these are pre revolution notes

1. COLONIAL AMERICA
1675-1763

2. GOOGLE
• BACON’S REBELLION
• KING PHILIP’S WAR
• PUEBLO REVOLT
• DOMINION OF NEW ENGLAND
• SALEM WITCHCRAFT CRISIS
• DEERFIELD ATTACK
• YAMASEE WAR
• BOSTON SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC
• FOUNDING OF GEORGIA
• ZENGER TRIAL
• STONO REBELLION
• NEW YORK CITY CONSPIRACY
• BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
• GREAT AWAKENING
• ALBANY CONGRESS

3. KING PHILIP’S WAR

5. • Bloodiest Indian war in New England
history: about 1,000 settlers and 3,000
natives dead
• Triggered by Plymouth’s public execution
of three Wampanoags convicted of killing
a praying Indian they considered a spy
• Numerous bands participated in
retaliatory raids against the English, who
had incurred native wrath by attacks and
seizing Indian lands
• Metacom (King Philip to the settlers) not
the evil mastermind imagined by the
colonists as the bands were decentralized
• Flintlock muskets, gradually acquired by
the warriors via the fur trade, equalized
the fighting

6. •
Religion a major factor as both sides
saw the hand of God in each victory or
defeat
• Indians employed total war strategy via
ambush and seize ( 12 colonial New
England towns destroyed)
• Settlers gradually abandon European
style mode of war and embrace Indian
tactics
• Tribesmen, eventually out of
ammunition and unable to obtain fresh
supplies, gradually weaken
• Vital role played by Iroquois in

7. • Praying Indians, despite being attacked
by the Puritans as an easy target,
fought in the war on the side of the
colonists
• Metacom, eventually shot in battle by a
praying Indian, was decapitated: this
trophy was displayed on the town wall
of Plymouth for generations
• His wife and 9 year old son, in what the
colonists considered an act of mercy,
were sold into slavery instead of
executed

8. 1680 PUEBLO REVOLT

9. • Pope’ a charismatic Pueblo shaman
who led a revolt against a divided
Spanish elite in what is today New
Mexico
• Divisions among a series of colonial
governors and the Franciscan
missionaries, both of whom exploited
the Indians for labor, emboldened
Pope’ and other Pueblo leaders to rise
up and reclaim their lands
• Royal governors tried to win the favor
of the conquered Pueblo by smearing
the priests, while the missionaries

10. • THE GREATEST SETBACK EVER
INFLICTED BY NATIVES ON EUROPEAN
EXPANSION IN NORTH AMERICA
• United in their hatred of the divided
Spanish conquerors, the Pueblo killed
about 20% of their overlords and drove
them completely out of the region
• Pope’ further sought a rejection of
Spanish culture and religion, and a return
to ancient and traditional tribal rituals and
customs
• Victorious Pueblo, without the unifying
force of hatred for their Spanish
oppressors, soon fell out among
themselves, paving the way within 20
years, for a return of the Spaniards

11. DOMINION OF NEW ENGLAND

12. • Triggered by the attempts in England
of the controversial Catholic king,
James II, to consolidate/increase his
power and freeze out Parliamentary
“power of the purse”
• Re-organize New England and New
York colonies into one obedient
“dominion” ruled by a royal toady
tasked to collect much more in taxes,
dissolve the colonial legislatures, and
curb the power of Puritans in the
region

13. • Colonial assemblies stripped of power
• Traditional town meetings weakened
• Anglican judges and officials replace
Puritans
• Salary of Andros = entire
administrative and government costs
of the whole region
• New taxes to pad England’s royal
treasury
• Royal military forces garrisoned in the
region

14. • 1688 Glorious Revolution changes
everything
• New rulers, William and Mary, dissolve the
entire Dominion experiment after
thousands of New England protesters jail
Andros
• Similar protesters, led in New York by
Calvinist Jacob Leisler, oust the Dominion
officials there
• Leisler hoping to restore Dutch and
Calvinist culture to the former New
Amsterdam: opposed, ironically, by the
old Dutch elite in Albany

15. RESULTS
• Compromise gradually worked out
between England and the colonies in
which a royal governor shares power with
the colonial assembly
• Governors can veto any bill passed by the
assembly but must rely on persuasion and
patronage with the leaders of the
assembly (frontier land)
• Assembly has power of the purse, right
of appointment to the council, and setting
of the governor’s salary = leverage in
future struggles
• Colonists accept their place in the
transatlantic British Empire but insist they
have all the rights of Englishmen with a

16. SALEM WITCHCRAFT CRISIS

17. • Occurred in Essex County, Massachusetts,
1692
• Witchcraft accusations against 144
residents (38 of whom were male)
• 54 confessed to witchcraft (allied with the
Devil)
• 14 women and 5 men hanged (one other
man was pressed to death)
• Several others died while in custody
• Women as the major instigators and
victims
• Probable that at least a few of the accused
were practicing “magic outside the
Christian tradition”

18. • Tensions between residents of Salem
Village and Salem Town: many of the
accusers lived in the Village while
many of the accused resided in the
Town
• Salem Crisis in the broader context of
King William’s War: Indian raids to the
north drove many war refugees,
suffering from “post-traumatic shock”
syndrome into Essex County
• Many of these refugees are among the
accusers and the accused
• Did they deal with the traumas and

21. YAMASEE WAR

22. • Similarities to Metacom’s War two
generations earlier in New England
• Here, however, the added dimension of
the complex relationship of English
slave traders bribing Indians to capture
rivals for plantation labor played a
major role
• As did the presence of Spain’s Florida
colony to the south of the Carolinas
and French Louisiana to the west
• Carolinas changing demographics: in
1700 about 15,000 natives/16,000
whites and Africans…….1730: 37,000

23. • As in the New England wars, English
adept at deepening Indian rivalries
via the allure of the fur trade…and
then ruthlessly exploiting the
intertribal divisions thus created
• Key factor in the eventual peace was
the colonial fear of empty lands,
vacated by vanquished tribes,
becoming an invitation to escaped
slave enclaves
• As was the colonial fear of driving
defeated tribes southward to the

24. • Brutality and ruthlessness on both
sides, but, morally, which bears the
greater burden?
• Thomas Nairne
• as in the Indian wars elsewhere in
colonial America, Yamasee and their
allies worn down by a lack of
ammunition as their former Virginia
trading partners united for once with
fellow settlers in the Carolinas and
refused to re-arm the “rebellious
savages”

25. BOSTON SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC

26. • 1721: 5,889 Bostonians struck/844
died
• Single largest epidemic disease
ravaging and weakening Native
American populations
• Inoculations were already done in
China, India, and parts of Africa
• Bostonians bitterly divided over
whether to inoculate (infect with small
dose: immunity)
• Cotton Mather, whose wife and three
children had already died in a measles

27. • Other Boston leaders passionately
disagreed, suggesting that plagues
were a sign of God’s displeasure
• Or a heathen practice, spurred on by
Satan’s wiles
• Health-wise, inoculations not without
peril because the procedure involved
transmission of bodily matter from one
person to another through an open
wound

28. EARLY GEORGIA

29. • Created in 1732 by the Georgia Trustees,
headed by landed gentleman and ex-
military officer, James Oglethorpe
• Dreamy do-gooders, who wanted to rid
London of annoying paupers, vagabonds,
and petty criminals as well as create a
frontier buffer against Spanish
encroachments on English North America
• Modeled on the old indentured servitude
system, except here each would be
granted a 50 acre tract of land
• Slavery banned, in part because the
plantation system dispersed whites,
reducing the ability militia units to serve
as a buffer against Spanish Florida

30. • Slavery also threatened to harm the
labor discipline that Oglethorpe
believed so necessary to rehabilitating
the able poor
• Contact with slave-owning white
Carolinians, who saw manual labor as
only for Africans, appealed to
frustrated white Georgians who
• Linked liberty with the right to own
property, non so important as African
slaves (paradox)
• Within two generations frustrated white

31. • By 1775, 18,000 whites/15,000 slaves
• A planter elite dominated society,
handsomely profiting from rice and indigo
• With a white population united by
supremacy and solidarity against the
African, whose legal standing and
humanity had been stripped by a series of
black codes
• Oglethorpe’s utopian dream of small
family farms, dedicated to hard work and
frontier defense against Catholic Spain,
had collapsed
• Relatively small group of immensely rich,
leisured, and politically powerful whites
now controlled the economic/political life

32. ZENGER TRIAL

33. • Most famous legal trial in colonial
American history: freedom of the press
• Haughty, greedy New York royal governor
William Colby attempted to extort salary
money from his predecessor
• Colby won at trial 2:1, thanks to hand-
picked toadies as judges in the case
• Colby, not content with the legal victory,
wrote a private letter to the one dissenting
judge that was published in pamphlet by
printer John Peter Zenger
• Zenger was then arrested and imprisoned
on a charge of libelous sedition

34. • Zenger’s eloquent Virginia attorney, hired
only because his two New York lawyers
were disbarred by the governor’s judicial
council for trying to defend him, used a
strategy of jury nullification
• Zenger was technically guilty under British
libel law, but his attorney argued to the
jury that “just complaints of a number of
men who suffer under a bad
administration” should nevertheless
exonerate his client
• Fhe further claimed that “a quarrel in New
York cannot possibly be attended with

35. • “what is good law at one time and in
one place is not so at another time and
in another place”
• He thus persuaded the jury that truth
is a valid defense against charges of
libel, claiming
• “the loss of liberty to a generous mind,
is worth than death….this is what every
man who values freedom ought to
consider”

36. STONO REBELLION

37. • Southern plantation owners paid a
heavy psychological price for adopting
the West Indian slave system: malaria
and yellow fever, abetted by
mosquitoes and a hot, humid climate
• And, more importantly, a deep-seated
dread of slave revolt
• Rumors of rebellion brought torture of
slaves to extract information, which led
to brutal executions
• Planters’ gut-wrenching fears became
realized in 1739 when 20 slaves rose
up, killed whites, and attempted to flee

38. • Their leisurely pace southward allowed a
white militia to form and ambush them,
but only after they had burned 7
plantations and killed 20
• Most surrendered, were then decapitated,
and their heads placed on poles along the
road back to Charles Town, the capital
• Indians were then used to hunt down
those who escaped into nearby forests
• Victory only exacerbated planter fears
• Slave codes were strengthened to bar: 1)
travelling without a pass,

39. • Masters, incredible to us today, pitied
themselves that they were burdened
with such a dangerous form of
property
• They saw their slave property as vital
to their own liberty and themselves as
the innocent victims of vicious blacks
• Their deep-seated fears plagued them
for centuries to follow, long after the
Civil War

40. NEW YORK CITY

41. • 20% of New Yorkers are slaves: highest
concentration in a non-southern colony
• Tensions heightened by a severe winter,
anti-Catholic feelings heightened by war
with Spain (during which Spain offered
freedom to escaped slaves), dread from
reports of recent slave insurrections
elsewhere, a severe winter, economic
depression, and dwindling food and fuel
stores
• Slave artisans, trained by their skilled
white masters, seen as a threat by many
non elite whites
• A series of fires, common under ordinary
circumstances, dramatically increased
fears among whites of a black conspiracy:

42. • Interpretations of this “event” further
muddied because many were executed
on the coerced and bribed testimony of
a servant girl, Mary Burton
• 70+ others deported
• Tensions calmed when the state’s chief
witness, Mary Burton, began to accuse
members of the elite and family
members of the judges’ tribunal
• Given the available evidence, we
cannot know the actual truth of the
“conspiracy”

43. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
• Class discussion based on Walter
Isaacson’s essay in “Portrait of
America”

44. THE FIRST GREAT

45. • “establishment” churches in the colonies,
mainly Congregationalist in New England (450
churches) and Anglican (300 churches)
primarily in the southern colonies, with
Quaker (250 meeting houses) and
Presbyterians, all perceived as dull, staid,
predictable, and formulaic by many in the
1730s
• Further supported by Enlightenment
rationalism: deistic worldview, less caught up
in magic and explanations based on divine
intervention
• New Light preachers surfaced, attempting to
“awaken” sinful colonists to the very real fires
of hell for those who did not embrace Christ
as their personal savior
• Accept human helplessness/worthlessness
and seek out God as the best hope for

46. • Emotion over Reason
• Jonathon Edwards: “Sinners in the Hands
of an Angry God”
• Ben Franklin encounters George
Whitefield during the latter’s famous
1739-41 tour of the American colonies
(mutually satisfactory)
• Short, slight, cross-eyed-but an
extraordinary public speaker (God-
inspired, many concluded)
• Fiery itinerant preachers anger many Old
Lights
• Did this religious revival help lay the

47. ALBANY CONGRESS

48. FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR