This might be a good moment to take a step back to get a bit of perspective. When we think about American history, we tend to think of it from the perspective of the United States, which tends to downplay the significant amount of change that had already taken place in the New World by the time Jamestown was founded in 1607. We tend to picture the arrival of Europeans in Virginia in much the same way we picture the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492, which is a completely garbage way to look at things. By the time the first idiots arrived in Jamestown, the Old World and New World had been interacting with each other for over a century, which for those of you who aren’t good with time as a concept, is a really fricking long time. Furthermore, as far as centuries go, the sixteenth century was probably the most transformative century in American history.
When Columbus first arrived, the New World was home to millions of people, comparable to Europe. By the time Jamestown was built, at least two-thirds of them were dead, most from disease, with the majority of the rest soon to be dead by the middle of the seventeenth century. Even though this death toll did not affect all areas equally, it most definitely had a ripple effect across the continent, shifting power dynamics and sparking waves of emigration and conquest. The world experienced by Columbus and the early Spanish was completely different than the world experienced by the first settlers of Jamestown.
In American history, the sixteenth century is most definitely the Spanish century. With the exception of a few small Portuguese colonies in Brazil, the Spanish were the only Europeans with a significant presence in the New World, controlling vast swaths of territories by the close of the century. However, they really didn’t give two shits about the land itself. The Spanish didn’t come to the New World for more land, they came for gold and silver, a dynamic that affected everything from what territories they claimed to how they interacted with the natives. The Spanish relationship with the natives was largely defined by a need for labor. They needed people to mine for gold and silver and to build and maintain the supporting infrastructure. From the Spanish point of view, they didn’t want to topple the existing power structures, they just wanted to be the ones on top controlling them. When the natives started dying off by the millions, the Spanish way of seeing it wasn’t: “sweet, more free land for us,” it was: “holy shit, all the fricking worker bees are dying.”
Unlike the later settlers in what we today call the United States, the primary goal of the early Spanish when dealing with the natives was integration. However, though they wanted the natives to be part of their new society, it was definitely a very stratified society based upon race and standing. The natives were on the bottom, then came people of mixed Spanish and native descent, then people of Spanish descent born in the New World, and then people born in Spain on the top. Though the lines between these groups grew increasingly blurred as time moved forward, the basic structure continues to exist to this day in many Latin American countries. As well, the integration of many tribes over time also created a distinction between “civilized” natives who had been fully integrated, those who were in the process of being “civilized”, and those who lived outside of Spanish society. Those deemed more “civilized” enjoyed greater rights and privileges, while it was basically okay to enslave, murder, and steal from those deemed “uncivilized”, as long as doing so would not negatively affect the mining of gold and silver.
It is worth noting that throughout the history of New Spain, the Spanish themselves were never the majority, even after pandemics killed the vast majority of natives and immigration from Spain increased in the second half of the century. By 1600, an estimated 275,000 people considered to be Spanish lived in New Spain, compared to 2.3 million considered to be natives. The fact that even when immigration increased, only 25% were women, meant that intermarriage with the natives was extremely common for everyone but the highest levels of the social ladder. The result was that even with all of the atrocities committed by the Spanish against the natives, their bloodlines and cultures became blended together, creating a new group of people and societies which today are collectively referred to as Hispanic. This blending of the Old World and New World, while not unique to just the Spanish, did not take place to the same degree with the later settlers of North America.
