PENGUIN BOOKS AMERICAN COLONIES Alan Taylor’s previous books include William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for history. He is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis. American Colonies is the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, award-winning author of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution and the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. Booklist Selection, Best Books of 2001 Praise for American Colonies “Drawing on the latest scholarship, Taylor expands our understanding of our own history in this comprehensive and exciting book. Full of surprising revelations, this superb book is history at its best.” —BookPage “A balanced synthesis of recent scholarship. … Alan Taylor expertly weaves together the arguments and evidence of dozens of historians and anthropologists … plac[ing] the familiar themes of early American history within a broad context created by the intersection of the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. [Taylor’s] strategy allows him to highlight the histories of peoples and places neglected in accounts of colonial North America. More than just a formidable work of historical synthesis, American Colonies provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity.” —The New York Times Book Review “At long last, we have an overview of colonial North America that addresses its full geographic, international, and multicultural sweep. In American Colonies, Alan Taylor transcends the heroic saga of freedom-loving Englishmen clustered along the Atlantic coast with a full-blown narrative that extends from the continent’s earliest inhabitants through Christian-Muslim interactions in fifteenth-century Africa and Europe to the onset of the American Revolution and Captain Cook’s Pacific voyages. Taylor challenges us to rethink the complexity and significance of America’s colonial past.” —Neal Salisbury, Professor of History, Smith College “Alan Taylor puts everything we thought we knew about early America in a refreshing international context. All over the country, teachers will be throwing out stale lecture notes. Students will be sitting up attentively. Here is a history that responds to the skeptical questions we ask in the twenty-first century.” —Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship “[A] superb overview of colonial America. Alan Taylor … draws upon an extraordinary array of recent scholarship to present a much more comprehensive and complex story. In the process, he punctures many myths and misperceptions. Taylor skillfully integrates social history into his narrative. His accounts of gender roles, family life, and religious beliefs help illuminate the political and economic processes that shape America’s role within the international community. Perhaps Taylor’s greatest contribution to our understanding of early American history is contextual. He is one of the few colonial historians to devote a whole chapter to the settlement of the West Indian islands and their role in the development of South Carolina, and perhaps the only one to include developments on the Great Plains and in California, Alaska, and Hawaii before the Revolution. He also broadens our understanding of the multinational aspects of early American history. American Colonies provides the most comprehensive and textured account of the diverse strands that formed the fabric of early American history. It is destined to become the standard work in its field.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Crammed full of fascinating material uncovered by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists in the past half-century.” —Newsday “Alan Taylor has ranged widely over the best new scholarship in ethnohistory, environmental, imperial, Atlantic, Pacific and Borderlands history, using it not simply to inform, but to transform the narrative of early North America. Compelling, readable, and fresh, American Colonies is perhaps the most brilliant piece of synthesis in recent American historical writing.” —Philip J. Deloria, Associate Professor History and American Culture, University of Michigan and author of Playing Indian “Even the serious student of history will find a great deal of previously obscure information. The book offers a balanced understanding of the diverse peoples and forces that converged on this continent and influenced the course of American history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) AMERICAN COLONIES ALAN TAYLOR The Penguin History of the United States Eric Foner, Editor PENGUIN BOOKS Overleaf: Taino Indians panning for gold, using Spanish tools. PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001 Published in Penguin Books 2002 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Copyright © Alan Taylor, 2001 All rights reserved ILLUSTRATION CREDITS: James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota: title page; Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.: p. 3; from Rhys Isaac’s The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill): p. 138, right and left; American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Williamsburg, Va.): p. 222; Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library: p. 388. All others courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Map illustrations by Jeffrey Ward THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Taylor, Alan, 1955– American colonies / Alan Taylor; Eric Foner, editor. p. cm.—(The Penguin history of the United States; 1) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN: 978-1-101-07581-4 1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. I. Foner, Eric. II. Title. III. Series. E188.T35 2001 973.2—dc21 2001017552 Printed in the United States of America Set in Janson Designed by Helene Berinsky Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. 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For Emily CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Part I ENCOUNTERS 1.Natives, 13,000 B.c.–A.D. 1492 2.Colonizers, 1400–1800 3.New Spain, 1500–1600 4.The Spanish Frontier, 1530–1700 5.Canada and Iroquoia, 1500–1660 Part II COLONIES 6.Virginia, 1570–1650 7.Chesapeake Colonies, 1650–1750 8.New England, 1600–1700 9.Puritans and Indians, 1600–1700 10.The West Indies, 1600–1700 11.Carolina, 1670–1760 12.Middle Colonies, 1600–1700 Part III EMPIRES 13.Revolutions, 1685–1730 14.The Atlantic, 1700–80 15.Awakenings, 1700–75 16.French America, 1650–1750 17.The Great Plains, 1680–1800 18.Imperial Wars and Crisis, 1739–75 19.The Pacific, 1760–1820 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX