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CHAPTER ISome First Significant Stages of the USA History
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CHAPTER ISome First Significant Stages of the USA History
Part I. The First Explorers and Settlers of America.
Read and translate the following words and word combinations:
to establish settlements to be bound to …
to set up colonies a cargo of …
to colonize(v. )-colonization(n) to be far-flung-from
hostility to share the pie
to be on the decline to buy for trinkets
to squat unobvious
to be doomed to… outright mass extermination
to cede a territory barren land
indentured servitude forced relocation of people
to enact a law to be recaptured
to be ill prepared rugged existence
to be engulfed to be distressed
a joint-stock company to be beset
to be economic” white elephant” to perish
a nightmare to thrive
to become drifters a mutiny
How did American history begin? For thousands of years America lay unknown to Europeans beyond the Atlantic Ocean. The very first discovery of the continent is supposed to have been made by Norsemen from Greenland who reached the New World and encamped there. The actual material on the voyages is very small and covered with mystery. But the voyage of Thor Heyerdahl’s papyrus craft, Ra 11, did demonstrate that ancient sailors could have crossed the Atlantic ocean even before the Christian era. Both archeological evidence and ancient sagas do reveal the activities of courageous Norsemen who reached North America around year 1100. An old Scandinavian saga tells that the Norsemen found there a lot of grapes and grape vines. They filled their ships with grapes and a cargo of timber and sailed away, naming the country Vinland. Another saga tells about a group of the Vikings who spent a winter in Vinland but failed to establish peace with the natives and returned to Greenland with their son, the first European born in what is now America.
It is well known that the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) rediscovered the “New World” in 1492 by accident while looking for a shorter route to the spice places in Asia. An all-water route to the Indies might reduce the cost of Oriental products, inflated by various middlemen along the traditional land-sea way. Finally the queen of Spain Isabella of Castile sponsored Columbus to sail westward with the fleet of three small ships. A navigational genius, Columbus made four successful voyages from Spain to the islands now called West Indies and claimed the land in the New World for Spain. The continent America however was named for another Italian explorer – Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) who completed many voyages to South America and was the first to understand that he had reached India but a new continent – the New World. After Vespucci’s accounts, published in Europe, geographer Martin Waldseemuller produced a world map (kept in the Library of Congress) on which he depicted the new continent and named it America after Vespucci’s first name.
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After Columbus’ voyages, Italian, Spanish, French and English explorers continued European expansion of the continent looking for riches and land to claim for their countries. Italian explorer John Cabot commanded the first European ship to reach the shores of North America. Like Columbus, Cabot hoped to reach Asia by sailing west. Like Columbus, Cabot had unsuccessfully offered his service to several countries before finding financial support from England’s port Bristol and formal authorization of King Henry Y11. In May 1497 Cabot sailed from Bristol with two small ships and made a remarkably quick journey to the coast of Newfoundland. He spent a month there exploring American waters.
Driven by a search for personal glory as much as by a desire for wealth, a lot of brave and skilled adventurers repeated the initial contacts with the New World. Cabot’s attempt was followed in 1524 by another Italian seaman Giovanni Verrazzano who sailed in the service of the king of France and reached the eastern coast of North America.
. In 1528 five Spanish ships under the command of Panfilo Narvaez reached the west coast of Florida, staying on the continent in search of gold for several years.
In 1539 Spanish legendary explorer Fray Marcos de Niza was sent to America and described a “very beautiful city” as one of the “Seven cities”. His report stimulated further explorations into the area.
In all areas of Spanish exploration, settlement and colonization soon followed and before long the Spanish Empire was far-flung-from Florida to California to Central and South America. It was an Empire based on Spanish culture, the Catholic Church and exploration of the native tribes, but eventually Spain found the task of mastering and controlling two continents too much for her resources. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588, Spain’s power started declining.
PART 2 The First Wave of North America Immigration
The English did not attempt to “share the American pie” and inhabit North America until the 17PthP century settlements in North America. English first colonization steps were stimulated by their hostility to Spain. The accession to the throne in 1558 of a protestant, Elizabeth 1, turned English and Spanish nations into real enemies. Queen Elizabeth’s advisers Sir H. Gilbert, Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake proposed a more aggressive policy toward Catholic Spain and persuaded the Queen that New World colonies would serve as bases for attacks on Spain, which had already founded its colonies in the New World. The first English attempts at colonization in Newfoundland and North Carolina however failed. Sir H. Gilbert’s expedition in 1583 was destroyed by a storm. It was bound to be unsuccessful from the start as the boats were too light for the trans-Atlantic passage. Walter Raleigh’s first expedition to America in 1587 brought back glorious reports of the coast of Virginia, but the. outbreak of war between England and Spain in 1588 postponed the mission of England’s transatlantic ventures.
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Only two decades later King James I authorized the chartering of a joint stock company to colonize Virginia. In 1607 Virginia Company landed 144 men near the mouth of the James River as a site for permanent settlement. The Virginia Company resembled English joint-stock companies of Africa and Asia, but the small Jamestown colony proved to be economic “white elephant” for investors and a nightmare for many of its earliest inhabitants. The location was low, swampy, covered with trees full of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. During the first six months fever and disease killed approximately half the settlers.
The English pictured the new land of America as New England – a region not noticeably different from old England. In 1609 the reorganized Virginia Company petitioned for a charter, fixing the limits of the colony at two hundred miles north and south and including all islands within one hundred miles of the coast.
Over the years, the company established more liberal land grants, encouraged immigration of men and women, and slowly but steadily built strong political and economic institutions. Finally the Crown recognized Virginia’s elective assembly, and as the population increased the planter class created effective units of local government. Tobacco eventually gave Virginia colony a valuable export crop. Maryland, Virginia’s neighbor to the north, became the first private estate of a single family – the Calverts who became the owners of a vast New World estate by charter of 1632.
The next group of the immigrants to the New World consisted of the English who disagreed with the teaching of the Church of England and fled from persecution at home to Holland. Later in July 1620 a group of 102 so-called pilgrims sailed on the ship “Mayflower” to North America with the hope to set up a colony and find there civil and religious freedom. After a long trans - Antlantic crossing the pilgrims landed in a place now called Province Town and started building one of the first permanent Massachusetts’s villages called New Plymouth. The group was ill prepared for the rugged existence of the New World. Although only a few people perished in the trans-Atlantic crossing, many of them were weakened by the journey, had little skill in hunting and fishing and survived through the following winter only thanks to the help of the neighboring Indians.
The first religious group was followed by a thousand so-called English Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay and founded in 1630 some communities in Boston. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans had been distressed by the policies of the English crown, alarmed over growing immorality in English society and beset by economic anxiety. But unlike the Pilgrims, the Puritans claimed not separating from the English church, but establishing a purer version of it. Puritans built the first small towns centered around a church and a meeting house. The colony’s political leaders were also church leaders who tried to create the orders based upon true and strict Christian rules and the family as the basic unit of society. Good harbors, especially at the new town Boston, provided the foundation for a thriving commerce. The growth of trade and the development of shipping industry assisted the colony’s prosperity.
While the English settlers were adjusting to the new region, France and the Netherlands also tried to acquire the territories in America. In 1609 an English adventurer Henry Hudson employed by Dutch East India Company in his small vessel the “Half Moon” sailed up the river in North America, which now bears his name. He changed little trifles and some firearms for the beautiful furs, given by Indians. In 1624 the Dutch ship “New Netherlands” brought thirty families to the mouth of the Hudson River. In 1626 the governor of the Dutch Colony bought from Indians Manhattan Island for the trinkets valued approximately $24, built a trading fort and a town, which he called New Amsterdam. The defenses of New Amsterdam were poor and later when English warships appeared in the bay the Dutch had to surrender the fort and the town to the English. In 1664 King Charles II gave a large area of Manhattan Island to his brother Duke of York and New Amsterdam was turned into New York in honor of the duke
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. As English settlements spread to the north, west, and south, they grew into thirteen colonies, populating the gap between New England and other British settlements.
In 1681 William Penn, a son of the famous admiral of the English Navy, and a follower of religious group called Quakers made an agreement with the King, about the land in America. He called this land Pennsylvania (“Penn’s woods”). W. Penn did very much to build up Pennsylvania, writing advertisements, telling people in Europe about the beauty of his colony, promising that it would be a place open to settlers of all faiths.
One of the most striking characteristics of the mainland colonies in the 18th century was their rapid population growth. European immigrants flooded New England attracted by beautiful stories about America. In 1700 only 250, 000 people resided in the colonies, but from the meager beginnings the population began to double every 25 years, sprawling along the Atlantic coast. By 1760 the colonies already had contained over a million inhabitants – rich and poor, white and black, rural and urban, commercial and agricultural, Protestant and Catholic. 17 -century settlers came largely from Britain, bringing with them the English language, institutions and cultures.
But in the 18th century other groups of immigrants began to arrive. The largest of them were the Scots and Irish who fled from economic distress, failure of crops and religious discrimination. Many Europeans, mostly from Germany, came to America through so-called “redemption”. Under that form of indentured servitude, so-called redemptioners paid as much as they could of their passage before sailing from Europe to America. After they landed in the colonies, they were indentured for a term of service proportional to the amount of their debt. The term of service lasted from one year to four or longer. According to American historians only two of every ten indentured servants became successful farmers or artisans. The remaining 80% either died during servitude, became drifters or caught the land belonging to native tribes.
The development of American colonization was dramatically influenced by two most important aspects: the relationships of Europeans and Native Americans and the importation of more than two hundred thousand Africans into North America.
Native Americans
It is well known that when Christopher Columbus arrived in the “New World” and thought that he was in India, he called the native people as Indians. When Columbus discovered the New World there seemed to be approximately from 1 to 10 million different Indian tribes who lived within the present limits of the United States and spoke about 450 distinct dialects. It is well known now that the American Indians who demand now to be called Native Americans or by their tribal names like Navajo or Lakota developed great civilizations in Pre-Columbian America( the Incas and the Aztecs and others), and contributed much to world culture and the welfare of the human race. They domesticated corn, potatoes, tobacco and many vegetables and fruits which we like so much now. They made discoveries of very many drugs that are used today in chemistry and medical science.
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At the time of European settlement in the 17PthP century the New England coastal area was densely populated with Indian tribes who mostly hunted buffalo for food, shelter, clothing, and articles of warfare. At that time Indian – white contacts in the New World favored the white settlers. It was the Indians who taught European newcomers how to adjust to the new nature and climate, how to hunt in the wilderness and fish. Christopher Columbus described the American Indians as “a loving, unobvious people, so docile in all things that there are no better people or better country… They loved their neighbors as themselves and they had the sweetest and gentlest way of speaking in the world, and always with a smile”. It was the Indians who kept the Virginia colony originally alive by trading corn and other foodstuffs to the settlers.
But in return for their friendship the Europeans took their lands, destroyed their way of life, and turned them into refugees and beggars in their own country. The story of the American Indians is one of the most brutal stories of violence and cruelty in human history. The settlers needed land, Indians occupied it. Only when the white men began pushing the Indians off their land did they started viewing them as enemies and tried to strike back. The year of 1622 marked the beginning of 200 long conflicts between the Native Americans and the white settlers. The Indians were doomed to be defeated. The colonists had guns, the Indians fought with bows and arrows.
Overall, the treatment of North American Indians by Europeans stands as the most bloody acts of genocide. In books and later in Westerns the Indians were always portrayed as “the hair-raising baddies” (villains). The phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” was generally used. The means of violence were varied and included not only outright mass extermination, but also bounty-hunting (scalping for profit), massacre of women and children, the assassination of Indian kings and leaders, the forced relocation of peoples. By the end of the 18-th century some Indian tribes had been exterminated. The others had been forced to accept “the peace terms” according to which they ceded a substantial part of their territory to the whites and moved to reservations, not suitable for farming and that’s why not needed by white settlers.
Afro-Americans.
To work the new lands, to produce large-scale products of tobacco, rice, cotton and indigo black slaves were captured in Africa and brought to America. In August 1619 the first cargo of twenty blacks was brought by a Dutch ship to Virginia. In 1661 the Virginia legislature enacted the law that assumed African Negroes as “inferior” and “servants for life”. After that slaves were brought into other colonies. Although while crossing the Atlantic many African slaves died from terrible conditions on the ships but their number had grown to six thousand by the end of the 17PthP century. The difference in skin and culture of Africans was viewed by most white settlers as their inferiority, creating the basis for a system of racial slavery
Black slaves were considered to be the property of their masters and were bought and sold like farm animals. In 1800, there were almost 900, 000 black slaves, most of them in the southern states of the New World. America proved for many of them a hideous prison, and death provided the only escape from life-long sufferings and degradation. They often came from different tribes and did not even speak the same languages. Enslaved into a hostile and strange culture, they had to fully obey their masters or else they would be beaten, tortured, or killed. Most of them worked in the fields on tobacco or cotton plantations, others worked as domestic servants, cooking, cleaning, and caring for the master’s family. It was illegal to teach a slave reading and writing. If slaves wanted to marry, they had to ask their master’s permission. The children of the slaves automatically became the property of the master. Sometimes family members were sold to different owners and never saw each other again.
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Scattered references to attempted suicides and occasional slave mutinies indicate that Africans did not accept their fate passively, and the sadness of their songs - their most powerful legacy of expression - provides insight into their personal tragedies. Outright resistance was impossible, but. some slaves tried to escape. Although a few northern states, including New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, abolished slavery at that time, escaped slaves from the South could be legally recaptured there and returned to their masters. Many slaves tried to escape to Canada, the only place that slaves could become free legally. The escape route, called the Underground Railroad, was a network of hiding places and people called “conductors” who led slaves north to freedom. The journey was long and extremely difficult. During the day, slaves hid in caves or in barns belonging to anti-slavery white farmers. At night, they were taken to the next hiding place. The “conductors” risked their lives, because people could be executed for helping slaves to escape. Only a few fugitive slaves ever reached the promised land of Canada.
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