During the seventeenth century, four European countries—France, England, Netherlands, and Spain–established permanent colonies in the Americas. The European colonists invaded North America driven by dreams of wealth: wealth from gold, silver, and perhaps rare gems; wealth from farmlands; wealth from trade with the indigenous nations; and, finally, wealth from slaves. As the European colonies expanded, the conflicts with the Native Americans over land increased in frequency and intensity. Briefly described below is the English approach to American Indian lands in the seventeenth century.
First of all, it should be noted that American Indians had been farming for many centuries by the time the English began to establish their colonies in North America. The first English colonists survived primarily because Indian farmers raised sufficient crops to support them.
English colonization of the Americas was in part a response to demographic changes in England. Farming was declining, and the cities were growing at a rate that resulted in high unemployment. Colonization was thus a solution to the unemployment problem: it was a way of getting rid of unwanted people, often labeled as “rogues,” “vagabonds,” and “beggars.”
Archaeologist J.M. Adovasio, in his book The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, summarizes the English colonial position this way:
“With a few notable exceptions, such as William Penn, and, to an extent, the clergyman Roger Williams, the British were mainly intent on taking over as much land as they could and removing the aboriginal inhabitants from it as quickly as possible.”
The English tended to view the Americas as a wilderness, a frightening concept with strong religious overtones. In his chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, Edwin Churchill, the chief curator at the Maine Museum, writes:
“They viewed the wilderness as a place where a person might lapse into disordered, confused, or ‘wild conditions’ and then succumb to the animal appetites latent in all men and restrained only by society.”
The Reverend Michael Wigglesworth described the New World as …
“a waste and howling wilderness, where none inhabited But hellish fiends, and brutish men That Devils worshipped.”
The English viewed the land as vacant, thus available to be re-created into a new English countryside. Historian Francis Jennings, in his book The Creation of America:Through Revolution to Empire, writes:
“Myth has it that Englishmen arrived in America to create colonies on ‘free land’ as though the land’s previous occupants and possessors had not existed, let alone had social and political institutions of property.”
One of the rationales used by the English for taking Indian land, or seeing it as “vacant,” was the belief that the English could put the land to “higher use” by the introduction of European-style agriculture and livestock. Anthropologist Samuel Wilson, in his book The Emperor’s Giraffe and Other Stories of Cultures in Contact, reports:
“The idea that Europeans might put the land to higher use required downplaying how the native people were using it.”
The governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629 declared that most of the land in the Americas can be considered vacuum domicilium because the Indians had not subdued the land according to English legal standards and therefore had no natural rights. Indians did not have a civil right to the land because they had no civil government recognized by the English. Only small plots of cultivated land were to be considered subdued and Indian hunting territories were to be regarded as waste lands available for European seizure. According to historian Francis Jennings, in the book The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest:
“Inherent in this doctrine was the notion that no Indian governments could be recognized as sovereign over any domain, and therefore no legal sanction could exist for Indian tenure of real estate.”
In 1633, English lawyer John Winthrop declared that most land in America was vacuum domicilium (vacant land) as the Indians had not subdued it by methods recognized under English law. At this time, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted a law which ordered that “what lands any of the Indians have possessed and improved, by subduing the same they have a just right unto according to that in Genesis.” Any lands not “subdued”—that is, fenced, plowed, and farmed in the European fashion—could be claimed by the English colonists.
Since the Natives were already farming the land, particularly the best land, it was important to the English to construct stereotypes of the Indians which portrayed them as nomadic hunters who did not modify or improve the land. This is, of course, the inaccurate stereotype which has continued through the centuries to be repeated in the popular media, in history textbooks, and in many classrooms.
Geography
Since the English tended to view the land as vacant as they occupied used Indian farms, they felt they had the right to provide new names for the geography of what they saw as a new world. The names which the English gave to various places in the Americas provide a great deal of insight into how they viewed the area: New England, New York, New Hampshire. Indian writer Vine Deloria, Jr., in his chapter in Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, puts it this way:
“We see throughout early colonial history the desire to re-create the English way of life in North America.”
In New England, the English colonists sought to recreate Old World towns: their housing, town layouts, and town names all mirrored English hamlets. Land management also mirrored English culture, and particularly the social stratification found in that culture. In his chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, Edwin Churchill writes:
“The distribution of land also reflected English social-economic hierarchies, and individuals holding more wealth, status, and education were systematically granted more, better, and more advantageously located properties.”
Thus, Indians were viewed in biblical terms as a lost tribe, one of the dregs and refuse of the lost posterity of Adam.
Indians 101
Twice each week this series explores American Indian topics. More seventeenth-century history from this series:
Indians 101: American Indians in 1615
Indians 101: American Indians in 1616
Indians 101: American Indians in 1617
Indians 101: Four Centuries Ago (1618)
Indians 101: 400 years ago, 1619
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1620
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1621
Indians 101: English religion and American Indians in the 17th century