Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (12 page)

For a rather more urban landscape it was necessary to look to the more northerly English settlements, where a different pattern of colonization developed during the course of the seventeenth century. Whereas communal living was in effect abandoned in Virginia after the collapse of the Jamestown experiment, the more controlled settlement patterns of Massachusetts led to the development of a landscape of contiguous settlements consisting of small towns and those 'compact and orderly villages' for which the Virginia Company had pleaded in vain." By 1700 there were between 120 and 140 towns in New England," although their character and appearance bore little relation to those of the towns in Spanish America. Essentially the New England township consisted of tracts of land granted to a particular group, with a village sited near the centre. The village church formed a place of assembly, and each village would have its commons. As in Spanish towns, families were allocated a house lot, along with parcels of land for cultivation outside the residential centre. The allocation of land was conditional, as in Spanish America, on its being `improved' and put to use."9

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, British America had also succeeded in generating, along with innumerable villages and townships, several cities along the Atlantic seaboard: in particular Boston, Newport, Philadelphia and Charles Town, along with New York, the city founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam.H' Outside New England, where towns tended to follow the local topography, the new cities, too, were often built with a regularity reminiscent of that of Spanish colonial cities, even if the inspiration seems to have come from Renaissance ideals of town planning. The streets of Charles Town (later Charleston), in the new settlement of Carolina, were planned around 1672 to conform to the ideals of regularity and symmetry that inspired Christopher Wren's plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666.91 Be sure', ordered William Penn a decade later in founding Philadelphia, `to settle the figure of the town, so as that the streets hereafter may be uniform down to the water from the country bounds ... Let the houses built be in a line (fig. 9).192 In accordance with his wishes, Philadelphia was laid out on the grid-iron plan, to create what Josiah Quincy would describe in 1773 as `the most regular, best laid out city in the world'.93 The geometric regularity of Philadelphia, the largest city yet built by British settlers, proved highly influential, and by the end of the seventeenth century, the grid-iron had become, other than in New England, the predominant form of urban design in British, as in Spanish, America.94

Yet in spite of the growth of its towns, British America remained in comparison with Spanish America an overwhelmingly rural society. For all the problems of public order in Hispanic American cities, the urban character of Spanish colonial society provided a continuing element of social control, inhibiting the dispersal of the colonial population through the countryside. British America was eventually to prove a far more geographically mobile society, characterized by a steady westward migration towards the agricultural frontier as the threat of Indian attack diminished.95 This was true even of New England, where strenuous, and partially successful, efforts were made to achieve a controlled dispersal as new immigrants began to arrive. Where Virginia, in order to meet the colony's chronic need of settlers, had to tilt its land distribution heavily in favour of individual interests through its headright system of land grants for each individual brought into the colony, the so-called `Great Migration' of the 1630s, with its continuing influx of new arrivals, gave the leaders of New England's colonization sufficient leeway to frame policies which would balance more nearly the aspirations of the individual and the needs of the community.96 Moreover, where the first immigrants to the Chesapeake region were primarily young single males, at least 60 per cent of travellers to New England were accompanied by family mem- bers.97 The preponderance of families in the immigration to New England, together with a much better generational and gender balance than was to be found among the Chesapeake immigrants, gave the new colony the cohesiveness and potential for stability that would continue to elude Virginia until the final years of the century.

The New England immigrants, too, knew that they were coming to a Puritan commonwealth. It is true that, even in Plymouth Colony, there were from the beginning so-called `strangers' or `particulars' alongside the Pilgrims, whose presence proved a source of continuing dissension and strain.98 But there was a sufficient degree of consensus among the majority of the immigrants to allow the leadership to embark on their great experiment of building a godly community. `We all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim,' began the preamble to the New England Articles of Confederation of 1643, `namely, to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to enjoy the liberties of the gospel in purity with peace.'99

Yet the failure of the simultaneous Puritan experiment on Providence Island, off the Nicaraguan coast, shows that, even among `visible saints', godly discipline was not of itself sufficient to ensure the development of a viable colony.100 In an effort to secure adequate returns for its shareholders, the Providence Island Company insisted on exercising centralized control from England, including control of land distribution. Lacking security of tenure, and as mere tenants at halves, with half the profits of their labour going to the investors, the Providence Island colonists lacked the inducement to experiment and innovate. Inexperienced in growing tropical products, they persisted with the planting of tobacco, although it proved to be of poor quality. They also seem to have given up too soon on their various attempts at new forms of specialization, which would be the salvation of another island colony, Barbados, as it moved away in the 1640s from tobacco to the production of new crops, and especially sugar.101 When a Spanish invading force wiped out the Providence Island colony in 1641, they destroyed a failed settlement.

One of the reasons why the Massachusetts Bay colonists escaped the fate of Providence island was that they took their charter with them, thus establishing from the beginning local control over the regulation of their lives and the distribution of the land. In Massachusetts, as in Virginia, untrammelled private ownership of land was to be crucial to success, in spite of the attempts of contemporary Puritan publicists to suggest that the motivations behind the establishment of the two colonies were fundamentally different. `This plantation [of Massachusetts]', wrote Emmanuel Downing to Sir John Coke, `and that of Virginia went not forth upon the same reasons nor for the same end. Those of Virginia went forth for profit ... Those [of Massachusetts] went upon two other designs, some to satisfy their own curiosity in point of conscience, others to transport the Gospel to those heathen that never heard thereof.'102

This distinction, which was to become canonical, between profit-motivated Virginians and pious New Englanders obscures the awkward truth that the profit motive was strongly present in New England from the outset and exercised a powerful influence over the founding of new towns.103 While the Puritan leadership remained committed to the preservation of a communal spirit, even at the expense of expansion into the wilderness, New England towns were created and controlled by land corporations whose membership was not coterminous with the municipal, let alone the religious, community. To participate, it was necessary to be not simply a resident but an `inhabitant' - a shareholder or town proprietor, the equivalent of the Spanish American vecino.104 These land corporations of `inhabitants' were dominated by a handful of entrepreneurs and speculators, who saw the accumulation of land as a major source of profit and were responsible for launching many of the towns of seventeenth-century New England.'°5

Roger Williams, seeing his own colony of Rhode island falling prey to the designs of Boston speculators, warned that the `God land will be (as now it is) as great a God with us English as God gold was with the Spaniards. 1106 None the less, the tension between individual profit and collective ideals in the early stages of the colonization of New England proved creative. It endowed the northern colonies with a form of landscape and community distinct from that of other parts of British America. Its township pattern of land distribution inhibited the development in New England of a class of great landlords, like the tobacco planters of Virginia or the patroons of colonial New York, where settlement patterns had been established during the period of Dutch colonization.107 In 1628, the Dutch West India Company had sought to revive its fortunes by mobilizing private capital and securing immigrants through an offer of generous land grants along the New Netherland coastline and up the Hudson river to entrepreneurs prepared to import European colonists who would farm the allocated land. Although the resulting patroonships failed to produce a significant increase in the colony's population, they offered a model for the future. Following the English seizure of the colony in 1664, the later seventeenth-century governors of what was now New York showed themselves at least as lavish as the Dutch in the generosity of their land grants. Although parts of the colony were to be settled by freehold farmers, other parts, and especially the Hudson Valley region, were characterized as a result by their distinctive manorial system, and a rural society of patrician landowners and their tenant farmers, very different from New England's rural society of independent farmers.

New England's continuing adherence to a set of common ideals gave it a stability and cohesion that another holy experiment towards the end of the seventeenth century - Pennsylvania - would have much greater difficulty in attaining. Starting later than New England and Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Middle Colonies as a whole would need time to develop the elements of cohesion provided in the north-east by the small town, and in the south by the planta- tion.108 Penn himself hoped to establish an orderly pattern of development based on contiguous townships, but his hopes of creating a structured society with a sense of community comparable to that to be found in New England were subverted by the emergence of speculative landlords and by the dilution of the original Quaker ideals of the colony as new settlers arrived. Pennsylvania enjoyed the advantage over New England of possessing a rich alluvial soil, while settler occupation was greatly facilitated by the relative thinness of Indian settlement and the abundance of land. In the Middle Colonies much of this land, unlike that of New England, had already been worked by Indians in pre-Columbian times. The cleared land, with its fertile soil, would prove ideal for the development of a rural society of small freeholders, whose conduct and attitudes had been shaped by the European family farm. With family interests tending to take priority over communal ideals, the environment of the Middle Colonies proved highly favourable to the emergence of a competitive market economy, but considerably less favourable to the achievement of social cohesion and political stability.109

Stability was in fact slow to come to the Middle Colonies, where the continuous arrival of shiploads of new immigrants kept the region in a state of flux. By the eighteenth century, these immigrants were coming no longer solely from England, but also from Scotland, Ireland and continental Europe, thus creating a volatile mixture of ethnic groups. On arrival in Philadelphia or Baltimore they soon moved out again in search of land, adding to the pressures on the western agricultural frontier produced by the rapid natural growth of a colonial population considerably healthier than that of contemporary Europe. Observers lamented their failure to settle in towns. `They acquire', complained a British official, `no attachment to Place; but wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature ...'110

The refusal to acquire `attachment to Place' was the nightmare of the official mind in British and Spanish America alike. In Spanish America the grant of Indians in encomienda, the predilection for urban living, and the weight of royal authority in backing up this predilection with legislation and enforcement, did something to tie the colonists to place, but it seemed to successive viceroys of New Spain and Peru that they were fighting a losing battle. Encomiendas were in the hands of a privileged few; new immigrants, even when willing to work, often found it difficult to obtain employment once the new colonial societies had established themselves; and from the middle years of the sixteenth century vagrants of Spanish origin - mostly unmarried young men or those who had left their wives behind in Spain - were joined by growing numbers of mestizos, blacks and mulattoes. The Spanish crown was especially concerned by the danger presented by these vagrants to the integrity of Indian villages and communities, and continued its attempts throughout the colonial period to curb their wanderings, although with very limited success."'

In British America, the constraints were weaker from the beginning, and the pressures even more intense. In the absence of a strong royal government to give shape and direction to settlement policies, the prime constraint on movement into the North American interior in the initial years of settlement was the existence of a sparsely settled but none the less ubiquitous Indian population. This set up barriers to expansion which were not only physical but also moral and psychological. In the early stages of colonization the immigrants to Virginia and New England envisaged themselves as settling among Indians with whom they looked forward to trading and other relations to mutual benefit. Nor indeed would the first English settlements have survived without Indian assistance and Indian supplies. But even where friendly relations were established with individual Indian tribes, undercurrents of fear and prejudice added a note of wariness to the relationship. Fears of Indian `treachery' were never far from the surface, and tended to be reinforced by every incident of mutual misunderstanding. The English, too, were caught up in inter-tribal rivalries of which they had little or no knowledge or understanding, and which made it difficult for them to know whether or not they found themselves among friends. For the settlers of Virginia, the defining moment came with the `massacre' of 1622; for those of New England with the murder in 1634 by the Pequots of two captains and their crew, and the chain of events which culminated in the brutal Pequot War of 1637.112