American History - Breadbasket

By the 1660s, the Dutch were securely in control of the area between the Hudson and Delaware rivers, a picturesque area of verdant forests and fertile soils which nobody really gave two shits about, because more importantly the rivers gave the Dutch direct access to the Iroquois Confederacy, who pretty much completely controlled the interior fur trade at the time.  This was the reason why in 1664, in the middle of one of many wars between the English and the Dutch which were all the rage during the mid-seventeenth century, that King Charles II told his brother, James, Duke of York, to just pop over and take shit over.  Not really wanting to get his frilly pants dirty, James instead had someone else lead a military expedition on his behalf, but either way, by the end of the year New Netherland had been renamed New York in James’ honor, and the largest port in the area, New Amsterdam, had been renamed New York City, because when you’re a narcissist you might as well go all in.

Now at the time, what was now known as New York was home to some 8,000 Dutch and Swedish settlers, as well as some scattered coastal Algonquian tribes, the largest of whom were the Lenape, who had been decimated by various epidemics and general European and Iroquois assholery in the preceding decades.  Not really caring two shits about any of this beyond the fur trade, James appointed a governor to rule on his behalf, but otherwise took a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards the whole thing.  As a result, pretty much anyone was welcome to come and settle, or do whatever the hell they wanted, just as long as it didn’t screw up the fur trade, which in turn resulted in the area becoming a bit of a melting pot over the next several decades, because everybody likes free land and nobody getting up in one’s personal business.  As long as whomever showed up was willing to swear an oath of loyalty to the English crown, no shits were really given.  By 1700, the area was home to some 55,000 people; including English, Dutch, Swedes, French, Finns, Germans, Scots, and Scot-Irish; worshipping as Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, Quakers, Calvinists, Mennonites, Huguenots, and even Jews.  About the only people who didn’t really seem welcome were the native Lenape, who upon noting that things were just getting worse for them the more asshats from Europe arrived, finally said fuck it and moved westward into the Ohio Country, which was conveniently empty thanks to the Iroquois.  Another group that was welcome, but not in a good way, were slaves from Africa, whom increasingly found themselves imported to work on the docks in New York City and on the new farms being built along the two rivers.

Now again, all James really cared about was the fur trade, which made a lot of the land he now controlled redundant, but useful in other ways.  Both James and his brother, King Charles II, having been involved in the whole English Civil War thing and the following political machinations, owed a lot of people debts, some of whom were perfectly willing to accept large chunks of empty land across the ocean to settle things.  The first of these were two friends of James’ whose names are unimportant.  What was important was that they were more than happy to accept a big chunk of land along the Atlantic coast which they named New Jersey after a tiny little island in the English Channel.  Overall the two new owners took the same laissez-faire approach as James, which along with the fertile soils attracted lots of settlers.  However, the lack of access to furs and the fact that it was run by two idiots who thought naming it after a tiny island was a good idea, left it fairly dearth of investment, which was probably why it remained relatively poor compared to everywhere else around it.

The second debt to be paid was in 1681, when King Charles II granted a ridiculously large swath of land to William Penn, whose father had been one of Charles’ biggest supporters and financiers, to get him to shut up already.  Penn wanted to setup a colony for his fellow Quakers, a new religious group that had appeared during the English Civil War whose main deal was that one didn’t need ordained clergy as an intermediary to commune with God and that women should play a major role in the spiritualism of the community.  For some reason, this didn’t sit well with the dominant Anglican clergy, who did everything in their power to stamp out this new, or as they referred to it, blasphemous way of thinking, which is a nice way of saying they persecuted the shit out of the Quakers, even getting the English parliament to outlaw them.  For King Charles II, shipping a bunch of unhappy troublemakers across the Atlantic was a perfect solution, though as a prank he insisted the new colony be called Pennsylvania, which horrified Penn since it would make people think he was some kind of narcissist.

Now unlike most people who were given colonies, William Penn actually set foot on his new lands, arriving with the first Quaker settlers in 1682, founding what would become the city of Philadelphia.  Thousands of Quakers soon after followed, as well as numerous other groups fleeing religious or ethnic persecution, because unlike many groups fleeing such conditions, the Quakers actually took said persecution as a good lesson in why one should be more tolerant of other beliefs.  Now one might think that such tolerance would cause all sorts of issues, but believe it or not, when the general philosophy of a place is just don’t be an asshat, people adapt amazingly well to not getting up in each other’s business.  Penn even took his philosophy a step further, expanding it to include the native groups as well, signing treaties with many of them, the most powerful being the Susquehannock, which kept the peace between the natives and the colonists for some eighty years.  About the only group that wasn’t happy with any of this were the colonists in what was to become Delaware, who were mostly plantation and slave owning asshats, which put them a little at odds with the Quakers’ whole don’t be a jerk thing.  This conflict was a constant pain in the ass for Penn, who eventually just said fuck it and let them become their own colony.       

American History - Carolina

Here’s a little fun fact, when you’re a newly appointed king whose father was deposed, it’s never a bad idea to reward the shit out of those who supported you, which is exactly what Charles II was doing when he was crowned king in 1660.  However, by 1663, having run out of good favors to hand out, he was forced to start improvising, which mostly meant giving away land in the New World, even if he didn’t actually own it.  This is how eight random nobles found themselves the owners of the unclaimed territory between Virginia and Florida, which they called Carolina, a bastardization of the Latin version of Charles’ name, because there is never not a time when it hurts to suck up to the king. 

Anyways, Carolina was largely unclaimed due to the natives in the area really not being down with putting up with any bullshit, which might have had something to do with the Spanish raiding the coast for slaves for the better part of a century.  Though some attempts had been made by Catholic friars from Florida to build missions in the area, all had basically ended with a bunch of dead Catholic friars.  At the time, the territory was a strange mishmash of many different native cultures and peoples.  Having been completely decimated by Old World diseases in the mid-sixteenth century, the various groups had somewhat recovered by 1660, but were far from as numerous as they once had been.  Their old cultures lost, they had coalesced into multiple new nations.  East of the Appalachians lived various Siouan and Algonquian peoples, while west of the mountain range were various Muskogean tribes and an Iroquois people called the Cherokee who had come south in the past century.  It should go without saying that these various peoples didn’t always get along, and the territory was in a constantly fluctuating state of alliances, wars, and somewhat understood territorial boundaries.

Now when the eight nobles were given Carolina, the only English colonists in the area were Virginians along the northern most coast and a couple of random fur trappers.  However, this quickly changed with the foundation of the colony of Charleston in 1670 by English settlers from Barbados, who founded the colony for one specific purpose, the Native American slave trade.  Now it should probably be mentioned that slavery was not a new thing in what would become the southeastern United States.  The tribes in the area had practiced slavery for centuries, and when the Spanish in Florida began offering European goods for slaves in the late sixteenth century, the various tribes were more than happy to attack each in order to create the supply to meet the demand. 

At first, the English mostly traded with whatever tribes were willing to trade slaves to them, which worked for awhile until some of the tribes being attacked decided enough was enough already.  One of the most negatively affected tribes were the Westo, a group of Iroquois speaking refugees who had fled south from the Iroquois Confederacy.  In 1674, the Westo beat the shit out of the tribes trading with the English, to which the English responded by shrugging and starting to trade with the Westo instead.  To aid their new trading partners and ensure a steady supply of slaves, the English began giving the Westo guns, which gave them a decided edge over their rivals.  However, this monopoly on trade only lasted until 1679, when a larger group called the Shawnee, always fleeing south from the Iroquois Confederacy, moved into the area.  Deciding that maybe having just one source of slaves wasn’t all that great, the English began selling guns to the Shawnee as well, which pissed off the Westo so much that they attacked the Shawnee and English.  As one can probably imagine, this did not work out well, and within a year the Westo pretty much ceased to exist, all of them enslaved and shipped to Barbados.    

For the next several decades the Native American slave trade was largely dominated by the Algonquian speaking Shawnee, the Muskogean speaking Yamasee and Cherokee, and the Iroquoian speaking Tuscarora.  Armed with English guns, these three tribes attacked the various small Muskogeean tribes to the west of the Spanish allied tribes to the south.  However, by 1710, the Spanish allied tribes in Florida were largely gone, and the smaller Muskogean tribes to the west had gathered together into the Creek Confederacy, making them much harder to attack.  As a result, the Cherokee, Yamasee, and Tuscarora began attacking the Shawnee, who quickly tiring of such shit began trading with the French to get even more guns, which led to their primary source of guns, the English, cutting them off, which resulted in them fleeing the area back north in 1710.  With the Shawnee gone, the Cherokee and Yamasee then began targeting the Tuscarora, who also tiring of such shit, tried attacking the English, which did not work out well, leading the tribe being almost completely enslaved wiped out by 1715.  You can probably guess what happened next.  The Cherokee began targeting the Yamasee, who retaliated against both the English and Cherokee, but were completely enslaved and wiped out 1717. 

The Yamasee War in many ways marked the end of the Native American slave trade.  The bloodshed of the past decade, the wide availability of slaves from Africa, and the increasing European demand for deer skins, all convinced the Carolina colonists that the Native American slave trade just wasn’t worth the time and effort.  After all, by that time Charleston had grown into a major port, surrounded by rice and indigo plantations worked by African slaves.  By 1700, the Carolina colony was home to some 15,000 people, but its two halves were very different.  While the southern half was increasingly plantation oriented, the northern half was more small farms and sparsely populated rural areas.  As a result, the colony split into South Carolina and North Carolina in 1710.  As for the original owners, they sold their rights to the colony back to the king of England in 1729, most having never left England to go see what they owned.

American History - Triangle Trade

In 1660, the newly crowned king of England, Charles II, decided to celebrate by granting his brother, the future King James II, a charter granting him the right to trade with Africa.  Rather excited, James lost no time in founding the Royal African Company which began trading with various kingdoms in west Africa right away, by which of course I mean he started buying and shipping African slaves across the Atlantic.  You see, at the time, most of the English colonies, both in the Caribbean and North America, were suffering from a bit of a labor shortage.  Sugar and tobacco plantations had been historically dependent on indentured servants and enslaved Native Americans, but the former were increasingly becoming a pain in the ass for various reasons and the latter kept dying of Old World diseases all the time, so really something had to be done to ensure people didn’t have to pay out the nose for a bit of the sweet stuff or a nice puff of pipe. 

Now prior to this time, the shipment of African slaves across the Atlantic had been a going concern for the better part of 150 years, dominated first by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch, but neither was ever really all that interested in selling slaves cheaply to their rivals.  However, the future King James solved this by hiring a private navy and army and attacking the Dutch slave traders every chance he got.  As a result, by 1675, the Dutch had lost their monopoly, and by 1690 the English were the largest shippers of African slaves, with trading posts, called factories for just plain terrible reasons, spread from present day Gambia to Nigeria.  For their part, the Dutch kept control of the slave trade in Central Africa, while the Portuguese maintained dominance in the area of present day Angola. 

Anyways, the breaking of the Dutch monopoly caused a complete collapse in the price of slaves, which was pretty sweet for the various plantation owners in the New World, who had lots of available land, just nobody to work it, but pretty terrible for the people of Africa because it greatly increased the demand for slaves.  The slave trade soon became a major part of the Atlantic sea trade, and it wasn’t long before the English, being both terrible and enterprising as fuck, setup what became known as the triangular trade.  This involved shipping guns, alcohol, indigo, textiles and other manufactured goods to Africa, using the proceeds to buy slaves which were shipped to the New World, and then buying sugar, rum, and tobacco to take back to England.  This made the whole venture even more profitable, which of course increased the slave trade even more, because once you get a terrible cycle going it’s really hard to stop.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning at this point, that similar to the earlier Portuguese slave trade, the various leaders of the hundred or so kingdoms which dotted the African west coast were totally down with all of this.  After all, slavery had long been a thing in Africa, and trading criminals and people from other kingdoms captured in wars to some random white guys for guns and various manufactured goods seemed like a pretty sweet deal.  However, as the slave trade began to accelerate, it began to royally screw up the economic and political systems of these kingdoms.  As demand began to outpace supply, some of the mor entrepreneurial kingdoms began starting wars with their neighbors specifically to capture slaves, which in turn forced the neighbors to buy more guns to protect themselves, which meant they needed more slaves to sell, and you can probably already tell where this shit cycle is going.  Over time, various kingdoms coalesced into larger and stronger empires with complex infrastructures, all constantly beating the shit out of each other to capture more slaves, which had pretty much become the basis for their entire economies.  For their part, the various European traders kept to the coasts, since every time they went into the interior they tended to die of diseases like malaria.

While this might seem all hunky dory for the various elites involved in this royally fucked up part of human history, it most definitely wasn’t in anyway great for the people sold across the ocean, never to see their homes again.  Marched from the interior to the port factories, they were crammed tightly on disease ridden unsanitary ships where they were purposefully starved and forced to dance to keep them docile, and chained together to keep them from jumping overboard, a common problem because of the harsh conditions.  Others tried to starve themselves to death and were force fed to be kept alive.  Between being marched to the ocean and shipped across it, some 20% perished.  Ironically the sailors who shipped them died just as often, treated terribly by the ship owners because the fewer who survived the return to England the fewer who would have to be paid. 

After a voyage of two to three months, the new slaves would be offloaded on various Caribbean islands, for the English usually Jamaica, for seasoning.  This involved packing them together in camps where what was left of their spirits was broken via constant beatings, until they were docile enough to be taught the various skills they would need for their new life of servitude.  Some 33% died within their first year of arrival, most of from various shitting oneself to death diseases.  The majority of the survivors were sent to sugar plantations, where most would be dead in less than ten years, worked to death by unimaginably harsh conditions.  A relatively “lucky” few got to go to Chesapeake Bay and the other English colonies along the North American coast.  Of course, lucky is a somewhat relative term.  Sure, they didn’t die as horrifyingly fast as their brethren in the Caribbean, but they were still slaves, more livestock then people, not just doomed to a life time of subservience, beatings, torture, and rape themselves, but also knowing that their children, and their children’s children, would have to endure the same.  Yeah, history is completely fucked up.