American History - Maryland

If there is one thing you should probably know about the religious conflicts which swept across Europe throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was not a great time to be the wrong religion in the wrong place.  Not only did you face persecution and harassment from the religious majority for not praying to god in just the right way, there was a very real chance of having all of your property seized or just ending up plain old murdered.  In England, one of the more persecuted group was Catholics, who were not only persecuted by the dominant Anglican church, but also the even more hardcore Puritans, who themselves were also persecuted by the Anglicans.  Anyways, after seeing the success of the Puritans in New England, the Catholic Lord of Baltimore went to the king of England with a plan to create a similar Catholic colony.  The king, pretty down with the idea given fewer Catholics around meant less arguing with the English parliament about them, agreed as long as the new colony was named after his wife.  Hence was born the colony of Maryland.

In 1632 the first 300 settlers departed for Maryland aboard two ships.  The settlers consisted of about 17 upper class Catholic families and a couple hundred indentured servants to see to their needs.  After a couple uneventful months at sea, the two ships landed in Chesapeake Bay and the colonists set about to building themselves a new home, purchasing land from a local Lenape tribe.  The Lenape were more than happy to see the English settlers.  They were in conflict with the powerful Susquehannock Confederacy further inland, and they hoped that trade with the English might give them an edge.  Plus, what was to become Maryland was a bit of a swampy shithole, so it wasn’t really all that big of a deal to hand it over.  However, the swampy soil proved perfect for growing tobacco, and the new colony quickly became profitable.  So profitable in fact that despite regular outbreaks of yellow fever and malaria, which made the average life expectancy significantly lower than in other colonies, the population was nearly 5,000 by 1650, most of whom were indentured servants who worked the fields while the wealthy landowners raced horses, played cards, and other such rich asshat hobbies. 

Maryland was somewhat unique compared to other English colonies, given it was technically all owned by the Lord of Baltimore, but otherwise it was fairly similar to the rest with an appointed governor and elected legislative assembly running things.  Though originally supposed to be a Catholic refuge, in practice it was more of a hodge podge of various religious types.  However, the existence of a so-called Catholic colony in no way pleased the Puritans, who saw the New World specifically as their promised land.  This general sense of hostility was little helped in 1638, when Maryland forcefully removed a Puritan trading post from an island in Chesapeake Bay.  From Maryland’s perspective, this had less to do with religion, and more to do with the fact that the traders were selling guns to the native tribes in the local area, who were undergoing a bit of turmoil due to a pandemic sweeping through the area, killing off around half of them.  Around this same time, Sweden built Fort Christina on the Delaware River, from which they happily began selling guns to the Susquehannock, who in turn used them to attack the Lenape.  Not really wanting to trade the friendly Lenape for the less friendly Susquehannock, the colonists in Maryland fought on behalf of their allies from 1642 until 1644, until a combined force of Susquehannock and Swedes kicked their asses, scattering the Maryland militia across the countryside. 

This turn of events created an opening that was quickly taken advantage of by the Puritans, who were still not happy about having Catholics in the New World, especially given recent events.  The English Civil War had begun in 1642, pitting supporters of the English parliament against supporters of the king.  While the colony of Virginia was solidly on the royalist side, the Puritans were not, and as a result Virginia passed a law making Anglicism the official religion of the colony.  Not exactly feeling welcome, the Puritans living in Virginia founded a new colony in Maryland, which welcomed them with the ideal of religious tolerance.  This proved to be a mistake given the moment the Maryland militia was scattered by the Swedes and Susquehannock in 1644, the Puritans seized control, beating up Catholics, forcing priests to return to England, and generally just being righteous dicks doing whatever the hell they felt like.  The governor of Maryland was only able to regain control two years later with the help of the Virginia militia.     

In 1649, the English Civil War ended with the king of England getting his head chopped off and the foundation of the English Commonwealth under the control of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.  The Puritans in Maryland celebrated by seizing control of the colony again, setting up a new government which outlawed both Catholicism and Anglicism, and burning down all of the Catholic churches.  The governor of Maryland again went to Virginia for help, but finding them less than willing to do so, he instead raised up a militia of colonists in Maryland who were tired of the Puritan shenanigans.  In response, the Puritans raised up their own militia, and the two sides met in 1655 at the Battle of the Severn, a rather sorry affair that left 19 people dead and the Puritans still firmly in control.  They would remain in control until 1658, when to their utter surprise Oliver Cromwell himself ordered them to quit being a bunch of jackasses and handed control of the colony back to the authority of the Lord of Baltimore. 

Despite all of the general chaos and rampant swamp diseases, Maryland continued to flourish throughout this period, its population reaching nearly 9,000 by 1660, the same year the English Commonwealth fell apart and the old king’s son was crowned the new king.  The Lord of Baltimore retained control of Maryland until 1688, when the Glorious Revolution ushered in a new set of hardcore Protestant rulers in England.  Soon after, the Puritans again forcefully seized control of Maryland and outlawed Catholicism in the colony, a law that was not rescinded until the Revolutionary War nearly a century later.           

American History - New Netherland

Starting in the late sixteenth century, the buying of furs from North America became big business, especially beaver given its water proof qualities. French, English, and Dutch traders regularly visited the North Atlantic coast of North America to trade with the local natives. This was generally seen as a positive by everyone involved. The local tribes got access to metal tools, wool blankets, and a bunch of other shit from Europe they thought was pretty damn awesome, and the traders made a bunch of money selling the furs in Europe. As the number of beaver along the coast began to decline, the coastal tribes began trading with tribes further into the interior for furs. However, this made the furs more expensive which in turn led to the Europeans to search for direct water routes into the interior to effectively cut out the middleman. The largest of these was the St. Lawrence River.

Between 1605 and 1610, the French built several small trading outposts along the St. Lawrence, not only allowing them to build strong trading relationships with the tribes in the area, but also effectively blocking the English and Dutch traders from the most accessible route into the interior. As one can probably imagine, this did not sit well with either the Dutch or the English, who were not about to give up on making a shit ton of cash. The English responded by attacking and burning down the various French outposts for the next twenty years, which was not super effective, because not only were the outposts easily rebuilt, but also because such behavior made the tribes in the area rather leery of dealing with them. After all, you wouldn’t buy groceries from the same guy who just burned down the grocery store next door. The Dutch traders were a little more strategic in their response, instead focusing their efforts on the Hudson River, the second best route into the interior, building Fort Nassau far up the river near present day Albany in 1614. This was a fortuitous location given it was right on top of the primary trade routes bringing furs from the interior to the coast, and because it put the Dutch in direct contact with the Iroquois Confederacy, an alliance of five powerful Iroquois tribes in what would become upper New York. Over the next decade the Dutch built several trading outposts up and down the Hudson, as well as outposts further afield near the mouths of the Delaware and Connecticut rivers.

At first, the Dutch presence in North America was limited to a few trading outposts. However, when the Puritans successfully established Plymouth colony in the early 1620’s, it began to raise concerns. After all, the English colony of Virginia to the south already had some thousand people, so the writing was kind of on the wall. In order to guard the Hudson River from excursion, the Dutch purchased land on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the river for a bunch of trade goods, worth little in Europe but worth a lot in North America, from a tribe who didn’t even technically control the land. Either way, the Dutch founded the colony of New Amsterdam there in 1624.

Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were a dominant force in the North American fur trade. This was largely accomplished by their close relationship with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy and their willingness to sell guns to them, something neither the French or English were willing to do with their respective trading partners. This in turn allowed the Iroquois Confederacy to utterly beat the shit out of their rivals, which in turn shifted a greater portion of the fur trade down the Hudson River to New Amsterdam. As a result, New Amsterdam became a bustling port home to some 1,500 people by 1650. As the English colonies in New England grew larger, the Dutch government did what it could to incentivize settlement along the Hudson River to ensure its control of the area wasn’t threatened, giving traders the right to claim vast tracts of land along the river, which they in turn leased to people willing to settle and farm said lands. By 1650, several small settlements had been built, with New Netherlands having a population of some 5,000 people.

The Dutch domination of the American fur trade was not without its challenges. In the north, the Iroquois, armed with Dutch guns, were in constant conflict with the French allied tribes along the St. Lawrence and eastern Great Lakes. However, they were also increasingly in conflict with the powerful Lenape and Susquehannock tribes to the south, which did little to improve these tribes views regarding the Dutch. Already weakened by epidemics that swept across the region during the 1630s, they were more than happy to look for new trading partners, the most prominent being the Swedes. First arriving on the scene in the 1630s, Swedish fur traders built Fort Christina at mouth of the Delaware River in 1638. By 1650, some 600 Swedish settlers were spread up and down the river. With a new trading partner on the scene, the Lenape decided that they really didn’t need to put up with Dutch bullshit anymore. The arming of the Iroquois was creating a refugee problem as tribes they were attacking fled south, creating conflict with the tribes and Dutch settlers already in the area. When the Dutch responded to this issue by attacking the refugee camps, the Lenape and refugees rose up in 1643, killing any Dutch settlers they could get their hands on. The Dutch responded in kind, massacring whole villages, in a back and forth which continued for the next two years before peace was restored.

The threat of New Sweden ended in 1655 when one of the seemingly never ending wars in Europe gave the Dutch the excuse to forcefully seize control of it. The seizure of New Sweden angered the Susquehannock, their closest trading partner, who that same year launched a major attack on the Dutch settlements along the Hudson, which did little to rectify the situation, but did deepen the level of distrust between the Dutch and the more closely neighboring Lenape. By 1660, the population of New Netherland was some 6,000 people, nearly half of which lived in New Amsterdam. Growing tensions between the weakening Lenape and the growing Dutch population resulted in conflict in 1659 and again in 1663. In both cases, though the Lenape did damage and disrupt Dutch settlements, they ultimately suffered defeat with the Dutch and their Iroquois allies burning their fields and villages. The violence only ended with the end of New Netherlands soon after. In 1665, the English went to war with the Dutch, one of a series of wars in which the English were attempting to end Dutch hegemony over global trade. Early in the war, English forces seized control of New Amsterdam, and when the war ended in 1667, the Dutch gave all of New Netherland to the English in return for retaining control of Suriname, with its valuable sugar plantations, and some key islands in southeast Asia. The English made peace with the Lenape by beginning a new policy of buying land from the tribe prior to settling it and creating a system to find peaceful resolutions in cases of conflict. Over the next two decades, most of the Lenape in the area of Hudson River sold their lands, taking refuge with the Iroquois.

American History - New England

In 1629, King Charles I of England, believing God had given him the authority to do whatever the hell he wanted, dissolved the English Parliament. This was not popular amongst many people in England, especially the Puritans, who aside from being pretty down with the idea of representative democracy, were also fairly concerned that Charles was too cool with the Catholics, what with him having a French wife and all. As a result, many of the more hardcore Puritans decided it would probably be best to clear the fuck out to find greener pastures. Over the next ten years, some 80,000 Puritans immigrated from England, with equal shares going to Ireland, the Netherlands, the West Indies, and New England. This was pretty all right with King Chucky, since it not got rid of some of his loudest critics, but also increased the English population in the New World. These Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, the Connecticut Colony in 1636, and the New Haven Colony in 1637, quickly spreading along the New England coast and then into the interior.

The mass immigration of Puritans to New England was unique in that it was not primarily a commercial venture. Most colonies of the time period were being established in an attempt to profit from the resources of the New World, and as such were almost entirely made up of younger men. In comparison, the Puritans were looking for new homes in which they could build the perfect society of their dreams. As a result, entire families and communities were moved lock stock and barrel over the Atlantic, quickly re-establishing themselves in the New World. The Pilgrims were more than happy to see this rapid influx of new colonists, showing them how to grow crops and welcoming them into the existing alliances with the locals. Being industrious sons of bitches, the Puritans quickly set about establishing industries which could export goods back to England. At first this largely included fishing, timber, and furs, but fairly quickly also included shipbuilding. The mass migration continued until 1641, when the English Civil War broke out between the royalists and parliamentarians. The Puritans, being big supporters of the latter, largely decided to fight the good fight in England, many even returning to England to do so. However, the population of New England continued to expand rapidly, thanks to Puritans seeing pumping out as many babies as humanely possible as the will of God, reaching 25,000 by 1650.

Now for being a group that felt they were so persecuted that they had to come to New England to make a better life for themselves, the Puritans were surprisingly not all that open to a diversity of opinions. The Puritans had a very specific way of viewing ethics and religion, and anyone who didn’t follow these views exactly were going to burn in hell for all of eternity. As a result, though the Puritan colonies were run by democratically elected councils, only land owning people who regularly attended Puritan church services could serve in public office. Furthermore, anyone who didn’t want to live that sweet Puritan life, whether for religious reasons or because they didn’t like a bunch of frumpy asshats telling them what to do all the time, was told to get the fuck out. Those who didn’t listen were imprisoned, beaten, and at times even executed. The New England colonies were pretty much all full fledged theocracies, with the exception of New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

Colonists first arrived in what became New Hampshire in 1629, settling mostly along the coast. Unlike the colonies further south, New Hampshire was not some Puritan wet dream, but rather just a bunch of fisherman who figured they could profit more by permanently resettling on the west side of the Atlantic. These colonies were absorbed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony after about a decade, but were allowed to not have to follow the strict Puritan ideal required everywhere else in the colony. Rhode Island was much more of a fuck you to the Puritans. It was founded in 1636 by a small collection of settlers who were kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for not being Puritan enough. Not wanting to be the same kind of jackasses, Rhode Island’s colonial charter included provisions establishing the right of its colonists to follow whatever religion they damn well pleased, with the exception of Catholics because apparently that was just one step too far. As a result, its population became a mish mash of disaffected Puritans, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, and even a small Jewish community fleeing the Spanish inquisition. This did not sit well with the surrounding Puritan colonies, but since Rhode Island was recognized as a colony by King Charles, there wasn’t really all that much they could do about it.

Overall, despite the rapid influx of new settlers, the majority of the native tribes in the area remained relatively peaceful with the Puritans. By allying themselves with the newcomers, they were better able to compete in the lucrative fur trade against the more powerful Pequot to the west. Most of the New England tribes used strings of small shells, known as wampum, as a means of exchange. Something the Puritans exploited by manufacturing large amounts of wampum using their more refined metal tools. The Pequot were much more aligned with the Dutch, who by this time controlled the Hudson River Valley, and neither were happy with the Puritans undercutting them when trading with the Iroquois. Things only grew worse when a small pox epidemic swept across New England in 1633, killing two-thirds of the Native Americans living in the area south to Long Island, north to the Saint Lawrence River, and west to Lake Ontario. The Puritans declared the plague a sign that God wanted to have this new promised land, while the locals mostly took it as less of a divine blessing. As a result of the pandemic, the Dutch made moves to increase their trade directly with the Iroquois, which enraged the shell shocked Pequot, who began attacking not only Dutch traders, but also English traders and tribes allied with the Puritans. In 1636, the Puritans responded by burning down a Pequot village, the Pequot retaliated, and the war began.

The Pequot War was a decidedly shitty affair for all of those involved. Few in number, the Pequot mostly used guerilla tactics to attack the colonists and their native allies, while the latter sent out militias each summer which burned villages and massacred their inhabitants. The allied tribes were pretty horrified by the English no holds barred style of conducting war, but went along with it because they didn’t want to get on their bad side. Pequot who were captured were shipped to Bermuda as slaves. After two years, the Pequot leadership decided enough was enough and tried to retreat west to find sanctuary amongst the Iroquois. However, the Iroquois instead killed them as a sign of goodwill to the English and Dutch. By the end of the war in 1638, fewer than 200 Pequot remained, most of whom were enslaved by other tribes. Not long after the war, in 1643, the Puritan colonies formed the New England Confederation, an agreement to protect each other from attack by the Dutch and Native Americans. Though limited in scope and ultimately largely ineffective, it did create the first forum outside of the English government for resolving disputes between colonial governments.