Chapter 1 A New World.

Chapter 1 A New World

A map of the Western Hemisphere
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company A map of the Western Hemisphere

The First Americans How did the first inhabitants come to the New World? Bering Strait to tip of S. America Hunting and Gathering Agriculture 3 sister farming (corn beans squash) The first Americans to settle what eventually became the United States were culturally diverse. They migrated by land over the Bering Strait or by sea anywhere from 15,000 to 60,000 years ago, some reaching the southern tip of South America perhaps 11,000 years ago. Facing a warming climate, and hunting animals such as the wooly mammoth and giant bison into extinction, these first settlers later developed agriculture, including the cultivation of maize (corn), squash, and beans, that enabled large, settled civilizations to emerge.

Map 1.1 The first Americans
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Map 1.1 The first Americans

What made early Native Americans easy to defeat? Lack of technology
The First Americans What made early Native Americans easy to defeat? Lack of technology The diverse Indian societies of the Americas first encountered by the Europeans included civilizations with populations of several millions of people, large cities, road and irrigation systems, trade networks, and impressive architectural achievements. But even the most developed Indian civilizations, located in South America, lacked the technologies, such as metal tools and machines, gunpowder, and scientific knowledge needed for long-distance navigation, which allowed Europeans to conquer them and justify that conquest. In North America about 3,500 years ago, one native culture, the “mound builders,” centered their community in the lower Mississippi River valley around a series of semi-circular mounds and established extensive trade networks throughout the continent. For over 3,000 years, in what is now northeastern Arizona, the Hopi and Zuni and their ancestors lived in settled villages with irrigation, dam, and canal systems and engaged in long-distance trade, becoming, after a period of decline, what the Spanish called the Pueblo Indians. The Pacific Coast was also densely populated by hundreds of independent groups of natives who lived primarily by fishing and gathering food, and on the Great Plains many Indians hunted the buffalo herds, while others lived in agricultural villages. In eastern North America, hundreds of tribes, from the Choctaw, Cherokee and Chickasaw in the southeast to the Iroquois peoples of the northeast, lived by hunting, fishing, gathering, and agriculture and engaged each other in trade, diplomacy, and occasionally war. When Europeans arrived, native peoples were tremendously diverse and differentiated by language, custom, political system, and religious belief, and they did not consider themselves a single unified people with a common cultural or racial identity.

Map 1.2 Native ways of life, ca.1500
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Map 1.2 Native ways of life, ca.1500

The First Americans Native American Religion
Everything has a spiritual component Single creator Land and Property All communal Gender Relations Men: Hunters Women: Farming Matrilineal More rights then European women Despite their diversity, North American Indian societies did have some common characteristics. Their religions and religious practices were often directly related to farming and hunting, invested living things like plants and animals and non-living things like the water and wind with spiritual power, and defined membership in their communities. Each Indian society respected and gave authority to those who seemed to have spiritual or supernatural powers. While most of their religions, like those of Europe, held that a single creator was at the top of the spiritual order, they did not distinguish sharply between the natural and supernatural or the secular and religious. Unlike the Europeans, North American Indian societies did not treat land as a commodity to be owned privately by individuals, but instead had family and communal-based notions of property. Although Indian tribes and groups had systems of social status, Indians did not devote themselves to accumulating wealth and material goods, and Indian trading was as much a social and cultural practice, emphasizing generosity and gift-giving, as an economic exchange. Relations between men and women were also markedly different from those of Europeans. Most but not all North American Indian societies were matrilineal, and in some groups it was possible for women to own property, engage in premarital sex, divorce their husbands, take part in religious ceremonies, and help select male tribal leaders. Men assumed political leadership, and proved their masculinity by engaging in hunting, agriculture, or warfare.

European Gender Roles Women could not: Own property Control wages
Write wills Divorce When Europeans colonized the New World, they had multiple ideas of freedom as a collection of rights and privileges, many of which were reserved for a small portion of the population. One important idea of freedom was religious or moral, based in an individual’s decision to subordinate themselves to the Christian God. This was not the same as modern notions of religious freedom or tolerance. Each European country had an established church, and their governments often suppressed or heavily regulated other Christian and non-Christian groups. Secular ideas of freedom located liberty in individual obedience to law and acceptance of one’s rank and its duties within a rigid and extensive social hierarchy, ranging from urban poor and rural peasants at the bottom, to church officials, hereditary aristocrats and nobles, and kings and other members of monarchies at the top. Inequality was built into all social relations; the king ruled by divine right, and superiors demanded deference from their social inferiors. In families, men had authority over their “dependent” women and children, whose legal identities were subsumed in that of the male. Women could not own property, control their wages, write separate wills, or even in most cases divorce, and husbands had rights to their wives’ labor and bodies. Few men enjoyed the freedom derived from economic independence, usually land ownership, and property qualifications for voting meant that few men could vote. Modern civil liberties such as freedom of religion and speech did not exist. Workers who defied employers and labor contracts suffered harsh criminal penalties. Yet each European country that colonized the New World claimed to be spreading freedom for themselves and the Indians.

The First Americans European Views of the Indians Inferior Uncivilized
Why was this the perception? Differences in land use, religion, gender relations Lack of European type government DEuropeans first tended to see Indians as either “noble savages” or uncivilized and brutal inferior barbarians. Over time, negative images of the Indians came to dominate Europeans’ views of indigenous peoples, with Europeans focusing on natives apparent lack of religion, land use practices, and gender relations as the basis of their relative inferiority. Indians were seen as devilish heathens, as people who didn’t use the land properly (which in the eyes of the English, French, and Dutch, justified their expropriation of the land), and as people who subverted European gender roles by allowing weak men to engage in “leisure” activities like hunting and fishing, leaving agricultural work to native women, whom Europeans believed belonged in the home.

The Expansion of Europe
Map 1.3 The old world on the eve of American colonization, ca.1500 Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

Contact Columbus in the New World Italian sponsored by Spain
Headed west in search of faster route to India/China “Indians” Columbian Exchange Exploration and Conquest Spanish Cortes and Pizarro wealth and to spread religion Indian Slaves (encomienda) Mestizos Christopher Columbus, an experienced mariner and explorer from Genoa in northern Italy, also sought sea routes to China and India and believed he could find them by sailing across the Atlantic. But most European monarchs knew that Columbus underestimated the size of the earth, and refused to support his expedition, except for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. In 1492 they completed the “reconquista” (reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors, African Muslims who had ruled there for centuries, and then endorsed and helped finance Columbus’s voyage. After only 33 days at sail, Columbus, on October 12, 1492, arrived at the Bahamas, and soon went to Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba. He brought back ten natives, whom he called “Indians,” to Spain for conversion to Christianity. The next year saw Columbus’s return with more ships and men and the beginnings of Spanish colonization of the New World. While a host of explorers and fishermen from other European nations, including England, France, and Portugal, soon came to the Americas, Spanish conquistadores such as Hernán Cortes and Francisco Pizarro took the lead in conquering the Americas, including large native civilizations in South America, for national glory, wealth, and Catholicism, devastating these cultures through warfare and disease and laying the basis for the gold and silver mines that would enrich the Spanish crown. The transatlantic flow of goods and people mixed millions of years of separate evolution, throwing together plants, animals, and cultures. This “Columbian exchange” transformed both Europe and the Americas. But the impact of war, enslavement, and especially diseases introduced by the Europeans was a demographic disaster for native peoples of the New World, whose population fell dramatically. In the 150 years since European contact, perhaps 80 million Indians—nearly one-fifth of humankind at that time—died.

Map 1.4 Voyages of Discovery
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Map 1.4 Voyages of Discovery

Columbian Exchange

Another scene from the Florentine Codex
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Another scene from the Florentine Codex

The Spanish Empire Spanish Florida Spain in the Southwest
Onate – Santa Fe, NM (1598) The Pueblo Revolt (Pope’s Rebellion) Destroyed Spanish relics Later reconquered The first area to be colonized by the Spanish in what became today’s United States was Florida, where the Spanish wiped out French settlers in their hopes of preventing further French colonization and ending piracy in nearby waters. Despite considerable Spanish efforts to build towns and forts and convert Indians, the Spanish presence in Florida remained small. In the southwest in 1598, the first major Spanish expedition in the area, led by Juan de Onate, searched for fabled minerals, but when attacked by natives of Acoma in present-day New Mexico, they retaliated by killing and enslaving thousands of native inhabitants. Onate was recalled by Spanish authorities and a period of more stable colonial rule was initiated with the establishment of New Mexico and its capital, Santa Fe. By 1680, a small number of mostly mestizo Spanish colonists ruled over the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Tensions arose over the colonists’ exploitation of the Indians’ labor and their increasingly harsh efforts to convert Indians and eliminate indigenous religious practices and beliefs. Among other factors, this led to a revolt that year to drive the Spanish from New Mexico and restore native autonomy. Led by Popé, a religious leader who had earlier been arrested by the Spanish for “sorcery,” the Pueblos attacked and nearly wiped out the entire population of Spanish colonists, destroying in the process all the symbols and icons of Spanish culture and Catholicism they could find. A dozen years later, the Spanish reconquered New Mexico for good.

Map 1.5 A Spanish Conquests and Explorations
in The New World, 1500–1600 Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

The French Empire French Colonization New France and the Indians
New France (Canada) Small Numbers New France and the Indians Fur trade Positive interactions with Natives Negatives? Even as other European powers disdained Spain’s treatment of the Indians, they aspired to match the Spanish empire’s incredible mineral wealth. During the seventeenth century, rival French, Dutch, and English colonists established colonies in North America. The French were first, hoping to find gold and locate a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Failed initial settlements were followed by permanent settlements in the Mississippi River Valley and along the St. Lawrence River in what became Canada, then called New France. The French crown limited migration, however, keeping the French colonists’ numbers small. Few in number and embracing the fur trade rather than agriculture, however, French colonists depended on friendly relations with local Indians. Not interested in land as were English colonists, or in exploiting Indian labor as had the Spanish, the French created elaborate military, commercial, and diplomatic connections with natives, creating alliances with Indians unparalleled in North America in their durability. Although French Jesuits sought to convert the Indians, the French generally were more tolerant of Indian religions and spiritual practices than rival European colonists, and in the “middle ground” of the upper Great Lakes region, French and Indians mixed in relative equality. But French colonialism all the same brought disease and warfare to native populations, especially as the fur trade and the introduction of European commodities intensified conflicts between native groups and as wars between European colonists on the continent embroiled natives allied to different European powers.

The Dutch Empire The Dutch Empire Samuel de Champlain Henry Hudson
New Amsterdam (NY) 1624 The Dutch first came to the New World with Henry Hudson’s exploration of New York Harbor and the river that would come to bear his name in 1609, setting the stage for the establishment in 1624 of New Amsterdam, the Dutch outpost on Manhattan that became the basis for New York. Although small in size and population, the Netherlands was the center of a global maritime empire of trade, culture, and enlightenment, and the Dutch invented practices, like the joint stock company, that were critical to the birth of modern capitalism.

Map 1.6 The New World-New France and New Netherland, ca. 1650
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company

Chapter 2 Beginnings of English America, 1607–1660

England and the New World
Unifying the English Nation Protestant Reformation Anti-Catholic In the sixteenth century, England was a second-rate power in England weakened by internal divisions, especially those between Catholics and Protestants once King Henry VIII launched the Protestant Reformation in England by severing the nation from the Catholic Church and established the Church of England, or Anglican Church, with himself at its head. Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603, finally secured the power of the Anglican Church and successfully defended England from its Catholic enemies on the continent, notably the Spanish, whose attempt in 1588 to invade by a massive armada was repulsed. Well into the 1600s, the English also attempted to subdue Ireland and its Catholic population, in part through military conquest and colonization. The English expelled Irish Catholics from land to make room for Protestant settlements, called “plantations.” The cultural practices and ideas that defined England’s colonization of Ireland shaped its conquest of North America.

The Coming of the English
English Emigrants Poor in VA and MD Indentured Servants Labor in exchange for passage Liberty and Slavery Abundance of land Emigration was risky. Diseases, internal religious, political, and economic tensions, and imperial wars and conflicts with Indians all threatened harm or death. Dependent on England for protection and economic aid, most settlements would have collapsed without such support and further emigration. Because economic conditions in England were so bad, more migrants in the seventeenth century—more than half a million —left England than in France or Spain. Most of the English who came to North America were young, single men from the lower ranks of English society, and they settled in the tobacco-producing colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where labor demand was high, while the rest settled in New England and the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Settlers who could afford their own passage arrived as free persons, and soon acquired land. In the 1600s, however, most Englishmen arrived as indentured servants, who voluntarily surrendered their freedom for a period of time (often five to seven years) in exchange for passage to America. Servants were as unfree as slaves in some ways: they could be bought and sold, could not marry without their owner’s permission, were subject to physical punishments, and could not refuse to work. Unlike slaves, however, servants, at least those who survived their term of labor (not many for most of the seventeenth century), eventually became free and received “freedom dues,” sometimes including land. Land for the English was the basis of liberty, allowing men control over their own labor and, in most colonies, the vote. The English crown also awarded land grants, sometimes quite extensive, to relatives and allies. Because land was so plentiful and so many English migrants, both free and servant, came to America to gain land and the independence that came with it, property owners soon turned to African slaves as a labor force. Liberty and slavery moved together in early English America.

The Coming of the English
Englishmen and Indians Land purchase, treaties and war The Transformation of Indian Life Appreciation to Resentment Changes in the Land Unlike the Spanish, English colonists did not want to rule over or assimilate the Indians they found; they wanted the Indians’ land. Although English colonial authorities insisted that the Indians had no real claim to the land because they did not farm or improve it, most authorities in practice recognized Indians’ title to land based on their occupancy. English colonists acquired Indian land by purchase, often through treaties forced on the natives after they had defeated them in the recurrent warfare which wracked the English colonies, a process that thoroughly displaced the Indians from their original territories. Though many eastern Indians initially welcomed English settlers, particularly for the goods they introduced to native culture, such as cloth, metal tools, and guns, many Indians gradually came to resent the changes English colonization wrought in Indian life. Men turned more to hunting beaver and fur trading, older skills fell into disuse with the appearance of English technologies, and alcohol became common and disruptive. As the colonists developed a military advantage over the Indians, profits from the fur trade flowed mostly to colonial and European merchants. English colonists also introduced diseases that led to devastating epidemics. English settlement transformed the land and its uses, threatening Indians’ way of life through fencing, new crops, livestock like pigs and cattle, which trampled Indian crops, and the depletion of forests to supply wood for the English domestic market.

Settling the Chesapeake
The Jamestown Colony (1607) Virginia Company In search of wealth Early failure From Company to Society House of Burgesses 1619 first slaves The first permanent English settlement in the New World was the Jamestown colony, founded in 1607 by the private Virginia Company in At first the colony, intended to as a means to discover gold or other precious minerals, was plagued by internal divisions, a high death rate, and few supplies from England. While colonists’ hopes for quick riches were soon dashed, few had any experience with agriculture, leading to starvation which, when compounded by disease and illness, led to a high death rate. Few initial settlers survived the first year, and only military discipline imposed by a former soldier, John Smith, saved the colony. To become viable and attract settlers, the Virginia Company stopped looking for gold, started to grow its own food and a marketable commodity, and created an elected representative assembly. The company awarded land to those who paid their own or others’ passage, and issued a “charter of grants and liberties,” which included a House of Burgesses, the first elected assembly in colonial America (though only landowners could vote). The arrival in 1619 of the first twenty blacks in Virginia marked, along with the meeting of the House of Burgesses that year, the conjoined development of freedom and slavery in English America.

Powhatan and Pocahantas The Uprising of 1622 Powhatan’s successor attacks settlers Settlers retaliate Native Americans ruled by Powhatan already lived in the area of Virginia colonized by the Jamestown settlers. At first the English, dependent on the Indians for food, tried to maintain friendly relations. When John Smith was captured by the Indians, Powhatan’s daughter Pocahantas, probably playing out her role in an elaborate ceremony, intervened to save Smith from execution. Pocahantas gradually became an intermediary between the Jamestown colony and Powhatan’s people. Sporadic fighting lasted between the Indians and the Jamestown colonists until But the peace declared that year was broken in 1622 by Powhatan’s successor, whose surprise attack nearly wiped out one-quarter of Virginia’s small settler population. Jamestown’s survivors retaliated by massacring scores of Indians and destroying their villages. The English now held the balance of power in the colony, and Virginia, which soon became the first royal colony of England, began to stabilize and slowly increase its population, in part by turning to the cultivation of tobacco.

Map 2.1 English settlement in the Chesapeake, ca. 1650
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Map 2.1 English settlement in the Chesapeake, ca. 1650

The Maryland Experiment Tobacco Feudal Religion in Maryland Catholic haven While Maryland, like Virginia, was a tobacco colony, it was established later, in 1632, by King Charles I as the proprietary colony of Cecilius Calvert. Calvert ruled Maryland like a feudal domain, controlling its trade and the decisions of its elected assembly, despite the charter’s guarantee ordinary Maryland colonists all the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Calvert, a Catholic, also saw Maryland as a refuge for persecuted fellow Catholics in England, and at first he hoped Catholics and Protestants could live there in harmony. But Protestants, mostly indentured or former servants, soon outnumbered Catholics, and their frustration mounted as they faced diminishing opportunities for land ownership in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

The New England Way The Rise of Puritanism Massachusetts Bay
Against religious authority in Anglican church Calvinism - predestination Massachusetts Bay John Winthrop “City Upon a Hill” Whereas Virginia and Maryland quickly became societies dominated by a small aristocracy ruling over many bound laborers, New England colonial society evolved differently. Early New England was decisively shaped by the Puritans, a diverse group of English Protestants united by their belief that the Anglican Church retained too many of the practices and doctrines of the old Catholic Church. They mainly were “Congregationalists,” who rejected Catholic structures of religious authority retained in the Anglican church, such as archbishops, bishops, and priests, and instead embraced independent local congregations that chose their own clergy, determined their mode of worship, and often listened to sermons and personally studied the bible. Like many English and Anglicans, however, Puritans shared a hatred of Catholicism and celebrated England’s greatness and devotion to liberty. As followers of John Calvin’s theology, the Puritans believed God had pre-destined different groups of people, the “elect,” to be saved from damnation; no amount of good deeds or good works could save those not among the elect. When a minority of Puritans in England separated from the Church of England, some Puritans decided to emigrate to America in order to fully practice their Protestant faith away from the influence and control of the Anglican church and the English government that enforced its rules. One leader of the Puritan emigrants who settled in the Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop, hoped to found “a city set upon a hill,” where Puritans would reject “natural” liberty, or action without restraints he believed typically practiced by the Irish, Indians and bad Christians, for a “moral” liberty to do “that only which is good,” in which Puritans became free by accepting severe restraints on speech, religion, and personal behavior.

The New England Way The Pilgrims at Plymouth The Great Migration
Mayflower: Mayflower Compact Thanksgiving The Great Migration Men & women Wealth Less indentured servitude The first Puritan settlers to America, the Pilgrims, left the Netherlands in 1620, financed by private investors interested in establishing a trading base in North America. The Pilgrims wanted to settle in Virginia, but their ship, the Mayflower, was blown off course and landed on Cape Cod. Before the survivors of the journey established the Plymouth colony there, they drew up the Mayflower Compact, in which all adult male colonists agreed to obey “just and equal laws” enacted by representatives of their own choosing. This was the first written frame of government in what became the United States. Resting on the consent of all members of the colony, their government did not restrict voting to church members, and all land was held in common until divided up in In 1691, this independent colony became an official crown colony of England. Although earlier visits by Europeans had brought diseases that devastated the local Indian population, local Indians helped the Puritans at Plymouth survive their first winter by offering them food, a relationship celebrated at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Chartered in 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Company was formed by London merchants hoping to further the Puritan cause and profit by trade with the Indians, and that year sent emigrants who settled in the Massachusetts Bay, north of Plymouth. By 1642, a “Great Migration” of 21,000 Puritans had flowed to Massachusetts Bay, though migration to New England soon thereafter ceased altogether. Compared to colonists in the Chesapeake, settlers in New England were older, more prosperous, and more religious. Fewer New England colonists were servants, and here women were just as numerous as men, leading to more families than in the southern colonies.

New Englanders Divided
Roger Williams - Rhode Island The Trials of Anne Hutchinson Antinomianism Although New England’s Puritans respected individual judgment, they disdained individualism and considered too much emphasis on the self as dangerous to social harmony and stability. In the region’s compact towns, residents monitored each other and punished or ostracized those who violated communal norms. Dissenters were not so much free to dissent as they were free to leave the Puritan community if they transgressed Puritan social and religious norms. Dissenter Roger Williams suggested that Massachusetts Bay should separate church and state, argued that its congregations should withdraw from the Anglican Church, and also rejected the conviction that Puritans were an elect people on a divine mission to spread the true Protestant faith. When banished from the colony, Williams and his followers founded Rhode Island, which became a beacon of religious freedom, with no established church or religious qualifications for voting. Other religious dissenters went on to found the colonies of Hartford and New Haven, which in 1662 united as the colony of Connecticut. The Puritan establishment found one dissenter, Anne Hutchinson, particularly threatening, for her gender and influence with other colonists. She argued that inner grace, not just church attendance and moral behavior, determined who could be a member of the saved Puritan elect. Denounced by church and state authorities for “Antinomianism” (putting one’s own judgment or faith above human law and Church teachings), Hutchinson was put on trial and banished from the colony.

Map 2.2 English Settlement in New England, ca. 1640
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company Map 2.2 English Settlement in New England, ca. 1640

Puritans and Indians The Pequot War 500 Native American men, women and children killed Led to expansion The Puritans, who recognized Indians’ claim to the land and sought to acquire it through purchase, also tended to see the Indians as savages and heathens, similar to Catholics in their deceptive rituals and worship of false gods. Afraid that undisciplined Indian life might attract some colonists, Puritan New Englanders hoped to prevent their fellow Englishmen from joining native tribes by passing punitive laws and publishing narratives of captivity promoting Christian life in the colony. Although the Puritans rhetorically advocated the conversion of Indians to Christianity, they initially made few efforts to do so. As the white population of New England increased, so did tensions with the region’s Indians. In 1637, colonists responded to the murder of a fur trader by a few members of the Pequots, a powerful tribe in southern New England that controlled the fur trade, by destroying a Pequot village at Mystic, Connecticut, massacring more than 500 men, women, and children. The Pequots’ defeat led to further white settlement in western New England and intimidated local Indians into quiescence for nearly four decades.

The New England Economy The Merchant Elite The Half-Way Covenant Allowed for church membership without conversion Although Puritan leaders celebrated religion as their primary motive for emigrating to America, profit and prosperity was always central to many Puritans’ decision to go to New England. Many were well-off in England but lived in economically depressed areas, and sought opportunity in the New World, especially in the form of land ownership or a craft. While many New Englanders made a living by exporting fish and timber to Europe, most survived on subsistence family farming and the small surpluses this produced. Compared to the southern colonies, in New England there were few slaves and fewer indentured servants. Although New Englanders were not as wealthy as colonists in the Chesapeake region, wealth was distributed more equally than in Virginia or Maryland. But economic development was accompanied by social inequality, with a growing number of wage earners and a merchant elite profiting from an expansive trade in goods between the West Indies, Europe, and Africa. This economic growth and increasing commercialization worried some Puritan leaders, with fewer members of the Massachusetts colony being eligible for church membership. The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 was designed to solve this problem by enabling third-generation Puritans, those least likely to have met the “conversion” standard of church membership, to become church members merely because they were descendants of original Puritan settlers. By the late seventeenth century, ministers were excoriating colonists for violations such as selfishness, pride, and violation of the Sabbath in lengthy sermons called “jeremiads.”

Religion, Politics, and Freedom
The Rights of Englishmen Magna Carta 1215 All free men Due process before imprisonment and seizure of property By 1600, the traditional view of English “liberties” as a set of privileges limited to certain social groups was competing with a notion that certain “rights of Englishmen” applied to everyone in the kingdom. This tradition rested on the Magna Carta of 1215, in which the king had given rights to all “free men” in England, including protection against arbitrary imprisonment and the seizure of property without due process of law. Over time this document came to signify a particularly “English freedom,” where the king was subject to the rule of law and all persons enjoyed security of person and property, and which was embodied in common law rights like habeus corpus and trial by jury. As the serfdom characteristic of feudalism receded, more and more Englishmen were considered “freeborn” and entitled to these rights.

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