanded me that, with a sufficient fleet, I should go to the said parts of India and for this accorded to me great rewards and ennobled me so that from that time henceforward I might style myself ‘don’ and be high admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy and perpetual governor the islands and continent which I should discover and gain and which from now henceforward might be discovered and gained in the Ocean Sea, and that my eldest son should succeed to the same position and so on from generation to generation.

And I departed from the city of Granada on the twelfth day of the month of May in the same year of 1492,

on a Saturday, and came to the town of Palos, which is a port of the sea, where I made ready three ships very suited for such an undertaking, do.

and I set out from that port, well furnished with very many supplies and with many seamen, on the third day of the month of August of the same year, on a Friday, half an hour before the rising of the sun and I steered my course for the Canary Islands of Your Highnesses, which are in the Ocean Sea, thence to set out on my way and to sail until I should arrive in the Indies, and deliver the embassy of Your Highnesses to those princes and perform all that you had commanded me to do.

The Old World Comes to America

• In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to plant a settlement, commanded by John White, in present day North Carolina. A large group of gentleman, and women and children arrived at Roanoke Island off North Carolina. White returned to England for supplies, was delayed by the Spanish Armada and when he finally returned he found no survivors of the small colony.

• Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607 as a commercial enterprise.

• In the Seventeenth Century about 155.000 people came to North American from England. From 1760 to 1775, about 125,000 emigrants left the British Isles for North American and another 12,000 arrived rom Germany and Switzerland.

• The majority of the immigrants were young.• Most came for social and economic opportunity.

Some were runaways, lawbreakers, and debtors. Some were convicts, indentured servants and slaves.

America as a Religious Haven

• Many Seventeenth Century immigrants came to America as refugees from religious intolerance and they settled primarily north of the Chesapeake, especially in New England and Pennsylvania.

• A group of radical Puritan separatists called, Pilgrims, decided to leave their refuge in Holland for Virginia where they could worship without interference.

• The Plymouth Colony slowly expanded until it slowly reached a population of about 3,000 people by 1660.

• A storm drove them north to Cape Cod Bay and because they were worried that their charter might not be legal because the region was outside of the London Company’s grant, the Pilgrims adopted the Mayflower Compact.

• The Plymouth Colony slowly expanded until it slowly reached a population of about 3,000 people by 1660.

• In 1601, Plymouth Colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Community.

• The Puritans wanted to reform the Church of England from within. When they discovered they could not accomplish this in England they came to Massachusetts in the mid 1600s. In 1629, John Winthrop, a lawyer educated at Cambridge, accepted the leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Company and led his people to America to start a new colony.

• America provided a refuge for religious dissenters from Europe, but religious toleration was not universal. Catholics and Jews could not openly practice their religions in many places. Toleration usually met toleration only for various kinds of Protestants.

• Yet the complete picture revealed that the British mainland colonies featured a more complete religious toleration than anywhere else in the Western world.

Agreement Between the Settlers at New Plymouth: 1620

In the Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith & c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia;

Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and Equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.

IN WITNESS thereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth Anno Domini; 1620.

Mr. John Carver Richard Gardiner John Alden John Turner Francis Eaton James Chilton

Mr. William Bradford Mr. John Allerton Thomas English Edward Doten Edward LiesterJohn Craxton John Billington Joses Fletcher John Goodman

Mr. Edward Winslow Mr. Samuel Fuller Mr. Christopher Martin Mr. William Mullins

Mr. William Brewster Mr. William White Mr. Richard Warren John Howland

Isaac Allerton Mr. Steven Hopkins Digery Priest Thomas Williams Gilbert Winslow

Myles Standish Edmund Margesson Peter Brown Richard Britteridge George Soule Edward Tilly

John Tilly Francis Cooke Thomas Rogers Thomas Tinker John Ridgdale Edward Fuller Richard Clark

Penn’s Woods or Pennsylvania

• The Anglican clergy and many orthodox English people considered Quaker behavior and teachings even worse than those of the Puritans.

• In 1681, William Penn received a charter from Charles II of England for a large land grant along the Delaware River in repayment for a debt the crown owed his father.

• Penn constructed a frame of government and a set of laws including land ownership as a basis for voting, no taxation without representation, trial by jury, and freedom to worship God in peace.

• By 1689 Pennsylvania had a population of 12,000.• In 1780, Pennsylvania became one of the first

colonies to introduce An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. It read in part: …

• It is not for us to inquire why, in the creation of mankind, the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion. It is sufficient to know that all are the work of an Almighty Hand…We esteem it a peculiar blessing granted to us, that we are enabled this day to add one more step to universal civilization,

• by removing as much as possible the sorrows of those who have lived in undeserved bondage, and from which, by the assumed authority of the Kings of Great Britain, no effectual, legal relief could be obtained…