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US History · AP US History
1607–1754
In 1607 about a hundred English men and boys built a fort on the James River in Virginia. By 1750 some 1,170,760 people lived in Britain’s mainland colonies, and four European empires were contesting North America with its Native nations.
The context. Spain had conquered the Aztec and Inca empires in the 1500s and grown rich on American silver; the Columbian Exchange had carried crops, animals and epidemic disease across the Atlantic (Period 1). England came late. Rivalry with Catholic Spain after the Protestant Reformation, a growing population with too little land, and new joint-stock companies that pooled investors’ money pushed it to try again after the failure of Roanoke in the 1580s. France and the Netherlands followed the same years.
The figure runs the period on the map. Spain (dark) held Mexico and the Caribbean and pushed missions north into Florida and New Mexico; France (blue) built a thin chain of fur-trade posts up the St. Lawrence, round the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi; the Dutch (ink) held the Hudson until 1664; and English settlement (red) spread inland from the coast, farm by farm. Watch New Mexico empty in 1680, and the Dutch colony turn English.
The period’s two big ideas, in the College Board’s words, are that Europeans developed a variety of colonization and migration patterns, shaped by imperial goals, cultures and the North American environment, and competed with each other and American Indians for resources; and that the British colonies were tied to Britain by exchanges of goods, beliefs and political ideas that bred both loyalty and resistance.
| topic | the question |
|---|---|
| 2.2 | How did the Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonize differently? |
| 2.3 | Why did the British colonies grow into distinct regions? |
| 2.4 | How did Atlantic trade and mercantilism bind the empire? |
| 2.5 | How did relations with American Indians shift between alliance and war? |
| 2.6 | Why and how did slavery take root, and how did enslaved people resist? |
| 2.7 | How did ideas, religion and print shape a colonial culture? |
The period ends in 1754, when fighting in the Ohio valley began the French and Indian War (Period 3).
four empires, four patterns
Spain, France, the Netherlands and England wanted different things from North America, and their goals for land and labor shaped their colonies and their dealings with Native peoples.
Spain sought wealth and converts. It built institutions on subjugating Native people: the encomienda (grants of Native tribute and labor) and the later repartimiento (forced labor drafts), missions where Franciscan friars converted and put Native people to work, and presidios (forts) to guard them. On its northern frontier it founded St. Augustine (1565), Santa Fe (1610) and, after 1690, missions in Texas. Native people and enslaved and free Africans were incorporated into a ranked casta society of Spaniards, mestizos, mulattoes and others; in New Mexico, genízaros were Native people, often captives, absorbed into Spanish society.
France sent few colonists: about 70,000 lived in New France and Louisiana by 1754. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608. Its wealth was fur, which only Native hunters could supply, so traders (coureurs de bois) lived among Native peoples, married into their families and joined their alliances, and Jesuit missionaries learned their languages. La Salle claimed the Mississippi basin as Louisiana in 1682.
The Dutch came for trade too. Henry Hudson sailed up his river in 1609; the Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, ran New Netherland from New Amsterdam and bought furs from the Mohawk and Mahican at Fort Orange. To draw farmers it gave patroons great estates to settle with tenants. With about 9,000 people it fell to the English in 1664 and became New York.
England sent people. Comparatively large numbers of men and women, and other Europeans, came seeking land, social mobility, religious freedom and better lives. They farmed, on land taken from Native peoples, and lived apart from them. By 1750 the British mainland held 1,170,760 people.
| goal | Europeans | relations with Native peoples | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | silver, land, converts | few; soldiers, friars | conquest, forced labor, conversion |
| France | furs, converts | very few | trade, alliance, intermarriage |
| Netherlands | furs, trade | few | trade; wars near New Amsterdam |
| England | land, farms, refuge | many, in families | displacement; separation; wars |
environment, economy, people
England’s colonies along the Atlantic grew into distinct regions, shaped by climate and soil, by what they could sell, and by who came.
The Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland) and North Carolina. The Virginia Company’s Jamestown nearly died in the “starving time” of 1609–1610; John Rolfe’s tobacco, first shipped in 1614, saved it. Tobacco is labor-hungry, so planters imported workers: at first white, mostly male indentured servants, who worked four to seven years for their passage; the headright gave 50 acres for each person brought over. Later, enslaved Africans did the work. Virginia’s House of Burgesses (1619) was the first elected assembly in English America; Virginia became a royal colony in 1624. Maryland (1634) was Lord Baltimore’s refuge for Catholics; its Toleration Act (1649) protected all Trinitarian Christians.
New England. Separatist Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact (1620) and settled Plymouth; Puritans under John Winthrop founded Massachusetts Bay in 1630, a covenanted “city upon a hill.” About 20,000 came in the Great Migration of the 1630s, in families. They built compact towns round a meetinghouse, governed by town meetings, and a mixed economy of family farms, fishing, timber, shipbuilding and trade. Dissenters founded new colonies: Roger Williams, banished for urging separation of church and state, founded Rhode Island (1636); Anne Hutchinson followed; Connecticut wrote its Fundamental Orders (1639).
The middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware) grew wheat and other grains for export through New York and Philadelphia. They drew the widest range of migrants (Dutch, English, Germans, Scots-Irish, Swedes, Huguenots, Jews) and were the most tolerant. William Penn, a Quaker, founded Pennsylvania (1681) as a “holy experiment” with liberty of conscience.
The southern Atlantic coast and the British West Indies used long growing seasons for plantation crops: sugar in Barbados and Jamaica; rice (grown with West African skill) and later indigo in the Carolina lowcountry, settled from Barbados. Enslaved Africans were often the majority (South Carolina by about 1708) and built their own cultures. Georgia (1732) was a buffer against Spanish Florida.
Self-government. Distance and Britain’s lax attention let the colonies build unusually democratic institutions: New England’s town meetings elected their legislatures; in the South, elite planters ran the counties and dominated the assemblies.
| region | economy | labor |
|---|---|---|
| New England | fish, timber, ships; small family farms | families; few enslaved people |
| Middle colonies | wheat and other cereal crops, flour | families, tenants, servants |
| Chesapeake and North Carolina | tobacco | indentured servants, then enslaved Africans |
| Southern Atlantic coast | rice and indigo | enslaved Africans, a Black majority in South Carolina |
| British West Indies | sugar | enslaved Africans, the great majority |
mercantilism and the Atlantic economy
An Atlantic economy tied Europe, Africa and the Americas together: colonial staples east, manufactures west, and enslaved Africans and American Indians traded as goods.
Mercantilism held that a nation grows rich by exporting more than it imports. Colonies existed to supply raw materials the mother country lacked and to buy its manufactures, and their trade was to stay inside the empire. England wrote this into law in the Navigation Acts, aimed first at the Dutch, whose ships carried much of the colonies’ trade.
| year | law | what it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1651 | Navigation Act | goods into England and its colonies only in English ships (aimed at the Dutch) |
| 1660 | Navigation Act | enumerated goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo …) shipped only to England or its colonies |
| 1663 | Staple Act | European goods for the colonies must pass through England |
| 1673 | Plantation Duty Act | a duty on enumerated goods shipped between colonies; customs officers in America |
| 1696 | Navigation Act | vice-admiralty courts; the Board of Trade set up the same year |
| 1699 | Wool Act | no export of colonial woollens |
| 1732 | Hat Act | no export of colonial hats |
| 1733 | Molasses Act | a duty of sixpence a gallon on foreign (French) molasses; widely evaded |
| 1750 | Iron Act | no new colonial slitting mills or forges; pig iron to Britain |
The legs of the trade are often drawn as a triangle: manufactures from Britain to West Africa, enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage to the West Indies, sugar and molasses back to Britain or to New England, where molasses became rum for Africa. Real voyages were more varied, but the pattern held: the plantation colonies sent tobacco, rice, indigo and sugar to Britain, and New England merchants built ships and carried food and lumber to the sugar islands. Colonists also smuggled, above all French molasses.
American Indians were drawn into the same trade. Furs and deerskins bought guns, metal tools, cloth and alcohol, changing how Native communities hunted, fought and lived; horses spread across the Plains, especially after the Pueblo Revolt; and epidemics followed the traders, causing radical population losses. Carolina traders bought Native captives from rival nations and shipped many to the West Indies as slaves; estimates for 1670–1715 run from about 24,000 to over 50,000.
Tighter control, unevenly enforced. England tried to bind the colonies into a hierarchical empire. James II merged the northern colonies into the Dominion of New England (1686–1689) under Sir Edmund Andros, abolishing their assemblies. When the Glorious Revolution (1688) toppled James, Bostonians jailed Andros; New York (Leisler’s Rebellion) and Maryland rose too. Afterward Parliament created the Board of Trade (1696), but in the decades of salutary neglect under Prime Minister Robert Walpole (from 1721) it enforced the trade laws loosely, and colonial assemblies grew used to running their own affairs.
accommodation and conflict
Native nations were not bystanders. They allied with Europeans, traded with them, fought them and played them against one another, and Europeans armed their Native allies against rival nations.
Alliances. The French allied with the Huron (Wendat) and Algonquian nations of the north; the Dutch, then the English, traded with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), whose Beaver Wars against rivals for the fur trade shook the Great Lakes until 1701. New York and the Haudenosaunee bound themselves in the Covenant Chain (1677); in 1701 the Haudenosaunee made the Great Peace of Montreal with New France and dozens of nations, and kept a neutrality that let them play the empires off against each other.
The English and the land. English farms needed land, not partners, so conflict came early. Powhatan’s confederacy first traded food to Jamestown; John Smith was captured by Opechancanough in 1607; peace followed Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe in 1614. In 1622 Opechancanough’s warriors killed about 347 colonists; the Crown took over Virginia, and a final war in 1644–1646 broke the confederacy. In New England the Pequot War (1636–1638) ended with the massacre at Mystic. Puritan missionaries such as John Eliot gathered converts in “praying towns.” Metacom’s War (King Philip’s War, 1675–1676), led by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom against English expansion, destroyed about a dozen towns and was, for its population, among the deadliest wars in American history; Native nations of southern New England lost their independence, and many captives were sold into slavery.
Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) in Virginia began as frontier settlers’ war on Native peoples, against Governor William Berkeley’s policy; Nathaniel Bacon’s men burned Jamestown. Later wars, the Tuscarora (1711–1715) and the Yamasee (1715–1717), struck the Carolinas. In Pennsylvania, the Walking Purchase (1737) used an old deed and a relay of runners to take about 1,200,000 acres from the Lenape.
The Spanish Southwest. In 1680 the Pueblo peoples, led by Popé (Po’pay), rose against forced labor and the suppression of their religion, killed about 400 Spaniards (21 of them friars) and drove the rest out of New Mexico. Diego de Vargas retook it in 1692, but Spain now accommodated Pueblo culture: it tolerated more of their religion, granted lands to each pueblo and named a defender for their cases.
| event | years | |
|---|---|---|
| First Anglo-Powhatan War | 1610–1614 | ends with Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe (1614) |
| Powhatan attack of 1622 | 1622 | Opechancanough’s warriors kill about 347 colonists, a quarter of the colony |
| Pequot War | 1636–1638 | Mystic massacre (1637): some 400–700 Pequots killed |
| Third Anglo-Powhatan War | 1644–1646 | Opechancanough captured and killed; the Powhatan made tributaries |
| Beaver Wars | c. 1640s–1701 | Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) fight rivals for the fur trade |
| Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War | 1675–1676 | about a dozen towns destroyed; thousands killed, captives sold into slavery |
| Bacon’s Rebellion | 1676 | Nathaniel Bacon’s followers attack Native peoples, then burn Jamestown |
| Covenant Chain | 1677 | New York and the Haudenosaunee: an alliance renewed for decades |
| Pueblo Revolt | 1680 | Popé’s revolt drives the Spanish out of New Mexico for 12 years |
| Great Peace of Montreal | 1701 | New France and 39 Native nations make peace |
| Tuscarora War | 1711–1715 | Tuscarora defeated; many move north to join the Haudenosaunee |
| Yamasee War | 1715–1717 | a near-collapse of South Carolina; the Indian slave trade shrinks |
| Walking Purchase | 1737 | Pennsylvania takes about 1.2 million acres of Lenape (Delaware) land |
law, labor and resistance
Every British colony took part in the Atlantic slave trade, but slavery took the shape of each region’s economy, numbers and land.
Why slavery grew. Land was plentiful and labor scarce, and Europe wanted more tobacco, rice and sugar. In the Chesapeake, servants did most of the work until the 1670s; then fewer came, as England’s economy improved, while former servants pressed for land, as in Bacon’s Rebellion. Enslaved people, bound for life and so were their children, became the planters’ answer; the Royal African Company (chartered 1672) and, after 1698, independent traders supplied them.
Where they went. Of about 12,500,000 Africans carried across the Atlantic from 1501 to 1866, about 10,700,000 survived the Middle Passage, packed below deck for weeks; under 4 in 100 (about 388,747) were landed in mainland North America. In the British empire the great majority went to the West Indies. New England’s small farms used few enslaved workers; every port city held significant minorities; the Chesapeake and the southern coast held many. By 1750 the mainland colonies had about 236,420 Black people, roughly a fifth of all, most of them enslaved; unlike the sugar islands, their number grew by natural increase.
Law made slavery racial and hereditary. As chattel slavery (people owned as property) became the South’s main labor system, laws drew a strict racial line, banned interracial marriage and made the children of enslaved mothers slaves for life.
| year | where | |
|---|---|---|
| 1619 | Virginia | “20. and odd” Africans landed at Point Comfort |
| 1661 | Barbados | slave code: the model for South Carolina’s and Jamaica’s |
| 1662 | Virginia | a child is slave or free as its mother is |
| 1664 | Maryland | enslavement for life (durante vita), and for the children |
| 1667 | Virginia | baptism does not free a slave |
| 1691 | Virginia | interracial marriage banned; freed people must leave |
| 1705 | Virginia | the slave code: enslaved people as property |
| 1740 | South Carolina | Negro Act: no assembling, earning money or learning to read |
Resistance. Enslaved people resisted overtly and covertly: they slowed work, broke tools, ran away (Spanish Florida promised freedom, and in 1738 founded Fort Mose for those who came), and rose in revolt. In the Stono Rebellion (September 9, 1739) about 20 enslaved men, led by Jemmy (sometimes called Cato), marched south from the Stono River, grew to some 80, and killed 20–25 colonists before militia caught them; 35–50 rebels died. South Carolina answered with the Negro Act of 1740. They also kept their families, languages, music, names and faith, as in the Gullah culture of the lowcountry and the task system of the rice fields, which left them some time of their own.
The chart shows the Black share of each region’s people, from the Census estimates; the squares, every 100 captives landed alive in the Americas.
awakening, enlightenment, Anglicization
People and ideas crossing the Atlantic made colonial society more varied, more English and more independent-minded, all at once.
Pluralism. Germans (many as redemptioners, who paid their passage by service after arriving), Scots-Irish Presbyterians from Ulster, French Huguenots, Dutch, Swedes and Jews joined the English and the Africans. Religious toleration grew: Maryland’s Toleration Act (1649), Rhode Island’s liberty of conscience, and Pennsylvania’s Charter of Privileges (1701).
The First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) was a wave of Protestant revivals that stressed a personal, emotional experience of conversion. Jonathan Edwards led a revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734–1735 and preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741. George Whitefield, an English preacher, toured the colonies in 1739–1740 and preached outdoors to huge crowds: Benjamin Franklin reckoned more than 30,000 could hear him at once in Philadelphia. Churches split between revivalist New Lights and traditional Old Lights; new denominations and colleges (Princeton, 1746) grew; ordinary people, women and enslaved Africans claimed a voice in religion, and the authority of established ministers weakened.
The Enlightenment taught that reason and observation could explain nature and improve society. Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) described a universe of natural laws; John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property and that government rests on their consent. Franklin, printer and scientist, embodied it; some educated colonists became Deists, believing in a creator who does not intervene.
Anglicization. The colonies grew more like England over time: assemblies modeled on Parliament, Anglican churches, English goods in a consumer revolution, and a transatlantic print culture of newspapers (the Boston News-Letter, 1704), almanacs and pamphlets. Intercolonial trade and the Awakening’s traveling preachers tied the colonies to each other.
Growing mistrust. British leaders and colonists’ goals diverged over trade, frontier defense, land and self-rule. Assemblies fought royal governors over the power of the purse. In the Zenger trial (1735) a New York jury acquitted a printer of libel after his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, argued that printing the truth was no crime; in 1747 Boston rioted against the navy’s impressment of sailors. Colonists drew on their own self-government, Enlightenment ideas, religious independence and a British opposition ideology that saw the empire’s ministers as corrupt.
the period on one page
The AP exam asks you to compare: how colonial societies developed in different regions and empires, and why. The evidence is this period’s, on one strip.
| New England | Middle | Chesapeake | Lower South and West Indies | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| economy | mixed: farms, fish, ships, trade | wheat, flour, trade | tobacco | rice, indigo; sugar |
| labor | families | families, tenants, servants | servants, then the enslaved | enslaved majorities |
| religion | Puritan (Congregational) | many: Quaker, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran … | Anglican | Anglican |
| government | town meetings | proprietors and assemblies | planters in the assembly | planters in the assembly |
Compare the empires. Spain subjugated and converted; France and the Netherlands traded and allied, with few settlers; England settled many and displaced. All competed for Native trade, land and allies, and all depended to some degree on unfree labor.
Change and continuity. The British mainland grew from 350 people in 1610 to 1,170,760 in 1750, by migration and by birth rates among the highest in the Western world. Labor changed from servitude to slavery; colonial government stayed self-governing in practice, under laws that bound trade to Britain. Wars between the empires (King William’s, Queen Anne’s and King George’s) reached into America, and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain Nova Scotia.
| imperial war | years | in Europe, and the outcome |
|---|---|---|
| King William’s War | 1689–1697 | War of the League of Augsburg |
| Queen Anne’s War | 1702–1713 | War of the Spanish Succession; Treaty of Utrecht |
| King George’s War | 1744–1748 | War of the Austrian Succession; Louisbourg taken 1745, returned 1748 |
| French and Indian War | 1754–1763 | the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) |
Toward Period 3. In 1754 colonial delegates met at Albany; Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union, for common defense and Indian affairs, was rejected by every colonial assembly. That spring French troops and Virginians under George Washington clashed in the Ohio valley, and the French and Indian War began.