“Let me explain. . . . No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” – Inigo Montoya
Twenty years after the first landings, the metaphorical mushroom cloud over Boston had cleared, and the world had changed. Besides recurrent epidemics – smallpox came in 1633-1634, taking half of some Indigenous communities – the English had also brought an agricultural toolkit and a commercial legal code that overwhelmed carefully tended local ecosystems and ignored longstanding customs of fairness and exchange. For the first time, land was demarcated permanently while existing fields and newly cleared forest came under steel plows pulled by heavy draft animals. Wolves, bears, and deer were driven off and replaced by pigs, cows, and sheep. The pigs ran especially rampant; belligerent and numerous enough to fend off predators on their own, they ate and/or destroyed crops, food stores, and aquaculture far from any English settlement.
The newcomers cut so much wood so quickly that it was said that the poorest Englishman in America warmed his hearth better than all but the wealthiest nobles of England. Meanwhile, streams and whole rivers disappeared as soil erosion filled them with debris that used to be forest floors. Cattle and other ruminants quickly overgrazed native vegetation unaccustomed to such voracious appetites, their hooves churning the ground and seeding it with fast growing European grasses that had come along for the ride. Fences sprang up almost as fast as invasive plants, creating boundaries where none had existed.{1}
The killing stroke came in 1637 with what was eventually known as “The Pequot War”, though it was less a distinct conflict than the brief and bloody culmination of two decades of English expansion. The Pequot people were the power just north of Boston and the other first settlements; and the war that bears their name flared for complex reasons: trade rivalries, that recent smallpox epidemic, Pequot insistence on pissing off every other local Indigenous community, Puritan factionalism, Puritan fanaticism, Puritan livestock, and the Dutch. The end result was brutally simple. Guides from the Narragansett people led a group of armed Puritans to a walled Pequot village on the Mystic River. Once they got there, the Puritans broke in, set it on fire, then shot every man, woman, and child who tried to escape the flames.{2}
Indigenous numbers in what became the greater Boston area never recovered; even today, the federally recognized Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation claims only about a thousand members. On the other side of the ledger, what had been a few hundred settlers in 1620 was more than 10,000 by the end of the war, and would double to over 20,000 by 1650.{3} English speaking people now had an unassailable foothold on the continent. And it didn’t take long for the next generation of colonists, plus their endless supply of diseases and domesticated animals, to push the Narragansett beyond endurance before crushing them in a brief and brutal war just as they had done to the Pequot forty years before.
This multi-dimensional assault was made possible by the link back to England, and from England to the wider world. Boston and similar port towns grew as nodes in the slave powered trade network that was becoming the British Empire, itself a recent outgrowth of the larger transimperial trade network that had spanned Africa, Asia, and Europe for thousands of years (more on this later).{4} Those ragged religious zealots with their livestock and infections weren’t terribly impressive specimens, but they were backed by power and wealth that must be measured on scales of continents and millennia.
Just two years after landing, the first ship carrying lumber and furs back to England was outbound;{5} by twenty years after landing (right around the Pequot War), these tiny settlements had become crucial export sources for the butcherously profitable sugar islands in the Caribbean. Whatever the local English needed could be bought and imported with the income they made by logging, grazing, and farming, all of which brought the soil and water more firmly under their control. Meanwhile, the local Indigenous communities had no such external support and their own land was being (literally) rooted out from underneath them.
North America was often lethal for Europeans (particularly when they first arrived), but more would come because home was worse. This was the closing stages of centuries of peasants being forced off their ancestral lands into cities so crowded, filthy, and disease ridden that they needed constant in-migration to avoid shrinking. Life was cheap, trivial crimes kept the hangman busy, and London needed at least 8,000 fresh migrants every year just to keep its population stable.{6} In sum, England was such a shithole that there were always plenty of people willing to leave it forever.
This unlimited source of fresh colonists put Indigenous communities in an impossible strategic position, like playing chess where your side is allowed only a few pieces while your opponent gets a full complement and two moves per turn. But as defenseless as the Indigenous were against this sustained, decades long onslaught, the strict hierarchy of empire was equally overmatched by their presence.
Long before the Revolution, legendary sex god Benjamin Franklin noted that Indians who came to live with the English often found their way back home, preferring life as they originally knew it. But the reverse wasn’t true for colonists who lived with the Indians. Even those whose friends and family had paid ransoms for their return often left a second time, preferring life outside the lines to the farms and villages in which they’d been born.{7} The old tools didn’t work in the New World; people who got flogged in England couldn’t do much about it, but people who got flogged in America could vote with their feet.
From the beginning, all attempts to install the ancient system of hereditary rank and privilege crumbled against the realities of North America. Curtsies, bows, and other formalities could be a matter of life and death in Europe, but in these raw settlements it was hard enough just keeping people around, nevermind keeping them in their place. Life in the wilderness, or with an Indian community, was often better than life in the fledgling colonies, many of which were reduced to passing oxymoronic laws making running away illegal. And who cared anyway? The king wasn’t there, the nobles weren’t there; the only people who were there were the Indians, and they laughed their asses off at the very idea, a practice the colonials swiftly adopted. Mockery and derision are poison to pomposity and unearned authority, and these earliest European Americans belittled and even threatened those who bragged of family wealth or fancy ancestry.{8}
The strict religious tenets of the early settlers similarly fell by the wayside. Colonial leaders who poured on too much fire and brimstone often found their congregations headed elsewhere. Mostly this meant new towns and churches, but, at their largest, these splits and migrations could create entire colonies. Rhode Island was founded as an integrated and religiously tolerant community when a bunch of white people who were sick of the Puritan government in Massachusetts went south at the invitation of Narragansett people who were equally sick of those very same Puritans.
Back in England, high born elites didn’t know quite what to make of all this and few bothered to try; as long as commerce flowed nobody with real power cared how people in such far flung places actually lived. And those people, quite sensibly, decided to copy the Indigenous system where everybody gets together and talks things out instead of the English system of taking orders from a guy in a nicer shirt than yours.{9}
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{1 – One last time, my summation of a lot of stuff, here from Cronan’s Changes in the Land, p54-158}
{2 – Cave, The Pequot War, p49-167}
{3 – McCusker & Menard, The Economy of British America, p103}
{4 – Bosma, The World of Sugar, p5-43}
{5 – Cronan, p109}
{6 – Steele, The English Atlantic, p253-261, London typically got 10k-12k newcomers every year, so its population grew even with the negative birth/death ratio.}
{7 – Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson (1753), retrieved from https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/, see passage beginning “When an Indian Child has been brought up among us…”, Franklin was specifically referring to how people didn’t want to work in the colonies.}
{8 – Grindle & Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty, p6-14}
{9 – Grindle & Johansen, p73-110}