APUSH Period 2 – Flashcards

Britain relied heavily on African slave labor and the Atlantic Slave Trade - exchange of goods and slaves between Britain, Africa, and America- for production of crops such as tobacco and rice in colonial America. Because slavery was so well established in colonial America, it shaped the social, political, and economic policies of the newly formed United States of America.

Immigrants to the New World paid for their journey to the New World via labor contracts which bound them to slave-like labor and treatment for a specific number of years, after which they were freed.

English Protestants who disapproved of the Anglican Church, migrated to New England, where they based the laws and society strictly on the Bible.

English colonization in the West Indies began with Oliver Cromwell seizing Jamaica - a valuable sugar island - from the Dutch. Throughout the seventeenth century, the British reaped immense profits from sugar plantations - first worked by natives and indentured servants, then by African slaves.

The British prided themselves on being the only European nation (at the time) to give liberties to it's people and limit the monarch's power, while Native Americans, Irish, and Africans, among others, were "uncivilized" and incapable of possessing true liberty. However, the British saw it as their duty to protect these peoples from "popery" and "the tyranny of Spanish (Catholic) rule" - a major impetus for colonization.

Unlike the Spanish and the French, the British colonies did not assimilate with the natives or Africans, creating a very strict racial hierarchy with whites on top and colored people on the bottom.

Due to a strong sense of racial and cultural superiority, the British were able to enslave blacks, working them to the death with no intention of freeing them. If the slaves surpassed them, they would be bequeathed to a family member or sold like property.

Slaves experienced inhumane treatment as property: being sold, bequeathed, worked tirelessly in harsh environments, and whipped. Resistance included feigned freedom, rebellion, sabotage, or escape.

As most slaves were of dark complexion, slave societies associated dark skin color with slavery. They insisted that slaves were a second-class species between humans and animals, incapable of intelligence, civilization, or freedom.

Except in South Carolina and Georgia where affairs between slave-owners and female slaves created a free mulatto class, assimilation in British North America was uncommon compared to that of the Spanish or French. Slaves remained at the bottom, whites on the top, and mulattos in between.

Starting with the settlement of Plymouth, New England was primarily chartered colonies of farmers, merchants, and artisans whose lives were dictated by strict Puritan governments. Outcasts of Puritan Massachusetts established separate colonies: Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; where they allowed greater religious toleration.

After settling Jamestown despite hardships and conflict with the natives, Virginia and Maryland quickly established planter elites and tobacco plantations worked by African slaves and indentured servants. Virginia became a royal colony while Maryland experienced turbulence with its absolute Catholic ruler.

An uprising in 1680 of the Pueblo Indians of Santa Fe in modern New Mexico, named Popé's Rebellion after its leader, led Spanish colonizers to lighten their behavior against the natives.