Vikings in North America

L’Anse aux Meadows

With the discovery in 1960–61 of artifacts and the ruins of eight buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada’s Newfoundland province, archaeologists and historians could at last replace centuries of fable and myth with hard evidence of Viking settlement in what, a half-millennium later, other Europeans would call the New World.

Excavations at the remote site, begun by husband-and-wife team Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, revealed a web of connections between Greenland and Iceland’s people of Norse heritage and Vinland. Vinland was the Viking name for a western land rich in prized grapes and butternuts, lumber and fi sh, located in what today is eastern Canada and the extreme northeastern United States.

Evidence found since then has enabled historians to link Viking activity in the New World to often-inconsistent tales of exploration and conquest found in ancient Norse sagas. L’Anse is now believed to have been a base camp for Norse chieftain Leif Ericson and others during the so-called Medieval Warm Period: several centuries of milder weather that permitted vigorous Norse exploration of sub-Arctic regions in both northern Europe and eastern Canada.


During a three-year sojourn in Vinland, Ericson’s former sister-in-law, Gudrid, then married to rival chieftain Karlsefni, gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European known to be born in the Americas.

Established sometime between 990 and 1030 and abandoned after just a few years, L’Anse provided access to Vinland and was a landmark for sailors from Greenland and other Norse settlements. Although it seems that some women were among about 100 people housed in eight sturdy wood and sod structures, L’Anse was less a colony than a gateway to southern Vinland’s richer resources.

It was also a workshop where Norse traders could find provisions and repair their ships and weapons. Slaves, probably of Scots or German origin, and sailors visiting L’Anse manned labor crews and ran a small iron-making operation, the first known in North America.

Indigenous people, dismissively called skraeling by the Vikings, had often successfully confronted Norse invaders in other parts of Vinland but were not then living on the grassy peninsula where L’Anse was built.

Nevertheless, residents soon abandoned the site, carefully removing useful goods and possibly setting fire to the largest dwelling halls. They may have feared new indigenous attacks, or perhaps Vinland was not producing enough desirable resources and trade items to make the difficulties of living there preferable to longer settled Greenland and Iceland.

In 1497 five years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to what he believed to be Asia, Venetian John Cabot, sailing for England, “discovered” a “new isle,” soon named Newfoundland. Historians continue to argue whether other Europeans ever knew of Viking incursions into this western land or had forgotten that knowledge over the centuries.


In any case, interest in Viking deeds, possibly including discovery of the New World, would become, especially for Scandinavian immigrants to America, a source of pride and fascination. In 1837 a Danish scholar translated parts of the Vinland sagas into English and argued for Norse presence in America. His research helped spawn various hoaxes and fantasies of America’s Viking past.

In 2000 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History celebrated the millennium of the first European contact with North America. L’Anse is a Canadian National Historic Site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a tourist attraction. During its brief summer season, costumed reenactors show and tell visitors about America’s Viking past.

Anabaptism

Anabaptism refers to a series of Reformation-era movements that was a part of what is commonly called nobles (an aberration of Christian teaching that that at the end time, God would judge the unrighteous). This eventually led to armed conflict that was put down in April 1525.

For his part in it, Müntzer was tortured and killed. In January 1525, Zwingli and Grebel held a disputation in Zürich to debate Baptism, with Zwingli prevailing. Grebel left Zürich, and by October he was imprisoned for his beliefs. He escaped in March 1526 and died of the plague that summer.

In 1527, a group of Anabaptists, whose followers were called the Swiss Brethren, met in Schleitheim, Switzerland, and adopted the Schleitheim Confession. In it, seven articles described the basic theology of the Anabaptist movement—adult baptism, the “ban” (expulsion from the church of unfaithful believers), a definition of the Lord’s Supper, separation from the world, a definition of the office of the pastor, refusal to take part in military service, and refusal to swear an oath. The author, Michael Sattler, was subsequently put to death for his beliefs. Many of his fellow participants were eventually killed.


Later that year, in Augsburg, Germany, a different group of Anabaptists connected with Zwickau, led by Hans Hut, Hans Denck, and Melchior Hoffmann, met in Augsburg. This so-called Martyrs Synod (of the 60 attendees, only two were alive five years later) emphasized the imminent return of Christ (some thought in 1528), along with a communal sharing of goods.

Heretics

In the coming years, many Anabaptists were executed as heretics for their beliefs. Both their view on baptism and their view on refusing military arms were grounds for punishment. Some were drowned as a mockery of their view of baptism (which the Anabaptists defined as full immersion).

Many fled to nearby Moravia, where a substantial community was established under the leadership of Jacob Hutter. Hutter was captured and burned at the stake in Austria in 1536 for refusing to renounce his faith.

The burning of a 16th-century Dutch Anabaptist, Anneken Hendriks

The culmination of the extreme wing of Anabaptism was the rise of the Münster Commune in 1534–35. Followers of Melchior Hoffman made their way to this German city and in a series of bizarre episodes, took over the city, forcibly converting townspeople to Anabaptism and eventually instituting polygamy and the “Kingdom of Münster” until the city was conquered in 1535.

After 1536, there were fewer violent episodes, though Anabaptists were persecuted by Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed alike. Anabaptists found new leaders, most notably Menno Simmons, a former Catholic priest who became an Anabaptist in 1536 in the Netherlands. His followers were called Mennonites.

The followers in Moravia, called Hutterites (after Jacob Hutter), were led by Peter Riedeman. By 1600, there were over 15,000 Hutterites in Moravia. The Amish were a group of Mennonites who, under the leadership of Jacob Amman in 1693, separated from the other Mennonite churches in Switzerland. Many migrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s.


While some Baptist denominations can trace their origins to Anabaptist influence, most Baptist denominations trace their origins to the English Reformation and the Puritan movement in the later 1500s and early 1600s. While both Baptist and Anabaptist would practice adult or “believer’s” baptism, Baptists would not have the same emphasis on nonviolence or separation from the world.

Today, the largest grouping of Anabaptists is the Mennonites, with around 1,250,000 followers throughout the world. The Amish number around 120,000 and are located primarily in the United States with a small number in Canada. The Hutterites number around 10,000 and are located in the United States and Canada.

All of these groups share the foundational beliefs and characterizations of the Anabaptists, being separate from the world around them, not serving in the military, and refusing to take oaths. The Amish and Hutterites still practice a strong communal approach to possessions.

Atlantic Islands of Spain and Portugal

Madeira Islands - nowdays

In the 15th century, the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal were crucial in the formation of a kind of technological and commercial prototype or template for slave-based sugar production that was transferred to the Americas after 1492.

The Portuguese began colonizing the Madeira Islands (especially Madeira, La Palma, Hierro, and Porto Santo, c. 768 square kilometers) in the early 1420s; the nine islands of the Azores (c. 2,300 square kilometers) in the 1430s or 1440s; and the 10 principal islands of the Cape Verde Islands (c. 4,000 square kilometers), most importantly São Tomé and Principe, in the late 1400s. None of these islands were inhabited. This was not true of the seven Canary Islands (c. 7,300 square kilometers), which were inhabited by a group collectively known as the Guanches.

In the late 1300s, Castilians, Italians, French, and others launched slave-raiding expeditions on the Canaries. The Spanish formally incorporated the Canaries into their empire in 1496 after the subjugation of the islands’ natives, though nominal Castilian rule dated back to the early 1400s.


Together these Atlantic islands provided the aggressively expansive empires of Spain and Portugal with “stepping stones” to the Americas for their nascent sugar and other tropical export industries.

Crucibles of empirical, hands-on experiments regarding all aspects of sugar production—from cultivation and harvest, to the importation and control of African slave labor, to the quasi-industrial processes by which cane juice was transformed into granular sugar—the Atlantic islands were crucial in the development of the technological know-how necessary for the explosion of sugar production in the Caribbean and Brazil in the 16th century and after.

By the late 1450s, sugar production on Madeira exceeded 70,000 kilograms, most exported to England and the Mediterranean, deepening markets and solidifying the financial and commercial networks that would later play a crucial role in the development of plantation-based export production in the Americas.

The administrative infrastructure that the Portuguese developed to rule Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands, based on hereditary “donatary captaincies,” were likewise transferred wholesale to Brazil during the first half-century of its colonization.

Plantation-based sugar production on Madeira in particular, based on both slave and free-wage labor, also whetted the European appetite for this luxury commodity, deepening demand just on the eve of the encounter with the Americas.

In addition both before and after sugar production had become established in the Americas, the Atlantic islands served as important way stations for the African slave trade and for long-distance trade with Asia.

Bacon’s Rebellion

Bacon confronting Gov. Berkeley

This uprising, the most significant in British North America before the Revolution, occurred in Virginia in 1675–76. It was a result of colonial government corruption, declining opportunities for white immigrants, and increased conflict with Native Americans.

Since the late 1610s, Virginia had been a profitable enterprise for both tobacco planters and impoverished English men and women who came to America as indentured servants. By 1665, however, a decline in the price of tobacco and increased regulation of trade had brought the boom times to a halt.

By this point, the wealthiest planters, especially those allied with the royal governor Sir William Berkeley, had patented thousands of acres of land and were well suited to ride out the hard times.


For small planters and recently freed servants, hard times coincided with a decline in the amount of available land and a high male to female ratio. “Six parts of seaven at least are Poore, Endebted, Discontented and Armed,” noted Berkeley, although he did little to mitigate the situation.

Instead, as landownership became less attainable, the government limited suffrage to property owners. Faced with a lack of opportunity and high taxes, poorer colonists rented land or headed to the frontier. As the latter group grew in number, it came into conflict with the Susquehannock Indians and war broke out in 1675.

Into this volatile situation came Nathaniel Bacon. A young and charismatic member of the English gentry, Bacon garnered a following among poor and frontier colonists by leading indiscriminate attacks on Native Americans. Berkeley worried that Bacon’s actions were hurtful to peaceful tribes and interfered with his monopoly over the fur trade.

Bacon burning Jamestown to the ground

Accordingly, Berkeley denied Bacon a military commission to continue his war with Native Americans, but the growing unrest of the populace soon sent events spiraling out of control. On June 23, 1676, Bacon and four hundred armed men arrived in Jamestown and demanded that Berkeley accede to their demands.

However, once Bacon left town, Berkeley declared him a traitor, to which Bacon responded by twice chasing Berkeley out of the capital and burning Jamestown to the ground on September 18. A month later, Bacon fell ill and died, bringing the rebellion to an abrupt halt. His fellow conspirators were hanged the following spring, while Berkeley returned to England and died soon after.

In the short term, Bacon’s Rebellion changed little in Virginia society. Although political inequalities had been addressed during the uprising, many of these, including the expansion of the electorate, were rescinded thereafter.


Poverty and a lack of opportunity remained prominent for at least another generation and it was less than a decade before another uprising broke out. In the long term, Bacon’s Rebellion further poisoned relations between colonists and Indians.

It also caused Virginia’s planters to realize that the success of a tobacco economy could not rest on a population of white servants for whom there was little opportunity for land ownership and a family once they finished their indentures. Indirectly, then, Bacon’s Rebellion became an impetus for the Chesapeake’s shift from white indentured servants to African slaves.

British North America

Italian merchant John Cabot’s 1497 voyage from England west to what is now Newfoundland, Canada, was Europe’s first contact with North America since the Vikings. Cabot’s feat intensified English attention to the New World, yet for more than a hundred years, England would trail Spain and other European nations in exploring and exploiting the hemisphere. By 1750, however, Britain, having overcome a multitude of political, religious, and economic crises, was poised to dominate North America.

Early Undertakings

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two efforts to establish English colonies in America ended in failure and death. In 1582, Sir Humphrey Gilbert personally led a large crew across the Atlantic to reclaim Cabot’s Newfoundland for the queen. Its unfavorable climate and competition from Spanish and Portuguese fishermen dampened Gilbert’s hopes. On the voyage home less than a year later, Gilbert perished in an Azores storm.

Somewhat more successful was Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother, and, for a time, a court favorite. Raleigh mounted a new colonial project in 1585, sending five ships bearing a hundred colonists to Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast.


When these settlers abandoned their mission in 1586, a second group was shipped to Roanoke, including the parents of Virginia Dare, who was, in 1587, the first English child born in North America. By 1590, a series of reprovisioning and rescue missions were reporting that the colony had disappeared, leaving generations of historians to argue whether Indian warfare, internal clashes, famine, disease, or some combination of these had wiped out Raleigh’s colonial ambitions.

As the 17th century dawned, England, despite its 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, followed by other triumphs over Spain, was still scarcely a presence in North America. At home, rapid population growth and policies that forced subsistence farmers off the land, combined with Reformation-fueled religious conflicts, were creating both crisis and opportunity.

British colonization in America emerged as a patchwork process that sent royal courtiers, London investors, religious dissident families, and the desperately poor across the Atlantic in search of profits and new hope.

Colonial “Plantation” Before 1660

Britain’s eventual dominion in eastern North America started unpromisingly in 1607 when Jamestown was founded in the region Raleigh had earlier named “Virginia” for Elizabeth I, the presumed “Virgin Queen.”

Disciplinary measures imposed by soldier-adventurer John Smith, followed by John Rolfe’s 1614 introduction of tobacco cultivation, eventually saved Jamestown, although major crises continued. Finding capable colonists in this wild and dangerous land remained difficult; Virginians turned to indentured servitude and eventually slavery for their labor needs.

As religious conflict deepened in the mother country, British dissidents of varying faiths sought refuge, influence, and livelihoods in North America. In 1632, Maryland was founded near Virginia by George Calvert, the first baron Baltimore, a recent convert to Catholicism.


He was granted a proprietary charter by King Charles I, who wife was Catholic. Together, Virginia and Maryland composed the Chesapeake region and survived with similar economies based on tobacco and coerced labor.

Meanwhile, in the Massachusetts Bay region other dissenting Englishmen deliberately sought exile from what they saw as a religiously and politically corrupt homeland. The Pilgrims, who made their way to Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans, who began arriving in large numbers in 1630, sought to create a religious commonwealth that would serve as a “light to the world” and end the reign of the hated Stuart monarchy.

Shrewd Puritan investors managed to assemble a joint-stock company that won Crown authorization to claim New England land. By the 1640s, more than 20,000 English men and women were living there.

Although more socially stable and economically diversified than the Chesapeake, the growing Puritan religious state experienced problems that fractured Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop’s leadership soon sparked internal religious dissent, led by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, resulting their 1635–36 banishment to Rhode Island. Religious differences and a desire for more land led Thomas Hooker and others to relocate in 1636 to what became Connecticut.

With the end of the Cromwell Commonwealth and the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Britain hit its imperial stride in the New World. Between 1660 and 1732, all the colonies that would eventually break away in the American Revolution came into existence or were wrenched from European rivals. Additionally, the British made significant inroads in the Canadian Maritime regions east of New France.

In 1664, as part of a consolidation of royal power, Charles II sent a fleet of ships to seize lands along the Hudson River that had been claimed in 1609 by the Dutch West Indian Company and settled by Dutch colonists.

New Netherland, soon renamed New York, was the king’s gift to his brother James, duke of York, who became King James II in 1687. As sole proprietor of a territory that also included New Jersey and Delaware, the duke ruled autocratically, parceling out some of his holdings to favored friends.

Although he was also the duke’s personal friend, William Penn in 1681 became a very different kind of proprietor when, in payment of debts owed Penn’s late father, the king granted him an extensive holding named Pennsylvania.

To the dismay of family and his royal connections, Penn had become a member of the Society of Friends, known scornfully as “Quakers,” and his “Holy Experiment” made Pennsylvania a refuge for Friends and others fleeing religious persecution.

In 1663, Charles II rewarded eight men who had supported his return to the British throne by granting them a proprietorship that they promptly named Carolina, Latin for Charles. By 1670, Carolina was peopled mainly by Virginians, moving south for better or more expansive lands, and Englishmen from West Indian sugar plantations.

This territory became the first in North America to depend heavily on slave labor from its inception. Within 20 years, the colony was profiting from such warm-weather commodities as cotton, indigo, timber, cattle, and rice. By the early 1700s, African slaves outnumbered white settlers in this “Rice Kingdom.”

At its founding in 1732, Georgia was quite unlike other British colonies. Located between Carolina and Spanish-controlled Florida, it had a royal charter from King George II that allowed English general James Oglethorpe to fulfill his philanthropic dream of resettling poor British immigrants.

To assure the virtue of these worthy poor, this new colony’s overseers forbade alcoholic beverages and banned slavery. By 1750, however, Georgia had become a slaveholding society, much like neighboring Carolina.

Mix of Religion and Governance

Britain’s North American colonies began as a hodgepodge of religions, forms of governance, and economic systems. Clinging mainly to the continent’s eastern seaboard, colonists of different regions and settlement histories had little to do with one another.

As Britain began to consolidate its imperial power and goals in the period of political stability that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its colonies experienced enormous population growth and new social and political challenges both within colonial society and in dealings with the “Mother Country.”

In 1651, during Cromwell’s regime, Parliament passed its first Navigation Act, designed to assure that growing colonial holdings, including those in North America, would produce wealth only for Britain’s benefit and not for its European rivals. Many more navigation acts would follow.

These mercantilist laws attempted to control both agricultural and manufactured goods. Many colonists, including plantation owners and New England shipbuilders, were enriched, but these laws also restricted colonial growth and trade initiatives.

As part of its aggressive commercial policy, Britain, by the 18th century, had become the world’s major trader in African slaves, surpassing the Dutch. Although the majority of slaves were destined for the sugar islands of the Caribbean, almost three hundred thousand slaves were “delivered” to the North American colonies between 1700 and the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Slave importation outstripped robust immigration of whites. No longer suffering a manpower glut, England discouraged emigration by its own people (with the exception of convicted criminals) but wooed colonists from many countries, including France, the Netherlands, and German principalities, often offering religious freedom and British citizenship.

As colonial populations increased and competed, issues of governance and home rule emerged. Many colonies had set up assemblies—Virginia’s House of Burgesses of 1619 was the first—to deal with local political problems.

These were by no means representative elected bodies, but were dominated by large landowners and other men of importance. Colonies that traced their origins to proprietors (like Calvert and the duke of York) tended to have more autocratic governments. The New England colonies generally allowed broader participation in political decision making.

Quaker Proprietor William Penn’s policies allowed more than half of Pennsylvania’s male population to have some political say. Royal governors, chosen by the king or Parliament, would often override local assemblies’ intentions. As colonial populations grew in the 1700s, so too did their thirst for effective political power.

Between the Glorious Revolution and the French and Indian War, assemblies in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts often contested royal prerogatives and frequently had their way. Colonial legislators asserted their rights as British citizens to participate in lawmaking.

Britain’s imperial dominance in the 18th century was closely connected to its relationships with Native American tribal groups and its use of diplomacy, or more often war, to keep Spain and France from gaining ground in the Western Hemisphere.

Colonial policies were crafted with an eye to outflanking perceived threats from the these two powerful nations, and their native allies. Fearing that an alliance between Spain and France would imperil its colonial interests, Britain entered the 1701 War of the Spanish Succession.

In the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Britain gained control of much of eastern Canada and wrested from Spain its remaining colonial slave trade. More conflicts flared up in succeeding years as the three powers competed for trade preferences and territorial control. Flare-ups occurred regularly between British Carolina and Georgia, and neighboring Spanish Florida.

The “War of Jenkins’ Ear” began in 1739 when Spanish customs officials stopped suspected British smugglers and perhaps cut off the English captain’s ear. By 1744, Britain was fighting both Spain and France for North American and West Indian dominance in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Wars with Indian tribes were a constant from the earliest years of British incursion in North America. In 1622, Opechancanough, the chief who succeeded his brother, Powhatan, became convinced that whites had no intention of leaving.

He and his men attacked Jamestown, killing 300 settlers. In 1675, Wampanoag chief Metacom, known to New Englanders as King Philip, launched a major but ultimately unsuccessful effort to drive out the rapidly growing white population.

Twelve towns in Massachusetts were destroyed; a thousand whites and three thousand natives perished. At almost the same time, Virginians desperate for land were killing local Indians in an uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.

But European powers also made alliances with tribes, hoping to recruit their military aid against other tribes allied with their rivals. The powerful Iroquois Confederacy, centered in New York and Pennsylvania, had once helped the Dutch, but later became an important British ally during King Philip’s War. The Iroquois would help British and colonial forces attack the French and their set of Indian allies in the run-up to the 1754 French and Indian War.

By 1750, although not unchallenged, Britain’s North American empire was near its zenith. Britain’s mastery of the continent would soon be enhanced by its smashing victory in the coming war with France. Yet from that victory grew the seeds of colonial rebellion that would, before the end of the century, lose Britain a major portion of North America.