US History

History

In addition to cross-references contained in the following account of U.S. history, the reader is referred, for supplementary materials, to the history sections of articles on the individual states and to separate articles on U.S. presidents.

Colonial Developments

The United States did not emerge as a nation-state until near the end of the 18th century, but national history is properly introduced with a brief survey of the chief events leading to the formation of the Union. The voyages, in the last years of the 15th century, of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, pioneer navigators who helped to open the European era of exploration and colonial expansion, were the decisive initial developments. On the strength of Columbus's explorations and those of later Spanish navigators, Spain staked out a vast domain in North, Central, and South America. Cabot, sailing in the service of Henry VII, king of England, reached the North American mainland in 1497. On the basis of this voyage, England later claimed the entire continent. Among other early voyagers to North America were Giovanni da Verrazano of Italy and Jacques Cartier of France. Sailing under the flag of France, they initiated a protracted period of French colonial activity.

The lands these navigators “discovered” had actually been inhabited for at least 20,000 years before Columbus's arrival. In 1492 the indigenous population of Indians (as Columbus misnamed them) numbered more than 90 million, of whom about 10 million lived in America north of present-day Mexico. Contact with Europeans precipitated a demographic disaster for these varied, and often highly civilized, Native Americans. Influenza, typhus, measles, and smallpox reduced native populations in the more densely settled regions of Central and South America by up to 95 percent within the first 150 years after contact. In North America, where the aboriginal cultures tended to be seminomadic and populations less dense, the population collapse was more protracted, but no less devastating. Once European colonists established permanent settlements in North America, they introduced not only diseases but also cattle and horses that displaced game animals and invaded Native American agricultural lands, altering the environment so drastically that indigenous populations declined to a fraction of precontact levels. Even in the absence of warfare, European colonization signaled the wholesale destruction of native cultures. (For a detailed discussion of the history of indigenous peoples of the United States, see Native Americans and articles on the individual tribes.)

The First Settlements

The founding of Saint Augustine (in what is now Florida) by the Spanish in 1565 marked the beginning of European colonization within the present boundaries of the United States. At the time of this settlement, England and Spain were engaged in warfare on the high seas, which in 1588 would culminate in the virtual annihilation of Spanish naval power (see ARMADA, SPANISH). After this defeat, Spain no longer figured as a potent rival of England for possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North America. Before that time, however, these same military pressures helped inhibit English efforts at colonization.

In 1585 an expedition sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony soon failed, in part because the settlers were more concerned with hunting for gold than with learning how to sustain their colony by agriculture. In 1587 Raleigh dispatched a larger group led by John White to the region, which he had named Virginia to honor Elizabeth I, known as the Virgin Queen. About a month after the colonists landed, Virginia Dare was born, the first birth to English parents in America. John White soon sailed back to England for additional supplies. The war with Spain prevented his returning to Roanoke until 1590, by which time the settlers had disappeared. The mystery of what happened to Raleigh's Lost Colony has never been solved.

The first permanent English settlement in North America was Jamestown. Established in 1607, Jamestown was a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock corporation chartered in 1606 by King James I of England for the purpose of trading in and colonizing North America. After a series of catastrophic misadventures, in which thousands of immigrants died because of disease, starvation, and a war in 1622 with Native Americans, the Crown revoked the company's charter in 1624 and took control of the colony as a royal province. Executive power in the new regime was vested in appointees of the Crown, but the colonists were eventually permitted to retain the representative assembly, called the House of Burgesses, that had been founded in 1619.

After the colonial government removed controls on the production of tobacco, there was a major expansion in the economy and in the English population of the Chesapeake Bay region. The incessant demand for labor to grow tobacco created a harsh system of indentured servitude. In the last quarter of the 17th century, when it became prohibitively expensive to import English laborers, English colonists in the United States followed the lead of European nations and began importing Africans kidnapped from their native countries. These African slaves emerged as the predominant agricultural labor force in the southern mainland.

French and Dutch Activities

During the decade following the settlement of Jamestown, France and the Netherlands—the other leading maritime nations of Europe—actively entered the contest for territory in North America. The French quickly recognized the importance of controlling the Saint Lawrence River, the best available route to the interior. In 1608, as the first step in their strategic design, they founded Québec. The brilliant achievements of such explorers as Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet, and Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle brought vast areas of the interior, including the entire Mississippi River valley, under nominal French ownership during the next 75 years. Consolidation of this enormous American dominion was impossible for various reasons, but stemmed especially from the French desire to trade with Native Americans for furs and skins, rather than to try forcing them off their lands, as the English did. In addition, the French had exported to America the absolutist institutions and traditions of the homeland. Their colonial policies, centrally directed and diametrically opposed to those of the English, discouraged large-scale immigration and the settlement of enduring communities with responsible local authority. As a consequence, French colonial populations remained small throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, enabling them to cultivate military alliances with Native American tribes, who rightly saw them as less threatening than the English settlers.