America 10th edition pdf download emory shi

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. • www.NortonEbooks.com

AMERICA A NARRATIVE HISTORY SEVENTH EDITION Volume One

George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi

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AMERICA



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D E TA I L O F E N G R AV I N G B A S E D O N THE CHASM OF THE COLOR AD O BY THOMAS MORAN

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AMERICA A

N A R R A T I V E

H I S T O R Y

Seventh Edition Volume One G E O R G E B R O W N T I N DA L L DAV I D E M O R Y S H I

W . W . NORTON & COMPANY . NEW YORK . LONDON

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F OR B RUCE

S USAN B LAIR

AND

AND FOR

F OR J ASON

AND J ESSICA

Copyright © 2007, 2004, 1999, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Composition by TechBooks Manufacturing by Quebecor, Taunton Book design by Antonina Krass Editor: Karl Bakeman Manuscript editor: Abigail Winograd Project editor: Lory A. Frenkel Director of Manufacturing, College: Roy Tedoff Editorial assistant: Rebecca Arata Cartographer: CARTO-GRAPHICS/Alice Thiede and William Thiede Acknowledgments and copyrights continue on page A104, which serves as a continuation of the copyright page. The Library of Congress has cataloged the one-volume edition as follows: Tindall, George Brown. America : a narrative history / George Brown Tindall, David E. Shi.—7th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92820-4 ISBN 10: 0-393-11087-7 1. United States—History. I. Shi, David E. II. Title. E178.1 .T55 2006 973—dc22 ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92732-0 ISBN 10: 0-393-11087-7

2006047300

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The Nortons soon expanded their program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.

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CONTENTS

List of Maps • xv Preface • xix

Part One /

A NEW WORLD

1 | THE COLLISION OF CULTURES

5

PRE-COLUMBIAN INDIAN CIVILIZATIONS

7 • EUROPEAN VISIONS OF 12 • THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE 13 • THE VOYAGES OF COLUMBUS 15 • THE GREAT BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE 18 • PROFESSIONAL EXPLORERS 22 • THE SPANISH EMPIRE 23 • THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 35 • CHALLENGES TO THE SPANISH EMPIRE • FURTHER READING 43 AMERICA

2 | BRITAIN AND ITS COLONIES THE ENGLISH BACKGROUND

• •

SETTLING NEW ENGLAND

• •

45 SETTLING THE CHESAPEAKE INDIANS IN NEW ENGLAND

THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA

CAROLINAS

•

46 61

77

•

76

•

50 72

SETTLING THE

SETTLING THE MIDDLE COLONIES AND GEORGIA

THRIVING COLONIES

94

•

38

FURTHER READING

83

96

ix

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x

•

Contents

3 | COLONIAL WAYS OF LIFE 99

THE SHAPE OF EARLY AMERICA

107

SOUTHERN COLONIES ENGLAND

•

118

•

COLONIAL CITIES

AWAKENING

141

98

•

•

SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE

SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN NEW

SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

134 • THE ENLIGHTENMENT • FURTHER READING 145

4 | THE IMPERIAL PERSPECTIVE

GOVERNMENT

162

148 • 153 • TROUBLED NEIGHBORS 157 • FURTHER READING 173

5 | FROM EMPIRE TO INDEPENDENCE 175

THE HERITAGE OF WAR

• • • •

•

DISCONTENT ON THE FRONTIER

195 206

SHIFTING AUTHORITY FURTHER READING

Part Two /

•

131

THE GREAT

177 • 188 •

THE HABIT OF SELF-

•

THE COLONIAL

174

BRITISH POLITICS

GRENVILLE AND THE STAMP ACT

•

147

ENGLISH ADMINISTRATION OF THE COLONIES

WARS

138

176

•

WESTERN LANDS

FANNING THE FLAMES A WORSENING CRISIS

INDEPENDENCE

177

184 189

202

BUILDING A NATION

6 | THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

213

1776: WASHINGTON’S NARROW ESCAPE 214 • AMERICAN SOCIETY AT WAR 218 • 1777: SETBACKS FOR THE BRITISH 221 • 1778: BOTH SIDES REGROUP 225 • THE WAR IN THE SOUTH 229 • NEGOTIATIONS 234 • THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION 235 • THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 239 • THE EMERGENCE OF AN AMERICAN CULTURE 246 • FURTHER READING 248

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Contents

7 | SHAPING A FEDERAL UNION 250 277

THE CONFEDERATION

•

FURTHER READING

•

8 | THE FEDERALIST ERA

•

249

ADOPTING THE CONSTITUTION

263

279

280 • HAMILTON’S VISION 285 • THE REPUBLICAN ALTERNATIVE 293 • CRISES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC 295 • SETTLEMENT OF NEW LAND 303 • TRANSFER OF POWER 307 • THE ADAMS YEARS 308 • FURTHER READING 319 A NEW NATION

9 | THE EARLY REPUBLIC JEFFERSONIAN SIMPLICITY

• •

322

320 •

JEFFERSON IN OFFICE

DIVISIONS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THE WAR OF 1812

339 •

Part Three /

333

•

324

WAR IN EUROPE

FURTHER READING

334

351

AN EXPANSIVE NATION

10 | NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM

357

358 • “GOOD FEELINGS” 362 • CRISES • JUDICIAL NATIONALISM 371 • NATIONALIST • ONE-PARTY POLITICS 376 • FURTHER READING 384

ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND COMPROMISES

374

DIPLOMACY

367

11 | THE JACKSONIAN IMPULSE

387 • NULLIFICATION 389 • JACKSON’S INDIAN • THE BANK CONTROVERSY 400 • VAN BUREN AND THE NEW 406 • ASSESSING THE JACKSON YEARS 412 • FURTHER

SETTING THE STAGE POLICY

396

PARTY SYSTEM READING

414

385

xi

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•

Contents

12 | THE DYNAMICS OF GROWTH

416

417 • TRANSPORTATION 421 • A COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION • THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 432 • THE POPULAR CULTURE 439 • IMMIGRATION 443 • ORGANIZED LABOR 449 • THE RISE OF THE PROFESSIONS 452 • JACKSONIAN INEQUALITY 455 • FURTHER READING 456 AGRICULTURE AND THE NATIONAL ECONOMY AND THE NATIONAL ECONOMY

430

13 | AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: RELIGION, ROMANTICISM, AND REFORM 458 459

RATIONAL RELIGION

•

470

•

466

EDUCATION

14 | MANIFEST DESTINY THE TYLER YEARS

•

501

•

490

•

489 THE WESTERN FRONTIER

507

ANNEXING TEXAS

THE MEXICAN WAR

Part Four /

• THE FLOWERING OF AMERICAN 475 • ANTEBELLUM REFORM 479

487

FURTHER READING

WEST

515

•

•

MOVING

511

524

531 • WHITE SOCIETY IN THE 543 • THE CULTURE OF THE • ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENTS 556

FURTHER READING

554 563

16 | THE CRISIS OF UNION

532

FOREIGN ADVENTURES

565

566 580 •

SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES

•

•

BLACK SOCIETY IN THE SOUTH

SOUTHERN FRONTIER

•

492

POLK’S PRESIDENCY

FURTHER READING

THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF THE OLD SOUTH

538

•

A HOUSE DIVIDED

15 | THE OLD SOUTH

SOUTH

460

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING

ROMANTICISM IN AMERICA

LITERATURE

•

•

•

THE COMPROMISE OF

1850

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA CRISIS

572 581

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Contents

•

591 • 606

THE DEEPENING SECTIONAL CRISIS

APART

599

•

FURTHER READING

17 | THE WAR OF THE UNION

THE CENTER COMES

607

608 • THE BALANCE OF FORCE 612 THE WAR’S EARLY COURSE 614 • EMANCIPATION 629 REACTIONS TO EMANCIPATION 630 • BLACKS IN THE MILITARY 632 WOMEN AND THE WAR 634 • GOVERNMENT DURING THE WAR 635 THE FALTERING CONFEDERACY 640 • THE CONFEDERACY’S DEFEAT 645 A MODERN WAR 655 • FURTHER READING 657

THE END OF THE WAITING GAME

• • • • •

18 | RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH THE WAR’S AFTERMATH

664 • RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTH 673 • THE RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH 679 • THE GRANT YEARS 686 • FURTHER READING 698

GLOSSARY

A1

APPENDIX

A43

659

•

659

THE BATTLE OVER RECONSTRUCTION

A45

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE CONFEDERATION

• •

A50

•

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

•

ARTICLES OF

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

A80

•

ADMISSION OF STATES

A58

A88

A89 • IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED A90 • IMMIGRATION BY REGION AND SELECTED COUNTRY OF LAST RESIDENCE, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2004 A92 • PRESIDENTS, VICE-PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE A99 POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES

STATES, FISCAL YEARS

CREDITS INDEX

A104 A108

1820–2005

•

xiii

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MAPS

The First Migration Pre-Columbian Civilizations in Middle and South America Pre-Columbian Civilizations in North America Norse Discoveries Columbus’s Voyages Spanish and Portuguese Explorations Spanish Explorations of the Mainland English, French, and Dutch Explorations Land Grants to the Virginia Company Early Virginia and Maryland Early New England Settlements The West Indies, 1600–1800 Early Settlements in the South The Middle Colonies European Settlements and Indian Tribes in Early America The African Slave Trade, 1500–1800 Atlantic Trade Routes Major Immigrant Groups in Colonial America The French in North America Major Campaigns of the French and Indian War North America, 1713 North America, 1763 Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775 Major Campaigns in New York and New Jersey, 1776–1777

6 8 10 12 17 23 30 39 53 61 64 67 79 88 92–93 113 124 133 160 164 170 171 196 216

xv

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•

Maps



222 227 231 231 236 253 254 275 300 303 317 330 343 345 361 364 369 383 398 412 420 421 422–423 428 429 437 440 441 466 492 503 512 516 521 534 535 546 547

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Maps

The Compromise of 1850 The Gadsden Purchase, 1853 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 The Election of 1856 The Election of 1860 Secession, 1860–1861 The First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861 Campaigns in the West, February–April 1862 The Peninsular Campaign, 1862 Campaigns in Virginia and Maryland, 1862 The Vicksburg Campaign, 1863 Campaigns in the East, 1863 Grant in Virginia, 1864–1865 Sherman’s Campaigns, 1864–1865 Reconstruction, 1865–1877 The Election of 1876

•

xvii

576 582 584 590 603 610 615 621 625 626 642 643 649 652 685 696

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PREFACE

Just as history is never complete, neither is a historical textbook. We have learned much from the responses of readers and instructors to the first six editions of America: A Narrative History. Perhaps the most important and reassuring lesson is that our original intention has proved valid: to provide a compelling narrative history of the American experience, a narrative animated by human characters, informed by analysis and social texture, and guided by the unfolding of events. Readers have also endorsed the book’s distinctive size and format. America is designed to be read and to carry a moderate price. While the book retains its classic look, America sports a new color design for the Seventh Edition. We have added new eye-catching maps and included new art in full color. Despite these changes, we have not raised the price between the Sixth and the Seventh Editions. As in previous revisions of America, we have adopted an overarching theme that informs many of the new sections we introduce throughout the Seventh Edition. In previous editions we have traced such broad-ranging themes as immigration, the frontier and the West, popular culture, and work. In each case we blend our discussions of the selected theme into the narrative, where they reside through succeeding editions. The Seventh Edition of America highlights environmental history, a relatively new field that examines how people have shaped—and been shaped by—the natural world. Geographic features, weather, plants, animals, and diseases are important elements of environmental history. Environmental historians study how environments have changed as a result of natural processes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods, and climatic changes. They also study how societies have used and abused their natural environment through economic activities such as hunting, farming, logging and mining, manufacturing, building dams, and

xix

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Preface

irrigation. Equally interesting is how different societies over time have perceived nature, as reflected in their religion, art, literature, and popular culture, and how they have reshaped nature according to those perceptions through the creation of parks, preserves, and designed landscapes. Finally, another major area of inquiry among environmental historians centers on the development of laws and regulations to govern the use of nature and maintain the quality of the natural environment. Some of the new additions to the Seventh Edition related to environmental history are listed below. • Chapter 1 includes discussions of the transmission of deadly infectious diseases from Europe to the New World and the ecological and social impact of the arrival of horses on the Great Plains. • Chapter 3 examines the ways in which European livestock reshaped the New World environment and complicated relations with Native Americans. • Chapters 5 and 6 describe the effects of smallpox on the American armies during the Revolution. • Chapter 12 details the impact of early industrialization on the environment. • Chapter 17 describes the impact of the Civil War on the southern landscape. • Chapter 19 includes new material related to the environmental impact of the sharecrop-tenant farm system in the South after the Civil War, industrial mining in the Far West, and the demise of the buffalo on the Great Plains. • Chapter 21 describes the dramatic rise of large cities after the Civil War and the distinctive aspects of the urban environment. • Chapter 24 surveys the key role played by sportsmen in the emergence of the conservation movement during the late nineteenth century and details Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the nation’s natural resources. • Chapter 28 surveys the environmental and human effects of the “dust bowl” during the Great Depression. • Chapter 37 discusses President George W. Bush’s controversial environmental policies and describes the devastation in Mississippi and Louisiana wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

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xxi

Beyond these explorations of environmental history we have introduced other new material throughout the Seventh Edition. Fresh insights from important new scholarly works have been incorporated, and we feel confident that the book provides students with an excellent introduction to the American experience. To enhance the pedagogical features of the text, we have added Focus Questions at the beginning of each chapter. Students can use these review tools to remind themselves of the key themes and central issues in the chapters. These questions are also available online as quizzes, the results of which students can e-mail to their instructors. In addition, the maps feature new Enhanced Captions designed to encourage students to think analytically about the relationship between geography and American history. We have also revised the outstanding ancillary package that supplements the text. For the Record: A Documentary History of America, Third Edition, by David E. Shi and Holly A. Mayer (Duquesne University), is a rich resource with over 300 primary source readings from diaries, journals, newspaper articles, speeches, government documents, and novels. The Study Guide, by Charles Eagles (University of Mississippi), is another valuable resource. This edition contains chapter outlines, learning objectives, timelines, expanded vocabulary exercises, and many new short-answer and essay questions. America: A Narrative History Study Space is an online collection of tools for review and research. It includes chapter summaries, review questions and quizzes, interactive map exercises, timelines, and research modules, many new to this edition. Norton Media Library is a CD-ROM slide and text resource that includes images from the text, four-color maps, additional images from the Library of Congress archives, and audio files of significant historical speeches. Finally, the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank, by Mark Goldman (Tallahassee Community College) and Steven Davis (Kingwood College) includes a test bank of short-answer and essay questions, as well as detailed chapter outlines, lecture suggestions, and bibliographies. In preparing the Seventh Edition, we have benefited from the insights and suggestions of many people. Some of these insights have come from student readers of the text and we encourage such feedback. Among the scholars and survey instructors who offered us their comments and suggestions are: James Lindgren (SUNY Plattsburgh), Joe Kudless (Raritan Valley Community College), Anthony Quiroz (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi), Steve Davis (Kingwood College), Mark Fiege (Colorado State University), David Head (John Tyler Community College), Hutch Johnson (Gordon College), Charles

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Our special thanks go Tom Pearcy (Slippery Rock University) for all of his work on the timelines. Once again, we thank our friends at W. W. Norton, especially Steve Forman, Steve Hoge, Karl Bakeman, Neil Hoos, Lory Frenkel, Roy Tedoff, Dan Jost, Rebecca Arata, and Matt Arnold, for their care and attention along the way. —George B. Tindall —David E. Shi

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Part One

 A NEW WORLD

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H

istory is filled with ironies. Luck and accident often shape human affairs. Long before Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World in his effort to find a passage to Asia, the tribal peoples he mislabeled Indians had occupied and shaped the lands of the Western Hemisphere. The first people to settle the New World were nomadic hunters and gatherers who had migrated from northeastern Asia during the last glacial advance of the Ice Age, nearly 20,000 years ago. By the end of the fifteenth century, when Columbus began his voyage west, there were millions of Native Americans living in the Western Hemisphere. Over the centuries they had developed diverse and often highly sophisticated societies, some rooted in agriculture, others in trade or imperial conquest. The Native American cultures were, of course, profoundly affected by the arrival of peoples from Europe and Africa. Indians were exploited, enslaved, displaced, and exterminated. Yet this conventional tale of conquest oversimplifies the complex process by which Indians, Europeans, and Africans interacted. The Indians were more than passive victims; they were also trading partners and rivals of the transatlantic newcomers. They became enemies and allies, neighbors and advisers, converts and spouses. As such they fully participated in the creation of the new society known as America. The Europeans who risked their lives to settle in the New World were themselves quite varied. Young and old, men and women, they came from Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and the various German states. A variety of motives inspired them to undertake the often harrowing transatlantic voyage. Some were adventurers and fortune seekers eager to find gold and spices. Others were fervent Christians determined to create kingdoms of God in the New World. Still others were convicts, debtors, indentured servants, or political or religious exiles. Many were simply seeking a piece of land, higher wages, and greater economic opportunity. A settler in Pennsylvania noted that “poor people (both men and women) of all kinds can here get three times the wages for their labour than they can in England or Wales.” Yet such enticements were not sufficient to attract enough workers to keep up with the rapidly expanding colonial economies. So the Europeans began to force Indians to work for them. But there were never enough laborers to meet the unceasing demand. Moreover, captive Indians often escaped or were so rebellious that several colonies banned their use. The Massachusetts legislature did so because it claimed that Indians were of such “a malicious, surly and revengeful spirit; rude and insolent in their behavior, and very ungovernable.”

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Beginning early in the seventeenth century more and more colonists turned to the African slave trade for their labor needs. In 1619 white traders began transporting captured Africans to the English colonies. This development would transform American society in ways that no one at the time envisioned. Few Europeans during the colonial era saw the contradiction between the New World’s promise of individual freedom and the expanding institution of race-based slavery. Nor did they reckon with the problems associated with introducing into the new society people they considered alien and unassimilable. The intermingling of peoples, cultures, and ecosystems from the continents of Africa, Europe, and North America gave colonial American society its distinctive vitality and variety. In turn, the diversity of the environment and the climate led to the creation of quite different economies and patterns of living in the various regions of North America. As the original settlements grew into prosperous and populous colonies, the transplanted Europeans had to fashion social institutions and political systems to manage growth and control tensions. At the same time, imperial rivalries among the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch produced numerous intrigues and costly wars. The monarchs of Europe struggled to manage and exploit this fluid and often volatile colonial society. Many of the colonists, they discovered, had brought with them to the New World a feisty independence that led them to resent government interference in their affairs. A British official in North Carolina reported that the residents of the Piedmont region were “without any Law or Order. Impudence is so very high [among them], as to be past bearing.” As long as the reins of imperial control were loosely applied, the two parties maintained an uneasy partnership. But as the British authorities tightened their control during the mid–eighteenth century, they met resistance, which became revolt and culminated in revolution.

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 1

THE COLLISION OF CULTURES

FOCUS QUESTIONS •

What civilizations existed in pre-Columbian America? What were their origins?

•

What were the goals of the European voyages of discovery and of the explorers who probed the shorelines of America?

•

What were the consequences of the exchanges and clashes that accompanied European contact with the plants, animals, and people of the New World?

T

he “New World” discovered by Christopher Columbus was in fact home to civilizations thousands of years old. Until recently archaeologists had long assumed that the first humans in the Western Hemisphere were Siberians who some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago had crossed the Bering Strait on a land bridge to Alaska made accessible by receding waters during the last Ice Age. These nomadic hunters and their descendants had then drifted south in pursuit of grazing herds of large mammals: mammoths, musk oxen, bison, and woolly rhinoceroses. Over the next 500 years these people had fanned out in small bands across the entire hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Recent archaeological discoveries in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Chile, however, suggest that ancient humans may have arrived by sea much earlier (perhaps 18,000 to 40,000 years ago) from various parts of Asia—and some may even have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from southwestern Europe.

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6

•

THE COLLISION OF CULTURES (CH. 1)

When did people first cross the Bering Sea? What evidence have archaeologists and anthropologists found from the lives of the first people in America? Why did they travel to North America?

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Pre-Columbian Indian Civilizations

•

7

P R E - C O L U M B I A N I N D I A N C I V I L I Z AT I O N S The first humans in North America discovered an immense continent with extraordinary climatic and environmental diversity. Coastal plains, broad grasslands, harsh deserts, and soaring mountain ranges generated distinct environments, social structures, and cultural patterns. By the time Columbus happened upon the New World, the native peoples of North America had developed a diverse array of communities in which more than 400 languages were spoken. Yet despite the distances and dialects separating them, the Indian societies created extensive trading networks that helped spread ideas and innovations. Contrary to the romantic myth of early Indian civilizations living in perfect harmony with nature and one another, the native societies exerted great pressure on their environment and engaged in frequent warfare with one another. After centuries of nomadic life, the ancient Indians settled in more permanent villages. Thousands of years after people first appeared in North America, climatic changes and extensive hunting had killed off the largest mammals. Global warming diminished grasslands and stimulated forest growth, which provided plants and small animals for human consumption. The ancient Indians adapted to the new environments by inventing fiber snares, basketry, and mills for grinding nuts, and they domesticated the dog and the turkey. A new cultural stage arrived with the introduction of farming, fishing, and pottery making. Hunting now focused on faster and more elusive mammals: deer, antelope, elk, moose, and caribou. Already by about 5000 B.C., Indians of the Mexican highlands were consuming plant foods that became the staples of the New World: chiefly maize (corn), beans, and squash but also chili peppers, avocados, and pumpkins.

E A R LY C U LT U R E S

T H E M AYA S , A Z T E C S , C H I B C H A S , A N D I N C A S

Between about 2000 and 1500 B.C., permanent farming towns appeared in Mexico. The more settled life in turn provided time for the cultivation of religion, crafts, art, science, administration—and warfare. From about A.D. 300 to 900, Middle America (Mesoamerica) developed great city centers complete with gigantic pyramids, temples, and palaces, all supported by the surrounding peasant villages. Moreover, the Mayas developed enough mathematics and astronomy to devise a calendar more accurate than the one the Europeans were using at the time of Columbus. In about A.D. 900 the complex Mayan culture collapsed. The Mayas had overexploited the rain forest upon whose fragile ecosystem they depended.

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ATLANTIC GULF OF MEXICO

S Y A M A

TOLTECS Teotihuacán A Z T Tenochtitlán E C S Monte Alban

OCEAN

MEXICO

CARIBBEAN SEA

IS

MIDDLE AMERICA

TH

M

US

OF

PA

PACIFIC

MA

CHIBCHAS

SOUTH AMERICA

ANDES

OCEAN

0 0

250 250

500 Miles

500 Kilometers

S IN A H T C N UE U M O S (Q A INC

PRE-COLUMBIAN CIVILIZATIONS IN MIDDLE AND SOUTH AMERICA

NA

U

AS

)

What were the major pre-Columbian civilizations? What factors caused the demise of the Mayan civilization? When did the Aztecs build Tenochtitlán?

As an archaeologist has explained, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Deforestation led to hillside erosion and a catastrophic loss of farmland. Overpopulation added to the strain on Mayan society. Unrelenting civil wars erupted among the Mayas. Mayan war parties destroyed one another’s cities and took prisoners, who were then sacrificed to the gods in theatrical rituals. Whatever the reasons for the weakening of Mayan society, it succumbed to the Toltecs, a warlike people who conquered most of the region in the tenth century. But around A.D. 1200 the Toltecs mysteriously withdrew.

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Mayan Society A fresco depicting the social divisions of Mayan society. A Mayan lord, at the center, receives offerings.

The Aztecs arrived from the northwest to fill the vacuum, founded the city of Tenochtitlán (twenty-five miles north of what is now Mexico City) in 1325, and gradually expanded their control over central Mexico. When the Spanish invaded in 1519, the Aztec Empire under Montezuma II ruled over perhaps 5 million people—though estimates range as high as 20 million. Farther south, in what is now Colombia, the Chibchas built a similar empire on a smaller scale. Still farther south the Quechuas (better known as the Incas, from the name for their ruler) controlled an empire that by the fifteenth century stretched 1,000 miles along the Andes Mountains from Ecuador to Chile. It was crisscrossed by an elaborate system of roads and organized under an autocratic government. I N D I A N C U LT U R E S O F N O R T H A M E R I C A The Indians of the present-day United States developed three identifiable civilizations: the Adena-Hopewell culture of the Northeast (800 B.C.–A.D. 600), the Mississippian culture of the Southeast (A.D. 600–1500), and the Pueblo-Hohokam culture of the Southwest (400 B.C.–present). None of these developed as fully as the civilizations of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas to the south.

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R

O C

K Y

PACIFIC OCEAN

PRE-COLUMBIAN CIVILIZATIONS IN NORTH AMERICA

ATLANTIC

IN

Y HIA

A E EN AL L AD HIO V O

N M OU N

LL WE

AL

AC

OCEAN

P

PUEBLO-HOHOKAM

PE

P

ANASAZI

O -H

ISSISSIP VALLEY PI

Mesa Verde

S

TA

AMERICA

MISSISSIPPI AN M

S I N T A U N M O

NORTH

A

0 0

500 Miles 500 Kilometers

GULF OF MEXICO

What were the three dominant pre-Columbian civilizations in North America? Where was the Adena-Hopewell culture centered? How was the Mississippian civilization similar to that of the Mayans or Aztecs? What made the Anasazi culture different from the other North American cultures?

The Adena-Hopewell culture, centered in the Ohio River valley, left behind enormous earthworks and burial mounds—some of them elaborately shaped like great snakes, birds, or other animals. Evidence from the mounds suggests a complex social structure and a specialized division of labor. Moreover, the Hopewell Indians developed an elaborate trade network that spanned the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered in the Mississippi River valley, resembled the Mayan and Aztec societies in its intensive agriculture, substantial towns built around central plazas, temple mounds (vaguely resembling pyramids), and death cults, which involved human torture and sacrifice. The Mississippians developed a specialized labor force, an effective government, and an extensive trading network. They worshipped the sun. The Mississippian

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culture peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and finally succumbed to diseases transmitted from Europe. The arid Southwest hosted irrigation-based cultures, elements of which persist today and heirs of which (the Hopis, Zunis, and others) still live in the adobe pueblos erected by their ancestors. The most widespread and best known of the cultures, the Anasazi (“enemy’s ancestors” in Mississippian Artifacts the Navajo language), developed in the “four corners,” where the Mississippian people produced finely made pottery, such as this deer-effigy jar. states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Anasazis lived in baked-mud adobe structures built four or five stories high. In contrast to the Mesoamerican and Mississippian cultures, Cliff Dwellings Ruins of Anasazi cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado.

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Anasazi society lacked a rigid class structure. The religious leaders and warriors labored much as the rest of the people did. In fact, they engaged in warfare only as a means of self-defense (Hopi means “Peaceful People”), and there is little evidence of human sacrifice or human trophies. Environmental factors shaped Anasazi culture and eventually caused its demise. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a lengthy drought and the pressure of new arrivals from the north began to restrict the territory of the Anasazis. Into their peaceful world came the aggressive Navajos and Apaches, followed two centuries later by Spaniards marching up from the south.

EUROPEAN VISIONS

OF

AMERICA

The European discovery of America was fueled by curiosity. People had long imagined what lay beyond the western horizon. Norse expeditions to the New World during the tenth and eleventh centuries are the earliest

HELLULAND (Baffin Island)

GREENLAND

NORWAY SHETLAND ISLANDS

ICELAND

FAROE ISLANDS

SCOTLAND MARKLAND (Labrador)

NORTH AMERICA CAPE COD

IRELAND L’Anse aux Meadows VINLAND (Newfoundland)

ENGLAND

EUROPE

ATLANTIC OCEAN NORSE DISCOVERIES Norse settlements

AFRICA

When did the first Norse settlers reach North America? What was the symbolic significance of these lands of the Western Hemisphere? How far south in North America did the Norse explorers travel?

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that can be verified, and even they have dissolved into legend. Around A.D. 985 an Icelander named Erik the Red—the New World’s first real-estate booster—colonized the west coast of a rocky, fogbound island he deceptively called Greenland, and about a year later a trader missed Greenland and sighted land beyond. Knowing of this, Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, sailed out from Greenland about A.D. 1001 and sighted the coasts of Helluland (Baffin Island), Markland (Labrador), and Vinland (Newfoundland), where he settled for the winter. The Norse settlers withdrew from North America in the face of hostile natives, and the Greenland colonies vanished mysteriously in the fifteenth century. Nowhere in Europe had the forces yet developed that would inspire adventurers to subdue the New World.

T H E E X PA N S I O N

OF

EUROPE

During the late fifteenth century, Europeans developed the maritime technology to venture around the world and the imperial ambitions to search for riches, colonies, and pagans to convert. This age of discovery coincided with the rise of an inquiring spirit; the growth of trade, towns, and modern corporations; the decline of feudalism and the formation of national states; the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; and the resurgence of some old sins—greed, conquest, exploitation, oppression, racism, and slavery—that quickly defiled the fancied innocence of the New World. For more than two centuries before Columbus, the mind of Europe quickened with the so-called Renaissance— the rediscovery of ancient texts, the rebirth of secular learning, the spirit of inquiry, all of which spread more rapidly after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of a printing press with movable type around 1440. Learned Europeans of the fifteenth century held in almost reverential awe the authority of ancient learning. The age of discovery was especially influenced by ancient concepts of geography. As early as the sixth century B.C., the Pythagoreans had taught the sphericity of the earth, and in the third century B.C. the earth’s size was computed very nearly correctly. All this was accepted in Renaissance universities on the word of Aristotle, and the myth that Columbus was trying to prove this theory is one of those falsehoods that will not disappear even in the face of evidence. No informed person at that time thought the earth was flat. Progress in the art of navigation accompanied the revival of learning. In the fifteenth century, mariners employed new instruments to sight stars and

RENAISSANCE GEO GRAPHY

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find the latitude. Steering across the open sea, however, remained a matter of dead reckoning. A ship’s captain set his course along a given latitude and calculated it from the angle of the North Star or, with less certainty, the sun, estimating speed by the eye. Longitude remained a matter of guesswork since accurate timepieces were needed to determine it. Ship’s clocks remained too inaccurate until the development of more precise chronometers in the eighteenth century. T H E G R OW T H O F T R A D E , TOW N S , A N D NAT I O N - S TAT E S

The forces that would invade and reshape the New World found their focus in Europe’s rising towns, the centers of a growing trade that slowly broadened the narrow horizons of feudal culture. In its farthest reaches this commerce moved either overland or through the eastern Mediterranean all the way to east Asia, where Europeans acquired medicine, silks, precious stones, dyewoods, perfumes, and rugs. There they also purchased the spices—pepper, nutmeg, clove—so essential to the preserving of food and for enhancing its flavor. The trade gave rise to a merchant class and to the idea of corporations through which stockholders would share risks and profits. The foreign trade was chancy and costly. Goods commonly passed from hand to hand, from ships to pack trains and back to ships along the way, subject to tax levies by all sorts of princes and potentates. The Muslim world, from Spain across North Africa into central Asia, straddled the important trade routes, adding to the hazards. Muslims tenaciously opposed efforts to “Christianize” their lands. Little wonder, then, that Europeans should dream of an all-water route to the coveted spices of east Asia and the Indies. Another spur to exploration was the rise of national states, ruled by kings and queens who had the power and the money to sponsor the search for foreign riches. The growth of the merchant class went hand in hand with the growth of centralized political power. Merchants wanted uniform currencies, trade laws, and the elimination of trade barriers. They thus became natural allies of the monarchs who could meet their needs. In turn, merchants and university-trained professionals supplied the monarchs with money, lawyers, and government officials. The Crusades to capture the Holy Land (1095–1270) had also advanced the process of international trade and exploration. They had brought Europe into contact with the Middle East and had decimated the ranks of the feudal lords. And new means of warfare—the use of gunpowder and standing armies—further weakened the independence of the nobility relative to royal power. By 1492 the map of western Europe showed several united kingdoms: France, where in 1453 Charles VII had emerged from the Hundred Years’

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War as head of a unified state; England, where in 1485 Henry VII had emerged victorious after thirty years of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses; Portugal, where John I had fought off the Castilians to ensure national independence; and Spain, where in 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had ended an era of chronic civil war when they united two great kingdoms in marriage. The Spanish king and queen were crusading expansionists. On January 1, 1492, after nearly eight centuries of religious warfare between Spanish Christians and Moorish Muslims on the Iberian peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella declared victory at Granada, the last Muslim stronghold. They gave the defeated Muslims a desperate choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Soon thereafter the Christian monarchs gave Sephardi, Jews from Spain or Portugal, the same awful ultimatum: baptism or exile. These factors—urbanization, world trade, the rise of centralized national states, and advances in knowledge, technology, and firepower—combined with natural human curiosity, greed, and religious zeal to create an outburst of energy, spurring the discovery and conquest of the New World. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Europeans set in motion the events that, as one historian has observed, bound together “four continents, three races, and a great diversity of regional parts.”

T H E V O YA G E S

OF

C O LU M B U S

It was in Portugal, with the guidance of King John’s son Prince Henry the Navigator, that exploration and discovery began in earnest. In 1422 Prince Henry dispatched his first naval expedition to map the African coast. Driven partly by the hope of outflanking the Islamic world and partly by the hope of trade, the Portuguese by 1446 had reached Cape Verde and then the equator and, by 1482, the Congo River. In 1488 Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip. Christopher Columbus, meanwhile, was learning his trade in the school of Portuguese seamanship. Born in 1451, the son of an Italian weaver, Columbus took to the sea at an early age, making up for his lack of formal education by teaching himself geography, navigation, and Latin. By the 1480s, Columbus, a tall, white-haired, pious man, was an experienced mariner and a skilled navigator. Dazzled by the prospect of Asian riches, he developed an outrageous plan to reach the Indies (India, China, the East Indies, or Japan) by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus won the support of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs. They awarded him a tenth share of any pearls; gold, silver,

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or other precious metals; and valuable spices he found in any new territories. The legend that the queen had to hock the crown jewels is as spurious as the fable that Columbus set out to prove the earth was round. Columbus chartered one seventyfive-foot ship, the Santa María, and the Spanish city of Palos supplied two smaller caravels, the Pinta and the Niña. From Palos this little squadron, with eighty-seven officers and men, set sail westward for what Columbus thought was Asia. The expedition stopped at the Canary Islands, the Christopher Columbus westernmost Spanish possessions, off A portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, the west coast of Africa. Early on Octoca. 1519. ber 12, 1492, a lookout on the Santa María yelled, “Tierra! Tierra!” (Land! Land!) It was an island in the Bahamas east of Florida that Columbus named San Salvador (Blessed Savior). Columbus decided they were near the Indies, so he called the island people los Indios. He described the “Indians” as naked people, “very well made, of very handsome bodies and very good faces.” He added that “with fifty men they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.” The natives, Columbus wrote, were “to be ruled and set to work, to cultivate the land and to do all else that may be necessary . . . and to adopt our customs.” Columbus continued to search for a passage to the fabled Indies through the Bahamian Cays, down to Cuba (a place-name that suggested Marco Polo’s Cipangu [associated with modern-day Japan]), and then eastward to the island he named Española (or Hispaniola, now the site of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where he first found significant amounts of gold jewelry. Columbus learned of, but did not encounter until his second voyage, the fierce Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. The Caribbean Sea was named after them, and because of their alleged bad habits the word cannibal was derived from a Spanish version of their name (Caníbal). On the night before Christmas 1492, the Santa María ran aground off Hispaniola. Columbus, still believing he had reached Asia, decided to return home. He left about forty men behind and seized a dozen natives to present as gifts to Spain’s royal couple. When Columbus reached Palos, he received a hero’s welcome. The news of his discovery spread rapidly across Europe

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ENGLAND

NORTH AMERICA AZORES

PORTUGAL

•

17

FRANCE SPAIN

ATLANTIC GULF OF MEXICO

BAHAMAS CUBA

JAMAICA

CENTRAL AMERICA

PACIFIC OCEAN

CANARY ISLANDS

1492

OCEAN

SAN SALVADOR

1493

AFRICA

HISPANIOLA 1502

CARIBBEAN SEA

LESSER ANTILLES

CAPE VERDE ISLANDS 1 4 98

TRINIDAD

SOUTH AMERICA

COLUMBUS’S VOYAGES

How many voyages did Columbus make to the Americas? What is the origin of the name for the Caribbean Sea? What happened to the colony that Columbus left on Hispaniola in 1493?

thanks to the improved communications brought about by Gutenberg’s printing press. In Italy, Pope Alexander VI, himself a Spaniard, was so convinced that God favored the conquest of the New World that he awarded Spain the right to control the entire hemisphere so that its pagan natives could be brought to Christ. Buoyed by such support and by the same burning religious zeal to battle heathens that had forced the Moors into exile or conversion, Ferdinand and Isabella instructed Columbus to prepare for a second voyage. The Spanish monarchs also set about shoring up their legal claim against Portugal’s pretensions to the newly discovered lands. Spain and Portugal reached a compromise agreement, called the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which drew an imaginary line west of the Cape Verde Islands and stipulated that the area west of it would be a Spanish sphere of exploration and settlement. Columbus returned across the Atlantic in 1493 with seventeen ships, livestock, and over 1,000 men, as well as royal instructions to “treat the Indians very well.” Back in the New World, Admiral Columbus discovered that the

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camp he had left behind was in chaos. The unsupervised soldiers had run amok, raping native women, robbing Indian villages, and as Columbus’s son later added, “committing a thousand excesses for which they were mortally hated by the Indians.” The natives finally struck back and killed ten Spaniards. A furious Columbus immediately attacked the Indian villages. The Spaniards, armed with crossbows, guns, and ferocious dogs, decimated the natives and loaded 550 of them onto ships bound for the slave market in Spain. Columbus then ventured out across the Caribbean Sea. He found the Lesser Antilles, explored the coast of Cuba, discovered Jamaica, and finally returned to Spain in 1496. On a third voyage, in 1498, Columbus found Trinidad and explored the northern coast of South America. He led a fourth voyage in 1502, during which he sailed along the coast of Central America, still looking in vain for Asia. Having been marooned on Jamaica for more than a year, he finally returned to Spain in 1504. He died two years later. To the end, Columbus refused to believe that he had discovered anything other than outlying parts of Asia. Full awareness that a great land mass lay between Europe and Asia dawned on Europeans very slowly. By one of history’s greatest ironies, this led the New World to be named not for its discoverer but for another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed to the New World in 1499. Vespucci landed on the coast of South America and reported that it was so large it must be a new continent. European mapmakers thereafter began to label the New World using a variant of Vespucci’s first name: America.

T H E G R E AT B I O L O G I C A L E XC H A N G E The first European contacts with the New World began an unprecedented worldwide biological exchange. It was in fact more than a diffusion of cultures: it was a diffusion of distinctive social and ecological elements that ultimately worked in favor of the Europeans at the expense of the natives. Indians, Europeans, and eventually Africans intersected to create new religious beliefs and languages, adopt new tastes in food, and develop new modes of dress. If anything, the plants and animals of the two worlds were more different than the people and their ways of life. Europeans had never seen such creatures as the fearsome (if harmless) iguana, the flying squirrel, fish with whiskers like those of a cat, or the rattlesnake, nor had they seen anything quite like several other species: bison, cougars, armadillos, opossums, sloths,

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tapirs, anacondas, American eels, toucans, condors, and hummingbirds. Among the few domesticated animals they could recognize the dog and the duck, but turkeys, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas were all new. Nor did the Native Americans know of horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and (maybe) chickens, which soon arrived from Unfamiliar Wildlife Europe in abundance. Yet within a A box tortoise drawn by John White, one half century whole islands of the of the earliest English settlers in America. Caribbean would be overrun by pigs. The exchange of plant life between Old and New Worlds worked a revolution in the diets of both hemispheres. Before Columbus’s voyage three staples of the modern diet were unknown in Europe: maize (corn), potatoes (sweet and white), and many kinds of beans (snap, kidney, lima, and others). The white potato, although commonly called Irish, actually migrated from South America to Europe and reached North America only with the Scotch-Irish immigrants of the early eighteenth century. Other New World food plants include peanuts, squash, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, pineapples, sassafras, papayas, guavas, avocados, cacao (the source of chocolate), and chicle (for chewing gum). Europeans in turn soon introduced rice, wheat, barley, oats, wine grapes, melons, coffee, olives, bananas, “Kentucky” bluegrass, daisies, and dandelions to the New World. The beauty of the exchange was that the food plants were more complementary than competitive. Corn, it turned out, could flourish almost anywhere—in highland or low, in hot climates or cold, in wet land or dry. It spread quickly throughout the world. Before the end of the 1500s, American maize and sweet potatoes were staple crops in China. The nutritious food crops exported from the Americas thus helped nourish a worldwide population explosion probably greater than any since the invention of agriculture. The dramatic increase in the European populations fueled by the new foods in turn helped provide the surplus of people that colonized the New World. Europeans, moreover, adopted many Native American devices: canoes, snowshoes, moccasins, hammocks, kayaks, ponchos, dogsleds, and toboggans. The rubber ball and the game of lacrosse have Indian origins. New words entered European languages: wigwam, tepee, papoose, tomahawk, succotash, hominy, moose, skunk, raccoon, opossum, woodchuck, chipmunk,

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hickory, pecan, and hundreds of others. And new terms appeared in translation: warpath, war paint, paleface, medicine man, firewater. The natives also left the map dotted with place-names of Indian origin long after they were gone, from Miami to Yakima, from Penobscot to Yuma. There were still other New World contributions: tobacco and a number of other drugs, including coca (for cocaine), curare (a muscle relaxant), and cinchona bark (for quinine). By far, however, the most significant aspect of the biological exchange was the transmission of infectious diseases from Europe and Africa to the New World. European colonists and enslaved Africans brought with them deadly pathogens that Native Americans had never experienced: smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, bubonic plague, malaria, yellow fever, and cholera. In dealing with such diseases over the centuries, people in the Old World had developed antibodies that enabled most of them to survive infection. Disease-toughened Smallpox Aztec victims of the 1538 smallpox epidemic are covered in shrouds (center) as two others lie dying (at right).

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adventurers, colonists, and slaves invading the New World thus carried viruses and bacteria that consumed Indians, who lacked the immunologic resistance that forms from experience with the diseases. The results were catastrophic. Epidemics are one of the most powerful forces shaping history, and disease played a profound role in decimating the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Far more Indians died of contagions than from combat. Major diseases such as typhus and smallpox produced pandemics in the New World on a scale never witnessed in history. The social chaos caused by the European invaders contributed to the devastation of native communities. In the face of such terrible and mysterious diseases, panic-stricken and often malnourished Indians fled to neighboring villages, unwittingly spreading the diseases in the process. Unable to explain or cure the contagions, Indian chiefs and religious leaders often lost their stature. Consequently, tribal cohesion and cultural life disintegrated, and Impact of European Diseases This 1592 engraving shows a shaman in a Tupinamba village in Brazil (at left) using his rattle to attract benevolent spirits to heal the diseases brought by Europeans.

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efforts to resist European assaults collapsed. Over time, Native Americans adapted to the presence of the diseases and better managed their effects. They began to quarantine victims and infected villages to confine the spread of germs, and they developed elaborate rituals to sanctify such practices. Smallpox was an especially ghastly and highly contagious disease in the New World. Santo Domingo boasted almost 4 million inhabitants in 1496; by 1570 the number of natives had plummeted to 125. In central Mexico alone, some 8 million people, perhaps one third of the entire Indian population, died of smallpox within a decade of the arrival of the Spanish. Smallpox brought horrific suffering. The virus passes through the air on moisture droplets or dust particles that enter the lungs of its victims. After incubating for twelve days, the virus causes headaches, backache, fever, and nausea. Victims then develop sores in the mouth, nose, and throat. Within a few days gruesome skin eruptions cover the body. Death usually results from massive internal bleeding. In colonial America, as Indians died by the thousands, disease became the most powerful weapon of the European invaders. A Spanish explorer noted that “half the natives” died from smallpox and “blamed us.” Many Europeans, however, interpreted such epidemics as diseases sent by God to punish Indians who resisted conversion to Christianity.

PROFESSIONAL EXPLORERS Undeterred by new diseases and encouraged by Columbus’s discoveries, professional explorers, mostly Italians, hired themselves out to look for the elusive western passage to Asia. They probed the shorelines of America during the early sixteenth century in the vain search for an opening and thus increased by leaps and bounds European knowledge of the New World. The first to sight the North American continent was John Cabot, a Venetian sponsored by Henry VII of England. Cabot sailed across the North Atlantic in 1497. His landfall at what the king called “the new founde lande” gave England the basis for a later claim to all of North America. During the early sixteenth century, however, the English grew so preoccupied with internal divisions and conflicts with France that they failed to capitalize on Cabot’s discoveries. Only fishermen exploited the teeming waters of the Grand Banks. In 1513 the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean, having crossed the Isthmus of Panama on foot. The Spanish were eager to find a nautical passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To that end, in 1519 Ferdinand Magellan, a haughty Portuguese

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SPAIN PORTUGAL

Line of Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494

Line of Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494

ATLANTIC OCEAN

EUROPE

PORTUGAL AZORES

A S I A

SPAIN

JAPAN

CANARY ISLANDS

V es

pu

cc

CHINA

i

AF RICA

INDIA

ARABIA

Prince Henry the Navigator

ell an

Congo River

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

M

ag

ZANZIBAR

Dias

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Magellan Strait CAPE HORN

0 0

2,000 Miles 2,000 Kilometers

PACIFIC OCEAN PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

SRI LANKA

Amazon River

SOUTH AMERICA

SPAIN PORTUGAL

NORTH AMERICA

MOLUCCAS

Equator

INDIAN OCEAN MADAGASCAR ip) s sh

no d el C a

lan’ agel (i n M

AUSTRALIA

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE EXPLORATIONS Spanish

Portuguese

What is the significance of Magellan’s 1519 voyage? What was the controversy over the Treaty of Tordesillas? What biological exchanges resulted from these early explorations?

seaman hired by the Spanish, discovered the strait that now bears his name at the southern tip of South America. Magellan kept sailing north and west across the Pacific Ocean, discovering Guam and eventually the Philippines, where he was killed by natives. Surviving crew members made their way back to Spain, arriving in 1522, having been at sea for three years. Their accounts of the global voyage quickened Spanish interest in exploration.

T H E S PA N I S H E M P I R E During the sixteenth century, Spain created the most powerful empire in the world by conquering and colonizing the Americas. The Caribbean Sea

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served as the funnel through which Spanish power entered the New World. After establishing colonies on Hispaniola, including Santo Domingo, which became the capital of the West Indies, the Spanish proceeded eastward to Puerto Rico (1508) and westward to Cuba (1511–1514). Their motives were explicit. Said one soldier, “We came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.” Like the French and the British after them, the Spanish who explored and conquered new worlds in the Western Hemisphere were willing to risk everything in pursuit of wealth, power, glory, or divine approval. The first adventurers were often larger-than-life figures. They displayed ambition and courage, ruthlessness and duplicity, resilience and creativity, as well as crusading religiosity and imperial arrogance. The European colonization of the New World was difficult and deadly. Most of those in the first wave of settlement died of malnutrition or disease. But the natives suffered even more casualties. A Spaniard on Hispaniola reported in 1494 that over 50,000 Indians had died from infectious diseases carried by the Europeans, and more were “falling each day, with every step, like cattle in an infected herd.” Even the most developed Indian societies of the sixteenth century were ill equipped to resist the European cultures invading their world. Disunity everywhere—civil disorder and rebellion plagued the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas—left the native peoples of the New World vulnerable to division and foreign conquest. The onslaught of men and microbes from Europe perplexed and overwhelmed the Indians. Prejudices and misunderstandings had tragic consequences. Europeans presumed that their civilization was superior to those they discovered in the New World. And such presumed superiority justified in their minds the conquest and enslavement of Indians, the destruction of their way of life, and the seizure of their land and resources. The violent encounter between Spaniards and Indians in North America involved more than a clash between different peoples. It also involved contrasting forms of technological development. The Indians of Mexico had copper and bronze but no iron. They had domesticated dogs and llamas but no horses. Whereas Indians used dugout canoes for transport, Europeans sailed heavily armed oceangoing vessels. The Spanish ships not only carried human cargo; they also brought steel swords, firearms, explosives, and armor. These advanced military tools struck fear into many Indians. A Spanish priest in Florida observed that gunpowder “frightens the most valiant and courageous Indian and renders him slave to the white man’s command.” Such weaponry helps explain why the Europeans were able to defeat far superior numbers of Indians. Arrows and tomahawks were seldom a match for guns and cannon.

A C L A S H O F C U LT U R E S

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The Europeans enjoyed other cultural advantages. For example, the only domestic four-legged animals in North America were dogs and llamas. The Spaniards, on the other hand, brought with them horses, pigs, and cattle, all of which served as sources of food and leather. Horses provided greater speed in battle and introduced a decided psychological advantage. “The most essential thing in new lands is horses,” reported one Spanish soldier. “They instill the greatest fear in the enemy and make the Indians respect the leaders of the army.” Even more feared among the Indians were the greyhound dogs that the Spaniards used to guard their camps. C O R T É S ’ S C O N Q U E S T The first European conquest of a major Indian civilization on the North American mainland began on February 18, 1519, when Hernando Cortés, driven by dreams of gold and glory, set sail from Cuba with nearly 600 soldiers and sailors. Also on board were 200 Cuban natives, sixteen horses, and several cannons. When the invaders landed at Vera Cruz, on the Mexican Gulf coast, they were assaulted by thousands of Indian warriors. After defeating the native force, Cortés invited the warriors to join his advance on the Aztecs. He then burned all but one of the Spanish ships. There would be no turning back.

Cortés in Mexico Page from the Tlaxcala Lienzo, a historical narrative from the sixteenth century. The scene, in which Cortés is shown seated on a throne, depicts the arrival of the Spaniards in Tlaxcala.

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Cortés’s expedition was unauthorized. His soldiers, called conquistadores, received no pay; they were military entrepreneurs willing to risk their lives for a share in the expected plunder and slaves. The ruthless Cortés had participated in the Spanish occupation of Cuba and had acquired his own plantations and gold mines. But he yearned for even more wealth and glory. Against the wishes of the Spanish governor in Cuba, who wanted the Aztec Empire for himself, Cortés launched the daring invasion of Mexico. The 200-mile march from Vera Cruz through difficult mountain passes to the magnificent Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (north of present-day Mexico City) and the subjugation of the Aztecs, who thought themselves “masters of the world,” constituted one of the most remarkable feats in history. Tenochtitlán, with some 200,000 inhabitants, was the largest city in the Americas and was much larger than Seville, the most populous city in Spain. Graced by wide canals and verdant gardens and boasting beautiful stone pyramids and other buildings, the fabled capital seemed impregnable. But Cortés made the most of his assets. His invasion force had landed in a coastal region where the local Indians were still fighting off the spread of Aztec power and were ready to embrace new allies, especially those possessing strange animals (horses) and powerful weapons. By a combination of threats and deceptions, Cortés entered Tenochtitlán peacefully and made the emperor, Montezuma II, his puppet. Cortés explained to Montezuma why the invasion was necessary: “We Spaniards have a disease of the heart that only gold can cure.” Montezuma mistook Cortés for a returning god. After taking all the Aztec gold, the Spanish forced Montezuma to provide Indian laborers to mine more. This state of affairs lasted until the spring of 1520, when disgruntled Aztecs, regarding Montezuma as a traitor, rebelled, stoned him to death, and attacked Cortés’s forces. The Spaniards lost about one third of their men as they retreated. Their 20,000 Indian allies remained loyal, however, and Cortés gradually regrouped his men. In 1521, having been reinforced with troops from Cuba and thousands of Indians eager to defeat the Aztecs, he besieged the imperial city for eighty-five days, cutting off its access to water and food and allowing a smallpox epidemic to decimate the inhabitants. An African slave infected with the virus spawned the contagion. As a Spaniard observed, the smallpox “spread over the people as great destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There was great havoc. Very many died of it. . . . They could not move; they could not stir.” The ravages of smallpox help explain how such a small force of determined Spaniards lusting for gold and silver was able to

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vanquish a proud nation of nearly 1 million people. Montezuma’s nephew led the final fierce assault by the desperate Aztecs. Some 15,000 died in the battle. After the Aztecs surrendered, a merciless Cortés ordered the leaders hanged and the priests devoured by dogs. He and his officers replaced them as rulers over the Aztec Empire. In two years the brilliant Cortés and his disciplined army had conquered a fabled empire that had taken thirty centuries to develop. Cortés and his army set the style for plundering conquistadores to follow, who within twenty years had established a sprawling Spanish Empire in the New World. Between 1522 and 1528 various lieutenants of Cortés’s conquered the remnants of Indian culture in the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala. In 1531 Francisco Pizarro led a band of soldiers down the Pacific coast from Panama toward Peru, where they brutally subdued the Inca Empire. From Peru, conquistadores had extended Spanish authority south through Chile by about 1553 and north, to present-day Colombia, by 1536 to 1538. The Spaniards sought to displace the “pagan” civilizations of the Americas with their Catholic-based culture. Believing that God was on their side in this cultural exchange, the Spaniards carried with them a fervent sense of mission that bred both intolerance and zeal. The conquistadores transferred to America a system known as the encomienda, whereby favored officers became privileged landowners who controlled Indian villages or groups of villages. As encomenderos, they were called upon to protect and care for the villages and support missionary priests. In turn they could require Indians to provide them with goods and labor. Spanish America therefore developed from the start a society of extremes: wealthy conquistadores and encomenderos at one end of the spectrum and native peoples held in poverty at the other end. What was left of them, that is. By the mid-1500s native Indians were nearly extinct in the West Indies, reduced more by European diseases than by Spanish brutality. To take their place, as early as 1503 the colonizers began to transport Africans to work as slaves, the first in a wretched traffic that eventually would carry over 9 million people across the Atlantic. In all of Spain’s New World empire, by one informed estimate, the Indian population dropped from about 50 million at the outset to 4 million in the seventeenth century and slowly rose again to 7.5 million by the end of the eighteenth century. Whites, who totaled no more than 100,000 in the mid–sixteenth century, numbered over 3 million by the end of the colonial period. The Indians, however, did not always lack advocates. In many cases Catholic missionaries offered a sharp contrast to the conquistadores. Setting S PA N I S H A M E R I C A

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an example of self-denial, they ventured into remote areas, usually without weapons or protection, to spread the gospel—and often suffered martyrdom for their efforts. Among them rose defenders of the Indians, the most noted of whom was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a priest in Hispaniola and later a bishop in Mexico, author of A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). From such violently contrasting forces, Spanish America gradually developed into a settled society. The independent conquistadores were replaced by a second generation of bureaucrats, and the encomienda was succeeded by the hacienda (a great farm or ranch) as the claim to land became a more important source of wealth than the Spanish claim to labor. From the outset, in sharp contrast to the later English experience, the Spanish government regulated every detail of colonial administration. After 1524 the Council of the Indies, directly under the crown, issued laws for America, served as the appellate court for civil cases arising in the colonies, and administered the bureaucracy. The culture of Spanish America would be fundamentally unlike the Englishspeaking culture that would arise to the north. In fact, a difference already existed among the pre-Columbian Indians with largely nomadic tribes to the north and the more complex civilizations inhabiting Mesoamerica. On the latter world the Spaniards imposed an overlay of their own peculiar ways, but without uprooting the deeply planted cultures they found. Catholicism, which for centuries had absorbed pagan gods and transformed pagan feasts into such holy days as Christmas and Easter, in turn adapted Indian beliefs and rituals to its own purposes. The Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe Hidalgo, for instance, evoked memories of feminine divinities in native cults. Thus Spanish America, in the words of the modern-day Mexican writer Octavio Paz, became a land of superimposed pasts: “Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec city that was built in the likeness of Tula, the Toltec city that was built in the likeness of Teotihuacán, the first great city on the American continent. Every Mexican bears within him this continuity, which goes back two thousand years.” E X P L O R AT I O N S Throughout the sixteenth century no European power other than Spain had more than a brief foothold in the New World. Spain had the advantage not only of having sponsored the discovery but also of having stumbled onto those parts of America that would bring the quickest profits. While France and England struggled with domestic quarrels and religious conflict, Spain had forged an intense national unity. Under Charles V, heir to the throne of Austria and the Netherlands and Holy Roman emperor to boot, Spain dominated Europe as well as the

S PA N I S H

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New World. The treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas added to its power, but the easy reliance on American gold and silver also undermined the basic economy of Spain and tempted the government to live beyond its means. The influx of gold from the New World also caused inflation throughout Europe. For most of the colonial period, much of what is now the United States belonged to Spain, and Spanish culture has left a lasting imprint upon American ways of life. Spain’s colonial presence lasted more than three centuries, much longer than either England’s or France’s. New Spain was centered in Mexico, but its frontiers extended from the Florida Keys to Alaska and included areas not currently thought of as formerly Spanish, such as the Deep South and the lower Midwest. Hispanic place-names—San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Pensacola, and St. Augustine—survive to this day, as do Hispanic influences in art, architecture, literature, music, law, and cuisine. The Spanish encounter with Native American populations and their diverse cultures produced a two-way exchange by which the two societies blended, coexisted, and interacted. Even when locked in mortal conflict and riven by hostility and mutual suspicion, the two cultures necessarily affected each other. The imperative of survival forced both natives and conquerors to devise creative adaptations. In other words, the frontier world, while permeated with violence, coercion, and intolerance, also produced a mutual accommodation that enabled two living traditions to persist side by side. For example, the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest practiced two religious traditions simultaneously, adopting Spanish Catholicism while retaining the essence of their inherited animistic faith. The “Spanish borderlands” of the southern United States preserve many reminders of the Spanish presence. The earliest known exploration of Florida was made in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, then governor of Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, Spanish explorers skirted the Gulf coast from Florida to Vera Cruz, scouted the Atlantic coast from Key West to Newfoundland, and established a short-lived colony on the Carolina coast. Sixteenth-century knowledge of the North American interior came mostly from would-be conquistadores who sought to plunder the hinterlands. The first, Pánfilo de Narváez, landed in 1528 at Tampa Bay, marched northward to Apalachee, an Indian village in present-day Alabama, and then returned to the coast near present-day St. Marks, Florida, where his party contrived crude vessels in the hope of reaching Mexico. Wrecked on the coast of Texas, a few survivors under Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca worked their way painfully overland and after eight years stumbled into a Spanish outpost in western Mexico.

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SPANISH EXPLORATIONS OF THE MAINLAND

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What were the Spanish conquistadores’ goals for exploring the Americas? How did Cortés conquer the Aztecs? Why did the Spanish first explore North America, and why did they establish St. Augustine, the first European settlement in what would become the United States?

Hernando de Soto followed their example. With 600 men, as well as horses, and war dogs, he landed on Florida’s west coast in 1539, hiked up as far as western North Carolina and then moved westward beyond the Mississippi River and up the Arkansas River, looting and destroying Indian villages along the way. In the spring of 1542, de Soto died near Natchez; the next year the

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survivors among his party floated down the Mississippi, and 311 of the original adventurers found their way to Mexico. In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, inspired by rumors of gold, traveled northward into New Mexico and northeast across Texas and Oklahoma as far as Kansas. He returned in 1542 without gold but with a more realistic view of what lay in those arid lands. The Spanish established provinces in North America not so much as commercial enterprises but as defensive buffers protecting their more lucrative trading empire in Mexico and South America. They were concerned about French traders infiltrating from Louisiana, English settlers crossing into Florida, and Russian seal hunters wandering down the California coast. Yet the Spanish settlements in what is today the United States never flourished. Preoccupied with a lust for gold, the Spanish never understood the significance of developing a viable market economy. England and France eventually surpassed Spain in America because Spain mistakenly assumed that developing a thriving trade in goods with the Native Americans was less important than the conversion of “heathens” and the relentless search for gold and silver. The first Spanish outpost in the present United States emerged in response to French encroachments on Spanish claims. In the 1560s French Huguenots (Protestants) established short-lived colonies in what became South Carolina and Florida. In 1565 a Spanish outpost, St. Augustine, became the first European town in the present-day United States and is now its oldest urban center, except for the pueblos of New Mexico. Spain’s colony at St. Augustine included fort, church, hospital, fish market, and over 100 shops and houses—all built decades before the first English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth. While other outposts failed, St. Augustine survived as a defensive base perched on the edge of a continent. The Spanish eventually established other permanent settlements in what is now New Mexico, Texas, and California. Eager to pacify rather than fight the far more numerous Indians of the region, the Spanish used religion as an effective instrument of colonial control. Missionaries, particularly Franciscans and Jesuits, established isolated Catholic missions where they taught Christianity to the Indians. After about ten years a mission would be secularized: its lands would be divided among the converted Indians, the mission chapel would become a parish church, and the inhabitants would be given full Spanish citizenship—including the privilege of paying taxes. The soldiers who were sent to protect the missions were housed in presidios, or forts; their families and the merchants accompanying them lived in adjacent villages. The land that would later be called New Mexico was the first center of mission activity in the American Southwest. In 1598 Juan de Oñate, the THE

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wealthy son of a Spanish mining family in Mexico, received a patent for the territory north of Mexico above the Rio Grande. With an expeditionary military force made up mostly of Mexican Indians and mestizos (sons of Spanish fathers and native mothers), he took possession of New Mexico, established a capital north of present-day Santa Fe at San Gabriel, and sent out expeditions to search for evidence of gold and silver deposits. He promised the Pueblo Indian leaders that Spanish dominion would bring them peace, justice, prosperity, and protection. Conversion to Catholicism offered even greater benefits: “an eternal life of great bliss” instead of “cruel and everlasting torment.” Some Indians welcomed the missionaries as “powerful witches” capable of easing their burdens. Others tried to use the invaders as allies against rival tribes. Still others saw no alternative but to submit. The Indians living in Spanish New Mexico were required to pay tribute to their encomenderos and perform personal tasks for them, including sexual favors. Disobedient Indians were flogged, by soldiers and priests. Before the end of the province’s first year, the Indians revolted, killing several soldiers and incurring Oñate’s wrath. During three days of relentless fighting, the army killed 500 Pueblo men and 300 women and children. Survivors were enslaved. Pueblo males over the age of twenty-five had one foot severed in a public ritual intended to strike fear in the hearts of the Indians and keep them from escaping or resisting. Children were taken from their parents and placed under the care of a Franciscan mission, where, Oñate remarked, “they may attain the knowledge of God and the salvation of their souls.” During the first three quarters Cultural Conflict of the seventeenth century, SpanThis 1616 Peruvian illustration, from a ish New Mexico expanded very manuscript by Felipe Guamán Poma de slowly. The hoped-for deposits of Ayala, shows a Dominican friar forcing a native woman to weave. gold and silver were never found,

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