Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH COLONIAL LITERATURE
of the Puritans, as we see in William Bradford’s account of Thomas Morton (c.
1579–1647) and the residents of Merrymount.
More colonies soon joined those in Massachusetts and Virginia. In 1632, Lord
Baltimore (1605–1675) was given a charter for land north of the Potomac River.
A Catholic, Baltimore established the colony of Maryland as a place of religious
tolerance. A charter for the Carolinas, a territory which extended well beyond
the modern borders of those states, was granted in 1663 and settlers established
one of the rst colonies under this charter near Charleston, South Carolina. In
1681, Pennsylvania was granted by King Charles II to William Penn (1644–1718)
in repayment of a debt owed to Penn’s father. The colony became a refuge for
members of the Society of Friends or Quakers, as Penn was a recent convert to the
denomination. Georgia was the last of the original colonies. Founded in 1732, the
colony was intended primarily as a bulwark between the English colonies to the
north and the Spanish colonies to the south.
Certainly, this ongoing expansion of English colonies caused continual tension
with the Native American tribes already occupying the territory. The Powhatan
Confederacy, a union of tribes occupying the tidewater Virginia region, alternately
collaborated with and fought against the Jamestown colony from its founding
until 1645, when the English forced the confederacy to surrender and cede land. In
New England, the Pequod War (1636–1638) was one of the rst signicant ghts
between the colonies in Massachusetts and the local tribes, pitting the Pequod tribe
against the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies,
the Narragansett tribe. The natives of New England continued attempting to hold
back English encroachments, making their last major eort when the Wampanoag,
Narragansett, and other allied tribes, led by Metacom (1638–1675)—called King
Philip by the English—attacked frontier towns. The so-called King Philip’s War
lasted from 1675 to 1676, when Metacom was captured and executed.
The use of African slaves in the colonies also grew during this century.
African slavery had rst been introduced to North America by the Spanish,
especially after the Catholic Church started cracking down on enslaving Native
Americans. Slaves were rst brought to the English colony of Jamestown in 1619,
to Connecticut in 1629, and to Massachusetts in 1637. The widespread adoption
of slavery languished initially as it proved to be too expensive of an option for the
struggling colonists. Indentured servants were a more economical option, but as
wages rose in England toward the end of the century and dried up the supply of
indentured servants, the use of enslaved Africans grew in the colonies. Though
slavery was most prevalent in the southern colonies because of their greater
focus on agriculture, the New England colonies were the rst to codify slavery (in
Massachusetts in 1641) and the rst to forbid it (in Rhode Island in 1652). Even
before America was a nation ocially, America had a slavery problem. As Samuel
Sewall’s anti-slavery tract shows, the arguments for and against slavery made
during this century are some of the same ones that will be made again and again
in the following two centuries.
Page | 96