The expectations of English colonists in Chesapeake and New England - Essay Example

The Expectations of English Colonists in Chesapeake and New England Captain John Smith had infact challenged the rationale of the English attempt to Christianize, civilize, and educate Native American Indians. This fact attests to the possibility that the people of Chesapeake and New England in the 16th and 17th centuries were not as the English colonists initially expected: uncivilized, uneducated, and irreverent. Immediately after entering in 1607 the muddy outposts the English colonists referred to as Jamestown, Smith observed the inappropriateness of the orders given by the pioneers of the colony with the pressures of survival and endurance on the Anglo-American border. The Native American lands which the British colonists inhabited had corn, while the settlers gave in quickly to diseases as the quantity of their foods declined. Smith eventually initiated a strategy of threats and forced trade. In a matter of weeks Smith had forced from the chiefdom of Powhatan large quantities of corn. As Smith paraded all over the Chesapeake, he became a vicious onlooker of the Algonquian tribes he wanted to conquer. Already fascinated in the richness of human cultures, prior to his entrance to Virginia he had stumbled upon a diversity of peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The biographers of Smith claim that his encounters with different human cultures put him in a good position to understand Indian culture and the native people than any other of his contemporaries. Hence, this essay will use the perspective of Captain John Smith to discuss the initial expectations of the English colonists with Chesapeake and New England and how they lived among the Native American Indians. As the correspondences of Stockam shows, various English groups grew essentially distinct sets of perceptions of the Algonquian tribes of Virginia. At Jamestown the ideals and standards of a liberal, profit oriented, and determined border population dominated the imperial and religious interests of elites in Virginia and London. The fierce resolve with which the border population dedicated itself to the planting of tobacco weakened the attempts of the last governor of the Virginia Company, Sir Francis Wyatt, to endorse colonialism through organized invasion, military restraint and harmonious relationships with the Native American Indians. The forcefulness of the English border population devastated as well as the agenda of George Thorpe to acculturate and civilize the Powhatan Indians into a Christian and English New World realm. The demands of the border population generated the 1622 Indian rebellion, which hampered the development of the colony, sped up the collapse of the Virginia Company of London, and compelled elites to reject any idea of humanitarian Indian strategy. In defending the missionary attempts, the pioneers of the company dealt with the issue of the right of Englishmen to Indian lands. Some English scholars compared the Native American Indians to wild beasts who do not know private ownership. A report of the Virginia Company claimed that it is not illegal or immoral to take over the land of the Indians and inhabit them because there is no other reasonable alternative to discuss this matter with the natives but through coercion. The Virginia Company never reached, nor did it try, an ultimate resolution to the issue of aboriginal title. Only invasion, the pioneers argued, could not rationalize occupation of the Indian soil. Rather, the Company was predisposed to consider English occupation as an ‘irreversible deed’ and to defend its continuance on the basis that the Indians would give in to Christianity and dealt with compassionately. The process of conversion could, and ought to be, diplomatic. While the Spaniards invaded the West Indies with bloodshed and brutality, the English would employ humane and benevolent means, appropriate to the natural character of the English. An expectation that the Indians would willingly dispose of their own cultural foundations and embrace the religious and cultural ideals of the British society rests at the core of this debate. The Indians, expected to be open to influence and wiles, would simply follow a course of development that seemed to a large number of scholars as comparable to that followed hundreds of years before by the English when faced with the dominant Roman culture. The people of Europe had long ago renounced their pagan beliefs and embraced Christianity and the advantages of civilized society. Therefore, the past offered a decisive pattern: the Native American Indians would conform to the same path that had carried the British society to their present-day stage of modernity and civilization. The English colonists expected that the comparative backwardness of the Indians can be attributed less to any cultural or racial/ethnic features than to a desire for knowledge. As stated by some English writers, it is not human nature but human knowledge which makes people uncultured and savage, and hence change human education and then human nature will be significantly repaired and righted. However, though the English colonists’ objectives were acceptable, these severely ethnocentric people failed to grasp the reality that they had stumbled upon a population as committed and devoted to their own cultural moorings as the Englishmen were to theirs. The advancement of the English society provided little to the natives living contentedly and happily outside the realm of civil and Christian society. To trail the course of development the English had planned for them would have implied the abandonment of their religion and culture. That the civility of the English society held little appeal for Native American Indians is clear. Indians of the component tribes of the supreme chiefdom of Powhatan, such as the English, were deeply ethnocentric and they saw almost nothing about English culture and religion that they were pleasant. As vital as native rebellion in thwarting the realization of metropolitan objectives, though, were the composition of the maritime expansion of the English society in the advent of the Stuart era and the pressures of physical survival and economic endurance along the Virginia border. References Henretta, J.A., D. Brody, & L. Dumenil. America: A Concise History. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. Read More