Penguin History of the United States of America Read Online Free PDF

In America there were none of the oppressive feudal laws that encumbered landholding in England: there, copyholders could become freeholders. No enclosing of common lands in America: there, men could eat sheep, not sheep men. It is little wonder that, according to Andrews, ‘the bulk of the colonial population was of the artisan and tenant class which in England held by some form of burgage or copyholdtenure’. 6 Life in England held little charm for many such: they might reckon themselves fortunate to have a way of escape. Plague and famine are not pleasant things in themselves, and both were common; they also had disastrous effects on the economy, effects which, inevitably, bore hardest on the poorest. Misgovernment, as symbolized under James I by Alderman Cockayne’s scheme, which wrecked the cloth-trade in the 1620s, or international tragedy, such as the Thirty Years War, which completed Cockayne’s work, were only a little less inevitable. Human misfortune on a national or continental scale has been one of the most constant forces behind emigration to America from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. 7
    The promoters, in fact, were in a seller’s market. All they had to do was to overcome memories of Ireland by doubling and redoubling their assurances that America was the true demi-Paradise. Nor did they fail. The Reverend Daniel Price displayed the true colours of Celtic fantasy when, in a sermon in 1609, he rhapsodized that Virginia was
    Tyrus for colours, Basan for woods, Persia for oils, Arabia for spices, Spain for silks, Narcis for shipping, Netherlands for fish, Pomona for fruit, and by tillage, Babylon for corn, besides the abundance of mulberries, minerals, rubies, pearls, gems, grapes, deer, fowls, drugs for physic, herbs for food, roots for colours, ashes for soap, timber for building, pastures for feeding, rivers for fishing, and whatsoever commodity England wanteth. 8
    Not only Wales spoke in this strain. It was an English play which, four years before Mr Price gave tongue, asserted that in Virginia ‘wild boar is as common as our tamest Bacon is here’ (the wild boar is not an American species). Curiosity and ignorance about the New World could be advantageously manipulated in a hundred ways. Thus, in 1605 five Indians were brought over and paraded round the country, to its vast excitement. 9 They were an excellent advertisement for Virginia: the best sort of proof that it did actually exist. Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian ‘Princess’ whom John Rolfe married a few years later 10 and brought to England, must have been an even stronger stimulus to the imagination.
    It is true that another motive, the religious, played a major, indeed a heroic part in stimulating English settlement in America; but it can best be studied through the history of New England. And many years before the Pilgrims sailed, the twin desires of the capitalists for gain and of the poor for land, both stimulated by the tribe of Hakluyt, succeeded at last in planting Englishmen permanently in the New World. As a motive, materialism had proved sufficient. In 1605 two companies, for London and for Plymouth, were chartered, their business being to establish colonies in America. After some exploratory journeys and yet another abortive attempt by the Plymouth Company to establish a settlement (this time at Sagadahoc, in what is now the state of Maine) the London Company founded the first enduring English plantation, on 24 May 1607, on the James river in Virginia. It was small, and already unfortunate, since of the company of 144 that had embarked in three little ships
(Susan Constant, Godspeed, Discovery)
only 105 had survived the voyage. The place they founded, Jamestown, has long been abandoned. 11 But with Jamestown begins the history proper of the people known as Americans.

3 The Planting of Virginia 1607–76
    And cheerfully at sea
    Success you still entice
    To get the pearl and gold,
    And ours to