Key People
He introduced the profitable strain of tobacco that saved Jamestown economically. His marriage to Pocahontas temporarily eased tensions with the Powhatan Confederacy.
John Rolfe
A Spanish colonial grant giving conquistadors the right to demand labor and tribute from Native Americans in exchange for "protection" and religious instruction.
Encomienda System
Jamestown
An agricultural economy based on large-scale production of a single cash crop (ie tobacco, rice, indigo & sugar) using enslaved African labor on concentrated landholdings.
Plantation System
Daughter of Chief Powhatan whose relationship with John Smith and later marriage to John Rolfe temporarily stabilized relations between Jamestown and the Powhatan Confederacy.
Pocahontas
Virginia planter who led an armed rebellion (1675–76) against royal governor William Berkeley, attacking both Native Americans and the colonial establishment.
Nathaniel Bacon
The unofficial British policy of loosely enforcing trade laws and allowing colonial assemblies to govern themselves - strengthened colonial self-government habits.
Salutary Neglect
Frontier settlers demanded the right to attack Native Americans; Royal Governor Berkeley refused. Class tensions between poor whites and the planter elite exploded.
Bacon's Rebellion
A system of slavery in which enslaved people were treated as permanent personal property, inheritable and bought and sold - passed on to children through the mother's status.
Chattel Slavery
Tewa religious leader who organized the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, driving the Spanish out of New Mexico for 12 years. The most successful indigenous uprising against European colonizers.
Pope
He led the Puritan 'Great Migration' and established Massachusetts Bay Colony. Delivered the famous 'City upon a Hill' sermon articulating Puritan mission.
John Winthrop
A 1662 Puritan compromise allowing the children of church members who had not had a full conversion experience to be baptized and gain partial church membership.
Halfway Covenant
Religious anxiety, social tensions and crop failures in this small Massachusetts town led to mass accusations of witchcraft.
Salem Witch Trials
A racial classification system in Spanish colonial society that ranked people by ancestry - pure Spanish at the top, mixed-race categories in the middle, indigenous and African at the bottom.
Casta (Caste) System
Wampanoag sachem who organized a broad Native American coalition against New England settlers in King Philip's War (1675–76) — the most devastating colonial war per capita.
Metacom (King Philip)
Puritan minister banished from Massachusetts for arguing separation of church and state and for fair treatment of Native Americans. Founded Providence/Rhode Island.
Roger Williams
A Virginia incentive granting 50 acres of land to anyone who paid for a worker's passage to the colony - attracted thousands of indentured servants.
Headright System
Religious decline, social tensions and influence of German pietism led to revivalist preaching by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
The First Great Awakening
King James II's 1686 merger of New England, New York and New Jersey into a single royal province - eliminating colonial assemblies and representative government.
Dominion of New England
Puritans in Connecticut sought to seize native land and trading networks; a series of incidents escalated to war. This conflict set a genocidal precedent for future English-Native conflicts in New England.
The Pequot War
Connecticut minister whose 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' (1741) used vivid hellfire imagery and Lockean psychology to trigger mass conversions - thus beginning the First Great Awakening.
Jonathan Edwards
A series of British laws requiring colonial goods to be shipped on English vessels and trade to flow through England - designed to enforce mercantilist policy.
The Navigation Acts
Enslaved Africans in South Carolina, many from Angola, sought to escape to Spanish Florida where freedom awaited to those who converted to Catholicism.
Stono Rebellion
The belief that Christians saved by God's grace are not bound by moral law - Anne Hutchinson's and Roger Williams' versions challenged Puritan authority by claiming direct revelation from God. This idea created conflict that led to the creation of Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Antinomianism
This Powhatan War Leader led two massive coordinated attacks on Virginia colonists — in 1622 (killing 347) and 1644 — attempting to drive the English out of the Chesapeake. Finally captured and killed.
Opechananough