The Illusion of a New World — Native Peoples and the Dawn of Settlement

People often begin the story of America with a single ship. In 1620, the Mayflower carried people who crossed the Atlantic in search of religious freedom — a story long told as the starting point of America, the land of liberty. Yet the land they reached was by no means an empty wilderness. Countless people had already lived there for thousands of years, building their lives. The history of America begins at the moment of an encounter: between people who believed they had ‘discovered’ a new world, and people who had always lived upon it. And that encounter was, at one and the same time, a moment of hope and a doorway to tragedy.

A Land Where People Already Lived

The continent that Europeans called the ‘New World’ was home to diverse peoples long before they arrived. Across North America there were people who farmed, people who lived by hunting and gathering, and people who had woven vast networks of trade — their languages, faiths, and ways of life remarkably varied. They are often spoken of through the single image of ‘the Indian,’ but in reality hundreds of distinct groups, by some accounts, each nurtured their own culture upon their own land.

The turning point came in 1492. Columbus and his crew, backed by the Spanish crown, reached an island in the Caribbean, and from here sustained contact between Europe and the Americas is said to have begun. Columbus himself, it is said, believed the land he had reached was part of Asia. To him it was a ‘discovery,’ but to the people already living there it was the arrival of strangers. The same event held entirely different meanings depending on where one stood — and this asymmetry became a shadow running through the long history that followed.

The greatest calamity that contact brought was not force of arms, but invisible disease. To the smallpox, measles, and other epidemics the Europeans carried, Native peoples had almost no immunity. Research estimates that in the centuries after contact the Native population declined dramatically in many regions; while the scale remains debated, the view that the damage was profoundly severe is widely shared. The dawn of a new world was, for the people who had long lived upon that land, also the beginning of an unprecedented loss.

The Shore the Mayflower Reached

England’s serious colonization of North America began as the seventeenth century unfolded. Jamestown, established in Virginia in 1607, is regarded as the first permanent English colony in North America; though at first it suffered from hunger and disease, it gradually built an economic footing through tobacco cultivation.

Then in 1620, a single ship that would later become legend crossed the Atlantic: the Mayflower. Aboard were people who would not conform to the ways of the Church of England and who sought a new land in pursuit of religious freedom — a group later called the Pilgrim Fathers. Its hundred-odd passengers, after a brutal two-month voyage, reached the coast of present-day Massachusetts and founded the Plymouth Colony. Before going ashore, they drew up the ‘Mayflower Compact’ to govern their community, which later came to be spoken of as one of the wellsprings of America’s spirit of self-government.

The first winter was harsh. Cold, hunger, and disease are said to have taken the lives of roughly half the settlers. That those who survived could gather a harvest the following year owed much to the help of Native peoples, who taught them how to live on this land — how to grow corn, among other things. In 1621, the occasion on which settlers and the Wampanoag people shared a harvest came to be handed down as the origin of Thanksgiving.

The Thirteen Colonies, Another Society

Following Plymouth and Jamestown, colonies were established one after another along the eastern seaboard. With Georgia, founded in 1732, the thirteen English colonies that would later form the body of independence were complete. Each colony differed greatly in the circumstances of its birth and in its character.

In New England to the north, a society that prized self-government and community spread, built by people who shared a common faith. In Virginia and the Carolinas to the south, by contrast, plantations that grew tobacco and rice on a large scale became the center of the economy. And to supply the labor for this large-scale agriculture, people were brought from Africa as enslaved laborers. Beneath the society built by people who had crossed the sea in search of freedom, the labor of people stripped of their freedom was producing wealth. The ideal of the nation’s founding and the shadow of slavery stood side by side upon the same land, long before independence.

The richer the colonies grew, the greater the demand for land became. Settlers pushed inland, and conflicts over land with the Native peoples who had lived there were repeated again and again. Sometimes they were bound together by trade; sometimes misunderstanding or conflicting interests led to war. Treaties were made and broken, and Native peoples were pushed ever westward. The process by which a new society spread was also the process by which another society was forced into retreat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen colonies had each matured and grown into distinct societies, different from the mother country of Britain. People had their own assemblies and, in the course of daily life, came to feel that they should decide their own affairs for themselves. Not the king across the sea, but they themselves, rooted in this land — were they not the true masters of this society? Such a consciousness was quietly but surely taking root.

This story, begun from the illusion of a new world, moves on to the next stage, carrying hope and sacrifice at once. When relations with the mother country began to strain, the people of the colonies sought to seize their own fate with their own hands. They would in time bring before the world a document that endures in human history. All men are created equal — toward the story of that declaration, which proclaimed those words aloud.