*America’s colonisation was defined by conflict.  Why did Europeans come to the colonies?  God, gold, and glory—and for most Europeans, wealth meant land.  In the Americas, land already belonged to the Indians, and Europeans were ready to take it.

*The first English settlement in America, Roanoke, was founded in 1585 by an all-male military expedition, abandoned in 1586, and re-settled by families in 1587.  In 1588 the English fought off the Spanish Armada in one of the most important military victories in history (because it allowed the English to begin colonising the world), but were so busy they were unable to re-supply Roanoke that year, and when they returned in 1589, the colonists were gone, possibly killed by local Indians.

*The first permanent English settlement at Jamestown immediately had conflict with the Indians, but initially made peace with Chief Powhatan. 

*After his death, though, his brother Opechancanough lead his people to massacre 347 of the 1,240 colonists in Virginia--about 28% of the population.  The surviving English descended upon the Indians just before the harvest, killed all they could, burnt their corn, and made treaties with the intention of breaking them in order to gain advantages.  One negotiator took a butt (that’s a barrel of 126 U.S. gallons) of poisoned sack (that’s a type of light, dry wine) to a peace parley on the Potomac, and bragged that he killed about 200 with the drink and got about 50 more with force of arms later on.  These tactics, especially burning crops and villages, were so dirty they were called ‘Irish Tactics,’ because that was the only group hitherto savage enough to use them against.  The plan for the Indians (at least for the moment), even more than for the Irish, was to utterly wipe them off the earth.  There may have been 20,000 Indians in Virginia when the English arrived.  The official count in 1669 was 2,000.

*The massacre hurt the English a little bit up front, but hurt the Indians much more within a year or two as the English had their revenge, but it also hurt the colony as a whole, as fear of the Indians stopped attempts at glassworks and ironworks and mining out in the backcountry.  This is one more reason Virginia adopted so fully the tobacco economy and ultimately dependence upon slavery.

*In 1634, disputes over trading rights in New England (including the fact that the English were beginning to manufacture wampum, which the Pequot Indians had previously had a monopoly on) led to fighting between Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies and the Pequot Indians.  Certain Pequot killed a trader who had already been banished from Boston and had gone into Pequot territory to kidnap women and children to sell as slaves.  Later, more respected traders were killed, and Massachusetts finally responded by raising the militia and fighting the Pequot nearly to the last man.  At a Pequot settlement near the Mystic River, the New Englanders burned the fort and village in 1637, killing all but a handful of the inhabitants—several hundred men, women, and children died in the massacre.  By the time the war ended in 1638, perhaps as few as 200 Pequot survived out of a pre-war population of almost 3,000 (already half the population the Pequot had before Europeans arrived in 1620).

*As the Puritans of New England increased in population they also converted local Indians to Christianity, and many moved to ‘praying towns.’  On the other hand, Indians who did not convert faced the loss of the hunting grounds, dishonest traders, and discrimination, while all Indians faced diseases to which they had no immunity.

*In the 1660s and 1670s, Metacom, also known as King Philip, began negotiating with various Indian tribes in New England to plan attacks on the Puritans and the Praying Towns.  In 1675, John Sassamon, an Indian who had converted to Christianity and graduating from Harvard brought news of this to the leaders of Plymouth.  Three Wampanoag Indians were arrested, tried, and hanged.  Shortly afterwards, John Sassamon was murdered, and in the summer of 1675 King Philip’s people began attacking English towns and Praying Indian towns throughout New England.

*At first the Wampanoag were successful—Plymouth was attacked and Providence, Rhode Island was abandoned and burnt.  However, the colonists began to fight back with greater success, Philip’s allies abandoned him, and he was shot in 1676 and his body was beheaded, drawn, and quartered.  His head was displayed in Plymouth for 20 years.  A few Indians continued to fight on until 1677, but the war largely ended with Philip’s death.  Although at least 600 colonists were killed, many more Indians died, and a higher birth rate and immigration from England allowed the New Englanders to replace their population much more quickly.  However, the Praying Indians were largely wiped out, and the war made the British government pay closer attention to New England and begin trying to bring it under London’s control—the beginning of the tensions that would eventually lead to the American Revolution.

*As England (and France) began to pay more attention to their colonies, wars in Europe began to spill over into America, where they were largely fought by colonial militias and their Indian allies against other colonial militia and their Indian allies, for many Indians sided with one European group or another to gain trade or military support in their own conflicts with other Indian nations—any distrust they might have had for a European nation was secondary to generations-old disputes with their Indian neighbours.

*In 1689 the War of the League of Augsburg spread to North America where it was known as King William’s War (after King William III, then king of England).  No land changed hands in America, but it was the first of many wars in which the Iroquois Confederation fought as an ally of Britain, shortly after the beginning of the Covenant Chain agreement, a long alliance between the British (primarily in New York) and the Iroquois, maintained through a regular stream of gifts to the Indians.

*In 1701 war began in Europe over who would inherit the throne of Spain when the deeply inbred king of Spain died without any heirs and the great powers of Europe fought over who would control the vast Spanish Empire, particularly since the most likely heirs were the already-powerful rulers of France or Austria.  In 1702 the war spread to America, where it was called Queen Anne’s War.  The Spanish attacked Charleston in 1703.

*On 29 February, 1704, French soldiers and their Indian allies attacked the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts.  Snow had drifted up against the wooden stockade built around the town, and the French and Indians climbed up these drifts to get over the walls in the dead of night.  56 English men, women, and children were killed in the Deerfield Massacre, and over 100 more were taken captive and driven on a forced march through the snow to Canada, where those who survived were made prisoners of the Indians.  Some were killed, some were ransomed back by their community, and some chose to stay with the Indians.

*At the end of Queen Anne’s War, the British gained Acadia from France and renamed it Nova Scotia.  During later wars between Britain and France the British would treat the French-speaking Acadians badly and eventually force many of them into exile.  Many of them went to Louisiana, where Acadians became known as Cajuns.

*The treaty that ended Queen Anne’s War did not really satisfy anyone in Europe, particularly because the British continued to smuggle goods into Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.  In 1731, a Spanish coastguard captain boarded the ship Rebecca, searched it for contraband, and, upon finding it, cut off the ear of the ship’s captain, Robert Jenkins.  Seven years later, Jenkins took the ear (which he had pickled and saved in a bottle) to Parliament, where Prime Minister Robert Walpole supposedly fainted upon seeing it.  England was already mad at Spain, so they declared war—the War of Jenkins’s Ear, which in and of itself did not solve anything, because it soon became part of a larger conflict. 

*One of the few memorable outcomes of the war is that Lawrence Washington, half-brother of George, served under Admiral Vernon in the Caribbean and named his estate after his commander.  George Washington later inherited Mount Vernon.

*In December 1740, much of Europe went to war over whether a woman could rule an empire, when Maria Theresa of Austria inherited the throne from her father.  Britain (and many other countries) went to war to support her against Prussia and its many allies.  When the fighting spread to America in 1744, it was known as King George’s War.

*This was a memorable war.  At Dettingen in 1743, King George II became the last British king to lead troops in battle—and he won!  In 1744 the British anthem, ‘God Save the King’ was performed for the first time.  In 1745 the Scottish rose in rebellion and were crushed at Culloden the next year, and in Canada, New England militia besieged and captured Fortress Louisbourg, which guarded the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence and was a major base for French fishing fleets and potentially the French navy.

*The capture of Louisbourg was a great victory for the New Englanders, and should have been a great strategic gain for the British Empire, but in 1748 the British government returned it to France in the treaty that ended the war.  From the point of view of many Americans, they had fought and won a great victory for nothing.

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