Beginnings to 1750
More than a century after European explorers first landed in North America,
there were still no permanent settlements in the Western Hemisphere north of St.Augustine, Florida.
By 1607, however, a small group of English settlers was struggling to survive
on a marshy island in the James River in the present state of Virginia.
In 1611, Thomas Dale, governor of the colony,
wrote a report to the king expressing the colonists's determination to succeed.
Despite disease and starvation, Jamestown did survive.
The first settlers were entranced by the native inhabitants they met.
They did not at first realize that these earlier Americans,
like Europeans, had cultural values and literary traditions of their own.
Their literature was entirely oral, for the tribes of North America
had not yet developed writing systems.
This extensive oral literature, along with the first written works of the colonists,
forms the beginning of the American literary heritage.
When Christopher Columbus reached North America in 1492,
the continent was already populated, though sparsely, by several hundred Native Americans tribes.
Europeans did not encounter these tribes all at one time.
Explorers from different nations came into contact with them at different times.
As we now know, these widely dispersed tribes of Native Americans
differed greatly from one to another in language, government,
social organization, customs, housing, and methods of survival.
The Native Americans
No one knows for certain when or how the first Americans arrived in what is now the United States.
It may have been as recently as 12,000 years ago as 70,000 years.
Even if the shorter estimate is correct,
Native Americans have been on the continent thirty times longer than the Europeans.
Colonists from Europe did not begin arriving
on the east coast of North America until the late 1500's.
What were the earliest Americans doing for those many centuries?
To a great extent, the answer is shrouded in mystery.
No written story of the Native Americans exists.
Archaeologists have deduced a great deal from artifacts, however,
and folkorists have recorded a rich variety of songs, legends and myths.
What we do know is that the Native Americans usually,
but no means always, greeted the earliest European settlers as friends.
They instructed the newcomers in their agriculture and woodcraft,
introduced them to maize, beans, squash, maple sugar, snowshoes,
toboggans, and birch bark canoes.
Indeed, many more of the European settlers would have succumbed to
the bitter northeastern winters had it not been for the help of these first Americans.
Pilgrims and Puritans
A small group of Europeans sailed from England on the Mayflower in 1620.
The passengers were religious reformers -- Puritans who were critical of the Church of England.
Having given up hope of "purifying" the Church from within,
they chose instead to withdraw from the Church. This action earned them the name Separatists.
We know them as the Pilgrims.
They landed in North America and established a settlement at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts.
With help from friendly tribes of Native Americans, the Plymouth,
settlement managed to survive the rigor of North America.
The colony never grew very large, however.
Eventually, it was engulfed by the much larger settlement to the north.
Like the Plymouth Colony, the Massachusetts Boy Colony was also founded by religious reformers.
These reformers, however, did not withdraw from the Church of England.
Unlike the Separatists, they were Puritans who intended instead to reform the Church from within.
In America, the Puritans hoped to establish what John Winthrop, governor of the Colony,
called a "city upon a hill", a model community guided in all aspects by the Bible.
Their form of the government would be a theocracy, a state under the immediate guidance of God.
Among the Puritans' central beliefs were the ideas that human beings exist
for the glory of God and that the Bible is the sole expression of God's will.
They also believed in predestination -- John Calvin's doctrine
that God has already decided who will achieve salvation and who will not.
The elect, or saints, who are to be saved cannot take election for granted, however.
Because of that, all devout Puritans searched their souls
with great rigor and frequency for signs of grace.
The Puritans felt that they could accomplish good
only through continual hard work and self-discipline.
When people today speak of the "Puritan ethic", that is what they mean.
Puritanism was in decline throughout New England by the early 1700's,
as more liberal Protestant congregations attracted followers.
A reaction against this new freedom, however, set in around 1720.
The Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals led by such eloquent ministers as
the famous Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, swept through the colonies.
The Great Awakening attracted thousands of converts to many Protestant groups,
but it did little to revive old -- fashioned Puritanism. Nevertheless,
Puritan ideals of hard work, frugality, self-improvement, and self-reliance
are still regarded as basic American virtues.
The Southern Planters
The Southern Colonies differed from New England
in climate, crops, social organization, and religion.
Prosperous coastal cities grew up in the South,
just as in the North, but beyond the southern cities
lay large plantations, not small farms.
Despite its romantic image, the plantation was in fact
a large-scale agricultural enterprise and a center of commerce.
Up to a thousand people, many of them enslaved, might live and work on a single plantation.
The first black slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619,
a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.
The plantation system and the institution of slavery were closely connected
from the very beginning, although slavery existed in every colony, including Massachusetts.
Most of the plantation owners were Church of England members
who regarded themselves as aristocrats.
The first generation of owners, the men who established the great plantations, were ambitious,
energetic, self-disciplined, and resourceful, just as the Puritans were.
The way of life on most plantations, however,
was more sociable and elegant than that of any Puritan.
By 1750, Puritanism was in decline everywhere, and the plantation system in the South
was just reaching its peak.