Period 1 · 1491–1607

First Contacts

North America held hundreds of distinct societies long before 1492, each shaped by the food its environment could produce. The Europeans who sailed west were pushed by mercantilism, religious conflict, and a new way of pooling money. Spain, France, and the Dutch each built a different colonial world, and each rested on a different relationship with Native nations.

Why Europe looked west

Mercantilism held that world wealth is fixed, so a state exports more than it imports and hoards gold and silver.
A tariff taxed imported goods to protect domestic producers.
Colonies supplied raw materials and bought finished goods without draining the gold supply.
The joint-stock company spread a voyage's cost and risk across many investors; it later financed Jamestown.

Reformation and religious motives

The Reformation of 1517 split Western Christianity and made colonization a religious contest.

Calvinism taught predestination: God has already chosen who will be saved.
Huguenots were persecuted French Calvinists; Puritans wanted the Church of England purified; Separatists left it entirely.
Franciscans demanded rapid, strict conversion; Jesuits learned Native languages and lived in Native towns.

Native North America before 1492

Native societies differed by food supply, so name a people and its environment.

Maize farming villages: Pueblo irrigation in the Southwest, plus Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, and Lenape.
Mixed farming and hunting on the Atlantic coast: Wampanoag, Powhatan, Secotan.
Nomadic Plains and Great Basin hunting: Comanche, Lakota, Apache, Shoshone.
Fishing and gathering without farming on the Northwest coast and in California: Chumash, Chinook, Tlingit.

The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange moved crops, animals, people, and diseases both ways after 1492.

East went maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco, feeding European population growth.
West went wheat, rice, sugar, and livestock; horses remade Plains economies.
West also went smallpox, measles, and influenza: epidemic disease, not battle, caused most Native deaths.
American silver set off the price revolution, a long inflation that weakened Spain.

Spanish colonization

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) split claims: Portugal east of an Atlantic line, Spain west.
St. Augustine (1565) is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the future United States.
The requerimiento made refusal a legal excuse for war; the encomienda traded Native labor for protection and conversion.
The casta system ranked people by ancestry, peninsulares first, Native and enslaved Africans last.
The Pueblo Revolt (1680) expelled Spain from New Mexico; the 1692 reconquest eased demands on Pueblo religion.

New France

New France became a royal colony under Louis XIV in 1663: few settlers, built on the fur trade.

Farms were seigneuries, narrow strips running back from a river.
Dependence on Native hunters meant France negotiated rather than dictated, and Jesuits converted on Native ground.
Métis children of French and Native parents traded and interpreted; the Wyandot alliance pulled France into Haudenosaunee wars.

New Netherland

Henry Hudson explored the river for the Dutch in 1609.
The Dutch West India Company (1621) settled permanently in 1624, and New Amsterdam grew on Manhattan as a diverse fur-trading port.
Director-general Peter Stuyvesant surrendered to an English fleet in 1664 without a fight, and New Amsterdam became New York.
Land pressure still brought the Peach War (1655) and the Esopus Wars (1659–1663).

The middle ground

The middle ground names the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, where neither side could impose its will.

Native nations played French, Dutch, and English rivals against one another for trade and weapons.
They adopted iron tools, guns, and livestock selectively, on their own terms.
Europeans had to accept Native diplomacy: gift exchange, kinship language, and slow councils.